We believe in sexual freedom. We take it for granted that consenting men and women have the right to do what they like with their bodies. Sex is everywhere in our culture. We love to think and talk about it; we devour news about celebrities’ affairs; we produce and consume pornography on an unprecedented scale. We think it wrong that in other cultures its discussion is censured, people suffer for their sexual orientation, women are treated as second-class citizens, or adulterers are put to death.
Yet a few centuries ago, our own society was like this too ….

As one might expect from that beginning, the article (which I plan to read, very critically, via Instapaper when opportunity allows) continues as one might expect from a popular lament of, say, the Salem Witch Trials. (You didn’t really need that link, did you? “Witch Trials” remains one of a relative handful of historic myths that shape a culture largely ignorant of history.)

Thursday’s Der Spiegel, in contrast, brings this opening to an article:

It wasn’t the usual images — those of long shapely legs and deep cleavage — that outraged Ibrahim Burak Birer, 31. Rather, it was pictures of penises and of fake, strap-on breasts which convinced him that things were getting out of hand. Birer had happened upon a series of photos on the subject of trans-sexuality printed in a major international fashion magazine.
The photos demonstrated conclusively to him that taboos hardly exist anymore — and that it was time to come up with something to combat the “diktat of nudity.” He knew that he and his team were on the right track.
“Cosmopolitan, Elle, Vogue, Marie Claire, it’s all about sex and naked skin,” says the devout Muslim. “The motto is that sex sells. But we, and millions of women around the world, believe that fashion can also be different.”
Çamlica is a quiet residential neighborhood on the Asian side of the megacity Istanbul. Birer and his friend Mehmet Volkan Atay, 32, two stout men in jeans and designer jackets, are sitting at their desks on the second floor of a white house.
Soft jazz music is playing on a laptop. The two managing directors of Alâ are in excellent spirits, as are the two women who are sitting across from them: Eyma Yol Kara, 28, the editor-in-chief of Alâ, “the magazine for a beautiful lifestyle,” and Esra Sezi, 24, the head fashion editor. Both women are young, attractive and wearing headscarves.

They’re producing what has been dubbed “The Vogue of the veiled.”

Islamic Fashion Magazine Alâ

Rather too tame for our pornogaified culture, it’s “fundamentally un-Islamic” to Islamic hardliners:

The people behind Alâ have not understood the concept of “tesettür,” one theologian grumbled. A woman’s desire to present herself is fundamentally un-Islamic, he claimed — be it in a bikini or in a headscarf. Muslim women, the theologian continued, should remain submissively in the background.

I’ll avoid the simple “both extremes are ticked off, so they must be right” thing. But I do think they’re basically right.

I find it difficult to believe that any woman would freely choose the burqa, but I find it easy to believe that that a lot of American women have embraced Islam, and a degree of modesty roughly in alignment Alâ, to escape mandatory sluttiness and the hookup culture.

I wish those young, American, formerly-Christian-in-some-sense women knew about Churches that value modesty and chastity. They’ll find only equivocal support in America’s commercialized and sexualized “Evangelical” Churches. In contrast, I can smile inside when, at my mostly-convert Orthodox Christian Church, I see many women of all ages, and even young girls, with long skirts and, if only for worship, covered heads. On average,  Orthodox modesty is high, and we’re not completely alone.

I don’t want to make headscarves and long skirts mandatory (outside monasteries – not that I have any say in monastic policies). Each starts his or her journey in a unique place, and there’s something wholesome about a Christian inquirer, or a “backslider” coming back, avoiding affectation of modesty (or any other virtue) just to fit in.

Moreover, I’ve been in a relatively legalistic Christian tradition, and have lived the “well, we stopped at ‘third base’ so it’s okay” version of Chastity Lite. When it’s all about rules, it becomes all about walking as close to the rule’s edge as possible. When it’s about “chastity,” it involves actions and inward attitudes.

Christians of greatly differing traditions manage to cooperate on issues like pregnancy resource centers for women (yay!) and the Culture Wars generally (eh, whatever). Can we find some way to cooperate with moderate, modest Muslims in shifting the culture on modesty and chastity, or at least to produce defiantly modest counterculture?

Can we at least set aside the myth of a single, hegemonic, pandemic Islamofascism long enough to recognize somewhat kindred spirits?

* * * * *

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Standing advice on enduring themes.

Socrates: What do you mean by “saved”?

Street preacher:  You don’t know what it means to be saved?!

Socrates: What makes you think I don’t know what it means to be saved?

Street preacher: Huh! You just said so! That’s why!

