The Face of God -- Pagan Antiquity and Christianity

Icon of the Resurrection of Our Lord

Over at On Behalf of All, Vincent Martini recently posted on the topic of the resurrection of Christ and the charge by skeptics that this event is a myth that was borrowed and re-imagined from pagan mystery cults. Drawing heavily on N.T. Wright's scholarship in The Resurrection of the Son of God, Vincent points out that the "dying and rising" gods of said cults were gods whose "resurrections" are cyclical  and are linked to the perpetual cycles of life and death within nature. Appeasing these gods or attempting to commune with them had the chief purpose of ensuring a prosperous harvest. As Martini and Wright both point out, this is somewhat a far cry from the resurrection of the Incarnate Son of God, the 2nd person of the Trinity, who conquers death itself and in whom the Kingdom of God is made manifest on the Earth.

Skeptics are quite fond of pointing out the similarities between Christianity and certain mystery cults of antiquity, in order to insinuate that the similarities are (somehow) evidence of Christianity being some sort of fraud or myth. But these similarities are often cherrypicked from a wide range of beliefs and cults, omitting all those which bear no resemblance, and focusing on anything that has even a superficial resemblance. The result is usually a drastic exaggeration of the actual parallels and overlap.

In addition, there is often a historical confusion over which direction the influence is running in. Many ancient religions and cults were influenced by the spread of Christianity, and adopted elements into themselves. Shoddy amateur scholarship that pollutes the internet is prone to see any similarity and falsely infer that the influence necessarily ran in the other direction, since paganism in general preceded Christianity.

With all that said, to the extent that there is some legitimate overlap between certain elements of Christian worship, piety, and devotion and that of certain pagan cults, this is hardly surprising and is no challenge to the truth of Christianity.

In the February 2013 issue of First Things, Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart addresses this topic from this angle.[1] Granting that there are more substantial similarities than some Christians usually feel comfortable admitting -- sacramental initiation rites which are supposed to conquer the power of death, for example -- Hart notes that it's a false inference from these facts to the story of Christ being false or somehow stolen from the pagan religions.

There was a brief period in the early heady days of anthropology of religion when James Frazer was still in fashion, during which it was regarded by many as something of a scandal that so many seemingly common elements could be found in both Christianity of the early centuries and many of the pagan devotions of late antiquity. To this day in fact, there are Christians who become terribly anxious at the suggestion that the early Church, in many places, had something of the form of an Asiatic or Hellenistic mystery cult, or that other sects that offered salvation with a savior deity cherished some of the same religious aspirations of Christianity.

Really, though, there is nothing alarming or even surprising in the discovery that the gospel spoke to religious hopes that existed outside its corporate boundaries, or that early Christian devotion should have been expressed in forms not wholly alien to the culture and language of its time.

On the contrary, we confess that Christ came "in the fullness of time" (Gal. 4:4), so it makes sense that his coming into the world would constitute the fulfillment of certain religious longings of the world which was, after all, created through Him. Longing such as as the desire to see the "face of God", as expressed -- among other places -- in Apuleius' The Golden Ass. Hart notes that these religious expectations are both fulfilled and overturned in Christ. The face of God is revealed, but it's revealed in a scandalous form: that of a crucified Jewish peasant.

My main interest in the discussion is to affirm that these two apologetic approaches are compatible, rather than mutually exclusive. Provided that the apologist is careful not to blithely dismiss all similarities while accurately articulating the great, significant divergence that does in fact occur with the advent of Christianity.


[1] - This article is behind a paywall. Hart has a similar piece from 2011 that is available for free here.

Louie Giglio and Preaching to the Culture

On this the day of Obama's 2nd inauguration, Mark Galli has a piece in Christianity Today on the Louie Giglio fiasco and its significance for Christians and their engagement with culture. The overall thrust of the piece -- that the Church needs to preach Christ crucified vigorously, and ditch the moralistic therapeutic deism -- is admirable, but Galli makes some crucial mistakes in his diagnosis of the problem. He says:

When the culture takes issue with the church today, it carps about our oppressive sexual ethics (especially our opposition to homosexual behavior) and our various prosperity gospels (from the most egregious health-and-wealth messages to the more subtle but equally dangerous sermons on how faith in Christ can improve your marriage, your business, and your self-esteem).

With regard to the first, I don't get the impression that Galli thinks this is a problem on the Church's end -- let's be charitable and assume he doesn't. Then this is a non-issue: the Church rightly stands up for its sexual ethics in the public square, and the culture rightly (given its values) tears at its garments and wails. This is as it should be. May it ever be so.

The real mistake is with the latter. The claim that our culture takes issue with self-help, life-management tactics is utterly false. Not only does the wider culture not take issue with this element of American Christianity, but this aberrant strain of the faith is a direct outworking of -- and sustained ally to -- our cultural values and ideology. Thus, when Galli declares:

The current state of our preaching is driven by an admirable desire to show our age the relevance of the gospel. But our recent attempts have inadvertently turned that gospel into mere good advice—about sex, about social ethics, about how to live successfully. This either offends or bores our culture.

One wonders which culture he could possibly be referring to. Again, with regard to preaching about sex, sin, and repentance, our culture does rage against us and we should welcome the fury with delight. With regard to preaching practical, self-help therapy, our culture has no issue at all and is in complete sync with the Church on this point.

Another small complaint about Galli's piece is the introduction, in which he echoes the unfortunately widespread downplaying of Christian persecution in this country -- such as that suffered by Giglio and Hobby Lobby -- by noting that other Christians, at other times and places, get killed and tortured for their faith. Expressed in syllogistic form this argument seems to go something like:

Premise 1: There are many levels of severity of persecution.
Premise 2: ?????
Conclusion: Relatively mild persecution is not persecution at all.

We are called to live faithfully and to suffer through the persecution that might result. And we should encourage our brothers and sisters who suffer persecution, no matter what form it comes in. This obsessive need to downplay legitimate persecution, just because it's not as bad as it could be, is abhorrent. Murdering Christians for their faith is wicked; chasing Christians from the public square because they refuse to submit to the anti-Christian secular hegemony is also wicked, not to mention anti-American. If we are going to serve as a prophetic witness to the culture, we have to call out persecution for what it is rather than shrug it off.

With all that said, Galli is still right about the prosperity gospels, subtle and blatant, which need to be rooted out from the garden of Christianity. What he doesn't seem to get is that, even if this purge were wholly successful, this is much more likely to make Christianity even less attractive to our culture. Thankfully, we're not called to market the faith effectively, but rather to repentance, faithfulness, and holiness.

The Church as Hermeneutic

Because the matter of ecclesiology -- that is the question of "What/Who is the Church?" -- was the primary catalyst for my conversion to Orthodoxy, and because my chief witness as an Orthodox Christian is likely to be to groups of friends and family who are evangelical Protestants (or lapsed ones), I've been reflecting on the issue some more. Having found what I view to be the answer to the question, the issue of how to share that answer becomes a matter that requires cultivating a loving, charitable disposition through much thought and prayer. This issue becomes especially acute in the midst of the Holiday season.

It also requires a strengthening of my own understanding. This being the case, I recently read the book The Non-Orthodox and the essay The Church is Visible and One, both by Patrick Barnes. Both cite, and extensively quote, various Orthodox sources -- Patristic and contemporary -- as well as some Protestant voices, such as T.F. Torrance. I also recently re-watched the stellar lecture by David Bentley Hart on The Intersection of Scripture and Theology (below), which on one level functions as a crypto-Orthodox apologia for the Patristic view of Scripture. A topic which inevitably ties back into ecclesiology.

One key takeaway from Hart's lecture is that, contra modern sensibilities, historical-critical methods of reading Scripture -- as valuable as they often are -- in no sense supersede or make invalid the ways the Church has traditionally read and understood Scripture. He specifically is talking about how the early Fathers read much of the Old Testament allegorically (which isn't always to say non-literally, as Hart explains). This is a narrower point that opens into the broader idea that because Scripture can be read and interpreted many ways, and often in contradictory and irreconcilable ways, an authority is needed. A Church who is united in matters of Truth needs a mechanism for settling disputes in how Scripture is understood and taught, as well as in many other matters. The mechanism the Apostles established in Acts 15, and passed down to their followers, was the conciliar model of Church authority. The convening of Church councils, within which the Holy Spirit is judging and guiding authoritatively (Acts 15:28).

