Sunday, 12/15/24

Theology isn’t all deductive

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

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Puritan Phobia

The Puritans quickly developed a phobia about ritual, going so far as to resist “rote” recitation of the Lord’s Prayer:

Henry’s Method culminates with his most fascinating phrase-collection of all, “A Paraphrase on the Lord’s Prayer, in Scripture Expressions.” Christ’s own form of prayer given to his disciples had long been a thorn in Puritans’ sides, to be plucked out by being understood as only a general guideline. Henry’s strategy is to neutralize the prayer’s form in a pages of verses elaborating on the one phrase “Our Father, who art in similar method; he provides, for instance, an amazing two and a half Heaven” (MP, 163-65), a general topos, he says, from which begins. Many editions of the Method were printed as Henry intended, interleaved with one blank page between each printed one, to enable the reader to pen in his own collection of phrases to supplement Henry’s own. Like Bunyan’s demand for scrupulous sincerity, Henry’s lists and blank pages, figures of accumulation and abstraction, combine literally to efface the Lord’s Prayer and erase it from Dissenting practice.

Between the ledgerlike pages of Henry’s collected phrases and the blank sheets for scribbled lists of readers’ personal prayer phrases, one senses of variety of fears: that without this careful accounting, the business might go bankrupt, that in the copious, nervous quoting from God’s word to talk and talk and talk to God, God might not listen or respond at all.

Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity

Hyperpluralism’s roots

Moreover, Reformation scholars tend analytically and in their division of labor to hive off the magisterial Reformation-Lutheranism, Reformed Protestantism, and the Church of England-from the radical Reformation. Consequently, whether oriented primarily toward theology or toward social history, they have overlooked the significance of the principle of sola scripture for contemporary hyperpluralism.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

A catholic vision of Christian faith

When I first opened A Severe Mercy nearly 20 years ago I had needed a vision of Christian faith that was unapologetically devoted to Christian doctrine without being materialistic, more American than Christian, and completely uprooted from history. Up to that point, the expressions of Christianity I had encountered were simply different forms of sectarian faith—a vapid progressivism or a parochial and narrow fundamentalism. Vanauken gave me catholicity ….

Jake Meador (hyperlink added)

Know-it-alls

In practical terms, the Reformed commitment to the theological significance of everyday life led to the development of something like Protestant metaphysics, Protestant epistemology, Protestant science, Protestant politics, Protestant social and economic theory, Protestant art, and Protestant poetics. The development of these Reformed spheres of intellectual and cultural activity never occurred without substantial influence from sources not specifically religious. In Switzerland, the southern German regions, Hungary, Holland, and the British Isles, the Reformed perspective could be used to mask economic or political aggression. More commonly, it emerged from a complicated mix of sacred and secular motives. Yet wherever sufficient Reformed strength existed, the assumption also existed that biblical Christianity had something fairly definite to say about everything.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

Some of us have been glued to the BBC on a Sunday evening this autumn watching Mark Rylance return mesmerically as Thomas Cromwell in the second series of Wolf Hall. This all takes place in the era of the Reformation, and a particular scene has stayed with me. Surrounded by crosses lifted from churches, Cromwell says the following:

The English will discover God in daylight, not hidden in a cloud of incense. They will hear his word in their own language from a minister who faces them, not turning his back and muttering in some obscure, foreign tongue…no one will ever believe the poor once bowed and scraped to stocks of wood, and prayed to lumps of plaster.

I have such a mixed response to this brilliant bit of writing.

I went to such a daylight church and could not find God there. I didn’t find him in a cloud of incense either. I found him in a moonlit, midnight forest. I found him in a place with almost no human imprint. That was where he suddenly said NOW.

And I suppose I have become someone who ‘bows and scrapes’ to icons and prays to ‘lumps of plaster’. But, of course, to reduce them as Cromwell does is to misunderstand their function, what they do to the spirit and heart of the faithful. It’s not to the wood or plasterness of them I am praying. It’s just that I am not entirely just a brain on legs fed by sermons. These scorned ‘lumps’ of Cromwell become luminous by attention and repetition, by their physicality, by their evocation of tradition, what exudes through them. They gather and focus devotion, taking it from a lyric (entirely personal) into an epic (collective) encounter with the divine. Their materials are not the thing.

I have sympathies with all that want to hear gospel in their own language, and I’m glad that happened. Surely we all, really, want a profound sense of both tradition and innovation?

Maybe we long for a God of daylight and moonlight, of lyric and epic, of straight talking and unknowable mystery. I’d find it hard to imagine someone who didn’t. We stand on the Mount of Olives with our teacher and surely all is possible. Surely anything less than this is just silly.

But human history is human history and we make our choices. They are rarely ideal, but we chew, we rail, then we decide.

Martin Shaw

A personal favorite

I have three lists of Maxims or such that I review regularly. This one, which I think was originally embedded in a longer blog post by Father Stephen Freeman, seems more precious (in the good sense, not the snarky sense) every time I read it:

First, live as though in the coming of Jesus Christ, the Kingdom of God has been inaugurated into the world and the outcome of history has already been determined. (Quit worrying)
Second, love people as the very image of God and resist the temptation to improve them.
Third, refuse to make economics the basis of your life. Your job is not even of secondary importance.
Fourth, quit arguing about politics as though the political realm were the answer to the world’s problems. It gives it power that is not legitimate and enables a project that is anti-God.
Fifth, learn to love your enemies. God did not place them in the world for us to fix or eliminate. If possible, refrain from violence.
Sixth, raise the taking of human life to a matter of prime importance and refuse to accept violence as a means to peace. Every single life is a vast and irreplaceable treasure.
Seventh, cultivate contentment rather than pleasure. It will help you consume less and free you from slavery to your economic masters.
Eighth, as much as possible, think small. You are not in charge of the world. Love what is local, at hand, personal, intimate, unique, and natural. It’s a preference that matters.
Ninth, learn another language. Very few things are better at teaching you about who you are not.
Tenth, be thankful for everything, remembering that the world we live in and everything in it belongs to God.

