Rod, once again a fine post. I know you’re busy & inundated, but can you send me a recent email link? I’d like to reconnect—we’re very much on the same page. Thanks.
We need retreats like Martin's but can it survive financially? A lot of Benedict Options get crushed or don't begin due to the demands of the financial system.
I'd argue that Shaw is going about it the right way. It sounds like he has a pretty clear business plan that will keep it fiscally solvent. I don't know UK real estate laws, but at least in the US, churches are exempt from property tax which, minus staff and maintenance, are the main expenses. If it allays your fears any, there are hundreds of Buddhist monasteries that are getting in just fine in the US that don't have nearly the organization that Shaw seems to have going into this.
Take the issue of a hypothetical (not really) small Christian (or actually any religion) college. They know that to liberalize is to slowly decline into nothingness. So they decide to double down on theological orthodoxy. This gives them some stability, but their equilibrium size is much smaller, and it's doubtful that they can cover all the fixed costs of running a high quality educational institution. And without high academic quality, eventually enrollment declines anyway.
Someone suggests an alternate path, where they remain orthodox but take a kind, forgiving, loving tone. Surely that's what God wants from us anyway, right?
But then the trouble is, how do you continue to hold the line?
It's an enormous conundrum. The future belongs to anyone who can solve it, but I haven't figured it out myself yet.
If you can make it work without the gold plated facilities and the atmosphere of luxury then running an institution will be easier. It might depend upon your market and the spirit of sacrifice of the people in your institution. Monastic institutions were always easier to run because you have 0 labour costs and a large workforce subject to military discipline filled with the spirit of sacrifice.
Some of it is the luxuries that students have come to expect by default -- they won't attend a college that doesn't have them. Some of it is the administrative burden of meeting regulatory and accreditation requirements. Some of it is funding research, which you need to do if you want a good ranking.
The kind of people attracted to such a place wouldn't expect an atmosphere of luxury, and would be happy to do whatever necessary for upkeep, whether living there full time or visiting for a couple of weeks.
As for Benedict Options, I'm working on an idea for a virtual one. I don't mean some kind of Christian Matrix either. Just going to continue with a small group I already meet with and work on foundations and supporting each other. Obviously it could not stop there, but I believe it could start there.
Of course, as an Evangelical, my approach to Benedict Options might be different than Rod's, but I think we are both in the same spirit on this one.
It won't cost as much to try something virtual; and you could tap into existing secular rental facilities for in person events without having the cost of ownership.
It has to be said, sincerity is no defense. All kinds of people who were tragically wrong in the eyes of God and men have been sincere in their stance. All sincere is means is that they mean it.
You ought to read Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity. Because you're right, sincerity is no test. Was the subject of Godwin's Law sincere? I'd have to say, yes.
All bad guys imagine themselves to be the good guy—and the worst are self-righteous fanatics, who lack the self-awareness to even contemplate the possibility that they might be the baddies.
This goes along with my notion of how it isn't possible for us to consciously will evil while also knowing that it is evil. First we have to rationalize and delude ourselves into thinking it's somehow good.
I think rationalization (not blindness) is the operative mechanism of seeing the good in evil acts. Expediency to exact one’s will becomes the driving ethical framework. The relativist works backwards to construct the argument, fallacious as it may be.
I would say that rationalization is a type of blindness, though: a blindness we inflict upon ourselves, and also blind in the original impetus to flee truth.
C.S. Lewis might differ with you. He allowed that a man who sincerely believed he was serving God and country in the German army during WW II would be welcomed by God for his sincerity -- which doesn't of course mean that he doesn't have to be killed to stop his Leader from committing further atrocities.
There is no sin Christ cannot redeem. The only one he cannot is "grieving the Holy Spirit," ie refusing his salvation. That's anyone. There is nothing unique about the "sin" of serving in the Army of an unjust cause.
Again, scripture makes it clear that is the case. Just like salvation, it is beyond man's recognition. Salvation can forgive all from a genuinely repentant heart. Likewise, human justification, without Christ's salvation, means nothing.
Happily, it’s a point that is almost certainly moot. I highly doubt either Hitler or Stalin showed even the slightest remorse on their deathbeds. Even Franco, staunch Catholic that he was, likely went to his grave convinced of the rightness of his actions, atrocities notwithstanding. Pride and power go hand in hand.
Well, I’d say sincerity is “no defense” when judging the rightness or wrongness of an action, for sure. It most certainly is a defense when considering the moral character of the actor, wouldn’t you say?
The only character the Lord is concerned about is one's spiritual state, whether you are in sin or grace. As far as one's character goes, the Lord makes it clear, "no one is without sin, not one." And "man's righteousness is as filthy rags before a Holy God." There is no finessing this. There is just accepting the Lord's terms, humbly, in prayer.
I see two angles on it. The first it is that true faith involves sincerity, so a person who’s sincere about anything at all might get some practice in the right habit. But the second is: if a person believes in evil, then well, wouldn’t it be better for his character to not be sincere about it?
It’s sort of like how loyalty is only a secondary virtue; a lot depends on the object of loyalty. If you’re loyal to a demon, then it ceases to be a virtue.
"However, can the Constitution and all that follows from it survive the loss of a shared religious/metaphysical framework?"
Definitely not. It pains me to acknowledge that. But it's true. I try not to give into doom-mongering, but I think here in the US we're already over the edge of the cliff. We've crossed a number of Rubicons, both constitutional and otherwise. Makes me deeply sad.
Shared metaphysics maybe-- but we do not need a "shared" religious framework. The US has never had a single dominant church and in the 18th century we ranged from Calvinists to Quakers to evangelical-like congregations of the First Awakening to high church Episcopalians, along with a sprinkling of Catholics and Jews. And of course there were the Deists and assorted other free thinkers who were the ancestors of today's secularists.
I understand your point, and am not necessarily arguing with you. I do believe, though, that the line between "shared metaphysics" and a "shared religious framework" is pretty thin. In my opinion.
I think that, overall, many things may be shared among people without necessarily brining specific claims about Jesus into the picture. So it's sort of a gradient of specificity. For social and political life, it's mostly enough to believe in objective values and some objective source of those values. (I think that Ramaswamy, a Hindu, evokes this picture well.)
Basically, there's "Values are real things to which you and I are collectively answerable" versus "Values are whatever I happened to dream up this afternoon". That seems like the real fault line, with the solipsism of the latter view rendering shared life impossible.
Do yourself a favor and seek out a bouzouki (greek guitar) performance. Certain bars/restaurants will hire amateur musicians to play and man, oh man, few other instruments can make one feel as festive.
Great idea. In addition, since Rod said he's looking forward to a cold, white wine, he should try a 'retsina', a Greek style going back to antiquity which uses a touch of pine resin in its production. No, it doesn't taste like Lysol, but it's something unique and fun. When in Greece...
“No, it doesn't taste like Lysol”. I respectfully disagree! Some of my travelling companions leaned towards retsina but I could never adapt to the taste and so stuck with white demestica
I was hired in the summer of '88 to edit a start-up magazine. That was the summer when the temperature did not get below 80 degrees night or day. It was to have been my big break (har). I was working 14-hour days. Every night I got off the number one train at Columbia and went over to Amsterdam and down three blocks to dine at Symposium. And every night I accompanied my spaghetti alla greca or pastitsio with a glass of retsina. Then I got back on the train went home to Washington Heights and did it all over again. Experto crede.
Ouzo is required when in Greece. Shoot it after the Lemon-rosemary-garlic marinaded grilled octopus served at a seaside table with the Aegean threatening to lap at your sandals.
Why not Agiorgitiko, or if you like sweet wines, Mavrodaphni? I'd bet a lot of Greeks themselves don't particularly like Retsina. I've had it, I'd rather drink mouthwash.
<<<”Does church teaching need to evolve to serve the felt needs and honor the experiences of the community — or do members of the community need to evolve to bring their beliefs and behavior in line with church teaching?”>>>
The last thing I want to do is to split myself apart from the good people here, because I appear to differ on something fundamental. Therefore, I am going to put forth my thoughts, and then put forth that maybe, for at least one layer of meaning, I am not so different.
I respectfully disagree with any premise that the historic church has, for the most part, made changes *only* because they want to honor “felt needs”. At the same time I acknowledge that feeling a need has caused some appropriate re-evaluation – to wit:
(1) Slavery – it was fine in scripture, slaves were even told, in the NT to cheerfully endure beatings from an unbelieving master. But then people overwhelmingly realized it was immoral and felt need to end it. This is even though we have no specific scripture for this basic and central belief. (Yes – love one another – but we had that when the Bible said we could have slaves.)
(2) Divorce – The position of the historic church was that persons sacramentally married, both baptized, could not divorce. There was annulment, but not on many of grounds allowed today. Protestants, until about 1970, went Sola Scriptura on this, so no divorce at all except for adultery and perhaps desertion.
(3) Women ministers and teachers – forbidden in the “plain” language of the NT. Then, after 1900 years, we decided things like “the context was they were getting away from goddess worship” or something like that. We felt a need to let women teach and preach.
I think many “feel a need”, actually there all along, to allow faithful, monogamous same sex relationship. I can state a case from scripture, that I have heard, to allow that, though when I first heard it I made the sign of the cross and fled the church. And I have a question. Is it even possible for the same sex to have spiritual-metaphysical sex with one another, the kind that makes persons “one”? Or are they merely, well, touching in certain ways. Oh, and personally I’m so heterosexual it hurts, but I greatly love some homosexual friends. With CS Lewis I believe they were born that way. And I have so much trouble believing God would allow them such terrible, terrible suffering - to be born with a choice to sin or to be forever alone and tormented for all your life.
By the way, regarding Methodism – the African UMC split from the rest of the UMC, but USA congregations leaving the US denomination might consider joining these other United Methodists.
If you disagree and would shun me as a result, please have at me instead.
Slavery was an economic necessity in New Testament times, and for long after: a necessary evil (as war still is). The moral problem was that slavery lasted well past its "necessary" phase.
On divorce the Eastern tradition of ekonomia outlined a different path.
On women and the church, ordination beyond a special women's diaconate has no support in Scripture or tradition. There were women missionaries (Mary Magdalene, and later St. Nino of Georgia), prophestesses and other women active in the Church (a favorite of mine from the Middle Ages is the polymath Hildegarde of Bingen-- the Pope himself gave an imprimatur to her mystical theological writings). The context of "women, be silent in church" points to women asking questions in the middle of the liturgy. And when Paul says "I do not allow women to teach" he is stating a personal choice, not a commandment- there is no "Thus saith the Lord" about it. Elsewhere Paul commends specific women for their active work.
I can only suggest you ask God whether or not slavery was ever a necessary evil, considering what you might have felt like while enslaved. I'll leave it up to you to hear what God might say. I know all about ekonomia, it is recent and not the belief of almost the whole church through history. (And I think divorce and remarriage is right for Christians under some circumstances). And you thing about women gave me the impression you did not read what I said. "It is not given that they should teach nor instruct a man" is nothing to do with asking questions in the middle of liturgy.
I would not want to be a slave of course. I would not want to be a collateral damage in war either-- but war is sometimes a necessity.
The 9th century is recent? That is when the Orthodox tradition on divorce and the "rule of three canonical marriages" was formally codified. And when Christ told the legalistic hair-splitting Pharisees "The Sabbath is made for Man not Man for the Sabbath" he was stating the underlying principle beneath ekonomia.
I was addressing the "women be silent in Church" verse. And also pointing out that Paul expresses a personal POV when he says "I do not allow..." Not everything in Scripture can or should be taken as a general commandment for everyone everywhere in all ages.
(And I think divorce and remarriage is right for Christians under some circumstances).
What do you think porneia means at Matthew 5:32 - παρεκτὸς λόγου πορνείας - and 19:9 - μὴ ἐπὶ πορνείᾳ? I think that they mean nothing like what we understand as divorce, while our colleague Tee Stoney would probably regard that as allowing of a broader meaning; but I also think that he would not allow any "remarriage after divorce" beyond that which he conceives these texts to allow. I find all invocations of such considerations of "kindness" or "compassion" to allow what the Lord forbade presumptuous in practice and corrosive in consequences.
The problem with that is that there is a good Greek word for adultery, and it's not porneia; it's μοιχεία (moicheia). So whatever porneia means I think it has to mean something wider or narrower than adultery.
Porneia means something like, literally, "whoredom" or "harlotry," some sort of really really bad sexual conduct, and not just engaging in sexual activity with a whore/harlot/prostitute (the two English words also had that wider meaning when they were current rather than obsolescent) and I think it means - very Catholic of me, I know - sexual couplings which are abhorrent of their very nature and which therefore cannot constitute "marriages" acceptable in God;s sight, a brother/sister or father/daughter "marriage," which of its nature is no marriage at all, or the marriage of Herodias to Herod Antipas after she divorced Antipas's brother, Herod II (or Herod Philip) to marry him. That's why I have no problem with the theory behind "annulment," although I think it has always been wide open to abuse in practice.
My grandmother swore it meant the woman was not a virgin on her wedding night and the man could tell. My grandmother did not say that such a women would have been considered a whore, but if she married without revealing past activity then was found out, she would have lost out.. Grandma said that it had to happen right away - no coming back after a fun two week honeymoon with a fight at the end and getting a divorce.
I'd be interested to look at the times porneia is used verses the common word for adultery. However, my niece has arrived and I will be showing her Budapest all weekend, so I will bid you adieu. - not ignoring the link to the long article in another post but I probably won't get ot it until Tuesday.
I'll add to my comment above - if you have never deeply loved a homosexual person - perhaps a son, daughter, sibling person you hoped to marry, or even person you were married to - then there but for the Grace of God go you. The sufferings of that person might destroy your heart, especially if you are convinced God won't let them have one partner for life, but they most be tormented and alone their whole life. I don't think people know what their thoughts will be until that happens.