Socrates: No. I asked what you meant by “saved.” Surely I must understand what you mean by your question if I’m to answer it to your satisfaction.

Street preacher: What kind of relativistic mumbo-jumbo is that? I asked you a simple question: “Are you saved?” Can I have a simple answer?

Socrates: Surely your question is simply only if “salvation” is simple in your view.

Street preacher: Okay. Have it your way. Salvation means escaping the wrath of God.

Socrates: Well, then. Here I stand, a mature man in reasonably good health, blessed with a wife and children, adequate food, friends, and the prospect of all this indefinitely into the future. I guess I have escaped the wrath of God so in your terms, I’m saved. Have a good day.

Street preacher: No! I mean the wrath of God at the Last Judgment!

Socrates: What do you mean by “Last Judgment.”

Street preacher: I mean the end of the world, when God judges everyone, graciously allowing some to enter heaven, sending other to hell.

Socrates: This thing has happened? How did I miss it?

Street preacher: No! Of course it hasn’t happened! It won’t happen until the end of the world!

Socrates: Then surely I cannot yet be saved since the event by which salvation is defined has not yet come.

Street preacher: But you can be assured that you’ll be saved!

Socrates: But that I will be saved is something in the future. You asked if I am saved, which is in the present. So on your terms, it is impossible that anyone is saved now.

Street preacher: Okay, but I meant by “are you saved” to elicit whether you are sure you will be saved. Are you?

Socrates: No.

Street preacher: Do you want me to tell you how you can be sure?

Socrates: From what source can you prove the legitimacy of such assurance?

Street preacher: From the Bible.

Socrates: I know that book well, yet somehow missed assurance of future salvation.

Street preacher: “I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39)

Socrates: That is a wonderful passage, but can I not separate myself from the love of God?

Street preacher: Why would you want to do that?

Socrates: I did not say I should ever want to do that. I asked whether I could separate myself if I did want to – or if I became lax, or something.

Street preacher: You cannot be so lax as to separate yourself from the love of God!

Socrates: God does not care what I do, or whether, for instance, I love Him with all my heart, soul, mind and strength?

Street preacher: No! All you need to do is Pray The Sinner’s Prayer.

Socrates: Where is this “Sinner’s Prayer” in the Bible? …

Street preacher: Er, um, uh ….

Socrates: And why, if it is that simple, did the Apostle Paul not know about it?

Street preacher: But he did! He wrote that passage in Romans!

Socrates: The scope of which were were discussing. Can nothing on my part separate me from the love of God?

Street preacher: Again, no! We’re saved by faith alone! Once you’ve had faith, you’re golden!

Socrates: Even if I lose faith later?

Street preacher: Yes!

Socrates: Then why did James write –  the only time “faith alone” is found in the Bible, by the way – “You see then that a man is justified by works, and not by faith only”? …

Street preacher: (Muttering) Martin Luther should have taken that book out of the Bible. “Epistle of straw” indeed! It doesn’t belong there ….

Socrates: But more relevant, why did Paul himself write: “And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible. I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air: But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.“? (I Corinthians 9:25-27)

Street preacher: Well, Paul must have been having a bad day. Assurance of salvation is central to true Christianity. Any Christianity that lacks such assurance is false!

Socrates: So Paul was a false Christian?

Street preacher: Er, um, uh ….

Socrates: Well, I must be going. Have a good day, sir.

Street preacher: Yeah, same to you. (Muttering) I hate arguing outside the Philosophy Building!

I know Christians who seem to practice a sort of MED Christianity. One of them, an evangelical friend of many decades, put it pretty starkly. He’ll leave “jewels in the crown” (an evangelical metaphor for celestial rewards) for others; he just wants to “get into heaven.”

I can understand that if only because it used to be my own inchoate attitude:

• Human beings have a problem: God is angry with them and has half a mind to send them to hell.
• You need to do, believe, say, or pray whatever it takes to deal with God’s anger problem so he won’t do that to you.
• If you go for that sort of thing, you might even want to go above and beyond, vying for “jewels in your crown,” but it really isn’t necessary. Or as W.H. Auden put it, “I like to sin. God likes to forgive. It’s an admirable arrangement, really.”

But is there really a Minimum Effective Dose of Christianity, such that you’re wasting your time on anything beyond what it takes to produce the desired result?

Master, which is the great commandment in the law?

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Matthew 22:36-40 (KJV)

“All” doesn’t sound at all minimal. “Minimal” doesn’t sound at all like love.

“Minimal” sounds like somebody who’s buying fire insurance. And I don’t think God is fooled.

* * * * *

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Standing advice on enduring themes.