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

Paul Kingsnorth

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

Sunday, October 27

Booknotes

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

…

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

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

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

…

“The Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science. It is his store-house of facts; and his method of ascertaining what the Bible teaches, is the same as that which the natural philosopher adopts to ascertain what nature teaches…. The duty of the Christian theologian is to ascertain, collect, and combine all the facts which God has revealed concerning himself and our relation to Him. These facts are all in the Bible.” On the basis of these assertions, Hodge then went on to suggest that “the Theologian [is] to be guided by the same rules as the Man of Science.”

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

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

Selective resistance to secularity

In his book Fault Lines, Voddie Baucham argues that

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

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

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

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

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

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

Josh Fenska, Thin Discipleship‌

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

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

Sunday July 7

Why classical education? Why ecclesial Christianity?

(Sorry if this item feels a bit stream-of-consciousness. If you can’t get into my stream, it’s probably my fault. Skip to the next item if you get lost.)

A cyberfriend, who is both an Anglican rector and a classical school headmaster, posted this as an audio file, which I have (with a little help from VR) transcribed:

I occasionally find myself talking to folks who know that I moved into the classical Christian tradition from other educational models and they’re curious what the draw was into the classical Christian world.

Similarly, I find myself talking to many people who know that I moved into the Anglican tradition from the beginning of the century. from other Christian traditions and they have similar questions. What was it that drew you into the Anglican tradition?

Every once in a while, I also encounter people who are curious about both at the same time. Kind of what moved you into the classical Christian world while you were being moved into the Anglican world as it were, and in conversations with folks like that, I’ve begun to pinpoint some movements, some understandings of who God is, that moved me along in both of those worlds, the worlds of education and the world of Anglicanism.

Here’s one example. Seeing God as infinitely grand was one of those movement moments for me. Once I saw God as infinitely grand, I realized he could no longer be contained to a religion class or a Bible class, and all other disciplines just carry on as usual.

If God is infinitely grand, he must appear pretty thoroughly and visibly and noticeably across all disciplines, and that’s something that the classical Christian movement has focused on for some time. Seeing God in all disciplines.

Similarly, if God is infinitely grand, then he cannot be contained by words alone. We can’t worship him with just words if he’s infinitely grand. Our worship must capture more of the human person than just our words. We can’t fully grasp him, though we can sometimes helpfully describe him with words, but we can’t fully grasp him through doctrine alone. There has to be an element of mystery involved, and when we capture God in some ways through words, we do our best to be as broad as possible with those words. So a preference, for example, for something as broad and ancient as and as ecumenical as the Nicene Creed as a statement of faith, as opposed to some later post-enlightenment, more detailed statements of faith.

… Once I saw God as infinitely grand, that vision moved me both into the world of classical Christian education, where God is throughout all disciplines. It moved me more into a Catholic or Anglican tradition that is going to describe and understand and participate in worship of that infinitely grand God in ways that go beyond mere cognition and mere words.

Things like this make me feel much closer to Anglicans than I do to most Western Christian traditions — some of which I’ve been having trouble seeing even as authentically Christian, so far down Nathan Hatch’s Democratization road have they gone. (But then I go to the website of a Mount Pleasant, South Carolina Anglican parish, pastored by the newly-elected Anglican Presiding Bishop for North America, and find what looks like a cringey megachurch. If I had no Orthodox option, I personally would prefer a dignified Episcopal liturgy to any plexiglas-podium, praise-band “Anglican” operation.)

I don’t remember how far I’d gone along the road into Orthodox Christianity before I internalized that it didn’t have anything equivalent to, say, the massive and detailed Catechism of the Catholic Church, and that wasn’t just because they were too lazy to prepare one.

That was a surprise. I’d previous identified “orthodoxy” as detailed doctrinal rectitude. Now I was finding that it was like a high plateau, with dangerous cliffs all around it. The Nicene Creed was a fence to keep people from careening unwittingly over any of the cliffs; but the plateau was large, and diverse. The residents were not clones. Our priests and confessors may prescribe individual conduct on the plateau, but that can vary from person to person according to the discernment of priests and confessors.

Fr. Jon hints at why this is proper: God’s infinity makes Him apprehendable, but incomprehensible. We can’t fully define Him or cabin him, although doing so would make Him ever so more convenient and comforting. And it’s a fearful responsibility to be a spiritual guide who needs discernment, not just a rulebook with a good table of contents.

In fact, Orthodox (and orthodox) Christianity can feel kind of wild. Coincidentally, or likelier providentially, I’ve been getting a lot of exposure to that wildness lately in ways that I’m not (yet?) ready to articulate.

[John] Moriarty spoke of himself as a singing Christian. I would also suggest we may need to be grieving Christians, earthy Christians, happy Christians, and yes, on occasion, troublesome Christians. How did this Middle-Eastern mystery religion get so corralled?