I agree with you, and there are people I care a lot about who are gay and have suffered immensely for it. In Muslim societies, they're often browbeaten into arranged marriages, so now there's a spouse suffering too.
But consider the alternative.
It is really hard to come to terms with the fact that traditional morality, which God ordained for us with good reason, necessitates the suffering of a few. But it does. So does changing it around in the modern way, except the suffering is different, and falls on different people.
Westerners loathe the way this is handled in countries like Qatar, but if you want to hold firm to orthodoxy, what is the alternative?
Another way of framing it. Many of us know and love people who struggle with alcoholism or substance abuse. We would never tell them that what they're doing is fine and moral and they should keep going. You might push back, saying alcoholism is different because it impairs normal functioning. But actually, so does homosexuality, unless you simply don't view heterosexuality as normal and normative. (Which, of course, is the point of the queer theorists: smashing heteronormativity. And look where it's gotten us.)
You are not rambling at all and I am glad you said these things.
Probably most have realized I am telling a story about a man I loved and wished to marry, so there is that.
"necessitates the suffering of a few" - it is apparently a pretty good percent, at least of males, maybe 5% (some say 3%, some say more than 5%).
"God ordained for good reason" - I wish I could figure out the reason to forbid faithful, same sex pairs. Of course I know promiscuity and adultery is wrong.
"What is the alternative to Quatar?" - I don't know what happens there, is it stoning, throwing off roofs? If so, there are alternatives. But I don't know what happens.
"Many of us know and love people who struggle with alcoholism or substance abuse. We would never tell them that what they're doing is fine and moral and they should keep going" - I don't say promiscuity is fine and moral. I do say suffering from addiction is not as horrible as suffering from homosexuality. It does not entail a life of the types of suffering I detailed in my reply to Rosemary. And I do view heterosexuality as normative.
Qatar doesn't execute people for homosexuality. They also don't arrest anyone who does whatever inside their own home. They do have prison time for those who promote homosexuality or are public with their affection (or more).
The tragedy is, the sexual revolution has also created a wasteland of human suffering. It's just borne mostly by lonely heterosexuals trapped in the apps or checking out altogether.
Penalizing homosexuality in one way or another does cause a non trivial amount of human suffering. But those pushed into arranged marriages do at least perpetuate the species. As many people are coming to realize, the sexual revolution and self-actualization aren't actually compatible with high fertility. There really are no easy answers.
Thanks - I had asked about Qutar and you did tell me. My folks used to say "that's their business" and I'm not sure my belief is far off from that. Except I have no problem with my cousin's daughter and her female partner when I have Thanksgiving with that side of the family. No reason to shout it and promote it, but no reason to totally hide. Here in Budapest, same sex couple hold hands and such, and I am not sure they need prison.
Yes, we have too many people who are never able to get married. I think you see that in my case I was too much in love with someone I could never marry when young, then other things happened. But....oh my...imagine the tragedy if he had been forced to marry me. You think I wanted him in my bed if being with me caused to feel the way I would have felt if forced to be with a woman. No. I do not approve of forcing homosexuals to marry.
For fertility, I hope Christians who are married will choose to have many children. Then the world will again be peopled by a majority who grew up in a Christian atmosphere. (And for Islamic countries without cultural problems mistreating women, such and B&H, pretty much the same.)
Can I ask you a question? You seem to entirely preclude the idea that someone with same sex attraction could have a fulfilling and happy heterosexual marriage. I wonder whether that's actually true. I wonder because 1) my understanding is that most people who identify as homosexual have also had heterosexual sex; so for most people with same sex attraction, opposite sex attraction doesn't seem impossible or horrific 2) which brings me to my second point that sexuality doesn't seem to be binary, but more on a sliding scale; someone might generally identify as homosexual, but might still be able to have a very fulfilling heterosexual relationship with the right person 3) although sex is an important part of marriage, it's also a fairly small part of the day to day operation of marriage; marriage is primarily about building a life together and raising a family, so even if the sex isn't perfectly what one might want that shouldn't preclude all the rest of marriage 4) it seems to me that a lot of what is called love in marriage is the friendship that comes from building a life together; that's a true love such as one has for good friends, but it's not primarily sexual. I don't know, but I wonder if the a priori assumption that those with homosexual attraction can't have fulfilling heterosexual marriages is cutting people off from a real possibility for many people. I'm not necessarily arguing for this point, because I'm really not sure about it, but I wonder what you think.
The alternative is to insist that monogamous marriage (civil marriage for gays) should be the ideal and that promiscuity and porn are big problems which should be avoided.
I think those would be great ideals to aspire to. Sometimes I think society can change enough to enshrine those as ideals, but most of the time I'm more pessimistic.
Marriage was the norm (well, for heterosexuals) for millennia, though sure, lots and lots (and lots and lots) of non-married sex happened. It's only been in about the last human lifetime that marriage ceased to be considered the absolute norm in some parts of the world (and it's still considered something preferred). I really do think we can and should go back to that ideal. It may mean acknowledging more "common law marriages" and civil SSM, and it definitely must mean dethroning the wedding industry and its five digit price tags for "average" weddings. And probably ending, in the US, the damaging restrictions public benefits impose so that low income couples may marry without loss of benefits.
I got married twice (same woman, differnet countries, one church one civil) and niether time did it cost more than 1000. Weddings consting so much they're a marriage deterrent is insane.
If a girl wants to feel like a princess on her wedding day she should have to marry a geriatric third cousin like a real princess. :P
That's one part of it, and the younger generation is getting a little jaded about hookup culture (at least some of them are). But how do we put the pornography toothpaste back in the tube? I have a lot of respect for the states trying to at least impose age restrictions, but they're being fought tooth and nail.
If it is true, that no homosexual may have sex with anyone of the same sex, then both. And more. All of things I talked about in the first reply I made to Rosemary.
Well as someone who didn't get married until I was 35, I would regard being single and not having sex themselves as all that bad. Undergoing the kind of hazing that gay people, at least a lot of gay men, are put through on the other hand is awful.
Where is friendship in your view, Linda? Friendship used to be highly valued; it's pretty much nowhere on the social scale now - the idea is that in relationships it's either sex or nothing, with no in-between state that is both intimate and without sexual activity.
Yes, people without permanent live-in companions and/or family get lonely. So do people in happy, stable marriages and/or with lots of kindred, and even with deep friendships. One of the things that has been helpful when a person is lonely, testified to by many generations of Christians, is to find a way to serve others. Loneliness isn't great, but it's also not the worst feeling as long as one is not completely self-focused. The reason loneliness is so bad these days is that there is so much encouragement to keep the focus on the self.
On women ministers and teachers. We dealt with this at School of Ministry. It is clear in the language of Paul's letters that there were specific instructions to the churches out of those cultures. That the new Christians in Ephasus were formerly pagans, worshipping goddesses in which temple priestesses held leadership positions in their former traditions, and whose rites involved very immoral practices. Paul was advising them specifically in order to structure things in such a way to avoid them falling into older habits. Because if you read the whole of Scripture, women have been used by God as religious leaders, prophets and teachers since the beginning. To believe that Paul's instructions were general sanctions against female Christian leaders, for ever, Amen, is to disregard too much Scripture to be credible.
On slavery, God sees the issue differently than we do, then or now. His main concern is the state of your soul and your relationship to him. Civic structures and ideas of "rights" that the Western world prizes, are not in sync with God. He is not against it, and the sacredness of the individual IS of God, and Western concepts such as the Bill of Rights spins off from that. But slavery as it existed in that world is not something God had a problem with, an institution that was more akin to indentured servitude. It was mostly used to pay off debts, although some servants, after finishing out their legal time, often stayed with the famly they had served, willingly, sometimes for generations.
Chattel slavery, which denied the integrity and sacredness of the individual, where humans were indeed treated as objects, under the law as well as practically, WAS an offense to God. Such corruption existed in the Bible as well, and such institutions were prone to such corruption with such a power dynamic and human nature being what it is. To the point that such is even remarked upon in the New Testament, where such corruption of the same was rampant.
I do not think it was at all a coincidence that one of the Great Revivals in history played out alongside the Abolitionist Movement in Europe and America. God was clearly communicating His displeasure at what that "peculiar institution" had become. The racist component of it was also clearly anti-Biblical. Racism is a straight up sin.
Tee, I think you give here reasons that the church has changed its tradition. I have not said I doubt that there are valid reasons for change of validity. I said earlier I'd heard about women not speaking as getting away from goddess worship. I do have to ask, you seem to say "God is not against slavery" and if so, I deeply disagree. But I wish the replies would not focus on women, slaves and divorce, trying to pretend Christian practice has not changed when it most definitely has!!!
I ask if another tradition can be changed. Yes, it is central. But the speech of women, the bond of marriage and the torture of slavery are pretty central too. - No one has asked me for scripture supporting what I am asking about and I am not giving it until I am asked.
Well, just to be clear, I am not one who banks on tradition. I go on Scripture. As always, it is Scripture where we start.
And no, there is no sanction against "slavery." But our view of "slavery" is not God's, as Scripture makes clear. Nor is what was ended in the Abolitionist movement the same thing that existed, or what God has no problems with. And that is easily verifable through both Scripture and other historical records.
Churches as institutions are human creations, and are subject to temptation, corruption and falling out of grace, in part or even in whole, just as individuals are.
Well, since you go on Scripture, I note you made no comment on changes in Christian divorce. - - I'm drawing a parallel here. Substack says people are changing church doctrine/practice for 100 percent selfish reasons. People make cases from Scripture regarding women, divorce and slaves, then practice changes after that and we don't say they were 100 percent serfish- we say people decided they had misunderstood scripture.
And the vast majority of churches accept divorce of two Christians for other than the Scriptural grounds of divorce/desertion. I am arguing that people changed their intepretation of what scripture says from what it was beginning thousands of years ago, up until recent times.
I'd say that slavery is just part of a wider set of issues; all those concerning how a Christian should relate, not to individual sin, but to deeply corrupt power structures. I don't there's any easy answer. I don't think the Gospel is a call to armed revolution, but I also don't think it should be cynical resignation.
Slaves are told to bear patiently even with an unbelieving master's beatings. However, what was the alternative? Armed slave revolt? That didn't go well for Spartacus. I suppose most slaves rebelled by sloth, studied idiocy, sabotage, and pilfering. Paul was saying that, by showing themselves to be above all that, it might be possible to impress their master, leading to conversion. That's a hard teaching, but it's not absurd.
I've said before, I don't see why slavery is seen as uniquely terrible. Why is it seen as worse than the most exploitative types of wage employment? Why are we horrified by slavery, but not by usury, which is clearly prohibited in the Bible, and it is the financial system that is responsible for the pauperisation of the working class in most Western countries, and the horrors due to the indebtedness of African nations. Why do we pat ourselves on the back about having abolished slavery, when we have the horror of usury?
It is also related to the demand to obey civil authorities. That is clearly stated in Romans, but does it mean all authorities? What about the Nazis?
I lean towards opposing rebellion. I think the American settlers were sinners in rebelling against the British over a mildly unjust tax code. However, I'm more inclined to sympathise with the Irish rebels. I don't know where the line should be drawn. There are also cases when there's dispute as to which the lawful government is.
Part of the issue is that the New Testament was written for people who were assumed to have little or no political power, and were at most upper-middle-class (e.g. Luke the doctor, Joseph of Arimathea the merchant, Paul the sort-of academic). I don't think it's possible to relate the teachings directly to what to do when Christians do have political power, even if that is no more than the right to vote. I also come back to what C.S. Lewis said, quoting from memory: "The worst thing that treating a man unjustly does is make it necessary to be obsessed about his being wronged".
I really don’t want to comment too much on this, but I think our conception of slavery blinds us to how it worked back then. In a lot of ways, it’s a different mindset to just slaves laboring in factories or fields or forced into prostitution.
It doesn’t make it any less bad, but We have totally different concepts of freedom, independence and individuality than they did then. Cultural context matters. Chuza was a slave, but he was also basically, the right hand Herod Antipas. Sometimes people chose to be slaves to fulfill a debt (remember these were honor cultures too) or they sold family members. Sometimes they were stolen people or victims of war - like we are more familiar with. But it was a totally different society with a totally different mindset.
Actually, I agree with you about how to read the epistles: we should be careful about generalizing permanent principles from words that were clearly intended as specific instructions for addressing specific, contingent problems.
Well, at the very least, we should keep in mind that it is the whole of Scripture we go to for complete understanding. NOt just the NT. Not just the Red Letters. All of it. That's why we were given it. For those who disregard such and believe every bit of those letters were intended to be general instruction to all Christians forever, to disregard why Paul was writng those letters to them, and not to the same thing to the other congregations (they all were tailored to each congregation, some of the instruction), and to disregard the Old Testament, I've yet to hear convincing arguments.
It is also known that some of the early church fathers, though great Christian leaders they were, were not flawless (sexism, antisemitism and more can be found among them.) So yes. That is why tradition is not a good argument. TRadition also has to be held to a standard. What is that standard? Scripture. Tradition alone is not enough to police itself.
I'd say it's ultimately the Holy Ghost, made known via prophetic inspiration, who has to police things. That was the Old Testament pattern, anyway: the priests go about making their sacrifices, and then God sends Isaiah to inform them that He hates their sacrifices.
There's also what's called reading by genre. Like, the Song of Songs is a poem, not a history. The gospels can only be credibly read as eyewitness accounts. And St. Paul's letters are instructions to specific churches at specific times, so they should be understood as such.
Scripture was a Holy Ghost infused creation. And interacting with the Scripture involves the Holy Spirit, ie it is not just another dusty tome. No, not all of it is historical eyewitness. There are many different genres present in its pages. But ALL of it is communication from the Lord to us. And against it we check external things. God will not contradict His Word.
My church doesn’t permit women to even do the readings in church. It also permits divorce only for adultery and apostasy.