While it is a popular (and true, so far as it goes) postmodern paradigm that no text has an inherent, self-disclosing meaning, and that every act of reading is already an act of interpretation, this truth -- along with either an explicit or effective belief in sola scriptura -- is too often used to lend purchase to a broad relativism. A hermeneutic buffet from which we all necessarily must partake. From which we must make interpretive choices which are not inherently superior to another hermeneutical lens, provided both are equally internally consistent. In response to a naive belief in a text that is fully self-disclosing of meaning, we have a reactionary belief in a divided -- not merely 'diverse and not divided', as I incorrectly speculated on in the past -- Church, which can and must permit mutually exclusive and contradictory understandings of Scripture, because there is no governing authority to which to turn. The situation yields as many interpretations as there are interpreters. A distant cry from the New Testament promise that the Holy Spirit would lead the Church "into all truth" (John 16:13) [emphasis mine].

And, where there is broad agreement among evangelicals on their (small number) of central non-negotiables, such as a proper Christology and Trinitarianism, this consensus was very much forged in the fires of the early Church's creedal formulas and the subsequent cleaving to them by the historical Church. That is, it's a product not of strict scriptural exegesis alone (though of course the orthodox position is eminently and uniquely scriptural), but of the conciliar authority of the Church.

Given all this, the Church's self-understanding as professed in the Creed isn't much in question. As Protestant scholar T.F. Torrance says:

[F]or Nicene ecclesiology the focus of attention was on the incorporation of believers into the Body of Christ on the ground of reconciliation with God which He had accomplished in and through His bodily death and resurrection. That is to say, it was precisely the visible, empirical Church in space and time that was held to be the Body of Christ.

The 12th article of the Creed ("I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church") was referring to this one, visible, concrete, historical entity.

So while my understanding continues to develop and cohere, and as I endeavor to make my life a living testament to the riches and truths uniquely found in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church, the living Body of Christ, the question of how to effectively witness is a sensitive one. Certainly the guiding principle must always to be to speak the truth in love, and to humbly recognize that the Grace bestowed to the Church is meant for all men equally. Something that is much easier to say, and to understand intellectually, than to actually live out. Pride is the quintessential sin, after all.

I suspect my spiritual Father would advise me that the period of one's catechesis isn't chiefly a time to focus on witnessing in any direct way, since I am still very much a humble beginner whose focus should be on my own drawing nearer to God and spiritual development. A process that acts as its own witness and testimony. Something I very much would take to heart, if he were to advise me thus. Though sharing my experience and fielding questions on these issues, especially with the holidays approaching, is unavoidable, as I'm sure Father Josiah would acknowledge. May the author of all truth, our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, grant us wisdom and the contrite heart of a servant with which to share it.

Journey to Orthodoxy (part 4)

The previous post in this series highlighted some areas where foundational shifts of perspective took place as I approached Orthodoxy from an evangelical background. The main ones were: (1) how authority in the church is derived, established and passed down (2) understanding of the sacraments, (3) the way the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity intensely shape the focus and the form of the worship of the Orthodox church, and (4) that worship and communion is what human beings were created for.

These realizations fueled others (and each other), which led to a deeper, more full appreciation of other issues, and then ultimately fed back into the primary, fundamental convictions -- who God is, what and who humanity and the Church are, and how they all relate -- again. I discovered the Orthodox faith to be a rich, intricate, and beautiful tapestry woven from these threads.

Initially I was going to explore this infinite inexhaustibility of Orthodoxy in writing, but as a lot of it is too much for words, or certainly beyond anything that I have to contribute, I have decided to defer some of that for now. Instead I would like to take a brief look at my first concrete experiences with the Orthodox Church.

With my interest in the Orthodox Faith piqued, and undergoing a sort of intellectual transformation, I knew attending Orthodox services was the next step. Many of the Church Fathers stress the centrality of the liturgy as a defining witness of what the Church believes and how she lives. St. John Chrysostom says that the best catechism is faithful, mindful attendance of divine services. Having listened to many episodes of Ancient Faith radio programming, one notices how often Orthodox will answer questions or address issues by saying, "Well, at such-and-such part of the liturgy we pray these words.." or "This hymn is sung during such-and-such a period the liturgical calendar for this reason.." And it is a common aphorism, accepted by the Orthodox Church that "we believe what we pray and we pray what we believe". With all this in mind, I set out to attend divine liturgy at an Orthodox parish.

The first I attended was the closest Orthodox parish to my home, St. George Antiochian Orthodox Church in Upland, California. On their website it said that 'Matins' began at 9 AM and liturgy at 10 AM. Not being sure exactly what Matins was, I figured I'd attend both. It was a small, ethnic parish and arriving at 9 AM, there was only the priest, the chanters (two of them) and one member of the laity (though many other parishioners arrived later in the hour). Immediately I realized (I'm a very attentive sort) that the liturgy was almost entirely in some form of Arabic. There were candles, an iconostasis, incense, much crossing of one's self, and other elements of worship foreign to my experience, but the service was beautiful and ancient and I felt strongly compelled to find an Orthodox church with (at least predominantly) English services.

A kind family at St. George recommended St. Andrew Orthodox Church in Riverside, which they said performed services in English. It was a bit of a drive, but I figured it was worth it. St. Andrew's temple (I later learned) is only about a year old, and is a magnificent, beautiful building, built in traditional Byzantine style of architecture.

While I had been among the first to arrive at St. George (and so saw no one else as they entered), this wasn't the case at St. Andrew. As I was entering the narthex of the church (the Western portion which is where the main entrance is), the first thing that struck me were the presence of icons and candles, and parishioners venerating the icons, lighting candles and praying. Looking beyond the narthex into the nave of the Church, there were icons in many places -- on the iconostasis, on the pillars, on the walls, inside the central dome, and on the walls and ceiling of the sanctuary. There seemed to be an open-air area of confession off to the side where parishioners were confessing before the priest. At St. George there was just the one priest and some altar boys, while at St. Andrew there was a priest and many deacons or assistant priests performing the liturgy. There was also full choir that sang hymns and prayers, in concert with the presbyters and deacons. Something else that caught my attention was a relative dearth of chairs and that during most of the service -- practically all of it -- the parishioners stand.

Having my senses overwhelmed in such a manner, with such unfamiliar sites, sounds and smells, it was difficult to process everything that occurred. But the beauty -- and therefore truth -- of it all struck me as unmistakable.

Something I kind of passed over without comment in the previous posts was that in my reading I had, in an intellectual way, come to a greater understanding of beauty and its theological significance. Largely -- but not solely -- due to David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. Here was a Church that seemed to take what was -- for me, at the time -- mere ideas and manifest them in a living reality.

But venerating icons? The intercessions of the Saints? Mary, the Theotokos? All of these things -- though I was aware of some of the history behind them -- are not just doctrines that the Orthodox Church affirms, but are actual significant elements of their liturgical worship, and elements that were utterly foreign to me, coming from the background that I had. These were stumbling blocks for myself and -- as many programs on Ancient Faith radio attest to -- for most Protestant converts to Orthodoxy. However, as I had already become somewhat inclined to accept the Orthodox Church as the true New Testament church, persisting throughout history and with us still today, I endeavored to approach these matters with a humble heart and the spirit of a learner, operating on the assumption that there must be much that I did not understand. Part of me instinctively recoiled at some of this, but I was eager to learn more. In the next installment we will look at these matters more closely, from the perspective of the Orthodox Church, and we'll examine the scriptural basis for these doctrines and practices as well as their theological significance.

Journey to Orthodoxy (part 3)

In the previous post I listed some of the issues that were the impetus to my exploring Orthodoxy seriously. The first thing this meant was securing a better understanding of the Early Church and its own self-understanding, which in turn meant reading the Early Church Fathers. The first place I turned was the Cappadocian Fathers (St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian, and especially St. Gregory of Nyssa, given his influence on David Bentley Hart). I also read some of the earlier fathers like St. Irenaeus of Lyons and Justin Martyr, as well as re-visited Augustine.

While I was reading more of the Church Fathers, I also began listening to podcasts at Ancient Faith Radio. Many of the programs there -- such as Our Life in Christ, At the Intersection of East and West, Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, and Faith and Philosophy -- focus on issues of the Orthodox church in America, and often the sorts of things that Protestants looking to better understand Orthodoxy would be concerned about. While the content at AFR was (and is) stellar -- addressing issues such as Church history, ecclesiology, the sacraments, and the differences between Orthodoxy and other Christian denominations -- just as importantly, it introduced me to a variety of voices within the tradition, which I found to be extremely favorable not only on matters of the Church, but how the shared tradition seems to shape their convictions in positive ways.

Listening to some of these podcasts dovetailed nicely with reading the Fathers because the programs revealed high esteem for the Fathers and a deep congruence with their thought on many levels. The theology and ecclesiology that I was being exposed to had a very venerable provenance, but also happened to address many of the issues I had felt as deficiencies in the non-denominational evangelical tradition.