Martin Shaw

Democratized heresies

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.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity

21st Century Rabbinic Judaism isn’t New Testament Judaism

As explained at the outset of this chapter, scholars today commonly presume that a form of Rabbinic Judaism that uniformly promoted a form of unitarian monotheism predated Christianity. New Testament scholars who have accepted this incorrect presupposition and marginalized the Old Testament evidence to the contrary have produced all manner of conjectures to explain how a supposed “transition” to belief in the Holy Trinity must have come about.

Fr. Stephen DeYoung, Religion of the Apostles.

At least two things gave rise to Rabbinic Judaism in the centuries after Christ:

Christ and Christians. From a controversial sect within the worship of the first century synagogue and temple, to the casting out of Christians therefrom, to the growth of Christianity and its eventual embrace by the emperor, Christ and Christianity haunted and bedeviled the Scribes and Pharisees and Rabbis.
The final destruction of the Jerusalem temple in A.D. 70. No temple means no sacrifice. So what do we do now? That, along with “how do we repudiate these Christians?”, led to a refashioning along the lines we see today (though not in final form).

I am told that well-educated modern Rabbis will readily admit this, but cannot confirm it.

Not the only, or last, amnesiac

He was a pure product of the postwar period; his heroes were the post-Left French who suffered for their apostasies, like Aron and Furet and Revel. He was right to honor them.

Right, I say, in what he honored, but wrong in what he ignored. Even on his own terms, [Clive] James should have read, memorialized, and found profit in Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Maritain, Eliot, Belloc, Knox, Greene, Undset, Bonhoeffer, Barth, Weil, Mauriac, Bernanos, de Lubac, Auden, Lewis, Tolkien, Fermor, Solzhenitsyn, Ratzinger, Percy, Illich, Berry, MacIntyre, Taylor, Levertov, and so many others. Instead, it’s as if religion in any form except the severely private disappears from the world by the end of the long nineteenth century. You certainly wouldn’t know that theists of any kind put pen to page in the twentieth, much less that it was good, sometimes, and that their words and deeds regularly made a difference on the public stage.

A writer like James, for all his erudition, has amnesia of his own, both in the immediate past and in the distant past. It’s a deficit common to most of his peers: highbrow journalists and elite critics who can’t bother to glance in the direction of the pious (at least, not without cringing). The deficit may be understandable, but it’s not defensible. It renders all that they write incomplete from the outset, by definition. Not just their knowledge but their love is circumscribed artificially by choice, and this alienates them from every human culture of which we have evidence.

Brad East. I’ve quoted most of it, but it would be worth your time to read the rest. Clive James wasn’t the only, or the last, amnesiac.

IVF reconsidered

If you are uneasy about IVF, as am I, you may benefit from reading this brief against it on Christian grounds. I hope I’m not just being contrarian, pushing against a pro-IVF consensus whose “arguments” I find unpersuasive.

Miracles and science

Given the assumptions and endeavor of the modern natural sciences, the profound irony is that science precludes any possible verification of the claim that miracles worked by a transcendent God are impossible. Only a transgression of science understood as an empirical investigation of the natural world could rule out the possibility of miracles. The philosophical belief that natural laws are necessarily exceptionless is not empirically verifiable in our own or any conceivable configuration of human knowledge, because verification would require the observation of all natural events in all times and places.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

America’s Puritanism

America’s Puritan …, while possessed of many virtues, also brought about deformations of central Christian themes and ideas. The danger of Puritanism lay not just in the incipient utopianism of the “city on a hill” metaphor, but in an excessively low view of nature and creation.

Gregory S. Wolfe, Beauty Will Save the World

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

Sunday of the Fathers

This “Fathers Day” in the USA also happens to be the Sunday of the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council in the Orthodox Church. That was the Council that dealt with Arianism, the heresy of Arius, who taught that Christ was a creature — very special and exalted, but a creature nonetheless.

That council responded that Christ was “very God of very God, begotten not made, of one essence with the Father,” words of the Nicene Creed, so called because that Council met at Nicea.

Theological definitions

Theological definitions were declared only reluctantly by the Church, only if absolutely necessary, and only to the extent necessary to oppose specific heresies.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox.

Such was the practice of the early church, before the Great Schism. It’s still that way in Orthodoxy, although the whole story now is a bit more complicated. An Orthodox cyberfriend summarized it: If it weren’t for heretics, we would have no theology.

Reminiscenses

The Red Shoes

There are many versions of The Red Shoes, but it basically tells of a young girl without much money who is entranced by a pair of red shoes she sees a princess wearing. They are so different to the heavy black shoes that everyone tramps in and out of church with. They all seem so serious, so weighed down. Through various kindnesses she gets a similar pair of red shoes.

One day outside the church she meets a man returning from a great war, far away. He has a long white beard and very bright eyes. He starts to play a fiddle. While others disapprove, he coos and simpers over the girl’s shoes, even asking her to give him a little twirl, a little dance. Feeling shamed by the churchgoers and affirmed by his gaze, she starts to dance. For a while it’s quite wonderful, even liberating. She twirls past the villagers, round the graves, laughing and in wild excitement. She hollers and pirouettes, all the time with the old man playing his fiddle and making her feel seen. For a few minutes this is quite the spectacle, but after a while, the crowd grow bored, gather their kids and go home for Sunday dinner.

Point made, the laughing girl tries to stop dancing and finds she can’t. As the panic grows in her eyes, this excites the old man even more. He starts to play faster and leads her out of the graveyard and onto the moors and through the woods. For many hours she splashes through streams and over hills, growing more and more crazed, more exhausted. Under a full moon she spasms and twists as the fiddling man keeps pace. The ecstasy has descended into nightmare, the passion into enchantment. Her feet are bleeding and somehow twined to the shoes.