I have to say that I’m troubled by the toleration of slavery. However, I think the principle of loving one another should rule out gross exploitation. I don’t really see why slavery is picked on as a uniquely terrible version of that; at least slaves have to be fed, whereas free laborers can be worked to death. I think focusing on slavery serves to ignore the horrors of out-of-control capitalism.
I don’t see what any of this has to do with homosexuality, which is plainly depraved, and seems to be in practice inseparable from transgenderism, which ranks among the greatest evils in the history of the world.
Homosexuality is a sin. An abomination. There is no reading of Scripture that can lead anyone to any other conclusion. It is a violation of God's created order and is a direct attack on human relations and institutions, specifically the family, and from which, the community. It is an unholy thing, a mockery, which destroys those who practice it, and those who advocate for it.
The evidence of the latter, replete in our culture.
There is a reading of Scripture, I have heard it made, that can say same sex faithful partnerships are acceptable to God. Of course there is no reading that makes promiscuity acceptable. My major point here - I disagree that churches changed doctrine on faithful same sex partnerships merely out of selfishness.
I guarantee you, that whatever verses were read in that reading, that is not what they actually said. The Bible is unambiguous where it stands on homosexuality.
OK, but I can tell you there is a decent case for that interpretation. Briefly - we are not bound by Old Testment law, so that will not apply. We then have "put aside their natural uses" and "homosexuals not inherit the kingdom".
One day, now decades ago, a broken-hearted woman sat in a church hearing a guest preacher - a gay Episcopal priest, say what I am about to summarize. She got up, made the sing of the cross, and left- she did not believe it and was horrified. She was me, of course. She was dead inside from watching someone she loved suffer from homosexuality but she still could not move away from the plain reading at that time.
The claim: In Romans, this refers to people deciding to have sex with anyone, no matter their orientation. It does not apply to people whose natural orientation is gay. In the "not inherit the kingdom" one, the word used for homosexual is not the normal one. It is a word normally translated "soft". I was reading Xenophon the other day condemning soft men, but it is plain he did not mean homosexuals.
"We are not bound by Old Testament Law. " Only so far as Jewish purity laws and the like go. When it comes down to God's moral laws, they are every bit in effect now as they were then. And the New Testament also makes it clear.
Christ obeyed those moral laws and in fact, took them several steps further. And made it clear, "I have not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it," that is, his grace made the purity laws obsolete. But God's holiness is never obsolete. It was God's holiness and our sin which made Jesus's sacrifice necessary, as is our realization of said sin state and needing to accept his offered salvation. Otherwise, we are under the judgement of the law you are trying to dismiss, and ALL OF US FALL SHORT.
There is no decent case for that "interpretation." At all. You are making emotional appeals alone. And those are not valid.
"The claim: In Romans, this refers to people deciding to have sex with anyone, no matter their orientation. It does not apply to people whose natural orientation is gay. In the "not inherit the kingdom" one, the word used for homosexual is not the normal one. It is a word normally translated "soft". I was reading Xenophon the other day condemning soft men, but it is plain he did not mean homosexuals."
I do not know of one scintilla of evidence that such a view was propounded by any apostle, any early Church theologian, any synod of bishops - or for that matter any organized heretical "church" such as the Arians or, better, the Marcionites (except, maybe, if we are to believe their critics, some Gnostic groups). If this is true, where did the a gay Episcopal priest(ess) get her notion from? Form her own brain (or, rather, feelings)? From a private revelation from some spirit or other? From the Zeitgeist? In my decades of pondering such matters, including, especially, women's "ordination" I wonder how the so many people can take what I see as the promptings of the Zeitgeist for that of the Heilig Geist.
First I am so very sorry for the suffering you and the one to whom you are referring have gone through. It is clear how much you love this other person.
Because it is so painful for you, I’m not sure I should say anything, so please forgive me if I shouldn’t have.
Regarding the Mosaic Law, in Acts 15, the Council of Jerusalem happens where St. Paul argues that the Gentiles should be welcomed into full communion with the Jewish Christians without following Jewish Mosaic Law, such as circumcision. The conclusion, suggested by St. James, was: “It is my judgment, therefore, that we ought to stop troubling the Gentiles who turn to God, but tell them by letter to avoid pollution from idols, unlawful marriage, the meat of strangled animals, and blood,”
Unlawful marriage/sexual immorality is thus considered much more important (like idolatry) than other aspects of the Mosaic Law, which we are not required to follow.
Bishop Barron says that suffering and sacrifice are aspects of a “world gone wrong” that has been twisted out of shape by sin and evil. However, that suffering, when united with Christ’s unimaginable suffering for us, conforms us ever more to His own image and allows us to share in His redemptive mission. As I know from experience, this is very hard, especially when the suffering seems that it will have no end. But the amazing thing is that God, in a way I still truly find mysterious, will turn it to a greater good that you would never have thought possible.
Also, if your friend/loved one is not called to the vocation of marriage, that does not mean that he/she is not called to be loved. In fact, the church has always taught that celibacy is a higher calling than marriage—because it means that that person is being called to an especially deep and intimate union with God.
Your friend may be giving up something that seems to be good, but in making that sacrifice he/she will gain something unimaginably more precious.
I’m sorry to say this but in my experience around gay men there are very few who reside in monogamy. Even if they are partnered it’s not necessarily monogamous. I heard a story on NPR, back when they were soft pedaling SSM on a weekly basis, about a couple who had been together twenty years, had adopted children together even but one partner contracted aids and died from it. I think SSM has been utterly destructive to society and yet I understand your POV.
I know. I have known Christian gay male couples whom I believe to be faithful, but I agree with what you are saying. I'm aware many gay male couples have "arrangements" and allow it, for instance, on a business trip or in other circumstances. But that is not what I consider a faithful same sex relationship. I think the NPR example might have been unfaithfulness, the same as happens in a heterosexual marriage at times.
I'm not taking a position here on SSM. But I am taking a position on what I believe to be terribly wrong, and what I do not believe to be terribly wrong, if at all. Whether it is rare, or common, I think two people in a faithful same sex relationship are not doing a terrible wrong.
I did discuss my suffering friend with the priest when I went to confession after many years, admitting some of the reason I stopped practicing so long was the suffering of the world, yes, but his suffering was there, and I was perhaps angry for a time. The priest was nice, but he did say that some people - meaning homosexuals - choose to disobey God.
Male homosexuals even if they are coupled- I won't say married- are promiscuous. At the end of his life, I'm guessing Sir John Gielgud was no longer promiscuous but he lived into his nineties. Female homosexuals are much more loyal and their breakups tend to be strong in emotional turmoil.
I’m disappointed to hear he was that way. I honestly would prefer not to know anything about my favorite celebs. It’s been a shock to read the horrible tweets from Stephen King and John Cleese.
Re: Same sex faithful partnerships are acceptable to God.
I cannot go that far. But better than "on the down low" promiscuity? Yes. Much in the manner that the remarriage of a divorced person (even if they are not the innocent party) is better than visiting the ladies of the evening or trawling meat market bars for one night stands.
On your church: I think that is closer to an uncomplicated, exact reading of what scripture says. On slavery, if out-of-control capitalism is a horror, it is not said to be acceptable in the Bible. Slavery is.
On homosexuality, you are strawmanning. Calling it inseparable from transgenderism makes me wonder what went on in your mind. Anyway, I was not talking about churches accepting promiscuous homosexuality - none do. I was talking about churches deciding Scripture says they can accept faithful same sex relationships the same way the decided women can speak, we can't have slaves, and divorced Christians can remarry sans adultery/desertion.
Why do three things get to change for almost the entire Body of Christ and we don't say "terrible selfish people who changed them based only on their needs" but this fourth thing has to be terrible?
I don't want the Church to accept these relationships as marriage.
In principle, I would want broad toleration for homosexuals on a civic level. I don't really see the objection to same-sex civil marriage, for example. I tend to feel "live and let live".
However, in practice, it doesn't seem to work like that, and, as soon as homosexuality is acceptable, there's a demand for gay marriage in church, and the floodgates are opened for monstrous evil of all sorts. There does seem to be something about homosexuality that is not just about sex but about alliance with Satan in the scheme to destroy the Church and completely corrupt society. I must say that I've been a bit surprised myself watching this work out.
Well, working out beliefs is good. I am certain no church must ever be forced to perform gay marriages. If a church wants to, well, whether it is right or wrong, I am not sure about forbidding them to. As far as the law, well, that seems to be settled pretty much everywhere in the Western world so if I wanted it to change, I do not think it would. I guess my best hope, the best I think it is realistic to hope for, is for faithful, monogamous relationships to be encouraged as the only right way. I'd tolerate someone who could not have a relationship with the opposite sex and so needed a person of the same sex.
I do not think all homosexuality is about being allied with Satan. Ever listen to Andrew Sullivan? I do agree that anger and fear and resentment are pretty common. The horror of teaching children about it is awful. I'd go back to the days everything was forbidden (even monogomas same sex couples) if it meant the kids would be left alone.
Re: as soon as homosexuality is acceptable, there's a demand for gay marriage in church,
Where is this happening? I mean on any significant scale, not occasional oddball stuff that's pretty much inevitable in a huge population where anything that doesn't violate the laws of physics will happen.
I am glad that slavery is dead in most of the world but always remember that serfdom existed for centuries in Europe. Most posters on this board have serf ancestors.
The canonical text on this matter is Belloc's Servile State. A free peasantry in Europe was the direct result of Christian civilization. Slavery is the default position of humanity, and has a strong case. There are elements, and very powerful ones today, who would bring it back, though of course they would eschew the word.
The Greeks and Rim,ans initially had a free peasantry too. Economic developments (ironically urban prosperity) and for the Romans widespread conquests with captives replaced much of the free labor farming with slave labor.
As Derek also notes below the Black Death did much to eliminate "hard" serfdom in western Europe. And at the end of the Roman Empire the Plague of Justinian had a similar effect so that the Byzantine Empire in its heyday was based on freeholders who had a stake in their lands and formed the backbone of the empire's military caste.
Andrew Gold recently posted an interview on hisYouTube Heretics channel with Andrew Wallis that is a must watch on this topic. Modern slavery is alive and well. I had to listen to it in chunks because it was just overwhelming to think about.
Don't confuse the elite activist class with the rank and file. You won't find very many gay (not bisexual) men who have any desire to take on a FtM "boyfriend", and lesbians are pretty resistant to "MtF" demanding to be dated as women. The activists no more represent all gay people than BLM represents all black people, or rad feminists represent all women.
I was going to respond that the "alliance" of homosexuality with transgenderism was a political one, and a power play. I think the power play came from transgender activists though.
But I have seen tweets from gay men that lament they (homosexuals in general, not the activists) never could have forseen the consequences of such an alliance. And now, they regret mocking the crackpot Christian fundamentalists who warned about slippery slopes back in the elder days of 2015.
All of this to say, I agree with your first sentence there. I was simply pointing out the "in practice, inseparable" statement might be meant in this way.
Gads, I need to go back to college. But I'm almost the same age as you are, so maybe not {grin}
“…a choice to sin or to be forever alone and tormented for all your life.”
I think this is a false choice, and the idea that being single means to be forever alone and tormented is one of the most vile pernicious lies that modern society has started telling.
I’ve been single since leaving my husband in 2018. While I theoretically could date (am Catholic, received annulment), I have found that my demographics make me undateable. Catholic men are largely uninterested because of my age and my child (even much older men on Catholic Match are usually looking for someone to have their babies, and I was once directly told that no one wanted “used goods”); secular modern men are *totally* uninterested because absolutely no sex is on offer until marriage (I live in a very secular area of a very secular American state).
Would I prefer to have a relationship? Yes. Do I feel sad and lonely sometimes? Also yes.
Is my life an unremitting torment of loneliness and despair? Absolutely not; that’s ridiculous nearly to the point of offense. Do I think my life is harder or sadder than someone who bears a different cross, like infertility, or the too-early death of a loved one, or chronic illness? Also absolutely not. We all grieve for might-have beens, all struggle, all suffer at times, all have parts of our life to which we say, “I wish that had been otherwise.” Can I look ahead for the remaining years (decades, God willing) of my life, imagine myself as single throughout, and accept this as the will of God? Yes, with prayer, I can.
Singleness is a normal state of life and often a holy and fruitful one if we let it instruct us. I’ve been able to give time to prayer and charitable work I never could have if still married. I’ve grown deeply in my faith. I think I’m a better person for it. And I have a rich, happy, interesting, full life that isn’t a horror show of thwarted desire.
The world lies, and lies, and lies to us when it claims that romantic love — and only romantic love! — is the key to a happy life, and to end up otherwise is to end up in despair. We all need to unlearn that lie.
This is lovely. And you're doing your child a favor. A friend of my wife's, an acid-tongued Irishwoman, often said that the first thing she thought about when confronted with a divorced woman dating was, is this dude more interested in the kid?
In the BIPOC community it's been an epidemic for 50 years, but that's a matter of violence, especially baby shaking. Among whites the abuse would be sexual.
Thank you, I appreciate this post, which was from your heart and with which I could surely identify. I am happy, God has at last granted that grace, and I have no one. But I am not gay.
I am thinking of one example, but this example is typical of millions of people. There was no marriage gone bad with a child to have and love. There never would be, could never be, and that hope was gone. There was a spirituality that absolutely sang to God "Holy is your name" and a self-condemnation for feelings unchangeable. Hope can bring joy while young, but there was no hope of a blessed life here. There was never the ability to even try for love without sin. There was the torment of being misunderstood and condemned (or trying to hide) for an attraction that could not be changed, a torment you and I do not face. And worst, worst of all - there was the belief that "homosexuality is an abomination" and hell awaits if it cannot be resisted. For most men, (98 percent or so?) a complete lifetime without sex is too much of a challenge, yet they believe God condemns then to an insurmountable challenge. Hell on earth.
Hell awaits only one thing, absolute refusal to admit you are a sinner and submit yourself before a Holy God as such and accept God's Grace. We all deal with sin and have our own private battles.