He:

Nice to know. Speaker Brian Bosma: ‘It’s not our job here to determine the constitutionality of something before we vote on it.” #INLegis

Me:

A bit out of context, no?

I believe the context of that remark was the Democrat leadership trying to get Bosma or the Republican leadership to say “Yes, your proposal to put ‘Right to Work’ to a referendum is constitutional.” If the Republicans won’t say it, the Democrats presumably will continue to shirk their duty to show up to work, thus preventing a quorum for any action on Right to Work or anything else.

He:

Only context: Hoping our reps consider the Constitution before passing a ‘law.’ Fair/unfair?

Me:

Fair. But Dems will break quorum until GOP says “constitutional,” then holler at any legal challenge by anyone.

I absolutely think legislators should consider constitutionality before voting. It’s even a pet peeve when one of them says “constitutionality is for courts to decide.” No, buddy: you took your own oath to uphold the constitution.

I don’t think Bosma was saying otherwise. Who’s the “we” behind “our job”? The Republicans? Was he saying “It’s not the GOP’s job to determine the constitutionality of a Democrat proposal we oppose on policy grounds and will vote against anyway”?

(But for that matter, newspapers should consider it before editorializing as well – a principle the local newspaper has violated at least once, as when they commanded the legislature to get out there and pass a lottery bill when there was a constitutional ban on lotteries to repeal first.)

He:

Don’t care the issue; if they pass things that aren’t constitutional, they’re basically making us finance lawsuits. #INLegis

Me:

This whole blog, the bottom line of which is I don’t think Bosma intends to pass the Democrat’s referendum dodge, constitutional or not. If Bosma really means the legislature can pass unconstitutional crap in reliance on the courts as a backstop, then I’d agree with the editor.

]]> http://intellectualoid.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/when-140-characters-isnt-enough/feed/ 0 readerjohn http://intellectualoid.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/gop-endorsement/ http://intellectualoid.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/gop-endorsement/#comments Sat, 21 Jan 2012 19:39:26 +0000 readerjohn http://intellectualoid.wordpress.com/?p=7447 ]]> Okay, the title’s misleading. I’ve repudiated the GOP (without embracing the Democrats – which I won’t do as long as the sexual revolution has pride of place in their platform), and I’m not likely to endorse anyone, but I write to see what I think sometimes, so here goes. No claim of comprehensive coverage made, by the way.

Newt:

• Is a very bright guy, but he’s 8 or 9 on a bright scale of 1 to 10, 11 15 on the glib scale.
• Were I President, I’d have him on speed dial for brainstorming.
• He seems to have adult Attention Deficit Disorder, leading to so many flip-flops that he’s got a lot of gall faulting anyone else as inconstant.
• By his own account, he loves the country so much and works so very hard for it that he gets stressed out and tends to rut on consenting bimbos. It’s unedifying to go too far into this topic, but I’d say that it’s at least one consideration for me that voting for Newt, assuming his Christian faith is sincere, would be voting to put muh Brotha’ in the path of a serious temptation that’s a personal weakness of his.
• Bellicose on multiple fronts. The single most blood chilling line of the debates: “Andrew Jackson had a theory about our enemies: kill them.”
• Relatively undisciplined and mercurial.
• His mouth could launch a nuclear war – unless his handlers muzzled him, in which case he wouldn’t be the Newt that has some people inexplicably enthused.

Summary: No way, José. I’m almost certain to abstain or vote Third Party if he’s the nominee.

Santorum:

• I’m ardently pro-life, so he has been on my radar for a long time.
• He, too, is bellicose. (In this election cycle, the only sane candidates are called “isolationist.” Has nobody noticed that our imperial wars are bankrupting us and killing our young men? Quem deus vult perdere, dementat prius. Oh. Never mind. They’re not young men from The Ruling Class, but rather are “cannon fodder.” But I digress.)
• His social views (abortion, contraception, marriage, sexual revolution generally) are relatively extreme. But that they are extreme is a worse commentary on us than on him. I happen to share, or at the very least keenly sympathize with, those extreme views, and I appreciate that he not only holds them, but eloquently defends them. He “gets it” on these issues. Silver lining? This election’s mostly about the economy, not social issues. He might slide by despite his social positions.
• Blue collar sentiments. I’m told they come across as sincere to blue collar folks. I’m in a sort of no-man’s land socially. I’m no 1-percenter, and I’m just one generation off the farm. But I can’t honestly say I’m in tune with the proles, either. But I can honestly say that a candidate who seems to be in touch with the proles gets bonus points with me, not because of electability concerns, but because I’m not not comfortable with power brokers or “movers and shakers,” who are too out of touch, especially these days. Common man does get screwed way more often than not, and a President who gets that is attractive.