Finally she dances into the arms of an angel who frees her from the ghastly parade and liberates her feet. The old man melts away into the trees. The angel washes her feet in a stream and over time she recovers. She is never going to wear those big heavy black shoes of the others, but she finds gentler, sweeter rhythms to move to. When she wants to stop, she simply sits down and takes her handmade shoes off.

…

In more brutal versions of the story, the girl meets not an angel but villagers, who, at her prompting, cut her feet off to stop the dance. She is now crippled but safe, being wheeled in and out of church for the rest of her life, chastened but wiser.

Martin Shaw, On Sex: Dancing With The Passions

Martin Shaw is a storyteller, but he upacks this story, with two of its alternate endings, nicely for the hard of hearing, including:

This grotesque scenario just exaggerates further the juxtaposition of rabid licentiousness and morbid ideas of purity. There is a distinct lack of imagination in both forms of acting out.

I’d never heard this story until last Sunday. Today’s blog is so full (too full?) of personal reminiscences that I’ve deleted an awkward one here.

The Refrigerium

Did ye never hear of the Refrigerium? A man with your advantages might have read of it in Prudentius, not to mention Jeremy Taylor.

The name is familiar, Sir, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten what it means.

It means that the damned have holidays—excursions, ye understand.

Excursions to this country?

For those that will take them. Of course most of the silly creatures don’t. They prefer taking trips back to Earth. They go and play tricks on the poor daft women ye call mediums. They go and try to assert their ownership of some house that once belonged to them: and then ye get what’s called a Haunting. Or they go to spy on their children. Or literary ghosts hang about public libraries to see if anyone’s still reading their books.

This forgotten passage from C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce popped up recently.

The Great Divorce is one of the most important books in my spiritual biography. There’s not a single word of explicit theology that I remember, but the tacit theology that struck me — that one might, by indulging habitual sins (including distortions of things like the maternal instinct, or pride), make his soul unfit for heaven and even repelled by it — shook me out of a dangerous rut. Since I didn’t think that God would hold an unwilling soul hostage in heaven, just because he’d once said “the sinner’s prayer” in a fit of pious enthusiasm, I in due course left Calvinism (which suggested something like that) for Orthodox Christianity (which decidedly does not).

(That’s not the whole story. There have been 26 or 27 intervening years as I’ve lived an active corporate life in Orthodoxy, and my thinking doesn’t exactly run along those lines any more. But an effort to put the change into words has failed me.)

Proto-exvangelical

When I left evangelicalism, it certainly was not because I was disillusioned with the faith of my early childhood. I have sweet (if somewhat nutty) memories of all those days … I think my problem with remaining an evangelical centered on what the evangelical community became. It was the merging of the entertainment business with faith, the flippant lightweight kitsch ugliness of American Christianity, the sheer stupidity, the paranoia of the American right-wing enterprise, the platitudes married to pop culture, all of it . . . that made me crazy. It was just too stupid for words.

Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God

I do not recommend books by Frank Schaeffer, but I read them “back in the day” for reasons not worth going into again. This quote popped up recently and seemed on point to some other things I’ve been thinking about.

Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how much Evangelicalism has changed since my youth. It really shouldn’t have surprised me; Evangelicalism is built on shifting sands, because the Bible they claim (or claimed in Evangelicalism1967) as their sole authority is easily twisted and manipulated.

The nondenominational Evangelical/Charismatic/Clericalist syncretism described in this piece would have been recognized, back in my Evangelical days, as cultic and outside Evangelical boundaries. Apparently it’s not so recognized any longer, but some people, God bless ‘em, become “exvangelical” by abandoning it.

IVCF & CCC

… on many campuses the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship flourished and became a locus for evangelical dissent. Founded in Britain and rooted in the tolerant English evangelical tradition, the ministry emphasized fellowship and religious studies. It published books, encouraged critical thinking, and gave students leave to raise the issues of their generation, such as racism and the Vietnam War.

Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals.

I was an IVCF kind of Christian, not a Campus Crusade for Christ (now “Cru”) kind of Christian, I found when I left Evangelical hothouses and entered a secular university. (Navigators wasn’t much of a thing on my campus.) Now a great chasm lies between me and both, as both are Western and Protestant, but I can say with some confidence that IVCF prepared me in many ways for Orthodoxy, and I still feel kindly toward it.

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

Sunday June 2

Reformation

An indifferent history student in my youth, I now enjoy it very much.

Pandora’s box

…in the wake of [Luther’s] defiant appearance at Worms, he found himself impotent to control the explosions that he had done so much to set in train. Nor was he alone. Every claim by a reformer to an authority over his fellow Christians might be met by appeals to the Spirit; every appeal to the Spirit by a claim to authority. The consequence, detonating across entire reaches of Christendom, was a veritable chain reaction of protest.