"Too much.." Says who? Christ enables us to overcome all. The refusal to submit such before God is from the pride of human beings, nothing more. That is any sin, not just homosexuality.
You are not condemned for feelings. You are condemned for dealing with it on your own terms, rather than submitting them to God.
And Rosemary is right about the primacy that culture lays upon romantisexual relationships and and activities and how you are somehow incomplete without them. It is a lie from the depths of Hell. With the damage done clear. And not just on this subject.
Even in a properly done man/woman relationship, under Christian auspices, it needs to be submitted prayerfully to God, and He takes center stage, not either one of the couple.
If I ever do marry, she needs to be somone who loves God even more than she loves me. And the same needs to be said for me. And the relationship is not based on feelings, which come and go and change form through time. But a commitment, blessed by the Holy Spirit, whose bond becomes stronger under that arrangement. It is not based on tingles or butterflies or some such nonsense. But a deep, holy commitment, made before a Holy God, who will be with us every step of the way in this life.
So then I need to look deeper in my heart if I had assumed you have not walked a mile in the shoes of the suffering homosexual. At least partly you have, whilst converted, and though you have hope yet, you've given your age. Also, you are not condemned by society as much as a gay person. Yet we both know Americans condemn the never married over a certain age who are not gay.
Anyway, my 2 cents which you probably get all the time - plenty of good Christian women fish in the sea if you are searching and it is God's time. I pray for the best for you.
It’s definitely the responsibility of anyone small-o orthodox on matters of sexuality to be very careful about not reinforcing damaging and incorrect teaching. It sounds like your friend was a victim of much of that. That’s awful and I’m sorry.
Feelings and aren’t sinful, and no one should ever be taught that they are.
Chastity as taught by the Church is really, really hard and almost everyone struggles with it. Someone who desires the same sex definitely shouldn’t feel any more guilty or ashamed than someone who really wants to use contraception, or someone tempted by pornography, or somehow who wants to have sex outside of marriage. It’s absolutely normal to be tempted in these ways.
God knows that we’re going to fail and sin, and he loves us through it all. While perfection is certainly the ultimate aim, the daily call is simply to confess failures, repent, and strive for more faithfulness.
I get that to some it feels impossible. To me the call to martyrdom both impossible and also unfair, but God does in fact sometimes ask this of us, and many have been obedient unto death. Similarly, there are many, many examples of men and women who have led lives of lifelong chastity (and many more, like Augustine, who led chaste lives after a decidedly unchaste youth) and while certainly a hard ask, I think the witness of the saints shows us it isn’t actually an impossible one.
But I’ll definitely offer my prayers today for you and yours because I hear the pain so clearly, and it shouldn’t be hand-waved away.
For many years I thought my friend was condemned if he did things he really could not be expected to resist. I do not believe all homosexuals are granted the gift of chastity like those people with callings to vocations are. But it is an alternate explanation and very close to what CS Lewis believed about inability to change homosexual orientation, yet requirement to live chaste.
Chastity is a virtue for all people, though most people do sin against it at times. Celibacy is a much rarer ascesis, and IMO it should never be forced on anyone who is unwilling.
The very word slavery conjures up thoughts of masters beating slaves and mistreatment of those to whom they deny freedom. But there were several types of slavery in the ancient world. I remember in Ancient Greek history the professor reading a complaint from an Athenian citizen that the slaves had more rights than they. St Paul was only saying that master and slave should treat each other fairly and as brothers in the Lord. In Christ they were free! Both of them free!
It was also possible to become part of the household of a master; to be like family and to be adopted. Certainly to be part of a household of a Christian master following the Lord would have been a blessing compared to the alternative, especially if you were a prisoner of war. To argue that the Church changed its position on slavery is to miss the point regarding stopping the mistreatment of each other, which was primary, versus changing societal economic systems, which was secondary.
Regarding human sexuality and being born this way, we live in a fallen world. None of were intended to be born this way! That is why we must be born again!
Regarding slaves: As stated, the Bible allows all types of slavery, including telling Christian slaves to cheerfully endure beatings, and sending Onesimus back, not free, though plainly willing to be a free servant.
I do not want to mess up anyone's faith because the Bible does not condemn slavery. I came at last to see (and admit on a certain day in a certain coffee shop) that logic is not always going to work in matters of faith. Scripture is inspired, God is love, my sprit tells me that. That is what I believe. (I did not mean your faith, Mark, but it troubles some.)
Regarding being born again -yes. But a homosexual orientation is not changed when a person is born again.
To be born a new creature also means to grow. This growth is not without growing pains and struggles. Some are born with other propensities to sin and their struggles can be just as difficult as homosexuality. But this argument is about individual struggle. The argument that people are born this way as a justifiable reason for Church splits and changing Methodist church doctrine is invalid.
With respect, I do not think you have walked a mile in my shoes nor in the shoes of one who cannot change a homosexual orientation. You do not know the lifelong suffering. I would not want my friend to have died from a disease, but I would have had less pain that way than to have seen this.
And you do not know anyone else's life. Everyone deals with something. And that's the problem with some engaging in homosexual advocacy, that they are somehow unique and the rest of the world has it easy. And of course, all of that completely misses the central message of Christ. That their sin struggle is somehow unique, deserves unequaled sympathy and also gets a free pass.
All of humanity, all people, deal with something.
No one has walked a mile in your shoes, nor you theirs. And either is completely beside the point.
I do not believe in genetic determinism as an excuse for any behavior. In fact, I believe that even our genetics are subject to change. But, let us look at the current state of the UMC. From arguing for lesbian and gay, Methodists have now gone to full LGBTQIA+. Many of those letters stand for fluidity, not born this way! For Methodists to split over this only adds to the confusion over the issue. For ministers to have taken oaths of ordination to uphold Methodist beliefs and simultaneously conspiring to change Methodism, that showed a serious lack of integrity and honesty. Such ministers put themselves on pedastals above those that went before. As leaders, they now promote heresy and mislead. But no problem there! Society looks at such churches and proclaims, “We don’t need such Churches! In fact, you are only now believing as we do because we pulled you along kicking and screaming! Away with you!”
Well, as I said, I will have to stay in the traditional church. You say "Methodist ministers", not qualifying the words, so all Methodist ministers lack integrity and honesty. Can you not imagine maybe some went through a very big challenge to their beliefs, like I did. I don't lack integrity and honesty. - - And did I say genetic determinism is an "excuse"? Well, that is complicated. One basic answer is that in theory it is possible for a homosexual to have no sex in life. Thus no loving relationship, no family, no children, a terrible life, alone. No hope of change, ever. Go on having no question in your mind that a loving God condemns people to that. I used to, until I saw the suffering close up, and realized.
Returning to "genetic determinism", there are indeed people who cannot control themselves - talking mentally ill here. God is the judge and He does not condemn the mentally ill.
There were liberal Christians at the time of the Civil War who argued that if the Bible truly defended slavery then "away with the Bible!" This is one of the things that prompted historian Mark Noll to argue that the Protestant debates over slavery presaged the later fundamentalist/modernist arguments.
The debates over slavery also put a total kibosh on the notion that Scripture is crystal-clear on such matters. It obviously isn't, or else there wouldn't have been such strong disagreement on it with both sides attempting to proof-text the other to death.
I believe that there are many things that Scripture is clear on and can be taken more or less at face value. On issues that are less clear I defer to the teaching of the Church. On some of these matters the Church has spoken definitively, or there is a consensus of the faithful, but others are seen as theologoumena or "indifferent" issues which are open to more than one interpretation. The thing to remember is that it's the Church and not us that decides what's important and what isn't. I am not free to dismiss as unimportant what Tradition has deemed to be otherwise.
I'm reminded of a story about St. Jerome, a Church Father who had a very high view of Scripture, perhaps among the highest along with St Augustine. A monk or student came to him with a question about a certain passage of Scripture, asking Jerome if it could interpreted in some certain way. He responded quickly and directly, "No, because the Church does not allow that intepretation." That's the importance of Tradition in a nutshell, coming from a Church Father whose love and respect for Holy Scripture cannot be gainsaid.
Ancient slavery could be surpassingly cruel too. But it had the one great virtue that it had no connection to an ideology of racial supremacy. Anyone could become a slave. The philosopher Plato was sold into slavery by a tyrant he had annoyed (luckily a friend bought him out of it).
Basically true, although the root word of "slave" in most European languages is "Slav." See David Levering Lewis's "Islam and the Making of Europe" on the massive trafficking of Slavs across the Mediterranean world. The Caliphs of Cordoba staffed whole armies with them, and the Mameluks were basically a mix of Slavs and Turk sold into slavery, who after a few generations took control of one caliphate themselves.
Your point is subject to some criticisms, many of which are valid from the perspective of traditional Christian morality, but on the practical/optical/human level it has always seemed likely that your point is what will prevail in most of Christianity outside of the kind of enclaves I mention in my other comment today. It won't happen overnight, but it likely will happen because of the same line of reasoning, I think, which works on a human level.
My own issue is that it is impossible for me to see God, as I conceive of him anyway, blessing a man placing his sexual organ inside the rear-end of another man, or placing this kind of activity on anything like a similar level to the conjugal union of male and female which is at the core of all Christian understandings of marriage historically. To get there, it seems to me, you have to smudge that away and just say "well, at it's best this should be the validation of an emotionally committed relationship that includes the sexual relations you prefer", but that isn't at all what the Church has understood about marriage over the course of history, and I simply can't believe that the kind of sex, at least as practiced by male homosexuals (which is all sodomy, either way) is to be placed on the same level, or blessed in any way, by God or the Church.
But, as I say, on a human level, because our culture now widely -- Christian or not -- views marriage as the validation of an emotionally committed relationship that involves as much sex of whatever type the parties mutually agree upon, it makes little "sense" to exclude gay people from this. This is why, in the end, the arguments against civil gay marriage fell flat -- the culture around marriage had changed for everyone, including for almost all Christians, in terms of how they actually understood marriage, regardless of what the Church, of whatever stripe, has taught about marriage historically. And I think it's just a question of time, therefore, until this becomes generally applied through most American Christianity (again, outside the traditional enclaves) for the same reason -- almost all of the people there view marriage in a way that is compatible with same sex marriage, regardless of what the Church has historically taught about marriage (or may even "officially" still teach).
Paragraph one: True. And I am going to have to learn to function among people who believe all homosexual activity is sin. Because the churches who accept faithful same sex relationships all accept many other things. That will be a hard thing in my life. Whether to stay silent or live by a lie. I've just refused to lie here. I think it was brave if I do say so.
Paragraph two: I thought this was a great paragraph and was glad you did not shy away from the physiological. In my posts today, I've differentiated spiritual-metaphysical sex that makes two people one and placing the penis in the anus, etc. I don't think that makes two people one. I presume a faithful partner-relationship has both sex and love, but I do not think the sex is the same as spiritual-metaphysical-oneness sex.
Paragraph three: I'm not sure I catch your point. You mention "involves as much sex of whatever type the parties mutually agree upon". I speak of two married people, of course. Is the point here that "sodomy" (mouths, anuses) are forbidden. I don't see that in Scripture. Is the further point that therefore we are more likely to allow homosexuality because we allow those things. If those are the points, then I disagree. Two adults who are married should have as much fun between them as they can as long as no one is harmed and consent for specific acts in mutual and uncoerced.
I have read your posts and the responses with great interest, and I appreciate your courage to discuss this on a substack where most of the readers are traditional or orthodox Christians of some sort.
Suffice to say that this particular issue is one of several that troubles me at an emotional level, even though I accept the Orthodox church's position.
Some questions: (maybe this is far too late into the discussion)
You said this: 'Because the churches who accept faithful same sex relationships all accept many other things'. At this point, I think all the mainline churches officially are on-board. And from what I gather, SSM acceptance is making inroads into the Evangelical churches (Rob Bell comes to mind). I am personally glad you are staying where you are (Orthodox?), but today there certainly are plenty of churches that one can attend that are LGBTQ friendly.
My questions (1) why does SSM acceptance seem to come as a package deal with a general watering down of the faith? (2) If this particular change was in response to the gentle nudging of the Holy Spirit, and not just capitulation to the zeitgeist, why are we not seeing growth in the churches following this path? All churches outside of the 3rd world seem to be in decline, but I'm pretty sure the statistics show that the mainline churches are in virtual freefall. The statistics are not great for the Orthodox churches, but I have seen more catechumens the past few years than when I first was chrismated.
Well, you have just forced my brain into admitting what it did not want to - that I can either go where I feel the Holy Spirit, and same-sex monogamy is rejected, or where I don't, though it and much else is accepted. I'm Catholic, btw, but could be Orthodox if services here were in English.
I suppose I could say there is nowhere (no church) that accepts same-sex monogamy without adding other things that they should not. But of course, it makes me wonder. Then again, all the other changes - women can now teach, divorcees can now remarry, slavery can be forbidden - it took a long time for those things to change. Over 1800 years, almost 2000 for two of the three.
So the only answer I can give is that the time is not yet, to allow faithful same sex partnerships in Catholic/Orthodox - and the various non-modernist churches, it if it to be. I cannot go with the modernist churches. They really are doing just about what Rod said - doing whatever they think sounds right. (I don't question the motives of all of their priests and congregants- I would think most think they are helping people unfairly rejected.)
What is really good is that no one here said "You hypocrite, get out of the Church, get out of here" because I can't see my way, at present, to accepting one traditional tenant, the forbidding of faithful monogamous same sex relationships. I do promise to pray and seek God and ask that He show me if I'm wrong.
Re: it is impossible for me to see God, as I conceive of him anyway, blessing a man placing his sexual organ inside the rear-end of another man
I find this sort of hyper-focus on physical details irrelevant. Sex is kind of gross no matter how it is done. Sometimes I think of it as a bit of a jest God plays on to keep us in our place by reminding us that we are corporeal beings made up of crude matter.