One of the central, large differences the Orthodox church has with Protestantism is its understanding of the Church, authority, tradition, and scripture and the relationship between them. Orthodoxy sees a very organic, mutually enforcing relationship between these things and no contradictions. The Orthodox Church sees authority as flowing from  Christ of course, but also from the Church itself, which is in-dwelt with the Holy Spirit, and who not only wrote, but decided upon the canon of scripture. And the scripture inherits its authority from the Church, the body of Christ. While the evangelical tradition sees the Bible itself as the ultimate authority for Christian life and practice, as distinct from the Church, with the Holy Spirit having worked to create the Bible through human beings, but not necessarily through the Church as a single, concrete, visible, distinguishable historical entity. While the Orthodox Church also sees the Bible as authoritative and divinely inspired, it believes that the way the Church reads Scripture, and Scripture's place in the whole life of the Church is similarly authoritative. This is a large difference, though it may seem like a fine one to some. The Orthodox understanding is crucially at odds with the foundational Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura.

Now, I had not ever had a problem with sola scriptura, but then I never gave much countenance to alternative views before and so I started to question the position. Or really, to think through it for the first time, since in the tradition I grew up in, even though sola scriptura was tacitly affirmed, it was not something that was ever much preached about or taught explicitly but rather assumed.

Is sola scriptura an absolute doctrine or just a local, temporal principle? After all, if it was a doctrine that all Christians throughout the ages should have held to, what were the scriptures that the Church held to from Pentecost to the year 397 AD, when the New Testament canon of scripture was established at the council of Chalcedon?  Almost 400 years is a long time for Christians to go without any authority to turn to. Did God abandon the Church during those 400 years (or at least the years from the time the last apostle died)? Further, given the evangelical emphasis on individual scripture reading and interpretation, in light of your conscience, what about the next 1000 years of lay Christians, before the printing press was invented? Also, isn't sola scriptura somewhat self-contradictory since that principle isn't itself found in scripture?

Of course, defenders of sola scriptura have thought about these issues and can offer their defenses, but in my case the way Orthodox ecclesiology addresses these issues, and the way it feeds into so many others, made it a very attractive solution. And a Biblical one! In 1st Timothy 3:15 St. Paul writes that "the church is the pillar and foundation of the truth." While this mostly does away with sola scriptura, it resolves so many other issues, and is such an elegant solution that does justice to the majestic claims of the New Testament that the Church is Christ's beautiful bride; that she is Christ's body. If the Church is such a highly exalted reality, then why should not the life of the church -- her oral and written traditions, liturgical life -- be authoritative? And was this not the understanding of the nature of the Church as professed by the Fathers, who were directly taught by the Apostles? In 2 Thessalonians 2:15 Paul writes to "stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle." Paul doesn't say to hold fast only to that which is written down, excluding the oral tradition of the Faith of the Apostles.

This understanding of the Church addresses many problems, such as the one that was raised in part 2 of this series of blogs regarding unity. It doesn't resolve that problem entirely without remainder, but it does significantly narrow the scope of the problem. The Orthodox Church conceives of itself as uniquely the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. The primary question therefore becomes how to maintain the unity of the Orthodox church, rather than ecumenical efforts with heretical and schismatic sects, which aren't the Church divided as much as simply not-the-Church (or, at least, are not in the fullness of the Orthodox faith). This is a much more realistically manageable goal, while the ever proliferating division of the Protestant church offers little hope on this count. Of course, the non-denominational tradition offers an alternative solution to unity, but one that requires theological imprecision and a lowest-common-denominator approach to unity, which is extremely unsatisfying by my lights.

Another question that arises is, if Christians recognize the Christology and Trinitarianism of Nicaea as authoritative, and properly see Arianism as heretical, why do Protestants only acknowledge the authority of the first two Ecumenical Councils and their production of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed, and the canonization of Scripture established by the synod of Carthage in 397 (in concert with the mind of the Church on the matter), but disregard the Ecumenical Councils on many other matters? The Apostles established the normative practice of calling councils to settle disputes within the church in Acts 15, so why pick and choose in this way? Well, the Orthodox don't.

When approaching Orthodoxy I was aware that the Orthodox had a high sacramentology, which in my readings I had found to be consonant with venerable, historical Christianity. However, while what I thought was absent was a proper recognition of the centrality of the Eucharist to the worship of the church, as well as a full comprehension of the Eucharist itself, I was not aware just how integral it is not only to Orthodox worship, but to the entire life of the Church. For the Orthodox, it isn't simply a matter of celebrating the Eucharist rightly, but of developing a sacramental worldview, which is intimately tied with the Church's view of creation and the human being and how they relate to God. Some of which I dimly intimated before becoming acquainted with Orthodoxy, and which I began to gain a more robust understanding of by listening to some Ancient Faith programs, but which I really grasped (to the extent the Holy mysteries can be grasped) when I read Fr. Alexander Schmemmann's book For the Life of the World, on the Orthodox view of the sacraments.

Yet another fundamental difference that I recognized in Orthodoxy, and which I truly began to see when I started attending an Orthodox parish and observing the liturgy (which I will describe more of anon), is the manner in which the core Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity intimately shape the form of Orthodox worship and piety. Which is a large change from the tradition I was raised in where, for example, the Trinity is rarely even invoked (though it is affirmed). Along with this, and along with my greater appreciation of the nature of the sacraments, I began to understand 'worship' itself anew. Of course, scripture speaks of offering your body as a sacrifice of worship in Romans 12:1, and gives a picture of what true worship is, and teaches that we are creatures who were made for worship. This was head knowledge I've always had, but the Orthodox Church presented this as a living reality in a way I had never experienced. It's frankly something that is difficult to really put into words, and certainly impossible to encompass in a series of blog posts, so for now I will leave it at that.

These are just some of the real fundamental shifts in comprehension that started to reform my understanding of everything else. In the next post we will look at some more specific implications of these convictions, and touch upon my experience of going from a church of no formal liturgical tradition, to experiencing the highly liturgical Orthodox tradition. And perhaps briefly look at early medieval Church history and why I never gave Catholicism much consideration (partly unfairly). Ultimately this series will bring us up to the present, where I'm currently worshiping, studying, desiring to enter the catechumenate, and seeking the spiritual guidance of Fr. Josiah at St. Andrew Orthodox Church in Riverside.

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P.S. I hasten to add as a disclaimer that I haven't even officially begun my catechesis yet, and so I may be mistaken or imprecise about many of these points and my understanding of them. Indeed, Orthodoxy teaches that true understanding doesn't even really begin until one is participating in the life of the church fully, which I'm not. Lord have mercy.

Journey to Orthodoxy (part 2)

While I didn't mention it in my last post, I hope it is clear that the first stage in my journey to Orthodoxy was initiated due to a level of discontent with the tradition I grew up in. Here are some specific examples of  what seemed to be absent, under-emphasized, or over-emphasized in the non-denominational, evangelical tradition, given the general convictions regarding ecclesiology and pneumatology I had begun to arrive at.

• Lack of authority and consequential divisions in the church 
• Low sacramentology and view of creation
• Low ecclesiology
• Low view of tradition
• Inadequate recognition of the implications of the Incarnation
• A strain of Gnosticism in the church
• A strain of 'moralistic therapeutic deism' in the church (with Christ's name pegged on)

There are probably other things, and if it's requested of me, I would elaborate on any of these (in the comments or elsewhere), but I'd rather not belabor the point of the catalyst to explore other denominations and traditions, and instead transition into that exploration itself, which will in turn illuminate some of these matters.

Given my general dissatisfaction with non-denominational evangelicalism, my inherited, inchoate Romophobia, and my admiration of the Reformers, I initially believed that some form of Lutheranism or the Reformed tradition would best address these issues for me. Around this time I also stumbled upon the work of David Bentley Hart -- specifically his writings for First Things magazine, a predominantly Catholic publication -- an Eastern Orthodox theologian who I found to be utterly brilliant. While I quickly read everything of Hart's I could find, not much of his material was on the subject of Orthodoxy as such, but his Orthodox sensibility while addressing particular topics exposed me to aspects of that tradition. Which put another option on the table for me to explore, though I didn't seriously consider it an option at first because of its remote and 'exotic'-seeming nature, which was so far afield of my own experience.

My investigation of Lutheranism and the Reformed tradition never went very deep, I should confess. I read a lot of Luther and some Calvin, as well as theologians from later centuries within those traditions, and I felt I had a fairly firm grasp on the main features of their thought and the traditions. But when it came to actually investigating the churches in existence today, the plethora of strains of Lutheranism and Reformed churches was a bit dizzying -- where do I start? I could quickly discard the liberal strains of Lutheranism, of course, but where to go after that? It was a bit overwhelming, and so I sort of stalled out in my exploration (to my discredit).