Tom Holland, Dominion

Seizing Church properties

Predictably, secular authorities convinced by the reformers’ truth claims liked the distinction drawn between the necessity of obedience to them and of disobedience to Rome. They liked hearing “the Gospel” accompanied by such “good news”—it would allow them, for starters, to appropriate for themselves all ecclesiastical property, including the many buildings and lands that belonged to religious orders, and to use it or the money from its sale in whatever ways they saw fit. In two stages during the late 1530s, seizing for himself the vast holdings of all the hundreds of English monasteries and friaries, Henry VIII would demonstrate how thoroughly a ruler could learn this lesson without even having to accept Lutheran or Reformed Protestant doctrines about grace, faith, salvation, or worship.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Beauty

Conversion

The prevailing image of religious conversion today is one that is individualistic—conversion is in some sense experienced within the self—and sentimental—one is transported by emotions—which then cause one to affirm a certain set of religious dogmas. Such things do happen and to be absolutely clear they are great, but this individualistic and pietistic model is also of modern, recent vintage. Such experiences have always happened but they were not thought to be the majority, even less the default or only case.

“The best argument for the Catholic faith, in the end, is the beauty of her art, and the life of her saints,” once said none other than Benedict XVI, and the argument presented there is really a different version of Ali’s: look at what Christian civilization has produced, look at how uniquely beautiful and praiseworthy it is; the fact that a civilization animated by such ideas produced such unique and surpassing greatness must be an indication that these ideas are in a profound way true.

This is a perfectly rational train of thought, a perfectly legitimate thing to believe, and a perfectly legitimate route to the Church!

…

I have seen many people stumble on the path of faith because they have an expectation that religious belief or practice must, of necessity, produce some sort of deep personal or emotional effect, and therefore feel that they’re “doing it wrong” or that it’s “not for them” or that they just “haven’t been touched” or “called”. No! These people have also been called and touched, just in a different way. In the meantime, this pietistic understanding of faith has done a lot of damage.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, In Defense Of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Conversion

I perhaps should note that while Gobry is of the Roman Catholic faith, “Catholic” is also an appropriate adjective for the Orthodox Church.

Divine and counterfeit beauty

During his American tour in 2011, Archimandrite Vasileios of Iveron spent considerable time teaching Americans how to reorder their affections toward divine beauty. Speaking to Americans, who are known for their love of pleasure and their worship of the body, the Athonite monk warned his audience not to mistake the call of divine beauty by settling their affections on lesser objects that lure us with a counterfeit beauty.

Robin Phillips and Stephen De Young, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation

One of the huge confusions in our time is to mistake glamour for beauty.

Poet John O’Donohue, interviewed by Krista Tippett.

The sects

Achieving our country

For all its notional secularity, much of today’s liberalism is still informed by the essentially messianic assumption that “achieving our country,” in the words of Richard Rorty, the post-Christian grandson of the great Social Gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, can be a substitute for the consolations of traditional religious faith.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

The Force

When I was studying systematics, one of our seminars required us to read about a dozen different, so-called, systematic theologies, from across a very broad spectrum. I recall someone presenting a paper on the doctrine of God in the writings of the radical feminist Catholic, Rosemary Radford Ruether. When the student finished reading the paper, there was a dead, stunned silence in the room. Finally, a sheepish voice piped up, “Isn’t that the Force in Star Wars?” We broke out in laughter because it was precisely what she had articulated. It might make for interesting reading, but it certainly could not be called “Christian.”

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Ties that bind

The reality is that while many in the evangelical movement thought their bonds were primarily (or exclusively) theological or missional, many of those bonds were actually political, cultural, and socioeconomic.

Michael Graham, The Six Way Fracturing of Evangelicalism

Or, as Ken Myers had it decades ago, binding by feelings manifested in a common sensibility.

Christology

There is a cooperation of the divine and the human, the uncreated and the created. Christ is the perfect man, the complete man, the whole man. But Christ is also God. That is to say, paradox as it may sound, it is God alone who is the perfect man. Only God is completely and utterly human. As we said, in so far as man fails to realize the divine in himself, to that extent he falls short of being completely human. He remains less than human … It is not accidental or a cause of surprised that man’s attempts to be only human — to fulfill the ideals of the non-religious humanism of the last centuries — results in the dehumanization both of man and of the forms of the society which he has fabricated around himself.

Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature

Miscellany

Benedict Option

Socialized to believe that their culture was the majority, it seems Christians have invested much less than Orthodox Jews in four key elements of faithful living required to thrive as a minority: educating children separately from the broader society, marking space and time to bolster community cohesion, strengthening local institutions, and reducing the influence of secular media.

…

A Christian reader may counter that Jewish rules seem legalistic. Yes, Jewish rules are indeed commands. This is a key difference in our faiths, and Christians seem to enjoy a liberty that Jews do not. I wonder, though, if community-held “constraints” would bring Christians greater freedom. Could they leave you unhindered by the burden of trying to change the majority culture and free instead to pursue joy as a flourishing minority?

Seth Kaplan, How to Flourish as a Creative Minority

It’s true that a Christianish civil religion lulled a Christianish people into complacency. That possibility if over for the foreseeable future; neither wokeism (all is allowed, nothing forgiven) nor MAGA is bringing it back. Kaplan’s advice is good, though I don’t really see more than a tiny minority (e.g., the Bruderhof) re-arranging life to live in close physical proximity to other Christians.

In a manner of speaking …

Nancy French talks about David French’s return from war (he enlisted gratuitously and served in a war zone as a J.A.G.):

Before he left, he’d been patient, slow to anger. But now my formerly carefree husband was foul tempered and anxious. Many of his friends had been killed, but war did not provide him time to process the trauma. After someone was killed, he had to focus on the next thing and the next and the next. But now he was swallowed up by grief. Plus, his faith had taken a hit. And since he was the one who’d introduced me to Christianity, it was unnerving.

Nancy French, Ghosted (emphasis added).