I hear you, Linda. I don't quite know how to say it yet, but my feeling is that -- in this time when many are (rightly) so anxious to hold onto tradition -- there is also such a thing as remembering *too* much. I'm a strong believer in Dunbar's number; cognitively, we can only handle about maybe 50 real relationships. I wonder if there is such a thing as Dunbar's duration, too: We can only handle about *this* much of history, continuity, etc. I think of the many Jewish sects in 1st century Roman occupied Palestine, all the many ways of trying to hold onto Moses while also coping with here and now, and...it's just too much, man! You go psycho trying to hold it all. And one of the beautiful things about Yeshua, of the infinitely man, was he identified the core: "Love God with all your heart" + "Love God by loving your neighbor, who is yourself." And he lived that love in a way that was profound but also understandable, graspable. And the hard diamond core that he carried forward shed light on the entire Mosaic tradition, gave it immense new depths. But that was only possible by letting so much go. "The Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath..." (As the rest of this thread so aptly illustrates, we get kind of lost inside our sacred texts, and we get lost trying to hold it all...)
Well, yes, the many Jews were quite shocked that Christ told the healed man to take up his bed and walk, on the Sabbath. That was forbidden. They could have thought Christ healed through a demon. - - But for now, without Christ coming again, I want to be very, very careful of any change. I've given three examples (women, slaves, divorce) of things that I think were not really changes to what God wants, but without saying anything in Scripture should be overturned, as Christ overturned many laws. I've questioned, in godo faith, whether there is yet a fourth example. I am not 100 percent sure there is. But it is hard for me to believe there is not.
None of us can perform miracles by our own power. But doctors and nurses do labor on the Sabbath in mundane acts of healing-- and they should. "The Sabbath was made for Man not Man for the Sabbath".
It is Christ's job to declare what Jewish laws are actually God's laws, and what are the cumulated conceit of the Pharasees, Jon. Aka "tradtion." That's what was at dispute.
Ecclesial decline appears to be taking place across the board at this point. It isn't the 1990s or the 2000s any longer, when one could say that the liberal mainlines were in decline while conservative Evangelicals were waxing. Today the situation is that religious affiliation is in decline, across the board -- liberal, conservative, etc.
There are enclaves that are developing -- Latin Mass Catholics, Eastern Orthodox (who are small enough to be an enclave in the Western context), small congregation traditionalist Protestantism, smaller Protestant denominations like LCMS and so on -- but these are enclaves in the context of the broader Christian demographic, at least in North America. The bigger picture is that Christian affiliation is declining across the board generationally in very stark terms.
Traditionalism won't stave that off, it is being caused by larger factors than a distaste for traditional religion per se -- it's a complex set of factors arising from technology, movements in the popular culture, and socio-political changes, among other things. That doesn't mean that traditionally-minded Christians won't find their way into one of the enclaves -- they likely will, at least in many cases, do so -- but it means that Christianity as a whole is declining regardless.
Evangelicalism is an interesting case study in how this is likely going to play out. Right now there's a lot of tension in Evangelicalism about how to proceed given the growing disaffiliation from religion. Some wish to remain "traditional", in the evangelical sense of traditional moral teachings on things like sex, but a lot, especially in the leadership level, are concerned about remaining relevant to the broader culture so as to not endanger the evangelism-oriented focus of many evangelicals (the idea is that more you go against broadly accepted social settlements relating to sex, gender roles, marriage and so on, the harder it is to evangelize people). Right now there is a movement, for example, for evangelicalism to switch gears from being largely complementarian (gender roles, but often under the rubric of "servant leader" ideas) to being egalitarian (no gender roles), and to basically hive off the resistant complementarians as present-day "fundamentalists", thereby taking one of the issues that mainstream cultural people who are evangelism targets may have with evangelicalism. Aaron Renn has written about this at points during the past year or so, and it's well worth reading (I am not evangelical and have no personal insight into these matters, but Renn's writing on them and the sources he cites about it are well worth reading given the footprint that Evangelicalism has in American Christianity).
So a part of what is happening is also that "traditional Christianity" is becoming less traditional, as well, and this is being in fact supported by a variety of different people, both in the existing leadership set and among younger evangelicals and many evangelical women as well. The upshot of that is that soon there will be even fewer places that are "traditional", and that this will likely continue to morph over time -- that is, the "line" of what traditionalists have "given up" on, versus what they continue to remain steadfast on, will continue to move and shift over time, such that after enough time has elapsed, what remains "traditional" is not at all recognizable as such to anyone using that term today. In that way it's very much like what one has seen in American political conservatism, where the "content" of what the movement seeks to "conserve" changes over time to gradually include progressive "advances" that the conservative movement itself used to oppose. This seems to be a strong cultural current across the board in American culture, one that isn't confined to politics.
> But I still don’t understand why some Protestants are so resistant to schism. Yes, there are the normal things — for example, I can easily imagine that some friendships in the Methodist church in my hometown were damaged by the break-up — but as a concept, Protestantism was born in schism over principle. It’s in the blood.
Protestantism was born in schism over principle, but Evangelicalism was born to be a big-tent coalition that wouldn't schism because their identity was a shared commitment to missions and that common Christian core that made society functional, contra the Fundamentalists who were fully occupied with fighting among themselves due to their more detailed theological identities. (I'm currently finishing up "The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism," where this is a big part of the story.)
Schism just isn't part of the Evangelical culture, and dealing with the damage would *at minimum* require an admission that people can a) say they believe the Bible while b) their private interpretation is completely wrong and c) they resist correction. Some Evangelicals have made that concession, but it's not an easy one to make.
Rod "who knows how to second-line". Now that would be something to see - our host's sick dance moves grooving down the street to a New Orleans brass band.
When is it time to schism? Sometimes it doesn't take much. Arguing over the date of Easter, for instance. Not just in antiquity either - I'm told that the two Ukrainian Catholic churches just four blocks apart on Oakley Street in Chicago's Ukrainian Village neighborhood used to be a single parish until about 1980 when an argument over when to celebrate Easter split them.
From what I understand - and I worked for a UCC organization for nearly three years - the story isn't quite that simple. St. Nicholas is the much older parish, the cathedral, and they have the established school, etc. At some point, they went to the new calendar, which resulted in the infamous incident one year where some people were at church for Theophany and some for Nativity, and things got so heated that the police had to be called.
Ss. V&O was established, in large part, through the work of Cardinal Joseph Slipyj, who, after having received release from captivity by the Soviets, in large part due to the Vatican's entreaties, spent the last twenty years of his life evangelizing the Ukrainian Catholic cause throughout the whole world. (IIRC, he was 70 when he was released, and the Soviets seemed to think he'd croak soon anyway.) Slipyj is a controversial figure to the Orthodox, in particular, because it does seem like he was very anti-Orthodox, and did things like turn over Orthodox believers to Soviet authorities because they were Orthodox and not Ukrainian Catholic. In any case, there was a good deal of Ukrainian nationalism that was mixed in with his message, and when he got to Chicago, it seemed like he was very upset that the main Ukrainian Catholic parish would be new calendar, etc. And so V&O was built, literally within a 3-minute walk of St. Nicholas, to kind of "stick it in the eye" of St. Nicholas. Last I knew, V&O is the largest Ukrainian Catholic Church in terms of membership in the US, but St. Nicholas is still there, is still the cathedral church of the eparchy, and as far as I know, still runs its school and everything because there are enough Ukrainians in the area to support both (at least there was a few years back though). However, even when I was working over there, 40 years after the split, there were still issues that were sore spots to people who had lived through that time. (Then again, we were using two accounts for deposits because there were factions of the community aligned with MB - which had Ukrainian leadership at one point - and Selfreliance, who saw themselves as the financial institution of the Ukrainian community. Because, you know, Ukrainians. )
Thanks for the more complete background. I recall there being two different Ukrainian street festivals as well, but I don't know if either or both are sponsored by the parishes or some other group. I've been to services at both St Nicholas & St V&O. Of the two, I found V&O to be borderline xenophobic - almost the classic Chicago "We don't want nobody that nobody sent" treatment.
Re: The modernists, by contrast, more or less disbelieve that the material world has a telos
Well, I have a problem with using the singular in that formulation. The matterial world has telē, plural, as it has multiple possible futures. Which does not mean anything and everything is a telos, or that anything is possible. But Time is multivalued, and without that there could be no freedom of the will-- we would all be puppets of God's thought.
I wish you and Matthew and great and relaxing time on your vacation.
It's been a long time since I read Eric Metaxas' biography of Bonhoeffer, but I remember I came away with the idea that one of the central themes of the book was this idea of "What is the Church"? On one hand, Bonhoeffer was a devout Lutheran and didn't want schism, on the other hand, he ended up establishing a network of churches that became known as the "Confessing Church" because he felt like the Lutheran Church had allowed itself to be co-opted by the Nazi government, which he considered to be 100% wrong. This tension was never resolved in Bonhoeffer's lifetime, and it would have been interesting, had he lived, to have seen whether the Confessing Church churches got folded back into the Lutheran Church after the war, or if Bonhoeffer would have ended up leading them to a different direction.
True, in that sense it's similar to the situation with post-Revolutionary Russian Orthodoxy, where the "Synod", which became the ROCA or ROCOR, adamantly opposed all relations with the Moscow Patriarchate in the post-Revolution period for similar kinds of reasons. Of course that was eventually resolved after the collapse of communism, but settlement kept the structures of the ROCOR intact, and so it continues to operate as an autonomous church under the aegis of the MP. It's interesting to think if the German Lutherans would have come up with a similar kind of thing had there been two churches for an extended period.
The whole history of it is fascinating. In the US, there were all sorts of issues regarding property ownership, etc. with a lot of the old "Russian Mission" churches, which is one of the reasons why, I believe, many old churches didn't belong to the jurisdiction, but to the parish brotherhood. Nowadays, a lot of people think that's weird and/or borderline heretical, but in its place, it makes sense. The ROCOR/MP split makes a lot of sense in its historical setting, but even now that there's reconciliation, it's weird to have MP and ROCOR churches in the same place, like in Munich, where I was. Even before reconciliation, though, there were certainly people who kind of bounced back and forth there (it didn't seem like there was any ill will between the congregations). But now having OCA, ROCOR, and MP churches in the US? This is kind of crazy! Even the Serbs had their split in the US - now reconciled - about whether it was permissible to send money to the Serbian Patriarchate with a communist government in power, which one knew was going to take it's share of the riches of America sent back by the expat community.
Bonhoeffer had a really good relationship with the Roman Catholics, and had he lived, I wonder if there may have been some work or leaning in that direction. (I don't think he was particularly fond of the Orthodox, at least that was my impression from Metaxas.)
My wife and I live Schismatically as Latin Mass Catholics. My own pastor, Father Ringrose, explains several times a year that the Novus Ordo is a new religion created out of Vatican II and it is not just a new Mass. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI acted as bridges between the Latin Mass and the Novus Ordo because both preferred the Latin Mass themselves. Pope Francis I has obliterated the bridge into a thousand bits. So be it. Schism is in the cards because the Latin Mass and the Novus Ordo Mass, cobbled together by Archbishop Bugnini and several Protestant scholars, are two different religions that can not be reconciled.
Latin Mass Catholics who wish to be in unity with the Novus Ordo Church have been showed the door by Mr. Bergoglio. Mr. Bergoglio attacks the Latin Mass and has had his bishops ghettoize it. For instance, the Diocese of Arlington, led by the soft-speaking, feminine-sounding Bishop Burbidge, has reduced the Latin Mass from 21 places of worship to 8. All 8 are consigned to outer buildings not part of the actual church. The Archbishop of Washington, the sissy-speaking Archbishop Gregory, has reduced the Latin Mass to 3 locations. He closed the highly-attended St. Mary's Latin Mass(attended by Pat Buchanan by the way) despite it being the most well-attended Mass in the archdiocese just out of spite. It isn't hard to see where this is heading. Mr. Bergoglio or his successor will smother the Latin Mass within the Novus Ordo church completely dead in a few years. The indult Latin Mass is doomed.
And how is this working out for the Novus Ordo religion? The Archbishop of Baltimore is reducing parishes from 61 to 21 over the next couple of years. True, Baltimore has had an eighty-year flight of white Catholics from the city leaving many nearly empty church buildings in Baltimore but the Archdiocese extends into nine counties that includes the suburban counties where the whites moved. The Novus Ordo's decline is similar to the decline of the Mainline Protestant churches in America and Europe.
One of the really unpleasant things that Bergoglio has done is encourage liberal Catholics (of the National Catholic Reporter and America variety) to show their claws--as well as their inability to mount a coherent argument. Just hectoring and nasty. My problem with sedevacantists is that they can be even nastier, if smarter, and more learned (I'm not talking about you or your priest, of course, just the breed available online). I would have to take a very deep breath indeed before agreeing that a Novus Ordo Mass is invalid.
As for Bergoglio, he's headed for his eternal reward. The odds are from those who know on somebody in the middle who will make nobody happy in the long run but who will avoid a schism, somebody like Dolan, or Gomez had he a red hat. If somebody like Sarah gets the job, JPII will have retrospectively "grown" since his death.
Unpleasant, but useful to see everyone lay their cards on the table. Fr James Martin played it straight until Papa Frank came on the scene.
Sedevacantism is the ditch opposite the modernist one; hard to stay on the road, pocked and crumbled as it is by those who were supposed to maintain it.
Yes, the next pope is likely a non-American compromise candidate. Cardinal Sarah is too divisive and severe to be pope. His role in the Sacred College is to be a John the Baptist figure calling out the 'broods of vipers'.
I've pondered the argument that Vatican II (or at least what followed in its wake, as much of that was not envisioned by the council fathers or its sixteen documents) made a 'different' religion of Catholicism. Even if one claims the doctrines haven't changed there's no question the lived practice is different from my grandparents with the near elimination of fasting & meatless Fridays, Rogation/Ember days, Corpus Christi processions, Adoration/Benediction or even just sacred architecture as something built in the last 60 years probably resembles an airplane hangar.