Summary: Even though he got the endorsement of self-appointed Evangelical leaders on third vote, he might well get mine, too. But the bellicosity bothers me a lot. I’d like to think he has too much integrity to mouth such bloodlust just to be pandering, but mouthing it sincerely is scarier still.

Ron Paul:

• For my money, at least today, he’s even better than Santorum on social issues because, as he said in South Carolina, he’d support a law to take abortion jurisprudence away from the federal courts, thus effectively repealing Roe v. Wade  and giving the abortion issue back to the States. I don’t savor that, but I think it’s the right answer constitutionally. The states did not strip the unborn of their right to life (with a handful of early exceptions); the Supreme Court did.
• I cannot tell where he stands on too big to fail. I hope he’d bust ‘em up, but he hasn’t exactly said that so far as I can tell. See here, here and here. As of two weeks ago, another writer thought he was AWOL on this key issue (as are all other Republicans now that Jon Huntsman has withdrawn).
• He’s not bearish enough on the economy. He’s heavily invested in gold and silver mining stocks, whereas I’m unconvinced that those have intrinsic value (versus historically persistent countercyclical value). [Can you say "Oh, you're so provocative, Tipsy!" I thought you could!]
• I don’t get, and don’t really buy, the gold standard. Ditto abolishing the Fed.
• Does he really want to be President, or is he a stalking horse for Rand Paul in 2016, or a mere shaper of the debate?

Summary: my likeliest protest vote, but I’m almost as unsure of his temperament as I am of Newt’s.

Mitt Romney:

• Mormon Church would use his Presidency as a calling card in their proselytizing efforts. (Do not try calling me out for a religious test. Voters, including me, can impose any test they want for purposes of their own vote.)
• I don’t know if he actually has any politically salient principles, so often has he pivoted on political issues.
• Absolutely tone deaf about money and social class. He thinks $375,000 per year (probably his lowest is the last 30 years) is barely squeaking by, while I remember that a $100,000 Publisher’s Clearing House jackpot could set me day dreaming for days not all that long ago.
• I assume that he has sabre-rattled since that’s a GOP litmus test, but he’s been relatively quiet about it, hasn’t he? Maybe he’s insincere? A world at war isn’t a very good place for scrubbed young Mormon “Elders” to go on missions.
• His best comment to date was along the lines of “I’m a numbers guy. Seat me at a table with piles of budget papers and economic numbers and I’m in my glory.” If the election is going to be all about the economy, that’s pretty darned attractive.

Summary: to my surprise, maybe.

Bottommost line: I’m still likely to be looking for a third party candidate, but last time they tended to be even crazier than the two majors. This may be another year when I hold my nose to vote.

* * * * *

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Standing advice on enduring themes.

The Contemporary Christian Music equivalency tables probably say “If you like Eminem, you might like  Jefferson Bethke.” Said Bethke perpetrated a YouTube rap/rant titled “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus.” It seems that 12,000,000 people have consented to watching it. De gustibus non est disputandum.

But Father Andrew – who, be it noted, is much younger than I and (consequently?) more patient about such things – took many of the rhetorical questions as if they were serious (Oh, the kenosis!) and explained, point by point, why he loves true religion precisely because he loves Jesus. His response was irenic, but he firmly defended something that very much needs defense from barbarians young and old.

The rapper’s fans and fellow travelers were having none of it. They bombarded Fr. Andrew’s blog with a large share of 19,813 views and 500+ comments ranging from criticism of Father Andrew to ad hominem invitations to come-to-Jesus-and-say-The-Sinner’s-Prayer® and all that there.

In the comboxes on a followup blog, explaining why he has suspended comment on the original, Father Andrew summarized what earlier he addressed point-by-point:

Whenever I read these implorations for me to turn away from “religion” and “rules” to the “just me and Jesus” theology, here’s how it comes through to me:

Give up the Body of Christ; mystical communion with the one true God, growth in the knowledge of the Son of God; becoming a partaker of the divine nature; having actual physical contact with the Maker of the universe; communion with all the saints of the ages; timeless, otherworldly worship; perfectly balanced and thorough theology; an endless supply of Scriptural commentary woven into a single seamless tapestry of faith; and the surety that you stand in the same unchanging apostolic faith as the prophets, apostles, martyrs, fathers, confessors, ascetics and every righteous spirit made perfect in faith in exchange for pop songs with Jesus in them; “Christian” kitsch; a spiritual life whose whole fulfillment happens after saying one prayer; shallow theology; a historical sensibility that goes back roughly to last week; church communities designed according to marketing research; personality-cult leadership; doctrine that changes faster than you can blink; theological fads; and big crowds of arm-waving concert-goers.