Nancy French grew up in the Church of Christ denomination. She attended (albeit resentfully) a Church of Christ college. That she should say so casually that David introduced her to Christianity is quite telling.

Was the Church of Christ devoid of Christianity?
Were her ears stopped, her heart embittered, by something she experienced in the Church of Christ (she was sexually abused in early adolescence by a youth pastor)?
Is she fibbing a bit to zip up her book a bit?

I have heard things like this so many, many times. I heard a nationally famous figure say he’d “never heard the gospel” in the Church my wife and I were attending; I found that an indefensible swipe at a very sound Church (as Protestant Churches go), but it’s kind of the way Evangelicals tell their stories.

From my current perch, I can’t defend the adequacy of any Protestant Church. But it’s jarring to hear a Baptist or PCA Presbyterian or nondenominational Evangelical say that they never heard the heard the gospel (or never encountered Christianity) in the Baptist or PCA Presbyterian or nondenominational Evangelical church they left in favor of some other Baptist or PCA Presbyterian or nondenominational Evangelical Church.

I’m just not really buying it.

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

Making a virtue of necessity

I just finished reading The Old Faith in a New Nation, a 2023 book by one Paul J. Gutacker. I can write no better summary of the author’s purpose than the publisher’s:

Conventional wisdom holds that tradition and history meant little to nineteenth-century American Protestants, who relied on common sense and “the Bible alone.” The Old Faith in a New Nation challenges this portrayal by recovering evangelical engagement with the Christian past. Even when they appeared to be most scornful toward tradition, most optimistic and forward-looking, and most confident in their grasp of the Bible, evangelicals found themselves returning, time and again, to Christian history. They studied religious historiography, reinterpreted the history of the church, and argued over its implications for the present. Between the Revolution and the Civil War, American Protestants were deeply interested in the meaning of the Christian past.

The book

I concur with the 4-star rating at Amazon, mostly because the sympathetic academic author obviously spent a lot of time researching a narrow topic, off-the-beaten track. When I stumbled across it, I knew that I needed it to challenge the “conventional wisdom” resident in my own imagination.

It would be churlish to complain of faults in a book that did what I wanted it to do, and was passably readable to boot. I now have a better idea of how nineteenth-century American Evangelicals (and a few mainstream Protestants and Unitarians) treated Christian history.

Generally, the Evangelicals settled for tendentious 18th-Century historiography. It’s hard to blame them — the laymen, at least. There are only 24 hours in a day, and the 8-hour workday didn’t exist. We’re still that way:

The instinctual shortcut that we take when we have “too much information” is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.

Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise

Mnemohistory

A lover of obscure mots justes, I was pleased to meet the word mnemohistory, which to my disappointment isn’t even in the online Merriam-Webster. It is “the history of memory … The past is not only remembered by later generations, it also exerts by itself an influence on later times.” A near-equivalent, I guess, is “cultural history.”

The 19th-century American Evangelical mnemohistory was fiercely anti-Catholic — especially, and oddly, anti-celibacy, though the anti-Catholicism was comprehensive.

Somewhat to my surprise (I had already read in Frances Fitzgerald that it was anti-Calvinist), it was quite contemptuous of the Protestant Reformation as well — largely because the Reformation wasn’t adequately anti-Catholic. The Reformers baptized infants? Mumbled vague nothings about Christ’s presence in the Eucharistic elements? Damnable papacy!

Though the Magisterial Reformation opened Pandora’s box with its sola scriptura même, I’m newly-appreciative of its merits, at least compared to what followed. The Magisterial Reformers didn’t intend the whirlwind, and Rome did need reform.

That the best-laid plans chronically go astray is enough to make one suspect all is not right in the pre-eschaton world. (It’s also an imaginative buttress for temperamental conservatism.)

The acid test

The acid test of American Evangelical mnemohistory came in the debates over slavery, when there arose an urgent need to shuffle the deck chairs. Gutacker summarizes:

This was only one of many ironies in the debates over slavery, which saw Catholics ignoring or reinterpreting papal decrees, Episcopalians celebrating early American Puritans, Presbyterians defending medieval society while criticizing the Reformation, Baptists treating patristic exegesis as authoritative, and anticlerical abolitionists praising the pope. Not all of this irony was lost on contemporaries. As has been discussed, African American historians, in particular, took pleasure in pointing out the hypocrisy of proslavery authors who cited North African church fathers in their arguments for white supremacy.

Antebellum 19th-century American Evangelicals didn’t so much revere history as to use it to confirm their priors. They rejected tradition and precedent, those inconvenient facts, in favor of congenial theories they called “history” — again, a relatable vice, but it’s how we got Baptists and Southern Baptists, Methodists and Southern Methodists, and even Presbyterians and Southern Presbyterians (a division that leaves fewer contemporary traces than the Baptist and Methodist schisms).

Oh, yeah, almost forgot: It’s also a substantial explanation of how we got a Civil War.

I think that qualifies as failing the acid test.

Bless their hearts!

I’m fond of the expression “making a virtue of necessity.” 19th-century schisms over slavery were lamented at the time. Today’s more mercenary schisms pass without much objection as “isn’t-it-nice-that-there’s-a-church-for-all-preferences?” nondenominationalism. All hail the religiopreneur! (Bless their hearts!)

