A Living Text

Writing in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik says of G.K. Chesterton:

In these books, Chesterton becomes a Pangloss of the parish; anything Roman is right. It is hard to credit that even a convinced Catholic can feel equally strongly about St. Francis’s intuitive mysticism and St. Thomas’s pedantic religiosity, as Chesterton seems to. His writing suffers from conversion sickness. Converts tend to see the faith they were raised in as an exasperatingly makeshift and jury-rigged system: Anglican converts of Catholicism are relived not to have to defend Henry VIII’s divorces; Jewish converts to Christianity are relieved to get out from under the weight of all those strange Levitical laws on animal hooves. The newly adopted faith, they imagine, is a shining, perfectly balanced system, an intricately worked clock where the cosmos turns to tell the time and the cuckoo comes out singing every Sunday. An outsider sees the Church as a dreamy compound of incense and impossibility, and, overglamorizing its pretensions, underrates its adaptability. A Frenchman or an Italian, even a devout one, can see the Catholic Church as a normally bureaucratic human institution, the way patriotic Americans see the post office, recognizing the frailty and even the occasional psychosis of its employees without doubting its necessity or its ability to deliver the message. Chesterton writing about the Church is like someone who has just made his first trip to the post office. Look, it delivers letters for the tiny price of a stamp! You write an address on a label, and they will send it anywhere, literally anywhere you like, across a continent and an ocean, in any weather! The fact that the post office attracts time-servers, or has produced an occasional gun massacre, is only proof of the mystical enthusiasm that the post office alone provides! Glorifying the postman beyond what the postman can bear is what you do only if you’re new to mail.

Rod Dreher (Orthodox via the Catholic Church) comments on this:

Boy, does this feel familiar to me, and I can see now (from my own experience) why converts tend to wear on cradle believers (and vice versa: little exasperates a convert more than a cradle believer’s apparent inability to get excited about the Amazing Wonderful Church). Again, I can’t discern the justice of Gopnik’s judgment re: Chesterton’s writing, because I’ve never read enough of his apologetics to know. But this feels right to me. It also gives me insight into why I don’t have and never had that convert’s glow about Orthodoxy. I didn’t believe when I left it that Catholicism was a jury-rigged makeshift system, nor did I believe that Orthodoxy was a uniquely fabulous thing. I’m glad not to have those illusions about either faith, but it does take some of the romance out of the thing.

LDS professor Richard Sherlock offers a provocative thesis regarding the nature of the LDS Church. He writes:

These remarks are a prelude to a far-reaching claim I wish to make about Mormonism. Mormonism represents a hierarchical ecclesiastical order that holds special powers of priesthood and leadership combined with an emphasis on personal obedience and righteous works as having merit before God, which is at least Annabaptist in its flavor and background. In more traditional terms theological terms, Mormonism combines an authoritative magisterium with an emphasis on righteous works characteristic in Christian theology and history with its exact opposite.

In other words, the LDS Church has a Catholic hierarchy, with an Annabaptist, radically Pelagian theology and practice. In fact, Sherlock offers great honesty when he says:

These [Book of Mormon] passages and others do not articulate a strong theology of grace as clearly as Luther or Calvin may have wished. There is a Pelagian (or semi-Pelagian) ring to a number of the passages, and individuals who have claimed that Mormonism is essentially a modern Pelagianism are not entirely mistaken in such an assessment.

The fight that this story mentions is embodied at the local LCMS church in my neck of the woods. Unfortunately for them, they do both modern and ancient worship badly, thus casting an ill light on both sides.