Yet, even without Vatican II, a lot of this goes by the boards due to changes in society. Vatican II was an failed attempt to address the challenge of modernity. Yes, part of this failure is its partial hijacking by Bugnini & company as an excuse to do things not foreseen or even opposed to the council. To that extent, Vatican II became a springboard for the wreckovators to get ahead of schedule. That said, even a perfectly orthodox and wise council could not have stopped modernity's onslaught. Slow the bleeding for a while, perhaps.
By extension, one could argue that any form of today's Christianity is a 'different' religion than what was known / practiced in antiquity. This is not necessarily bad, the Gospel being 'ever old,
ever new', adaptable to all times and places, but mileage varies wildly. I do wonder about the 'tracking error' between what Christ intended and what His even his best-intentioned modern interpreters would have us believe.
I attend an independent chapel, St. Athanasius, which used to be very friendly with the SSPX. In 2015, our pastor thought that the head of the SSPX, Bishop Fellay, was playing footsie with Mr. Bergoglio of Rome. So he started The Resistance. Attendance is down by half since then. The SSPX has started two parishes since to compete with St. Athanasius.
Maybe someone on this thread knows. Are there any books to recommend that compare the before and after of Vatican II and maybe make a case that the religion changed?
I recommend Anne Muggeridge's "The Desolate City" which came out about 1986. She's a wonderful writer and the daughter-in-law of Malcolm Muggeridge. Sadly, she was afflicted by Alzheimer's when she was about sixty and died about ten years ago. She was interviewed by Michael Davies way back in the early 1990s, an excellent interview.
Dietrich von Hildebrand was theologian held in esteem by Popes JPII and BXVI. He wrote some critiques of Vatican II, "Trojan Horse in the City of God: the Catholic Crisis Explained" (1967) and "The Devasted Vineyard" (1973). The titles give the game away; he wasn't a fan. Too close to the actual event for a long-term view, but shows what one thinker saw in its immediate wake.
I am very lucky to attend a Carmelite mission church, served by Carmelite priests, and offering both the new mass (in three different languages!) and the ancient Carmelite Rite, which was not suppressed by TC. Our bishop has been enormously supportive, even subbing in to offer Latin mass for us when our pastor has been out on vacation or with a family emergency.
Maybe the charism of the Carmelites is the magic sauce holding us together, but it really does feel to me as if we are one “parish” (well, mission church, but you know) practicing one religion. I’m personally devoted to the ancient rite, but doctrinally I see no daylight between my fellow “parishioners” (I’m just going with it lol) who attend any the other masses. We all socialize together, so these are folks I know pretty well and with whom I can talk real issues of substance. I do find that the Latin crew trends sort of “nerdier,” for lack of a better word — deep into Latin and history and 19th century manuals of prayer — but definitely no doctrinal issues.
I listen to Larry Chapp a lot (he’s one of my favorite Catholic thinkers around today) and he talks about a hermeneutic of continuity vs a hermeneutic of rupture. I’m pretty convinced that a hermeneutic of continuity is the right way to look at things and idk I guess all of this to say you are clearly arguing for a hermeneutic of rupture, and I’m just not there! I think Vatican II gave superficial license for a lot of heretics to pop their heads out and sing, but I think they’re mooooooostly flushed out by now and that their way of thinking is on the wane.
Larry Chapp does an admirable job of avoiding undue cheerleading or blasting. His thoughtful analysis avoids the excesses of church libs and those who think the last good pope was Pius X or Clement XIV.
So this kind of attitude is why I am a little suspicious of the TLM enclaves. I notice more and more there is this sentiment that the Novus Ordo Mass is illegitimate. Not that it is aesthetically inferior or in bad taste, but that it is actually part of a false religion.
This is a pretty incredible claim and honestly makes Francis's crackdown make a ton of sense. Why would you support a tiny minority of Catholics who are rejecting the other 99% of the faithful, including a valid Mass and sacraments? People like this Fr Ringrose seem to have elected themselves as the Pope and Cardinals of their own little fiefdoms, but cry fowl when the actual hierarchy uses the same rhetoric on TLM that they use on NO?
And besides which, as nice as Latin Mass sounds, the truth is that form is a relatively *modern* invention, solidifying around the 16th century--i.e. 15 centuries(!) after Christ. It's 3 times closer in age and practice to 21st century Masses than it is to the early church. In that light, treating its existence as a celebrated form seems a bit silly, early Christians did just fine the centuries before it was even established.
Finally, I also don't really believe the whole idea that TLM will explode in a revival while NO wastes away. The simple fact is that roughly 0.4% of Catholics attend TLM. By contrast, last year there was a 1% increase in NO Catholics by infant baptism. TLM churches are a tiny little slice of the Catholic population that has an overestimated presence thanks to the internet. But every boom among Latin Massgoers is just a drop in the bucket compared to the billions of NO catholics around the world. TLM is and will remain a niche community, assuming it even lasts into next century, which I doubt
This is very sharp. But you're giving Francis way too much credit. It's precisely a "breakout" of TLM into the larger Catholic population that he's afraid of. I've aired in the past my distaste for Traddies and won't go through it again, but there is also in TLM attendance a leaven of fine people who should be models to us all in charity, good sense, and balance. They're the ones that Bergoglio and his goon, Artie Roche, are afraid of. Also, I bet I'm older than you, and you perhaps don't remember the spite with which Novus Ordo got imposed. And how is it that Corita banners, the music of Schutte, and clown masses are ok and TLM is verboten? Doesn't add up.
Oh I certainly agree Francis isn't acting in good faith. And if TLM communities were filled with the James Martin's of the world, he would no doubt be trumpeting them from the rooftops tomorrow.
That said, I also think it's very easy to jump from the frying pan into the fire with these sorts of scenarios. Martin Luther did have very legitimate grievances against the Pope in his day, but we see how quickly that went off the rails when he decided to take up the mantle of pontiff in his own way
Well-argued post. However, I think there are many more Latin Mass Catholics than you suppose as a percentage. In France, where Catholicism is dying, half the weekly Mass attendees are Latin Mass Catholics. The percentage is not so high in America. But the Catholic Church in America is being dishonest when they claim 80 million or so adherents. How many go to Mass every Sunday barring illness? Perhaps 15 million. And how many are heretics like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi? Are they even truly Catholics? I would think not.
The left is much better at politics than the right. That is why the modernist left was able to use bureaucratic skills to create a revolution in the church in the 1960s. By the end of the revolution, most Catholics left the pews. The remnant that stayed attend the Mass out of habit. When I used to go to the local Novus Ordo Mass, I was struck by how old the attendees were. What happens when they die? Parishes are closing all over Europe and America.
If you're asking "Is it time to schism?" it's probably time to schism. It's definitely time to start figuring out how to do it peacefully or in a manner that minimizes collateral damage.
We rarely do this, of course, whether it's religious schism, divorce, or the dissolution of nation states. We believe that the heretics will repent. We stay together for the kids. We destroy our empire while trying to preserve it's myths.
We drag out the inevitable until it can't happen without lots and lots of pain, be it spiritual pain, emotional pain, or physical pain and death. We're so afraid of how awful it will be that we delay taking action until the situation and what results from the actions we are eventually forced to take are usually worse than what we were initially afraid of at the beginning when we first recognized that there was a problem.
My sister was a longtime very active member of a United Methodist congregation. When the vote came over whther to remain with the United Methodist Church a lot of people who rarely if ever attended but were on the books suddenly showed up to vote in the favor of remaining. Subsequently a lot of the active members, herself included, left.
This. Structure and membership in Protestant churches is fungible. Ross Douthat wrote about how this unstructured-ness allows Protestants to innovate and experiment more than Catholics and Orthodox who had episcopal hierarchies and rules.
The downsides can be just as spectacular, as you point out.
To use a political science analogy, two-party systems and single-party rule stifle competition while promising stability (for as long as the powers-that-be hold things together). Multiparty democracies lack that stability--see how unwieldy the coalition governments in Italy and Israel can be, for example. Or how Geert Wilders and Sinn Fein can win a plurality of votes but still be locked out of power...But hey, they're not shoehorned into a rigid system, eh?
What happens in Protestant churches when things don't go your way is how Rod describes St. Francisville: people go their own way. Sometimes people start their own church, with varying degrees of success. Or they simply go church shopping. That's a lot easier than it used to be when denominational identities meant more.
I remember going with my Mom to different churches in town after we moved. We mostly looked at different low-church denominations, all Baptist and Pentecostal. One Baptist church stood out to me because they served cookies after the service and I pushed for it on that basis (I was seven).
Re the Marxist guy who celebrated Christmas because he loved being Italian: while attending the local community college, my daughter had a professor who was an atheist. Not sure how this came up in class but anyhoo, she arrived for class one November 30 to find him attired in a kilt. What’s that about, the students wanted to know. He replied that it was St. Andrew’s Dsy & he was of Scottish ancestry. So my daughter said “Dr. ____, you’re an atheist & you’re celebrating a Christian saint?” But it was a national pride thing. Well, honey, I said, how many people drinking green beer & making fools of themselves on March 17 are honoring St. Patrick? The professor was not one of those obnoxious militant atheists & wasn’t offended.
It reminds me of CS Lewis’ recollection of his tutor who was an atheist. But coming from an Ulster Scot background, he gardened on Sunday in a better looking suit.
The question is what happens when even the cultural Christianity goes away?
Rod, once again a fine post. I know you’re busy & inundated, but can you send me a recent email link? I’d like to reconnect—we’re very much on the same page. Thanks.
Sent you a note to your mac.com address -- will that work?
Yes. Thanks!
We need retreats like Martin's but can it survive financially? A lot of Benedict Options get crushed or don't begin due to the demands of the financial system.
I'd argue that Shaw is going about it the right way. It sounds like he has a pretty clear business plan that will keep it fiscally solvent. I don't know UK real estate laws, but at least in the US, churches are exempt from property tax which, minus staff and maintenance, are the main expenses. If it allays your fears any, there are hundreds of Buddhist monasteries that are getting in just fine in the US that don't have nearly the organization that Shaw seems to have going into this.
Financial viability is indeed a huge question.
Take the issue of a hypothetical (not really) small Christian (or actually any religion) college. They know that to liberalize is to slowly decline into nothingness. So they decide to double down on theological orthodoxy. This gives them some stability, but their equilibrium size is much smaller, and it's doubtful that they can cover all the fixed costs of running a high quality educational institution. And without high academic quality, eventually enrollment declines anyway.
Someone suggests an alternate path, where they remain orthodox but take a kind, forgiving, loving tone. Surely that's what God wants from us anyway, right?
But then the trouble is, how do you continue to hold the line?
It's an enormous conundrum. The future belongs to anyone who can solve it, but I haven't figured it out myself yet.
If you can make it work without the gold plated facilities and the atmosphere of luxury then running an institution will be easier. It might depend upon your market and the spirit of sacrifice of the people in your institution. Monastic institutions were always easier to run because you have 0 labour costs and a large workforce subject to military discipline filled with the spirit of sacrifice.
Some of it is the luxuries that students have come to expect by default -- they won't attend a college that doesn't have them. Some of it is the administrative burden of meeting regulatory and accreditation requirements. Some of it is funding research, which you need to do if you want a good ranking.
The kind of people attracted to such a place wouldn't expect an atmosphere of luxury, and would be happy to do whatever necessary for upkeep, whether living there full time or visiting for a couple of weeks.
Dana
As for Benedict Options, I'm working on an idea for a virtual one. I don't mean some kind of Christian Matrix either. Just going to continue with a small group I already meet with and work on foundations and supporting each other. Obviously it could not stop there, but I believe it could start there.
Of course, as an Evangelical, my approach to Benedict Options might be different than Rod's, but I think we are both in the same spirit on this one.
It won't cost as much to try something virtual; and you could tap into existing secular rental facilities for in person events without having the cost of ownership.
It has to be said, sincerity is no defense. All kinds of people who were tragically wrong in the eyes of God and men have been sincere in their stance. All sincere is means is that they mean it.
You ought to read Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity. Because you're right, sincerity is no test. Was the subject of Godwin's Law sincere? I'd have to say, yes.
That's a good book.
All bad guys imagine themselves to be the good guy—and the worst are self-righteous fanatics, who lack the self-awareness to even contemplate the possibility that they might be the baddies.
This goes along with my notion of how it isn't possible for us to consciously will evil while also knowing that it is evil. First we have to rationalize and delude ourselves into thinking it's somehow good.
"Are we the baddies?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWvpvlT9pJU
Glad you got my reference. Haha.
I think rationalization (not blindness) is the operative mechanism of seeing the good in evil acts. Expediency to exact one’s will becomes the driving ethical framework. The relativist works backwards to construct the argument, fallacious as it may be.
I would say that rationalization is a type of blindness, though: a blindness we inflict upon ourselves, and also blind in the original impetus to flee truth.
I'm really sorry about this Sethu, but as a K-Pop fan you leave me no choice
https://youtu.be/ocBhK7w0dRY?feature=shared
Sexy Korean chicks?—sign me right up for that sort of baddie. Haha.
C.S. Lewis might differ with you. He allowed that a man who sincerely believed he was serving God and country in the German army during WW II would be welcomed by God for his sincerity -- which doesn't of course mean that he doesn't have to be killed to stop his Leader from committing further atrocities.
There is no sin Christ cannot redeem. The only one he cannot is "grieving the Holy Spirit," ie refusing his salvation. That's anyone. There is nothing unique about the "sin" of serving in the Army of an unjust cause.
I even believe if one of the monsters of history sincerely asked for forgiveness on his deathbed, God would grant it to them.
Again, scripture makes it clear that is the case. Just like salvation, it is beyond man's recognition. Salvation can forgive all from a genuinely repentant heart. Likewise, human justification, without Christ's salvation, means nothing.