Christians were until recently (and in ecclesial Christianity, still are) horrified by schism. But what to make of the continued fissiparousness of movements themselves born in conscious schism, as was post-Second Great Awakening evangelicalism? Is it all that bad when badness can’t cohere?*

I confess a bit of schadenfreude, mitigated morally by faint hope for the epiphany “this isn’t working; our first principles must be wrong” — and for return to the Church that remained, albeit centered outside the West, when the Roman Church went into schism from it. There, Holy Tradition is preserved and transmitted as the warp and woof of liturgies, hymns, prayers, scripture, and all that goes into a lived faith.

* (An aside about coherence: Ken Myers, muse of Mars Hill Audio Journal, once suggested that today’s evangelicalism coheres, is united, not by orthodoxy but by orthpathos — not ~~right~~ shared doctrine but ~~right~~ shared feeling. Insofar as it does loosely cohere, I have no better explanation, and if I did it would be a topic for another day.)

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

St. John Climacus

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

I’m a religion skeptic

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

Brent Nongbri , Before Religion

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

Faithfulness precedes understanding

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

Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge

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

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

Mind and heart

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

Robert Louis Wilken Praying the Psalms.

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

Like receiving the gift of tongues

I’ve probably shared this before:

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

Jon Ward, Testimony

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

Last of the Fathers

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

John Strickland , The Age of Division

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

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.

Metaphysics and more

Metaphysics

Kicking God’s Tires

I believe that there are great philosophical questions that are opaque to our questioning. The book of Job raises the specter of the “problem of evil” and leaves it wrapped in the mystery of God Himself. I have yet to hear anyone offer an answer to the question that satisfies. I believe that there is a “shame of ignorance” that accompanies the question, a dynamic that explains why it so often produces anger. This very shame, however, is the raw edge of our own nakedness, a point where our existence as creature meets the silence of the Creator.
In my own life, I have stood at that point many times. More than that, I have stood beside others as the questions raged in their hearts. I have listened while God was compared to a heartless beast and torturer, the most evil of all. And the silence abides. My ignorance and my speechlessness are, however, a true part of me. They represent much of the powerlessness of my creaturely existence. “You cannot make one hair white or black,” Christ reminds us. (Matt. 5:36)
We have all largely been formed in a culture of consumerism. It is not surprising, therefore, that we approach God as consumers. We want to “kick His tires,” discuss His program, find out what makes Him tick and why He does what He does. Ignorance is the bane of a consumer’s existence. God, however, is not a product for consumption. He is rightly approached in a relationship of “offering.” He gives to us, and we give to Him. It is a different mode of existence.

(Fr. Stephen Freeman)

Mystical? Or mostly non-linear?

Orthodox theology is often described as “mystical.” I suspect that what is actually going on is that Orthodox theology is not “linear.” Rather, it is “everything at once.” This is actually how the world is. Things do not take place in a linear fashion, but together, and at once. History is not so polite as to “take turns,” waiting for one thing to lead to another. It is, undoubtedly the reason that all human plans fail in the end: we never “see coming” the train that hits us because we are too busy monitoring the linearity of our own expectations.
The Orthodox insight is that theology is “everything at once.” Although events may be described in a linear fashion, they are yet more fully understood when they are allowed to inform one another. The Annunciation is Pascha, if you have ears to hear. It is the descent of God into the depths of our humanity, in His self-emptying act of Incarnation. Orthodoxy struggles with this, often coining phrases such as “joyful sorrow” to describe the conjunction of God’s saving action in the world. St. Paul captures till somewhat in his statement that “all things work together for good.” It is not something that can be described in a linear fashion, but something that seeks to give voice to the full reality of God’s saving action. God has come among us not just some select people can go to heaven. He has come among us that He might “gather together in one all things in Christ Jesus.” That ingathering is everywhere, always, and at once.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, The World as Grand Opera

Russian Conservative insight

[F]or Christian conservatives to want moral sobriety AND all the goodies that can be produced by liquid modernity is to want what never has been and probably never can be.

Paul Robinson, Russian Conservatism

What were the odds?

“0.0001 led to you, my love.”

Christ the Eternal Tao

I began reading a book by that name last night. I mention it so my non-Orthodox Christian friends, mistaking this for syncretism, will intensify their prayers for me (although they might want to consult St. Clive’s Abolition of Man before any anathema).

Wordplay

the shallows of modernity

Andrew Sullivan. I’m not even sure that those four words in that order are original, but it jumped out at me in context of the “mesmerizing” allure of “reactionaryism.”

As I wrote last week, the Ukraine war has exposed certain limits to populist thinking generally: Organized as it is around the internal failures of Western and American elites, the populist response to a clear external threat has been a kind of anticipatory opposition, a critique of elite mistakes not yet in evidence.

Ross Douthat (italics added).

Every year the N.C.A.A. tournament draws us in and then spits us back out, and every year we come back for more. But why?

Jane Coaston

Miscellany

One Craftsman

A specialist in finishes, he is a journeyman in the original, literal sense. He goes wherever the furniture is, traveling by car because the airlines do not allow the chemicals he carries. He is at the very top of his profession, a conservator of multimillion-dollar pieces of furniture, and he makes a lot of money. He is essentially a forensic chemist; he speaks of particular oils, shellacs, acetones, and methylated spirits. He is also a cultural historian…

Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head.

American exceptionalism at its worst

80% of cars sold in Europe have manual transmissions. Some car makers, including Audi, no longer offer manual transmissions in the U.S. market at all.
So why would anyone want one? Your car is less likely to get stolen, for one thing. Thieves prove as incapable of using a clutch as any other American. There have been multiple reports over the past year—in Cleveland, St. Louis, Detroit and Pleasantville, N.J.—of carjackers unable to drive away.