While the issue of 'church unity' essentially never even came up when I was growing up in the church, even when I became aware of it, it didn't interest me much. 'Church unity' is guaranteed because there's a mystical, invisible Church which consists of all those who belong to Christ. Why fret about it? It can't be thwarted, ultimately, after all. But eventually this very process, and the proliferation of divisions in the Protestant church it brought to my attention, did cause some consternation for me, especially in light of Christ's high priestly prayer in John 17.

This brought to the forefront the idea of a 'pre-denominational' church, which essentially both the Catholic and Orthodox claim to be, and seem to be the only ones who could possibly make such a claim. I was already somewhat familiar with the bare basics of the history of the Church, and so with the character of the Early Church, also in a very limited way. I knew that the Great Schism occurred in 1054. But if there was a pre-denominational Church, which was it? How did schism come about, exactly? Being familiar with much of the anti-Catholic polemic of the Reformation, as well as with having my own objections to the Catholic Church today, my first inclination was to suspect that Orthodoxy might uniquely, legitimately make this claim to being the original church. This suspicion was somewhat bolstered by my admiration for the Orthodox thought of David Bentley Hart. In my next post we will (finally) begin to look at Orthodoxy itself and see what drew me to it, as well as shine light back on what bothered me about my own tradition, but which I couldn't see except in the light of Orthodoxy.

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P.S. It should be noted that this process I'm describing is more clean and simplified than it actually was, as there were many subtle factors, events, and ideas that contributed to me heading in this direction. I'm streamlining and simplifying to some degree to make the story manageable and coherent.

Journey to Orthodoxy (part 1)

Over the course of the last few months I've begun preparing to convert to Orthodoxy by joining the catechumenate at St. Andrew Orthodox parish in Riverside. While I don't often blog about personal topics, cataloging my journey to Orthodoxy seems like it would be a beneficial enterprise, for myself if for no one else. This will be the first post in a continuing series on the topic.

Being raised in a non-denominational, evangelical Protestant home and church in America, and having had no formal religious education, I was mostly oblivious to church history, the origins of Christian denominations and traditions, and the differences between them growing up. Nor did I have much interaction with those outside the stream of my own evangelical tradition. Also, a prominent feature of non-denominationalism is the belief that most other denominations (well, except Catholicism) are basically alright, as long as they believe in Jesus as God and savior, and as long as they don't have any of a few core Christian doctrines dreadfully wrong in some way. So there wasn't much of an incentive to look into anything else, as everything else was an optional addition to my 'mere Christianity'.

But something along the lines of what C.S. Lewis writes in the preface of Mere Christianity had started to dawn on me (though not as a result of reading it -- I had read it as a teenager, but this passage hadn't stuck with me).

I hope no reader will suppose that "mere" Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions — as if a man could adopt it in preference to Congregationalism or Greek Orthodoxy or anything else. 

It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall, I have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. For that purpose the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think preferable. It is true that some people may find they have to wait in the hall for a considerable time, while others feel certain almost at once which door they must knock at. I do not know why there is this difference, but I am sure God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait. When you do get into the room you will find that the long wait has done some kind of good which you would not have had otherwise. But you must regard it as waiting, not as camping. You must keep on praying for light: and, of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and paneling. 

Of course, non-denominational evangelicalism could be said to be a room of its own, in a certain way, but in hindsight it always felt somewhat more like the hall. Which is probably partly due to my own sinfulness and non-submittal, I should readily admit, but also seemed to be due to the inherent nature of non-denominationalism.

Along with this realization was a development of love for rich theological reflection -- whether it was from the patristics, the medieval period, the Reformers, or contemporary Christians -- and an interest in the history of Christianity. The more I read on these topics, the more I felt the deficiencies in my own tradition. Not as much in what was believed and confessed -- though I would later see problems on that level as well -- but in the disconnect between what was confessed and the praxis of the church. Which is not to echo the banal complaint that I felt my tradition was hypocritical -- because I mostly didn't and still don't -- but that the theology didn't intimately and rigorously shape the form of the life of the church, in my view. Or at least not in the way that seemed called for. And that this fact has negative consequences.

In addition, while there was a proper high reverence for Holy Scripture in my tradition, there seemed to be an improper disconnect from historical Christianity. My reading led me to the conviction that, while the Holy Spirit has been given to the church, the Spirit doesn't normally alight here and there upon individual believers, or even upon groups of them, in a haphazard fashion, but that the Holy Spirit was bequeathed to a specific, concrete, historical entity at Pentecost called the Church of Christ. And that His work is done among and through this concrete, historical reality. This doesn't mean the Holy Spirit's work is strictly confined to the Church, but it does mean that that is the one place where He always is, is always working in, and will never leave.

These general, ground-level convictions revealed a variety of specific deficiencies in my own tradition which I will discuss in the next post.

On Symbolism and Sacrament

I recently listened to an episode of Our Life in Christ -- a podcast at Ancient Faith Radio -- which discussed the sacraments of the Orthodox Church and referenced the book I'm currently reading on the same subject, For The Life of The World by Alexander Schmemmann.

The hosts mention that in some evangelical Protestant polemic they cite writings of the early Church Fathers (one example is given in the podcast, but I forget who it was) which refer to the Eucharist and baptism (or one or the other) as 'symbols', in a defense of a lower sacramentology. The hosts of the podcast -- Steve Robinson and Bill Gould -- point out that 'symbol' as used in contemporary English doesn't mean what the Greek word from which it is derived meant.

The Greek word translated as 'symbol' is Σύμβολο (sýmvolo), and it meant 'to throw together' or 'the joining of two things into one.' One supposes that 'symbol' is a cognate of 'symbiosis', but obviously the meaning of these two words are currently different from one another. It seems that 'symbiosis' retained a meaning closer to its etymological origin, while 'symbol' has drifted. Today we understand 'symbol' to roughly mean 'one thing that stands for or represents or images forth another thing.' Not two things coming together in a living, interacting unity, a la symbiosis. The latter understanding seems to describe the nature of a high sacramentology -- the bread and wine becoming the body of Christ, thereby transforming the Church into the actual body of Christ; baptism as an actual death to our old self and actual resurrection to new life joined to Christ and his Church etc. -- more accurately than it does a 'symbolic' (in today's meaning) representation of a decision for Christ, or a mental recollection of the cross.

And it's not as if the Church Fathers didn't have a Greek word at their disposal that could express this idea of two different things beside each other, one standing for the other. They had that word and it was παραβολή (paràbola), which defined exactly that concept. 'Paràbola' meant (roughly) 'two things alongside one another' and is the word from which we derive -- among other words -- the English word 'parable'. A parable being one story that stands for another story or reality, while remaining separate. This is closer to what we mean today when we use the words 'symbol' and 'symbolism', but the Fathers didn't use this word because it wasn't what they meant.

That is the argument that is made in the podcast, at any rate, and one that seemed persuasive to me.

Gay Marriage and Christian Penitence

Over at Patheos Christian Piatt has a piece in which he describes his experience at a Gay Pride parade in Portland where he and his wife wore sandwich boards with the following message:

According to Piatt, humbly begging for forgiveness from the Gay Community on behalf of all Christians (whom, it's worth noting, he doesn't necessarily speak for) in Portland at a Gay Pride parade is a daring act of courage that could possibly carry dire consequences. Consequences such as, I suppose, being accepted and extremely well-liked.

If you carried a "Homosexuality is a Sin" or a "Marriage is a Sacrament, Not a Right" sign, then you'd be taking a stand for the faith which almost certainly would get scorn and derision directed at you. Not that I would recommend such a tact, but let's be honest about what is and what is not an unpopular stance at a particular venue. There's scarcely anything safer or more in line with current cultural trends than gestures toward the LGBT community in this vein, especially at a Gay Pride parade in Portland.

This fact in itself doesn't mean that such gestures are wrong (though I think they are), but even bracketing out that question -- and saving it for another blog, perhaps -- it's objectively not the case that it's a stance very likely to cost you anything. Not even so much as being mildly disliked.