I’m being a touch hyperbolic here, but that’s really how I experience such appeals. “Here, give up the Ultimate Thanksgiving Dinner King’s Banquet for a Tic-Tac.”

And all God’s people said “Amen!”

Now in defense of Bethke, I readily allow that there may be some spiritually sensitive souls who find some religion intolerable. He just doesn’t strike me as one of them. He struck me, rather, as a guy who kicked his porn addiction and stopped fornicating after some sort of encounter with what Evangelicals call “Jesus,” and is now grabbing limelight with a rap version of a favorite Evangelical testimonial: “I was the biggest sinner on the block, but then I met Jesus.”

But even the glimpses of personal biography may be an affectation or sheer invention by a young attention-seeking missile, who has an internet presence that says “professional pretending to be passionate amateur.”

Well, Father Andrew did it far more nicely than I, and caught a lot of grief for it, so I’ll shut up now and let you read his response (which conveniently imbeds Bethke’s video. The response is devastating without being withering or demeaning. I’m incredulous that so many people turned out to defend the video, or to flame Father Andrew.

UPDATE: Awakened early by an unusual midwinter thunderstorm, I revisited this, disturbed especially by the discovery, late in my writing of the main post, that Bethke’s biography (porn addict, sex fiend, extremely grateful to have found Jesus) may be a theatrical persona of a performance artist. I wonder now if the better comparison isn’t Chris Crocker instead of Eminem.

To my friend who asked why I had not converted to Orthodoxy, the answer was surprisingly easy. I responded by writing back: “Because I am committed to key distinctives of the Protestant evangelical tradition.”

In context, that was not as vague as I suggested. “Conclusory,” yes, but not vague, as he had just marched through a long list of distinctives wherein Evangelicalism has departed from Orthodoxy (and orthodoxy).

I also discovered, with the benefit of at least a decade of Orthodox life since I last read him, that he does not, in my opinion, understand Orthodoxy as well as I initially thought.

I think I mistook the depth of his understanding when I first read him (which may have been when I was still a catechumen) because he had the “effable” distinctives down pretty well, as if he were preparing a table with side-by-side comparisons, while missing the ineffable pretty badly. At that stage, I probably had the “effables” down pretty well, but simply agreed with the Orthodox instead of the Evangelicals. The ineffable aspects of Orthodoxy come to the adherent’s appreciation much more gradually. (I’ll call the “effables” “tangible” from here.)

A second deficit I now see in Clendenin is that while he draws the distinction between fairly tangible differences passably well, he seems quite credulous about the foundations of Evangelicalism’s distinctives. That’s why I call the block quote above “conclusory.” This paragraph in particular jumped out:

In 1523-24 the Reformers Ulrich Zwingli and Martin Luther donned the gown of the university scholar. This simple change of dress symbolized a radical shift that has characterized the Protestant West ever since: that the knowledge of God is mediated primarily through the written Word. The Puritan John Foxe, for example, insisted that “God conducted the Reformation by printing, writing, and reading.” Before long, in Reformation churches the sermon had replaced the Eucharist as the defining moment of the liturgy.

I’ll give him credit for accuracy about the broad arc of Protestantism abandoning Eucharist for sermon as the defining moment of the liturgy, but I’m stunned that, even in an article that was running rather long, he makes no effort to defend this revolution against a millennium-and-a-half of unbroken tradition.

I don’t know what Clendenin would say to defend the revolution, but I have a few questions:

• If “the knowledge of God is mediated primarily through the written Word,” what did the Church do before there was a set New Testament canon — which was centuries, not decades, in coming?
• How do you know what the canon of the “written Word” is? Can you look it up in the Bible? Which book of the canon is it in?
• If “the knowledge of God is mediated primarily through the written Word,” what did believers do, and how did the Church survive and thrive, before the printing press?
• Is Protestantism essentially an techno-triumphalist epiphenomenon of the printing press?
• If “the knowledge of God is mediated primarily through the written Word,” isn’t your god necessarily, shall we say, a bit two-dimensional, and the knowledge of Him more intellectual than personal? Isn’t your faith semi-Gnostic, or even Docetist?
• How can you be so (expletives deleted) insouciant about this ”radical shift that has characterized the Protestant West ever since”? Are you saying, or assuming, that radical shifts are good?
• Can you clearly and convincingly justify this radical shift from the scriptures you claim as supreme authority? Or do you assume that interpretive and liturgical innovations, 1500 years after the seminal events and in contravention of the tradition and liturgies of the intervening years, bear no strong burden of proof?
• Why should I care one whit about what “doctrines many evangelicals consider nonnegotiable essentials of vital Christianity” when Evangelicalism is only tenuously connected to the novelty of the Reformation, owning more to the even more novel Second Great Awakening and arising 1800 years after the seminal events?
• Is a religion centered on sermons even the same essential religion as one centered on the Eucharist?