Happily, it’s a point that is almost certainly moot. I highly doubt either Hitler or Stalin showed even the slightest remorse on their deathbeds. Even Franco, staunch Catholic that he was, likely went to his grave convinced of the rightness of his actions, atrocities notwithstanding. Pride and power go hand in hand.
Well, I’d say sincerity is “no defense” when judging the rightness or wrongness of an action, for sure. It most certainly is a defense when considering the moral character of the actor, wouldn’t you say?
The only character the Lord is concerned about is one's spiritual state, whether you are in sin or grace. As far as one's character goes, the Lord makes it clear, "no one is without sin, not one." And "man's righteousness is as filthy rags before a Holy God." There is no finessing this. There is just accepting the Lord's terms, humbly, in prayer.
I see two angles on it. The first it is that true faith involves sincerity, so a person who’s sincere about anything at all might get some practice in the right habit. But the second is: if a person believes in evil, then well, wouldn’t it be better for his character to not be sincere about it?
It’s sort of like how loyalty is only a secondary virtue; a lot depends on the object of loyalty. If you’re loyal to a demon, then it ceases to be a virtue.
"However, can the Constitution and all that follows from it survive the loss of a shared religious/metaphysical framework?"
Definitely not. It pains me to acknowledge that. But it's true. I try not to give into doom-mongering, but I think here in the US we're already over the edge of the cliff. We've crossed a number of Rubicons, both constitutional and otherwise. Makes me deeply sad.
Shared metaphysics maybe-- but we do not need a "shared" religious framework. The US has never had a single dominant church and in the 18th century we ranged from Calvinists to Quakers to evangelical-like congregations of the First Awakening to high church Episcopalians, along with a sprinkling of Catholics and Jews. And of course there were the Deists and assorted other free thinkers who were the ancestors of today's secularists.
I understand your point, and am not necessarily arguing with you. I do believe, though, that the line between "shared metaphysics" and a "shared religious framework" is pretty thin. In my opinion.
I think that, overall, many things may be shared among people without necessarily brining specific claims about Jesus into the picture. So it's sort of a gradient of specificity. For social and political life, it's mostly enough to believe in objective values and some objective source of those values. (I think that Ramaswamy, a Hindu, evokes this picture well.)
Basically, there's "Values are real things to which you and I are collectively answerable" versus "Values are whatever I happened to dream up this afternoon". That seems like the real fault line, with the solipsism of the latter view rendering shared life impossible.
Bon voyage mon ami.
Do yourself a favor and seek out a bouzouki (greek guitar) performance. Certain bars/restaurants will hire amateur musicians to play and man, oh man, few other instruments can make one feel as festive.
Great idea. In addition, since Rod said he's looking forward to a cold, white wine, he should try a 'retsina', a Greek style going back to antiquity which uses a touch of pine resin in its production. No, it doesn't taste like Lysol, but it's something unique and fun. When in Greece...
“No, it doesn't taste like Lysol”. I respectfully disagree! Some of my travelling companions leaned towards retsina but I could never adapt to the taste and so stuck with white demestica
The colder the better. Tepid retisina is death.
Cold enough to numb the taste buds? I suppose it can be a little bit 'pine forward'...
I was hired in the summer of '88 to edit a start-up magazine. That was the summer when the temperature did not get below 80 degrees night or day. It was to have been my big break (har). I was working 14-hour days. Every night I got off the number one train at Columbia and went over to Amsterdam and down three blocks to dine at Symposium. And every night I accompanied my spaghetti alla greca or pastitsio with a glass of retsina. Then I got back on the train went home to Washington Heights and did it all over again. Experto crede.
Not to forget ouzo, if licorice flavor is something pleasing to you. I might just drink a little toast of it to Rod over the weekend...
Dana
Ouzo is required when in Greece. Shoot it after the Lemon-rosemary-garlic marinaded grilled octopus served at a seaside table with the Aegean threatening to lap at your sandals.
Why not Agiorgitiko, or if you like sweet wines, Mavrodaphni? I'd bet a lot of Greeks themselves don't particularly like Retsina. I've had it, I'd rather drink mouthwash.
<<<”Does church teaching need to evolve to serve the felt needs and honor the experiences of the community — or do members of the community need to evolve to bring their beliefs and behavior in line with church teaching?”>>>
The last thing I want to do is to split myself apart from the good people here, because I appear to differ on something fundamental. Therefore, I am going to put forth my thoughts, and then put forth that maybe, for at least one layer of meaning, I am not so different.
I respectfully disagree with any premise that the historic church has, for the most part, made changes *only* because they want to honor “felt needs”. At the same time I acknowledge that feeling a need has caused some appropriate re-evaluation – to wit:
(1) Slavery – it was fine in scripture, slaves were even told, in the NT to cheerfully endure beatings from an unbelieving master. But then people overwhelmingly realized it was immoral and felt need to end it. This is even though we have no specific scripture for this basic and central belief. (Yes – love one another – but we had that when the Bible said we could have slaves.)
(2) Divorce – The position of the historic church was that persons sacramentally married, both baptized, could not divorce. There was annulment, but not on many of grounds allowed today. Protestants, until about 1970, went Sola Scriptura on this, so no divorce at all except for adultery and perhaps desertion.
(3) Women ministers and teachers – forbidden in the “plain” language of the NT. Then, after 1900 years, we decided things like “the context was they were getting away from goddess worship” or something like that. We felt a need to let women teach and preach.
I think many “feel a need”, actually there all along, to allow faithful, monogamous same sex relationship. I can state a case from scripture, that I have heard, to allow that, though when I first heard it I made the sign of the cross and fled the church. And I have a question. Is it even possible for the same sex to have spiritual-metaphysical sex with one another, the kind that makes persons “one”? Or are they merely, well, touching in certain ways. Oh, and personally I’m so heterosexual it hurts, but I greatly love some homosexual friends. With CS Lewis I believe they were born that way. And I have so much trouble believing God would allow them such terrible, terrible suffering - to be born with a choice to sin or to be forever alone and tormented for all your life.
By the way, regarding Methodism – the African UMC split from the rest of the UMC, but USA congregations leaving the US denomination might consider joining these other United Methodists.
If you disagree and would shun me as a result, please have at me instead.
Slavery was an economic necessity in New Testament times, and for long after: a necessary evil (as war still is). The moral problem was that slavery lasted well past its "necessary" phase.
On divorce the Eastern tradition of ekonomia outlined a different path.
On women and the church, ordination beyond a special women's diaconate has no support in Scripture or tradition. There were women missionaries (Mary Magdalene, and later St. Nino of Georgia), prophestesses and other women active in the Church (a favorite of mine from the Middle Ages is the polymath Hildegarde of Bingen-- the Pope himself gave an imprimatur to her mystical theological writings). The context of "women, be silent in church" points to women asking questions in the middle of the liturgy. And when Paul says "I do not allow women to teach" he is stating a personal choice, not a commandment- there is no "Thus saith the Lord" about it. Elsewhere Paul commends specific women for their active work.
I can only suggest you ask God whether or not slavery was ever a necessary evil, considering what you might have felt like while enslaved. I'll leave it up to you to hear what God might say. I know all about ekonomia, it is recent and not the belief of almost the whole church through history. (And I think divorce and remarriage is right for Christians under some circumstances). And you thing about women gave me the impression you did not read what I said. "It is not given that they should teach nor instruct a man" is nothing to do with asking questions in the middle of liturgy.
Re: know all about ekonomia, it is recent
I would not want to be a slave of course. I would not want to be a collateral damage in war either-- but war is sometimes a necessity.
The 9th century is recent? That is when the Orthodox tradition on divorce and the "rule of three canonical marriages" was formally codified. And when Christ told the legalistic hair-splitting Pharisees "The Sabbath is made for Man not Man for the Sabbath" he was stating the underlying principle beneath ekonomia.
I was addressing the "women be silent in Church" verse. And also pointing out that Paul expresses a personal POV when he says "I do not allow..." Not everything in Scripture can or should be taken as a general commandment for everyone everywhere in all ages.
(And I think divorce and remarriage is right for Christians under some circumstances).
What do you think porneia means at Matthew 5:32 - παρεκτὸς λόγου πορνείας - and 19:9 - μὴ ἐπὶ πορνείᾳ? I think that they mean nothing like what we understand as divorce, while our colleague Tee Stoney would probably regard that as allowing of a broader meaning; but I also think that he would not allow any "remarriage after divorce" beyond that which he conceives these texts to allow. I find all invocations of such considerations of "kindness" or "compassion" to allow what the Lord forbade presumptuous in practice and corrosive in consequences.
I think it means adultery.
The problem with that is that there is a good Greek word for adultery, and it's not porneia; it's μοιχεία (moicheia). So whatever porneia means I think it has to mean something wider or narrower than adultery.
Porneia means something like, literally, "whoredom" or "harlotry," some sort of really really bad sexual conduct, and not just engaging in sexual activity with a whore/harlot/prostitute (the two English words also had that wider meaning when they were current rather than obsolescent) and I think it means - very Catholic of me, I know - sexual couplings which are abhorrent of their very nature and which therefore cannot constitute "marriages" acceptable in God;s sight, a brother/sister or father/daughter "marriage," which of its nature is no marriage at all, or the marriage of Herodias to Herod Antipas after she divorced Antipas's brother, Herod II (or Herod Philip) to marry him. That's why I have no problem with the theory behind "annulment," although I think it has always been wide open to abuse in practice.
My grandmother swore it meant the woman was not a virgin on her wedding night and the man could tell. My grandmother did not say that such a women would have been considered a whore, but if she married without revealing past activity then was found out, she would have lost out.. Grandma said that it had to happen right away - no coming back after a fun two week honeymoon with a fight at the end and getting a divorce.
I'd be interested to look at the times porneia is used verses the common word for adultery. However, my niece has arrived and I will be showing her Budapest all weekend, so I will bid you adieu. - not ignoring the link to the long article in another post but I probably won't get ot it until Tuesday.
I'll add to my comment above - if you have never deeply loved a homosexual person - perhaps a son, daughter, sibling person you hoped to marry, or even person you were married to - then there but for the Grace of God go you. The sufferings of that person might destroy your heart, especially if you are convinced God won't let them have one partner for life, but they most be tormented and alone their whole life. I don't think people know what their thoughts will be until that happens.
I agree with you, and there are people I care a lot about who are gay and have suffered immensely for it. In Muslim societies, they're often browbeaten into arranged marriages, so now there's a spouse suffering too.
But consider the alternative.
It is really hard to come to terms with the fact that traditional morality, which God ordained for us with good reason, necessitates the suffering of a few. But it does. So does changing it around in the modern way, except the suffering is different, and falls on different people.
Westerners loathe the way this is handled in countries like Qatar, but if you want to hold firm to orthodoxy, what is the alternative?
Another way of framing it. Many of us know and love people who struggle with alcoholism or substance abuse. We would never tell them that what they're doing is fine and moral and they should keep going. You might push back, saying alcoholism is different because it impairs normal functioning. But actually, so does homosexuality, unless you simply don't view heterosexuality as normal and normative. (Which, of course, is the point of the queer theorists: smashing heteronormativity. And look where it's gotten us.)
I guess I'm rambling a bit too. :(
You are not rambling at all and I am glad you said these things.
Probably most have realized I am telling a story about a man I loved and wished to marry, so there is that.
"necessitates the suffering of a few" - it is apparently a pretty good percent, at least of males, maybe 5% (some say 3%, some say more than 5%).
"God ordained for good reason" - I wish I could figure out the reason to forbid faithful, same sex pairs. Of course I know promiscuity and adultery is wrong.
"What is the alternative to Quatar?" - I don't know what happens there, is it stoning, throwing off roofs? If so, there are alternatives. But I don't know what happens.
"Many of us know and love people who struggle with alcoholism or substance abuse. We would never tell them that what they're doing is fine and moral and they should keep going" - I don't say promiscuity is fine and moral. I do say suffering from addiction is not as horrible as suffering from homosexuality. It does not entail a life of the types of suffering I detailed in my reply to Rosemary. And I do view heterosexuality as normative.
Qatar doesn't execute people for homosexuality. They also don't arrest anyone who does whatever inside their own home. They do have prison time for those who promote homosexuality or are public with their affection (or more).
The tragedy is, the sexual revolution has also created a wasteland of human suffering. It's just borne mostly by lonely heterosexuals trapped in the apps or checking out altogether.
Penalizing homosexuality in one way or another does cause a non trivial amount of human suffering. But those pushed into arranged marriages do at least perpetuate the species. As many people are coming to realize, the sexual revolution and self-actualization aren't actually compatible with high fertility. There really are no easy answers.
Thanks - I had asked about Qutar and you did tell me. My folks used to say "that's their business" and I'm not sure my belief is far off from that. Except I have no problem with my cousin's daughter and her female partner when I have Thanksgiving with that side of the family. No reason to shout it and promote it, but no reason to totally hide. Here in Budapest, same sex couple hold hands and such, and I am not sure they need prison.
Yes, we have too many people who are never able to get married. I think you see that in my case I was too much in love with someone I could never marry when young, then other things happened. But....oh my...imagine the tragedy if he had been forced to marry me. You think I wanted him in my bed if being with me caused to feel the way I would have felt if forced to be with a woman. No. I do not approve of forcing homosexuals to marry.
For fertility, I hope Christians who are married will choose to have many children. Then the world will again be peopled by a majority who grew up in a Christian atmosphere. (And for Islamic countries without cultural problems mistreating women, such and B&H, pretty much the same.)