Theology's Debt to Nietzsche

I intend nothing facetious in saying Nietzsche has bequeathed Christian thought a most beautiful gift, a needed amanesis of itself -- of its strangeness. His critique is a great camera obscura that brings into vivid and concentrated focus the aesthetic scandal of Christianity's origins, the great offense this new faith gave the gods of antiquity, and everything about it pagan wisdom could neither comprehend nor abide: a God who goes about in the dust of exodus for love of a race intransigent in its particularity; who apparels himself in common human nature, in the form of a servant; who brings good news to those who suffer and victory to those who are nothing; who dies like a slave and outcast without resistance; who penetrates to the very depths of hell in pursuit of those he loves; and who persists even after death not as a hero lifted up to Olympian glories, but in the company of peasants, breaking bread with them and offering them the solace of his wounds.

- David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite

Indeed. The one thing Christianity can't be -- which its modern detractors often take it to be -- is "old hat"; some slightly modified system of existing morality; a metaphysical or mythological re-run. Just as a matter of historical fact, Christianity is not those things, as Nietzsche understood. It is not in smooth continuity with what came before, but represents a massive upheaval, both in what it preached and in its effect on the world. And being so many centuries removed from the event of Christ in history the scandalous nature of it is difficult to grasp for us moderns, but Nietzsche reached back into the depths of time and was able to captured a glimpse of this notion at a time when it was being forgotten in "post-Christian" Europe.

Of course, Nietzsche understood the scandal of Christ and Christianity and despised them for what they actually were -- a radical evangel of peace amongst a sea of terrible ”majestic” violences -- but this seems preferable to despising Christianity for being something it isn't, as most do. As C.S. Lewis said "Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it."

On "Meta-Atheism" and Georges Rey

Our old friend Peter Boghossian recently posted a link to this short article from 2000, bearing the title Meta-Atheism, by Georges Rey who is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland. Why this old article is circulating I'm not sure, especially since it doesn't go much beyond Freud's standard account of religious belief as wishful thinking, only adding some particulars to the observation, but there it is.

The "meta-atheism" the title refers to is Rey's claim that "despite appearances, not many people -- particularly, not many adults who've been exposed to standard Western science -- seriously believe in God; most of those who sincerely claim to do so are self-deceived." This is a formulation of the de jure objection to religious belief which Alvin Plantinga deals with thoroughly in his Warranted Christian Belief (in which Plantinga rigorously demonstrates why none of the de jure objections, in their various formulations, actually work as objections).

Be that as it may, it certainly isn't controversial to suggest that if God is not real, or there is no supernatural reality, that therefore religious belief is a product of wishful thinking or self-deception. That's obviously true, operating on that conditional. Indeed, even if God does exist and one religion is True, it still may be true that other instances of religious belief in other gods are products of these mental processes (though Christians would claim that they are products of a natural desire for God, implanted by the creator, though this doesn't mean that desire can't be commingling with other, fallen mental processes). So that hypothesis (even though I don't accept it, at least as regards Christian faith) is at least understandable.

What doesn't make any sense at all is Rey's particular enumerated list of 'extensions' of wishful thinking in religious belief and practice. These seem to be specific examples of how self-deception and wishful thinking manifest themselves in things believers do and say. Rey thinks certain things believers do and say betray that they don't really believe what they claim they believe. Let's see if he has a point, and address them:

1) Detail Resistance
2) Comparability to Fiction

Though listed separately, this is actually a single objection, with #2 functioning as an addendum to #1. The problem here is that he mistakes a well established doctrine of creation ex nihilo for intellectual incuriosity to detail, when really it's acute attention to the conceptual details of that doctrine which reveals there simply can be no mechanistic 'details' of the kind he's asking for, nor is there any reason to expect they should exist. On the contrary, expecting them (as he does) shows a lack of understanding of the doctrine. The lay religious person may not articulate this to him in his interactions with them, but it's what they're intuiting when they recognize his questions as 'silly'. The one example he gives of 'detail resistance' is justified 'detail resistance'. Ignoring the specific example, and attempting to make sense of the objection itself, it still fails; given the Christian doctrine of Incarnation -- that God became flesh in a very particular, fleshly Jew, in whom all truth and hope resides -- 'detail', or the finite, or the-particular-as-such is entirely redeemed, as David Bentley Hart explains in The Beauty of The Infinite. The details of the form of Christ are everything, and we have no desire to shy from them.

However, it is sometimes, with regards to certain questions, entirely appropriate to point out that the "how" of some process is at best of secondary importance, or possibly of no functional significance at all.

3) Absence of Evidence IS Evidence of Absence

Here he attempts to flip a common theistic refrain on its head, though he fails to do so. Absence of evidence can be evidence of absence, if the evidence that's missing is evidence we would otherwise expect to find were the claim true. Which is the case (to some extent) in the murder example he gives, but not the case as regards Christian belief, and so the supposed objection is really no objection at all. If Christian belief is true there is no reason to expect we should have more evidence that it's true than what we do in fact have.

4) Appeals to "Mystery"

Some believers appeal to 'mystery' or 'paradox' at times when they ought not to. When, for instance, an answer to something isn't actually a mystery, it's just something they don't know or understand. Believers ought to have more humility and acknowledge that just because they don't understand, or aren't aware of, something, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a mystery. However, certain appeals to mystery (as it happens, the ones that are most commonly made) are absolutely justified, given that an infinite God can't be fully apprehended by finite creatures. We can -- through His Grace, the Incarnation, scripture, tradition and the intervention of the Holy Spirit -- come to know truths that He reveals to us about Him, but as finite beings we by definition will not be able to have a full knowledge of Him. This "appeal to mystery" is entirely appropriate given the infinite-finite distinction.

5) Merely Symbolic Status of the Stories

This objection is not very well articulated. First he objects to the internal coherence of the Christian doctrine of atonement (an objection which is predicated on a misunderstanding, which I will explain anon), and then says something about how if the Christian story is merely symbolism then the problems aren't relevant. Well yes, but so what? Is he saying that many believers do claim that such stories are symbolic? If so, how are they self-deceiving, according to him? I honestly can't make out what his point is here.

As for his objection to the doctrine of the atonement: One must first understand death as a consequence of sin -- rather than just something that happens for no ultimate reason, but just because of entropy or whatever -- and then one can begin to understand how the unjustified death of a sinless man can be an atoning death. I won't attempt to exegete the entire doctrine here, but he is missing the very fundamental first principles of it and then declaring it incoherent. Of course, if God doesn't exist, and death isn't a consequence of sin etc. then the atonement of Jesus doesn't make sense either, but what he's really objecting to here is the internal logic of the scheme of atonement, when that logic is absolutely pristine and he simply doesn't understand it.

6) Betrayals By Reactions and Behavior

The example he gives here may be somehow inconsistent for certain faiths, but not for Christian faith. And I suspect his confusion is a result of a confusion that is common among Christians too, which he just accepts but which is false; namely, that our eternal destiny is a disembodied heaven which we arrive at upon at the instance of our death, when actually our hope is in bodily resurrection and in New creation, a New Heavens and a New Earth. None of which has yet to come, and so mourning at death (which is a consequence of sin, and antithetical to God's plans for creation) is completely consistent and appropriate. Again, his confusion is somewhat understandable since even a wide swath of Christians share it, but it's his (and their) confusion that leads to seeing mourning as contradictory when it's perfectly consonant with orthodox Christian belief. "Blessed are the mourners, for they shall be [future tense] comforted". Jesus, significantly, didn't say "cursed are the mourners for there is nothing to mourn." Because there is something to mourn; death is inimical to God, God's enemy, and Christ defeats his enemy at the cross. Because of Christ's work death has no ultimate power over us, and therefore we don't sorrow like those without hope, but we do mourn a loss to the waste and destruction of death. For now.

7) Belief is Not a Matter of Choice

Again, his point here isn't all that clear. It seems to consist in nothing more than ponderous musings on the nature of 'faith' and how faith differs from simple 'belief'. Well, yes, quite. And? He does make the unsupported assertion that "I suspect you can have 'faith' only about what isn't really a serious contender for truth." Oh you suspect that, eh? Cool story, bro. I suspect differently. Glad that's all cleared up.

Somewhat more seriously, faith is mostly invoked with regard to propositions that are not matters of efficient, material causality, and so when he talks about "a serious contender for truth", he's pitting religious belief against scientific empiricism as a means for finding out truths about material causality -- something people of faith don't use faith for, at least not in the vast majority of cases, so the objection is just absurd and amounts to no more than "faith doesn't do what it isn't intended to do".

8) Projection

Here he merely asserts that humans have the capability to project meaning into things where it might not be there. Of course, he doesn't make an argument showing why this is what is occurring in all or most instances of religious belief, but merely asserts that it's something that can happen. Indeed it can, though I'm not sure how this supports his hypothesis. If the meaning he believes is being projected into things is actually there and he just isn't apprehending it, then it's his senses which are damaged, not the supposed 'projector'. And assuming said meaning isn't there presupposes atheism, rather than lends support to it as a conclusion.