I could probably go on. This is off the top of my head, without consulting the many apologetical notes I’ve made for myself over 14 years or so.

Clendenin makes other dubious arguments, too:

• “[W]hen an Orthodox believer once asked why his church did not do more doctrinal teaching, his priest responded, “Icons teach us all that we need to know.” (Clendenin) One Priest does not a doctrine establish, but if he did, that’s a game two can play, all day, all night. Item: An Evangelical friend assured me that all he wants to do is get into heaven; he’s not interested in attaining such holiness as would win him jewels in his crown. Or if that Item is too laicized, how about (Item:) the airhead Evangelical minstress on WMBI who said of Chist’s incarnation, in effect, ”Wow! Isn’t it amazing! Mary allowed her womb to be used so Jesus could zoop down to earth through her! What a gal!” She clearly was implying that Mary was just a conduit, not the source of the humanity of the God-man. And that charitably assumes that she actually believes in Christ’s humanity.
• “Icons are not merely sacred art. Rather, they are a source of revelation.” I’m not sure what he means by that, but every interpretation I can imagine is false. Icons are (among other things) teaching tools for the illiterate (and “visual learners”?), but not a source of revelation.
• “We think the fundamental Christian schism occurred when Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg church, October 31, 1517. Orthodox believers see things very differently. For them the fundamental schism occurred 500 years earlier—in the year 1054.” So he’s conceding that Protestants are schismatic? Does he have any idea how the Church Fathers frowned on schism, and how eager Catholicism and Orthodoxy are to fix the “schismatic” label to each other as a consequence?
• “[Russian] Intellectuals, like one of my students at Moscow University, often disdain Orthodoxy as a ‘medieval mentality.’” Yeah? Really? You mean that chronological snobbery, worship of novelty and reflexive rejection of The Venerable have reached Russia? I’m shocked, simply shocked!
• “[I]n biblical interpretation the Reformers placed the Scriptures above the church. They insisted that the Bible interprets itself, and through the Holy Spirit, God instructs its readers in a direct and individual manner rather than binding their consciences to the supposedly reliable teaching of the church. It is precisely this view that elevates Scripture above the church and actually encourages private interpretation that the Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky once called ‘the sin of the Reformation.’” Clendenin incredibly makes no response to this powerful indictment (which I believe is true).

I’m glad I found the Clendenin piece, and glad to see that the puzzle of his continued Evangelicalism isn’t such a puzzle after all. As a drawer of parallel tables of tangible similarities and differences, he’s adequate and fair (if mistaken at points); but it appears that he never got the intangibles of Orthodoxy.

And from what I’ve read of him that, I cannot see that he has any good basis for his commitment “to key distinctives of the Protestant evangelical tradition” — a tradition that, expounded by Clendenin, comes across as insouciantly radical.

I don’t have links, but could probably find proof that he is against polygamy and deliberately having children out of wedlock as a sort of lifestyle choice. All in all, not a fun guy by today’s insane standards.

So there’s the setup.

Now: suppose he give a speech touching on civil unrest, economic problems, religious freedom and family. And suppose that in that speech, he says this:

Blessed John Paul II stated that “the path of peace is at the same time the path of the young”, inasmuch as young people embody “the youth of the nations and societies, the youth of every family and of all humanity”. Young people thus impel us to take seriously their demand for truth, justice and peace. For this reason, I chose them as the subject of my annual World Day of Peace Message, entitled Educating Young People in Justice and Peace. Education is a crucial theme for every generation, for it determines the healthy development of each person and the future of all society. It thus represents a task of primary importance in this difficult and demanding time. In addition to a clear goal, that of leading young people to a full knowledge of reality and thus of truth, education needs settings. Among these, pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman. This is not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society. Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself. The family unit is fundamental for the educational process and for the development both of individuals and States; hence there is a need for policies which promote the family and aid social cohesion and dialogue. It is in the family that we become open to the world and to life and, as I pointed out during my visit to Croatia, “openness to life is a sign of openness to the future”. In this context of openness to life, I note with satisfaction the recent sentence of the Court of Justice of the European Union forbidding patenting processes relative to human embryonic stem cells, as well as the resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe condemning prenatal selection on the basis of sex.