Faith Bottum, The Dying Art of Driving a Stick Shift

Splashes of reality

Whatever his or her claims of solidarity with the Third World, each American college graduate has had an education costing an amount five times greater than the median life income of half of humanity.
The largest institutions compete most fiercely for resources which are not listed in any inventory: the air, the ocean, silence, sunlight, and health.

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

My pledge

I do not care that they have changed the dictionary. I will never use the word “literally” when I mean “figuratively” or “wow!”

BIPOC mothers, White birthing people

I am not making this up, and neither did Orwell:

The urgency of this moment is clear. Mortality rates of birthing people are too high, and babies born to Black and Puerto Rican mothers in this city are three times more likely to die in their first year of life than babies born to non-Hispanic White birthing people.

Dr. Michelle E. Morse, New York City’s chief medical officer (italics added for any slack-jawed readers) via Nellie Bowles

In a related vein, the World Health Organization, in the course of calling for abortion on demand for all nine months, world-wide, came up with this agnostic gem:

laws preventing abortion at any point during pregnancy risk violating the rights of ‘women, girls or other pregnant persons …’.

Via Wesley J. Smith. At least women and girls preceded the newly-obligatory “pregnant persons.”

Politics

As if on cue …

I mentioned last time that I had not voted for Indiana Senator Mike Braun. The GOP primary field the year he was elected consisted entirely of guys trying to outdo one another in Trumpiness, so I wouldn’t have voted for his primary opponents, either.

Since last time, he has astonishingly confirmed my judgment by suggesting that the Supreme Court should not have struck down anti-miscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia (but should have left it to the states to repeal them — thanks for that small bone, Senator).

This sort of thing is a risk of sending a faux-populist businessman to Congress: a reflex that the Supreme Court should stay out of social issues unleavened by appreciation for the gravaman of the civil war amendments.

Well if you don’t like America, why don’t you move to _?

True colors: January 6 insurrectionist granted asylum in Belarus.

What is a woman?

It’s odd that none of the GOP Senators baiting Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson about her inability to define “woman” have offered her their definition to see if she agrees.

No, it’s really not odd. The questions are not made in entirely good faith nor entirely bad faith. Neither was her answer. Nobody covered themselves in glory on this one.

(A workable definition is “adult female human”, but then I looked that up.)

“Parks”

The houses are all in their respective income pods, the shopping is miles away from the houses, and the schools are separate from both the shopping and the dwellings. Work takes place in the office park—the word park being a semantic gimmick to persuade zoning boards that a bunch of concrete and glass boxes set among parking lots amounts to a rewarding environment—and manufacturing takes place in the industrial park—ditto. This has some interesting, and rather grave, ramifications.

James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere

Who are the real imperialists?

In an interview with Mandiner several weeks ago, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was asked what he thought the main characteristics could be of a Chinese-led international order. While those characteristics are as yet unclear, he said, “one thing is for sure: the Anglo-Saxons want the world to recognise their position as morally right. For them it’s not enough to accept the reality of power; they also need you to accept the things that they think are right. The Chinese have no such need.”

Gladden Pappin.

Hawley, Cruz and others dispel a notion

Although their roles as members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are political rather than legal, Senators Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) got to play lawyers on TV at the Jackson confirmation hearings. And their performances won’t help dispel the notion that you don’t want Harvard and Yale Law grads as your advocates in the courtroom.

David Lat

Fact-checking the fact-checkers

[W]hen it really counts, the fact-checker’s role is not to investigate the truth but to uphold the credibility of official sources and their preferred narratives.

Jacob Siegel, ‌Invasion of the Fact-Checkers

Sunday before Nativity, 2021

I have no particular Advent or Nativity content, should the title have drawn you in looking for some such.

Rights? Shouldn’t it be truths and obligations?

Modern society, no longer looking to churches and communities to detail what is and what ought to be, relies on the social contract to parcel out what is owed and not owed—we speak of “rights” more than truths and obligations. Language of a child’s “right to life” only fits insofar as life has become a political and legal concept.

Sarah Soltis, ‌Membership in Grace: Reflecting on Dobbs and Gifts

Making friends with "the modern world"

For Barth, and for us, Nazi Germany was the supreme test for modern theology. There we experienced the “modern world,” which we had so labored to understand and to become credible to, as the world, not only of the Copernican world view, computers, and the dynamo, but also of the Nazis.

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens

See today’s last item, too.

Baggage

[H]uman beings never enter this world without baggage. The baggage is an inheritance, both cultural and biological that shapes the ground we walk on and the challenges we will inevitably confront. Fr. Alexander Schmemann is reported to have said that the spiritual life consists in “how we deal with what we’ve been dealt.” In some families, it seems that no matter how many times the deck is shuffled, the same hand (or close to it) appears.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, ‌Mary: The Blessing of All Generations

"Religious" news

The New York Times (1) has very little religious news (though there’s a religion "ghost" in many of its stories) and (2) has some odd ideas on what qualifies as religious news.

On the second point, consider Linda Greenhouse, Trump Weaponized the Supreme Court, apparently thinking there’s no explanation for the opinions of Trump’s three SCOTUS nominees except … religion, I guess.

This reminds me of a quote that unfortunately doesn’t qualify as aphoristic:

[T]he noun religion is an unhelpful reification of what does not as such exist.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence

Reminder to intellectualoids like me

We were created for communion with God—it is our very life. Thinking about communion with God is not a substitute for that communion. Theology as abstraction has no life within it.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, Everywhere Present

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.