In addition to each of these claims having problems within themselves, many of them don't even have any logical link to his central hypothesis about self-deception. His #3, for example, is just an attempt at a standard atheistic argument about God's non-existence. It's a de facto objection, not the de jure objection he was claiming that he was making. It's about the likely truth of religious belief, not whether religious persons are self-deceiving for holding to the belief. The objection, even if true, would not establish that religious people were self-deceiving when noting that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. This is true to varying degrees of a number of the listed objections.

Granted, this isn't a scholarly piece, and it comes with a disclaimer that he has developed the argument in more depth elsewhere, but with such carelessness of thought and with so many fundamental errors and misunderstandings, I can't imagine the argument gets anything but more convoluted and confused in its 'deeper' incarnation.

Emergent Hypocrisy

 When the hallmark of your public ministry is to advocate for the value of "conversation" and "dialogue", it seems it would behoove you to partake in "conversation", or at least not stomp it out wherever it might crop up.

Brian McLaren, one of the figureheads of the 'emergent' movement and its de facto leader of sorts (although the movement is too nebulous for such a concept to officially apply), loves conversation. "Conversation" is one of his -- and the movement's -- favorite words. In fact, one of the primary titles for the movement is the "Emergent Conversation". He's particularly fond of "starting a conversation" on some topic (preferably a "new" topic). In a way, it is what lies at the very heart of what he and the emergent movement claims to be about.

Isn't it strange, then, that the "dialogue" and "conversation" fetishist McLaren deletes Facebook comments that express any degree of mild dissent with a certain fascistic zeal? If you are all about conversation, if you recognize the value of people from diverse backgrounds exchanging ideas on a wide range of topics, then why stop conversations before they start?

As you're probably wondering what I'm talking about, here's what happened: I follow McLaren on both Facebook and Twitter, where he mostly posts links to his blog. Full disclosure: I'm a conservative Christian and he's a very liberal one. I follow him because I think it's a good thing to be apprised of the full spectrum of ideas out there on various subjects, and he represents a certain vision and perspective that I'm not a fan of, but which I think it is healthy to stay in -- I don't know -- dialogue with. As it turns out, monologue is more like it.

After following him for a while and never really interacting on any of his posts then, 3 or 4 months ago, I did respond to something he posted. It was a quote by Abraham Lincoln, and while I can't remember it or find it on Google, the very rough gist of the quote was that each generation has to summon up the courage and resources to face new problems with new solutions from within themselves, or from within a community, while not relying on tradition or inherited wisdom. Something along those lines. This is a common theme in McLaren's work too, though it seems like a naive superstition to me, but I digress since I don't have the specific quote and that really isn't the point.

I responded to the quote by simply stating "This proves conclusively that even very bright people can sometimes say dumb things." That's all. I disagreed with the quote, and expressed my disagreement in a fairly benign way, I thought, but the comment got deleted while the dozens of banal affirmations -- "right on!", "this is a great quote" etc. -- remained. The lover of conversation seems to only like when the other end of the conversation is saying something he likes and agrees with.

I didn't think much about it at the time and shrugged it off. Then, a few days ago, I happened to respond to something he posted again without even thinking about the earlier episode. This account will have far more detail, since -- though my comment is now lost and will have to be approximated -- the post it was in response to is still near the top of his page. He posted a quote from his new eBook:

"Nostalgia is never a good leadership strategy...Now is the time for Democrats to humble themselves, to be born again not as a party of nostalgic governance, but as a party of visionary leadership." -Ruth Schwartz (from Word of the Lord to Democrats ebook)

As you can see, there's a vague resemblance between this quote and the Abraham Lincoln quote -- abandon the past, claim the present/future -- though I didn't think of that at the time. The way he had advertised this book was as some sort of satirical take on the current political season. It's difficult to see how something so banal and dull could possibly be found in any decent work of satire, much less be worth excerpting as a notable quotable, but that isn't the point I made in comment. I will attempt to reconstruct my comment from memory as closely as possible:

Platitudinous, empty rhetoric that wouldn't be out of place on an Obama '08 campaign sticker. 

The real problem the Democrats have isn't excessive nostalgia, it's a deficit of nostalgia. This was once the party of JFK and now it's a ragtag assemblage of hacks who have abandoned the party's earlier, more noble ideals. Not that everyone can be a JFK, of course, he's just the exemplar of what the party used to stand for, as opposed to what it has accomplished by forging ahead in 'new directions'.

Once again the comment was deleted while all the effusive praise remained unmolested.

This time, at least, I was fairly contentious and was responding to something he had worked on. Nevertheless, as the torch-bearer for "conversation" and "dialogue", this seems well within the bounds of civil discourse so it's hard to see how he might defend deleting the comment.

Now, I want to point out what I hope is obvious: these are very insignificant episodes in and of themselves. After all, I find it quite absurd when people equate someone policing their own Facebook page, according to their own standards, with "censorship", as often happens. This is as preposterous as claiming someone erasing graffiti -- even if it happened to be a lovely mural -- from the wall around their property is an instance of "censorship." No, I have no problem with someone erasing Facebook comments from their page for any reason at all; whether it's to keep vulgarity off your page, or if you want no trace of "negativity" anywhere on your page, or if you capriciously and randomly remove comments, all of that is absolutely fine with me. It's your page, after all.

Obviously the issue here is rank hypocrisy, in deleting comments that express dissent while proclaiming that "conversation" is one of your highest ideals. As Jay-z once said: "We don't believe you, you need more people!"

The reason I find this significant is because of just how pervasive the totalitarian impulse is within liberalism, while ironically, simultaneously existing alongside the exhortation for people be tolerant. It's bigger than Brian McLaren's hypocrisy, it's symptomatic of a very wide swath of liberalism, which professes tolerance, and a love of diversity, and revels in the joy of "conversation", but which simply can't stand the sound of a conservative or traditionalist speaking, and will even silence them if it's within their power to do so.

Toward an Unapologetic Christian Conservatism

If you remember the "Why I Hate Religion" video, and surrounding controversy, from a few months back, in my critique of it I ignored one line which I found to be dumb, because it was minor compared to the other flaws of the video. Near the beginning of the video there was a cheap shot at Republicans, saying something along the lines of that Christians don't have to also be Republicans. While it's trivially true that Christianity is not synonymous with, or inextricably married to, Republicanism or conservative politics, this line betrays a false equivalency that becomes more and more glaring to me with time, and which I feel the need to rage against now.

Because Jesus' project was -- as He told us time and time again -- about the the Kingdom of God breaking into history, and was not a "worldly" political kingdom of any character, deriving specific political programs from his teaching is treacherous. Surely nothing like that is my aim here. But just as surely as Christ was not a political Messiah primarily (despite the ultimate political consequences his Kingship over Earth entails), political policies can be more or less in line with Jesus' vision for the Kingdom. They can be more or less in line with His injunction regarding the distinctness of the spiritual and political realms (Mark 12:17, Matt. 22:21). They can be more or less in line with his teaching about the just role political authorities have (Romans 13).

For example, a thoroughgoing anarchism would not be compatible with Romans 13. Similarly, but for opposite reasons, a totalitarian worldly authority which forces its subjects to do things that are contrary to God's law would be an illegitimate authority that ought to be opposed, and probably fought and overthrown. These are some of the obvious extremes where our response is clear and determined for us, but within the much more subtle shades of our liberal democracy, being a follower of Christ leaves a considerable degree of freedom for the types of political policies and agendas that are acceptable for us to support. And this is legitimate for Jefferson Bethke to point out.

But freedom doesn't mean that anything is on the table. On certain issues, there are stances that are highly compatible with Christian teaching and stances that -- at best -- strain compatibility wildly. For example, on whether or not to support laws which outlaw abortion, the dictates of Christian premises are difficult to avoid. Even if someone has some doubt about the point at which a fetus should attain the right to have its life protected by the state -- as irrational, and not particularly in line with Christian teaching or doctrines such doubts are -- still, it's difficult to avoid the Bible's relentless affirmation of the inherent worth of human life, and at worst one would have to choose to err on the side of defense of life on the question.

By contrast, when the left attempts to make similar cases that conservative beliefs on the poor or on war are also at odds with plain Christian teaching, the attempts fail rather laughably. Christians on both the left and right believe caring for the poor is of utmost importance for a Christian, they only disagree as to the role the federal government ought to play in that -- a subject on which Christ had nothing to say. As for war, this is closer to being a legitimate "inconsistency", if you will, at least as it relates to extreme hawkishness or imperialism, but not as it relates to support of any war. The Catholic Just War theory can be used to defend some war in a thoroughly consistent and Biblical fashion.

