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.

Forbes has an article discussing how relics are still sold today in a way that sound Medieval. This is a pagan practice, pure and simple, that was imported into the church. It is sad that it still persists.

Rushdoony has an insight that I had never thought of before regarding the Ecumenical Councils:

It was this hatred of Biblical certainty that the early councils had to war against. The ecumenical councils of the early church were in their purpose and nature very different from the modern councils and ecumenical efforts of the church. First, the early councils had as their primary purpose the defense and establishment of truth, not unity. Unity had to be established on the foundation of truth, not truth as a product of unity. The councils came together for the purpose of conflict, the battle of truth against error, and any unity on other than the whole truth of Scripture was anathema. Second, the concern of the councils was primarily the faith, not the church. Institutionally, the church suffered because of the conflict, but theologically it flourished and ensured its survival and growth. The modern ecumenical movement, and modern councils, are thus in purpose and work in direct contrast to the early councils: their concern is with unity, and with the institution, not the faith primarily.

Probably not much. He attacks the idea of factions in the church being called by a leader’s name when he writes about monasticism:

And that there might be no doubt as to their separation, they have given themselves the various names of factions. They have not been ashamed to glory in that which Paul so execrates, that he is unable to express his detestation too strongly. Unless, indeed, we suppose that Christ was not divided by the Corinthians, when one teacher set himself above another; and that now no injury is done to Christ when, instead of Christians, we hear some called Benedictines, others Franciscans, others Dominicans, and so called, that while they affect to be distinguished from the common body of Christians, they proudly substitute these names for a religious profession.

This probably puts me firmly into the fundamentalist camp, but I don’t mind. An article says that yoga can lead to demonic possession, and I tend to agree. All kinds of non-Christian practices that were anathema when I was a kid (not that long ago) are now widely embraced, including horoscope reading, acupuncture, and yoga. Many of these eastern practices have their roots in the idol worship of false religions, and open the mind by making it blank.

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.

I am being made increasingly aware of the existence of the Catholic counterparts to Robert Tilton, Benny Hinn, and their ilk. I subscribed to the New Oxford Review this past year, it’s a really hard core Catholic magazine that delights in calling out heretics and advocating for the Latin Mass and strict obedience. I respect folks who are straight-up about their beliefs and not afraid to call a spade a spade. At least I know that we disagree and what it is that divides us. 

But subscribing to this magazine has put me on the mailing list of all kinds of Catholic groups seeking money, many of which are eerily reminiscent of Protestant hucksters. Today I got a letter from “America Needs Fatima” which included a picture of a gaudy statue of Mary. The letter says in part:

Here is your beautiful and deeply spiritual picture of Our Lady of Fatima.

And I’m forwarding it to you with a sense of urgency because you are a very dear child of Mary, and you have proven your love for Our Lady because of your deep faith and devotion.

And as you confirm that you did actually receive your picture, I pray that you send your gift to help me enthrone Our Lady’s picture in 2,000,000 homes in 2008.

In gratitude, I’ll send you a free miraculous medal and novena brochure just as soon as I receive your gift in the mail.

It seems that these particular Catholics have learned some unfortunate lessons from the TBN wing of the Osteen-Joyce Meyers-heretical church.

In the latest issue of First Things is a long letter from N.T. Wright to the magazine responding to some comments made by Fr. Neuhaus. Within this long letter, Wright makes some very telling observations on two churches. First, on Rome, Wright says:

…the “centering authority” in the most ancient church was of course Jerusalem; and then the five great sees, working together; and only gradually, and for a long time controversially, Rome.

Then, discussing the new heavens and new earth that will come when Jesus returns, and Neuhaus’ knock on Wright as sounding like Joseph Smith, Wright says:

I suspect that one of the reasons the Mormons were able to gain credence for their very concrete eschatalogical expectation was that the Western Protestant church, precisely at that period, was eliminating the ancient concrete eschatalogical expectation.

Writing about Richard Hooker and his conception of the Church of England, C.S. Lewis says:

The prince as ‘Supreme Head’ of the Church is, in fact, the bottle-neck through which the decisions of the local Church-Nation pass in order to become law. And that Nation-Church owes an allegiance to the universal Church: yet the universal Church might swerve from scripture and we should then have to disobey her. (That is, all parts of her, except ourselves, might conceivably become ‘unsound’.) Where then does ultimate sovereignty lie? I think Hooker would answer, ‘Nowhere except in Heaven’. He allows no unambiguous sovereignty on earth either civil or ecclesiastical. Judged by the standards of Austin and of modern Catholicism, the church and state which Hooker welds together are both headless. And I do not think this is an oversight. Hooker felt no need either for omnicompetent prince or for infallible Pope. He was much more afraid of tyrannies and idolatries than of ambiguities and deadlocks.

Gotta spend time on this entry from the BH blog.