(Emphasis added, but read the whole thing as carefully as you like.)

How does Reuters report it?

Gay marriage a threat to humanity’s future: Pope.

Indeed, “some of his strongest comments against gay marriage.”

Do not trust the press on religious topics.

(Huge HT to GetReligion.com)

But Gnostic Myth #2 averred that “the resurrection of the body, is the goal of personal salvation” (emphasis added). The longer blog to which he linked on that point, which was targeted at a competing “immortality of the soul” view, left me fairly certain that Phillips was not a well-formed Orthodox Christian, though he illustrated this blog on bodily resurrection with a familiar Orthodox icon.

So: probably not Orthodox. Yet he recurrently and trenchantly criticized as Gnostic, or at least semi-Gnostic, many figures of Calvinism’s history over the past few centuries – Jonathan Edwards, Charles Hodge, even  Calvinism generally. He alluded to his high view of the Eucharist in Gnostic Myth #8 – higher than found almost anywhere in Calvinism since Zwingli ousted Calvin (let alone what is found in the revivalist Churches emerging from and after the Second Great Awakening).

He certainly recognizes that there’s a strong strain of Gnosticism and Docetism in Protestantism generally. He asked “Is Protestantism Heretical” as a debate set-up with a couple of Orthodox guys – a debate that never really lifted off as it broke down immediately over definitions.

He admires William Dyrness’ laments of the artistic impoverishment of the Reformed tradition (i.e., Calvinism, if you’re unaware of their essential synonymity), and of the loss that came with the transition from Altar to Pulpit as the focus of worship.

So I began to suspect that he was an astute convert from Calvinism to Roman Catholicism.  His blog titled “Why I am not Roman Catholic” has tantalizingly vanished from the blogosphere.

Yet when I went looking for a straightforward declaration from him about his faith, I discovered that at last report he was Calvinist — “kind of” (his own qualifier). Calvinist enough to attend a Reformed Presbyterian Church at least, while lamenting Calvinism’s Gnostic tendencies.

He also criticized the penal substitution theory of the atonement, characteristic, if not a sina qua non, of all Western Christianity for nearly a millennium, and evidenced on that point at least a bit of familiarity and sympathy for the Orthodox (“Eastern”) view.

* * * * *

When I encounter guys like Robin Phillips, or the aforementioned William Dyrness (who I heard on Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 109), or even Daniel Clendenin (the only Evangelical I know who seemed to understand Orthodoxy but walked away anyway), I wonder “why do they remain Reformed or Evangelical?” Phillips and Dyrness obviously have some major issues with their tradition. Why can’t they see what I saw and move on? Why do they linger to build a syncretistic sub-version of their tradition?

There’s a maxim attributed to John Henry Newman that “to be deep in history is to cease being Protestant.” Maybe Dyrness can remain Protestant because he’s deep in art, not history. But Phillips pretty clearly knows his history, especially of early heresies like Gnosticism and its fellow-traveler, Docetism. Why then does he remain Reformed? I’m pretty confident that he’s not consciously engaged in syncretism.

I have some conjectures:

1. They have deeply internalized the concept of semper reformanda, which I understand to mean “we’re always straying from truth and always needing to return.” Their critiques thus might be seen as attempted course corrections, and par for the course, in saecula seculorum.
2. They have deeply internalized the Reformation mottos sola scriptura, sola fides, sola this-and-that and cannot long entertain any full-orbed Christian tradition that rejects any “sola” and explicitly honors received teachings. (“Teachings,” by the way, is what Protestant translators call “paradosis” when it’s good; “tradition” is what they call it when it’s bad. It’s the same word, spun in translation.)
3. Like the True Believers in Communism or Capitalism, they reason from their ivory towers that The Real Thing has not failed, but really hasn’t been tried yet in all its pristine glory.

I’m more of a lex orandi, lex credendi guy than a semper reformanda guy or a sola anything guy. If I stray, the Scriptures will help correct my course, but I find them formally insufficient. Catholic apologist Mark Shea makes the distinction between material sufficiency and formal sufficiency (adding “the Magisterium,” which Orthodox reject):

Material sufficiency means that all the bricks necessary to build doctrine is there in Scripture. However, it also teaches that since the meaning of Scripture is not always clear and that sometimes a doctrine is implied rather than explicit, other things besides Scripture have been handed to us from the apostles: things like Sacred Tradition (which is the mortar that holds the bricks together in the right order and position) and the magisterium or teaching authority of the Church (which is the trowel in the hand of the Master Builder). Taken together, these three things — Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the Magisterium — are formally sufficient for knowing the revealed truth of God.