On many other issues such as the proper level of taxation, or the proper judicial philosophy, or the prosecution of the drug war, the dictates of Christian principles are not cut and dry. There is legitimate room for Christians to take a wide range of positions on these, and most, political issues.

But I would contend that the fundamental underlying philosophy of conservatism is much more compatible with Christian principles than is modern liberalism. And this is where simply saying "You can be a Christian and not be a Republican!" too swiftly dispenses with the legitimate question of whether one party, or -- really more centrally -- one side of the political spectrum is more compatible with Christian principles or not. The postmodern Christian assumption would seem to want to affirm a thoroughgoing centrism or moderate position as the best, but this is an illegitimate move. It's the same fallacy that results in people falsely deriving relativism from a postmodern critique of modernity.

Just because there are two sides to an issue or because the answer to the question at hand is not absolutely dictated by revelation, this does not mean that one side can not be much more closely in line with Christian principle, or that one position can not be totally at odds with Christian teaching. We can't let our cultural pluralism blind us to our moral senses, or certainly to our Christian inheritance, which I think is happening en masse. And on this score, I don't let all conservatives off the hook. Certain wings of conservatism, such as the libertarian wing, have elevated the virtue of personal volition so absurdly high, and as so ultimate, that all competing values are rendered subservient and secondary. This is very harmful. Though, with that said, that's just one wing of the right that has something somewhat wrong, whereas I think the left has everything completely wrong, and that most of their fundamental assumptions are at odds with Christian values.

However, if you do happen to be that rare species of Christian Democrat, I'm not going to try to convert you from your left-wing politics. That's surely a quixotic task, at least for a blog post of this length. What I do think should be easy enough for all Christians to acknowledge is that we can't simply rest in the proclamation that "You don't have to be a Republican!" We have to actually do the difficult work of examining our beliefs and actions in the political realm and honestly evaluate whether they are compatible with our Christian beliefs, which obviously are of prior and greater significance. We have to examine the possibility that some cherished political belief is actually sinful and at odds with Christ's teaching, even if that belief enjoys prominence and acceptance in mainstream American culture. We have to be mindful that our cultural prejudices don't dictate our theological inclinations, but that the relationship runs in the other direction.

If you do all that and you still come to the impossible conclusion that being a Christian Democrat is acceptable, well then, God bless you, and I pray earnestly and fervently that you are defeated at the polls regularly and egregiously.

Beauty, Postmodernism, and Christianity

While the ground sought by modernity proved to be elusive, thereby yielding the postmodern critique of modernity, the Christian claim to reality welcomes the postmodern critique. Not so that our particular metanarrative can sit comfortably alongside other metanarratives and live in harmony with them, but because our metanarrative is comparatively so robust, so compelling, so sensible and necessary in the light of all relevant experiential and evidential data -- in other words so beautiful. Strict relativism is an illegitimate position to deduce from the premises of postmodernity; the fact that there exist a plethora of metanarratives -- none of which can be its own objectively justified grounding -- does not mean that all metanarratives are of equal value or quality, or that one can't be present which is the metanarrative that supersedes and subsumes all other metanarratives. Christian truth, properly understood, always has been a rhetoric which presents itself aesthetically, first and foremost. The truth of Christianity can't be divorced from its beauty.

None of this is a concession that the object of Christian worship, the Triune God of the Bible, is anything (or really Anyone) less than absolute Truth, only that He can't be conclusively shown to be such in the interaction between finite minds (some currently imbued with the Holy Spirit and some not). Instead it's to say that the vibrancy and beauty of the Christian metanarrative, and the relative impoverishment of all others, is a signpost that points to the probable Truth of the Christian claim. Or, more precisely, that its truth and beauty have a dialectic relationship which testifies to its supremacy over all other metanarratives. Claims that some other rhetoric has comparable or greater force I dismiss, not out of hand, but out of the knowledge obtained in my investigation of the matter. If there really is no Capital-T Truth, then beauty will ultimately only be in the eye of the beholder, of course, and then those alternate claims are just as valid as mine; but if Truth is out there, then that Truth will be Beauty itself, and it becomes possible for one rhetoric to rise above and absorb all others into itself. The postmodern turn in philosophy doesn't answer the question of whether Truth is out there, but only says that there is no dispassionate, objective position we can occupy to access this knowledge and demonstrate that we have done so. The latter postulate is what seems to be forgotten often.

Incidentally, even some highly influential non-theist thinkers such as Hegel -- and some contemporary Hegelians, such as Slavoj Zizek -- seem to accept the supremacy of Christian rhetoric. While they don't make the move that I do here -- claiming that the nonpareil beauty of the Christian rhetoric is an overwhelming testament to its Truth -- they do affirm its beauty and its potency as a means for understanding the world.

As I've hinted at, modernity need not remain entirely silent on this issue; the popularized version of the postmodern triumph in epistemology and philosophy is a catastrophist model, meaning that it envisions postmodernity counteracting modernity and overturning it; in reality the postmodern project was really inaugurated within modernity all along, and postmodernity is really just its consummation. With this in mind, the internal coherence of the Christian story can still be examined by traditionally modern methods, and how well (or poorly) it fairs under such scrutiny will testify for (or against) its Beauty, which in turn will comment on its claim to Truth. If it patently fails, for example, this would obviously severely cripple its aesthetic appeal; conversely, if it stands up as well as can be expected, this fact either acts as an element of the rhetoric of the Christian story itself, or at least something that acts as an adjacent support structure for it.

With this position laid out, the only task that remains is actually presenting the rhetoric in question. Though it's of course too large a task for this trifle of a post, or for any individual, I can at least point you to the location of the current development of that rhetoric, which is Christ's church on Earth, inhabited and empowered by the Holy Spirit. The church, the Body of Christ, is a furthering of the rhetoric which begins with the loving God of creation making Man in His image for His pleasure, and then reconciling the fallen world to Himself through Christ, the second person of the Trinity. This is, of course, a terribly inadequate thumbnail sketch of the totality of the staggering beauty of Christian rhetoric, which can only be fully appreciated by partaking in that rhetoric, but can also be seen (to some degree) from the outside, if approached humbly, thoughtfully, and prayerfully.

My (self-imposed) task here wasn't to demonstrate the beauty of the rhetoric itself -- though I do earnestly implore anyone reading to investigate the matter for themselves -- but only to make the case that, within a postmodern framework, Beauty becomes a primary concern which can present a more powerful and potent case for one metanarrative's supremacy over others, which in turn can become an argument for its Truth.

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This post was inspired entirely by David Bentley Hart's Beauty of the Infinite. I make no claims to originality, but my thoughts on this subject were flitting through my head and asking to be transcribed in my own words.

Christian Response to the "Hating Religion" Video

From my previous post you should be able to infer that I found the viral popularity of the "Why I Hate Religion But Love Jesus" video to be discouraging and disheartening. It's one thing for one guy out there to write that poem, and make that video. That event in itself wouldn't bother me so much, because I could just write that person's thinking off as anomalous and not representative of any large swath of Christians. But when my first exposure to the video came via an explosion of praise and enthusiasm from Christians, that makes it more troublesome in two ways: 1) It means that many Christians already had similar thoughts and 2) The fact that it is being spread primarily as a positive thing may influence other Christians to adopt a similar attitude.

Of the four times it appeared on my facebook on the first day, each post only had positive feedback on it. It's possible that those who felt like I did about it just kept their dissent to themselves, perhaps not wanting to offend anyone. But, in any case, there are many, many Christians out there who either agree with the sentiments expressed in the video, or at least don't find them harmful.

To my relief, in the day or two following the appearance of the video, there has also been a substantial number of critical responses to the video from the Christian blogosphere. Many of which echo the criticisms from my post, others that took the video to task for different, but extremely important reasons, and still others that fall somewhere in the middle.

This one by my friend Ron focuses on the misunderstanding of the significance Christ's work displayed in the video, reducing that work to solely "dying for our sins", while failing to emphasize the utterly crucial regenerative aspect of Christ's resurrection. Resurrection which enables Christ's followers to change, not merely to be forgiven.

This post, by a friend of a friend, largely echoes my points regarding conflating one certain mode of religion for religion itself.

This post by my friend Scott wasn't written as a response to the video, but it was something he wrote previously that he thought was applicable in light of the video. It's about how -- despite the sometimes understandable desire to want to do so -- we can't separate Christ from His church, and say we love Him but not it. And if the Church of Christ is not "religion" then there's no such thing as "religion".

This post does an excellent job of highlighting the fact that using religion to erect a false facade to cover our brokenness is not the fault of "religion", but the fault of those of us who sinfully misuse "religion".

Finally, this post does a phenomenal point-by-point breakdown of the inaccuracies and fallacies of the video in a way that I wanted to do, but felt it would require too much effort. Even my post focusing on essentially one aspect of the video was fairly long. So, thank you for picking up my slack, sir.

I'm sure there are many other similar backlash responses out there, and thank God for that. I thought I'd just share a few of them that I found encouraging. While the "spiritual-Christ-follower-but-not-religious" attitude is still seemingly epidemic, it's good to know I'm not alone in opposing it.

Why I Love Jesus AND The Religion He Established

If you are a Christian and use the Internet you may have seen this video titled "Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus":

It has recently gone viral on the Christian-social-media scene, if my facebook is any indication (4 Christians posted or re-posted it today, which is a big number for one day). Since I'm going to expend a rather large amount of time critiquing aspects of it, I felt I should -- in the name of fairness -- list some of the things I did like about it first:

- The affirmation of love for Jesus. This is always a good thing to see and hear, and he mentions multiple  reasons Christ is worthy of praise and Glory. Amen to all of that.
- His honesty about his own struggles being a "Sunday-only" Christian and such.
- His rightful disdain of certain hypocrisies of certain typically religious types of people, such as the erection of a religious facade to mask their brokenness and sin.

The main downfall of the video is its critique of "religion" and the false antagonism it introduces between Jesus and "religion", and this will take some significant unpacking.

Critique of religion is not the exclusive domain of the un-religious. Or at least not of unbelievers. The amount of people who use the phrase "spiritual-but-not-religious" (alternatively, "Christ-follower-but-not-religious") to describe their belief system is staggering. If "spiritual-but-not-religious" was itself an option for checking on religious affiliation surveys, I imagine it would be in strong competition for being one of the top 2 or 3 religions in America, at least.

Whence such disdain for (Christian) "religion"? In largely Protestant America, it can partially be traced back to the Reformation. After all, the Reformation was a rebellion against the established, legalistic, Christian order of the time that resulted in a more individualized, more "free", more enigmatic form of religion. Ultimately this was a movement away from those things we tend to most closely associate with "religion": authority, tradition, ritual, legalism etc. And, in America and within Protestantism, the majority regard this movement to be a desirable result.

Another reason for the hostility toward religion is the historical failings of "religion", or really -- more precisely -- the failings of religious people and institutions. Of which there are plenty. Some of these are common human failings that seem to be magnified in religious people; self-righteousness, pride, "intolerance". Whether this perception of religious people -- or of the Church -- is in fact accurate is debatable, but it's easy enough to admit that many religious people (Christians included) do many wicked things, and certain tendencies are more closely associated with religiosity than others.

But the two biggest reasons for the hostility toward Christian religion specifically are A) sin -- the sinful rejection of Christ and His bride -- and B) the fact that "religion" is so nebulous, multifarious, and imprecise as to make it a perfect scapegoat. It literally has no one to defend it. A Christian has no interest in defending "religion", he will defend Christ or Christianity. A Muslim has no stake in defending "religion", he only wants to defend Islam. And so on.

As for "A)", that problem doesn't appear to be the best explanation for this video. He verifies that he loves "the Church and the Bible." However, in most instances of the "spiritual-not-religious" or "Christ-follower-not-religious" voicing their opposition to religion, it is often motivated by a desire to affirm certain sinful (or at least inaccurate) critiques of (Christian) religion, while attempting to avoid throwing Christ out with the religion. The problem is that you can't separate Christ from his Church as the Church is Christ's Body, indwelt and empowered by the Holy Spirit. His representative on Earth. The move for the "spiritual-not-religious" person at this juncture is to claim that Christ's church is not about "religion", which he (the "spiritual-not-religious" person) implicitly narrowly defines as a certain form of self-righteous, legalistic, Pharisee-ism. The problem is that "religion" is a much more broad, protean phenomenon than that and you can't disassociate yourself from it by redefining it, simply because the word has some nefarious associations for you.

With regard to "B)", this fellow in the video isn't alone in this scapegoating effort. The most visible perpetrators of this scapegoating currently are the New Atheists, a group of scientists and authors who have made penning haughty diatribes against 'religion' their main source of income. One overarching difficulty for their arguments -- and for this video -- is that they fail to distinguish religion as such from religion as practiced by most, or the particular case from the general case. Either that, or they have trouble distinguishing between correlation and causation. While the subject is too large to tackle in this post, David Bentley Hart does a marvelous job of that here and here. Or, as Hart says elsewhere, most of the criticisms lodged against religion are "simple category mistakes or the kind of historical oversimplifications that are either demonstrably false or irrelevantly true."

This is evident in the video when when the poet asks "If religion is so great, why has it started so many wars?", making multiple mistakes at once. The actual number of wars started by "religion" or in the name of "religion" is zero. And this is not (solely) a flippancy; if you're going to make an argument you have to make these critical distinctions between "religion" and "things religious people have done in the name of their religion", for instance. They are not equivalent.

If we're to be charitable and assume he meant something like "many wars have been started by adherents of particular religions for religious reasons", then it becomes a bit of a historical caricature that is true only in a limited sense. Many of the wars traditionally attributed to religious causation were not "religious" wars. The European wars of the 1800s that are commonly referred to as the "wars of religion", for instance, were not religious wars at all but wars waged by the modern secular state. Many other wars throughout history had various political, cultural, and religious tensions which resulted in the eruption of violence, but which were not fundamentally "religious" wars, but sometimes get mislabeled as such (usually because there were religious men fighting in them).

Further, if we narrow it to Christian religion specifically -- since that's the crux of the disagreement as the video claims all religion as such is bad, while I claim all religion is false except Christianity -- then the caricature is even more historically inaccurate. Still, I would happily grant that there have been wars started by religious people for religious reasons throughout history. But this only gets us to the aforementioned "irrelevantly true". What does this tell us about "religion"? It tells us that humans are often wicked, sure, but if the world were purged of religion, would we have more or less war? Does the existence of political wars condemn politics as an illegitimate enterprise? The point of these rhetorical questions is to point out that the existence of religious wars tells us absolutely nothing about the validity or goodness of particular religions, or even religion as such.

The video also claims that "Jesus came to abolish religion." If we consult any dictionary on the matter, we can plainly see that this is factually incorrect. We must assume that by "religion" he means the narrow form of legalistic religion -- along with the sinful, sanctimonious attitudes it engendered -- of the Pharisees. Jesus was indeed opposed to this aspect of religion, and in the light of what He did and who He was, religion was transformed forever. But this is not the same as abolishing religion. Jesus was not a-religious, or anti-religious, He was perfectly religious. In every deed and every thought He never broke the Law of God's covenant with Israel, living the life of a sinless Jew. If Jesus was perfectly religious, and He is to be the example that we follow, how do we conclude that we should be a-religious or anti-religious? How is it even possible to be followers of Christ without being a "body of persons adhering to a particular set of beliefs and practices"?

The man in the video goes on to point out the fact that religion is man-made, as if this were some strike against it. Art is man-made. Architecture is man-made. Science is man-made. Philosophy is man-made. Christ's work redeems all things -- except sin and death, which He defeats at the cross -- and religion is no exception. It's a logical fallacy to say that since Jesus opposed the religious order of his time, opposed hypocrisy and self-righteousness, or that since he atoned for sin, that therefore he was opposed religion as such. As with everything else, Christ redeems fallen religion and brings it under His righteous rule. He did not come to abolish it, contrary to what the video claims. And He told you as much: "I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished." - Matt. 5:18.  He came to fulfill the Law and make the one true religion, the Kingdom of God, accessible to all people (rather than the one true religion being exclusive to God's chosen people, the Jews).

In addition to all this, when you look at the religion of Christ's followers on Earth, and the record of Christian religion -- all of it, pros and cons -- there is absolutely no cause for shame whatsoever, or any indication that Jesus will reject adherents of this religion in the way that he rebuked the Pharisees. Nay, He actually assured the followers of this religion that He would be with them visa vis the Holy Spirit, until his return (John 14). That doesn't mean Jesus co-signs every action of the Church, which is still made up of fallen men, but it does mean that this is the religion He established and that He has no intention of rejecting it.

This -- his hating religion while loving Jesus, his claiming Jesus and religion are on the opposite ends of some spectrum -- is my primary beef with the video. I have others -- Churches do feed the poor, for instance -- but it kind of feels like excessive piling on at this point, so I'll leave it at that.

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UPDATE: It looks as if a friend of mine, Ron, did some of my expounding on other issues for me. He even touched on things I hadn't considered.