For the Orthodox, the list would be more like Scripture, liturgies and other services of the Church’s cycle, and prayers. Since we don’t tamper with the services (we just translate to vernacular, occasionally add new saints or optional Prayer Book prayers , and very rarely add new hymn texts), I get a very full-orbed experience, that touches both mind and heart, when I appear to sing so many of our Parish’s services. I dare say it “renews my mind” (Romans 12:2) in a way that preaching never did.

The third conjecture is the source of my title. If the Reformed faith, so elegant in the ivory tower, incorrigibly fails in practice, one should start to suspect that there’s something wrong with the theory. If the Calvinist plant only thrives in the hothouse, withering or dying in the wild, maybe there’s a problem in the seed.

And it does fail in practice, wither in the wild. For instance, have seen firsthand the casual handling of Eucharistic elements by Elders in a very Reformed church, and having heard of as bad or worse from Missouri Synod Lutherans, I can say fairly confidently that the Reformed (and Lutheran) views of Eucharist expressed on paper are not truly believed by the elders under pastoral supervision.

I believe with John Henry Newman that “to be deep in history is to cease being Protestant.” I also believe that to be really deep in history is to cease being Roman Catholic, too.

I can prove neither of those quips by syllogism, as the Orthodox guys found when debating definitions with Phillips, but I believe it, and believe I’ve experienced it.

Any Protestant readers who think they really understand Orthodoxy feel free to chime in on why you’re still Protestant.

But please: if you only have read secondary sources (i.e., Protestants explaining the errors of Roman Catholicism and/or Orthodoxy), restrain yourself. In my experience, only Mr. Clendenin really has understood Orthodoxy from outside, and his only explanation for remaining Evangelical was something vague like “I think Evangelicalism still has something to offer.”

I try to honor that same principle by focusing my critiques on Evangelicalism and Calvinism, both of which I’ve lived from the inside. I don’t beat up, for instance, on Arminians and Pentecostals doctrinally, having never lived them. Ditto Roman Catholicism. I shot off my mouth about that when I was a Prostestant, rendered unjustifiably cocky by reading anti-Rome secondary sources.

So: does anyone who really understands Orthodoxy care to chime in on why you’re not Orthodox?

I’m now very troubled by his bellicosity. It’s very consistent with what GOP voters appear to want to hear, but it’s not what I want to hear. As someone recently put it, war against the abstraction “terrorism” will be endless because there’s no criterion for victory. I probably could say that better, but it’s preliminary anyway.

Where I’ll defend him, though, is when people start pulling flippant, shallow lines like this:

Some of his positions he’s taken are just so weird,” he continued, “that I think some Republicans are going to be off-put. Not everybody is going to be down, for example, with the story of how he and his wife handled the stillborn child whose body they took home to kind of sleep with and introduce to the rest of the family. It’s a very weird story.

(Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson on “The Rachel Maddow Show” Tuesday.) First, the story’s not exactly true. Second, Santorum did what I wish I’d done.

His critics are roughly where I was at the time: insufficiently appreciative of the magnitude of the loss (yes, I think a loss can be bigger than the loser perceives at the time), of the preciousness of life.

I’ve been admiring his forthrightness, too. I think he’s wrong about the non-existence of Palestinians, but respect his effort to engage his interlocutor in dialogue about it, even if he’s more than a little pedantic:

He did the same thing Friday in defending “traditional marriage” (I use the scare quotes to acknowledge that the term is disputed and mocked, not that I recall him using the term) to a hostile student audience in New Hampshire; he tried to engage them in the (il)logic of their position, whereas they merely wanted to boo and bully him. Considering the rigors of the campaign trail, I can forgive a little pedantry.

He’s an authentic social conservative; I can tell you that a lot of GOP figures (e.g., Orrin Hatch, John McCain) are phonies on “the social issues,” and I can hear it in their inarticulate defense of their positions. They really don’t get it. They’re pandering from a memorized list of talking points.

I think he’s an authentically “compassionate conservative,” though that phrase puts me on guard. Another way of saying it might be that he’s an authentic proponent of Catholic social teaching (which I find very attractive),  subsidiarity, mediating structures and “communities” that are not synonymous with “political subdivisions.”

I’m pretty well convinced that what we’ve been doing, and what both parties appear to intend continuing, is broken very badly. Santorum seems to represent a real alternative view that I find attractive in many ways. But the bellicosity may be a deal breaker. I’m tired of voting for lesser evils.