Can I ask you a question? You seem to entirely preclude the idea that someone with same sex attraction could have a fulfilling and happy heterosexual marriage. I wonder whether that's actually true. I wonder because 1) my understanding is that most people who identify as homosexual have also had heterosexual sex; so for most people with same sex attraction, opposite sex attraction doesn't seem impossible or horrific 2) which brings me to my second point that sexuality doesn't seem to be binary, but more on a sliding scale; someone might generally identify as homosexual, but might still be able to have a very fulfilling heterosexual relationship with the right person 3) although sex is an important part of marriage, it's also a fairly small part of the day to day operation of marriage; marriage is primarily about building a life together and raising a family, so even if the sex isn't perfectly what one might want that shouldn't preclude all the rest of marriage 4) it seems to me that a lot of what is called love in marriage is the friendship that comes from building a life together; that's a true love such as one has for good friends, but it's not primarily sexual. I don't know, but I wonder if the a priori assumption that those with homosexual attraction can't have fulfilling heterosexual marriages is cutting people off from a real possibility for many people. I'm not necessarily arguing for this point, because I'm really not sure about it, but I wonder what you think.
Re: Consider the alternative
The alternative is to insist that monogamous marriage (civil marriage for gays) should be the ideal and that promiscuity and porn are big problems which should be avoided.
I think those would be great ideals to aspire to. Sometimes I think society can change enough to enshrine those as ideals, but most of the time I'm more pessimistic.
Marriage was the norm (well, for heterosexuals) for millennia, though sure, lots and lots (and lots and lots) of non-married sex happened. It's only been in about the last human lifetime that marriage ceased to be considered the absolute norm in some parts of the world (and it's still considered something preferred). I really do think we can and should go back to that ideal. It may mean acknowledging more "common law marriages" and civil SSM, and it definitely must mean dethroning the wedding industry and its five digit price tags for "average" weddings. And probably ending, in the US, the damaging restrictions public benefits impose so that low income couples may marry without loss of benefits.
I got married twice (same woman, differnet countries, one church one civil) and niether time did it cost more than 1000. Weddings consting so much they're a marriage deterrent is insane.
If a girl wants to feel like a princess on her wedding day she should have to marry a geriatric third cousin like a real princess. :P
That's one part of it, and the younger generation is getting a little jaded about hookup culture (at least some of them are). But how do we put the pornography toothpaste back in the tube? I have a lot of respect for the states trying to at least impose age restrictions, but they're being fought tooth and nail.
Are you saying that the suffering come from not being married, or do you mean suffering and not even having the comfort of a commited partner?
If it is true, that no homosexual may have sex with anyone of the same sex, then both. And more. All of things I talked about in the first reply I made to Rosemary.
Well as someone who didn't get married until I was 35, I would regard being single and not having sex themselves as all that bad. Undergoing the kind of hazing that gay people, at least a lot of gay men, are put through on the other hand is awful.
Its is a whole lifetime of "single" with no companion and no family possible. So it is different, do you see?
Yes, but often that's an exchange of problems. There are plenty of new problems and potential sources of unhappines that spouses and children bring.
Where is friendship in your view, Linda? Friendship used to be highly valued; it's pretty much nowhere on the social scale now - the idea is that in relationships it's either sex or nothing, with no in-between state that is both intimate and without sexual activity.
Yes, people without permanent live-in companions and/or family get lonely. So do people in happy, stable marriages and/or with lots of kindred, and even with deep friendships. One of the things that has been helpful when a person is lonely, testified to by many generations of Christians, is to find a way to serve others. Loneliness isn't great, but it's also not the worst feeling as long as one is not completely self-focused. The reason loneliness is so bad these days is that there is so much encouragement to keep the focus on the self.
Dana
Some disagreements.
On women ministers and teachers. We dealt with this at School of Ministry. It is clear in the language of Paul's letters that there were specific instructions to the churches out of those cultures. That the new Christians in Ephasus were formerly pagans, worshipping goddesses in which temple priestesses held leadership positions in their former traditions, and whose rites involved very immoral practices. Paul was advising them specifically in order to structure things in such a way to avoid them falling into older habits. Because if you read the whole of Scripture, women have been used by God as religious leaders, prophets and teachers since the beginning. To believe that Paul's instructions were general sanctions against female Christian leaders, for ever, Amen, is to disregard too much Scripture to be credible.
On slavery, God sees the issue differently than we do, then or now. His main concern is the state of your soul and your relationship to him. Civic structures and ideas of "rights" that the Western world prizes, are not in sync with God. He is not against it, and the sacredness of the individual IS of God, and Western concepts such as the Bill of Rights spins off from that. But slavery as it existed in that world is not something God had a problem with, an institution that was more akin to indentured servitude. It was mostly used to pay off debts, although some servants, after finishing out their legal time, often stayed with the famly they had served, willingly, sometimes for generations.
Chattel slavery, which denied the integrity and sacredness of the individual, where humans were indeed treated as objects, under the law as well as practically, WAS an offense to God. Such corruption existed in the Bible as well, and such institutions were prone to such corruption with such a power dynamic and human nature being what it is. To the point that such is even remarked upon in the New Testament, where such corruption of the same was rampant.
I do not think it was at all a coincidence that one of the Great Revivals in history played out alongside the Abolitionist Movement in Europe and America. God was clearly communicating His displeasure at what that "peculiar institution" had become. The racist component of it was also clearly anti-Biblical. Racism is a straight up sin.
Tee, I think you give here reasons that the church has changed its tradition. I have not said I doubt that there are valid reasons for change of validity. I said earlier I'd heard about women not speaking as getting away from goddess worship. I do have to ask, you seem to say "God is not against slavery" and if so, I deeply disagree. But I wish the replies would not focus on women, slaves and divorce, trying to pretend Christian practice has not changed when it most definitely has!!!
I ask if another tradition can be changed. Yes, it is central. But the speech of women, the bond of marriage and the torture of slavery are pretty central too. - No one has asked me for scripture supporting what I am asking about and I am not giving it until I am asked.
Well, just to be clear, I am not one who banks on tradition. I go on Scripture. As always, it is Scripture where we start.
And no, there is no sanction against "slavery." But our view of "slavery" is not God's, as Scripture makes clear. Nor is what was ended in the Abolitionist movement the same thing that existed, or what God has no problems with. And that is easily verifable through both Scripture and other historical records.
Churches as institutions are human creations, and are subject to temptation, corruption and falling out of grace, in part or even in whole, just as individuals are.
Well, since you go on Scripture, I note you made no comment on changes in Christian divorce. - - I'm drawing a parallel here. Substack says people are changing church doctrine/practice for 100 percent selfish reasons. People make cases from Scripture regarding women, divorce and slaves, then practice changes after that and we don't say they were 100 percent serfish- we say people decided they had misunderstood scripture.
The Scripture lays out the grounds for Biblical divorce.
Humans, again, are corrupt. That is why Scripture was given to us, as God's baseline.
And the vast majority of churches accept divorce of two Christians for other than the Scriptural grounds of divorce/desertion. I am arguing that people changed their intepretation of what scripture says from what it was beginning thousands of years ago, up until recent times.
I'd say that slavery is just part of a wider set of issues; all those concerning how a Christian should relate, not to individual sin, but to deeply corrupt power structures. I don't there's any easy answer. I don't think the Gospel is a call to armed revolution, but I also don't think it should be cynical resignation.
Slaves are told to bear patiently even with an unbelieving master's beatings. However, what was the alternative? Armed slave revolt? That didn't go well for Spartacus. I suppose most slaves rebelled by sloth, studied idiocy, sabotage, and pilfering. Paul was saying that, by showing themselves to be above all that, it might be possible to impress their master, leading to conversion. That's a hard teaching, but it's not absurd.
I've said before, I don't see why slavery is seen as uniquely terrible. Why is it seen as worse than the most exploitative types of wage employment? Why are we horrified by slavery, but not by usury, which is clearly prohibited in the Bible, and it is the financial system that is responsible for the pauperisation of the working class in most Western countries, and the horrors due to the indebtedness of African nations. Why do we pat ourselves on the back about having abolished slavery, when we have the horror of usury?
It is also related to the demand to obey civil authorities. That is clearly stated in Romans, but does it mean all authorities? What about the Nazis?
I lean towards opposing rebellion. I think the American settlers were sinners in rebelling against the British over a mildly unjust tax code. However, I'm more inclined to sympathise with the Irish rebels. I don't know where the line should be drawn. There are also cases when there's dispute as to which the lawful government is.
Part of the issue is that the New Testament was written for people who were assumed to have little or no political power, and were at most upper-middle-class (e.g. Luke the doctor, Joseph of Arimathea the merchant, Paul the sort-of academic). I don't think it's possible to relate the teachings directly to what to do when Christians do have political power, even if that is no more than the right to vote. I also come back to what C.S. Lewis said, quoting from memory: "The worst thing that treating a man unjustly does is make it necessary to be obsessed about his being wronged".
It is seen as uniquely horrible due to Western mindset and its history. And it is clear God was involved in taking down what it had become
But as it existed in thee culture back then, as an institution, God did mor forbid it. Hr just laid down rules how to conduct it.
I really don’t want to comment too much on this, but I think our conception of slavery blinds us to how it worked back then. In a lot of ways, it’s a different mindset to just slaves laboring in factories or fields or forced into prostitution.
It doesn’t make it any less bad, but We have totally different concepts of freedom, independence and individuality than they did then. Cultural context matters. Chuza was a slave, but he was also basically, the right hand Herod Antipas. Sometimes people chose to be slaves to fulfill a debt (remember these were honor cultures too) or they sold family members. Sometimes they were stolen people or victims of war - like we are more familiar with. But it was a totally different society with a totally different mindset.
As Socrates said: "It's better to suffer an injustice than to commit one."
Actually, I agree with you about how to read the epistles: we should be careful about generalizing permanent principles from words that were clearly intended as specific instructions for addressing specific, contingent problems.
Well, at the very least, we should keep in mind that it is the whole of Scripture we go to for complete understanding. NOt just the NT. Not just the Red Letters. All of it. That's why we were given it. For those who disregard such and believe every bit of those letters were intended to be general instruction to all Christians forever, to disregard why Paul was writng those letters to them, and not to the same thing to the other congregations (they all were tailored to each congregation, some of the instruction), and to disregard the Old Testament, I've yet to hear convincing arguments.
It is also known that some of the early church fathers, though great Christian leaders they were, were not flawless (sexism, antisemitism and more can be found among them.) So yes. That is why tradition is not a good argument. TRadition also has to be held to a standard. What is that standard? Scripture. Tradition alone is not enough to police itself.
I'd say it's ultimately the Holy Ghost, made known via prophetic inspiration, who has to police things. That was the Old Testament pattern, anyway: the priests go about making their sacrifices, and then God sends Isaiah to inform them that He hates their sacrifices.
There's also what's called reading by genre. Like, the Song of Songs is a poem, not a history. The gospels can only be credibly read as eyewitness accounts. And St. Paul's letters are instructions to specific churches at specific times, so they should be understood as such.
Scripture was a Holy Ghost infused creation. And interacting with the Scripture involves the Holy Spirit, ie it is not just another dusty tome. No, not all of it is historical eyewitness. There are many different genres present in its pages. But ALL of it is communication from the Lord to us. And against it we check external things. God will not contradict His Word.
Many different genres in the gospels? . . . Oh, never mind—you probably mean the Bible as a whole.
My church doesn’t permit women to even do the readings in church. It also permits divorce only for adultery and apostasy.
I have to say that I’m troubled by the toleration of slavery. However, I think the principle of loving one another should rule out gross exploitation. I don’t really see why slavery is picked on as a uniquely terrible version of that; at least slaves have to be fed, whereas free laborers can be worked to death. I think focusing on slavery serves to ignore the horrors of out-of-control capitalism.
I don’t see what any of this has to do with homosexuality, which is plainly depraved, and seems to be in practice inseparable from transgenderism, which ranks among the greatest evils in the history of the world.
Homosexuality is a sin. An abomination. There is no reading of Scripture that can lead anyone to any other conclusion. It is a violation of God's created order and is a direct attack on human relations and institutions, specifically the family, and from which, the community. It is an unholy thing, a mockery, which destroys those who practice it, and those who advocate for it.
The evidence of the latter, replete in our culture.
There is a reading of Scripture, I have heard it made, that can say same sex faithful partnerships are acceptable to God. Of course there is no reading that makes promiscuity acceptable. My major point here - I disagree that churches changed doctrine on faithful same sex partnerships merely out of selfishness.
I guarantee you, that whatever verses were read in that reading, that is not what they actually said. The Bible is unambiguous where it stands on homosexuality.
OK, but I can tell you there is a decent case for that interpretation. Briefly - we are not bound by Old Testment law, so that will not apply. We then have "put aside their natural uses" and "homosexuals not inherit the kingdom".
One day, now decades ago, a broken-hearted woman sat in a church hearing a guest preacher - a gay Episcopal priest, say what I am about to summarize. She got up, made the sing of the cross, and left- she did not believe it and was horrified. She was me, of course. She was dead inside from watching someone she loved suffer from homosexuality but she still could not move away from the plain reading at that time.
The claim: In Romans, this refers to people deciding to have sex with anyone, no matter their orientation. It does not apply to people whose natural orientation is gay. In the "not inherit the kingdom" one, the word used for homosexual is not the normal one. It is a word normally translated "soft". I was reading Xenophon the other day condemning soft men, but it is plain he did not mean homosexuals.
"We are not bound by Old Testament Law. " Only so far as Jewish purity laws and the like go. When it comes down to God's moral laws, they are every bit in effect now as they were then. And the New Testament also makes it clear.
Christ obeyed those moral laws and in fact, took them several steps further. And made it clear, "I have not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it," that is, his grace made the purity laws obsolete. But God's holiness is never obsolete. It was God's holiness and our sin which made Jesus's sacrifice necessary, as is our realization of said sin state and needing to accept his offered salvation. Otherwise, we are under the judgement of the law you are trying to dismiss, and ALL OF US FALL SHORT.
There is no decent case for that "interpretation." At all. You are making emotional appeals alone. And those are not valid.
Homosexuality is abomination.
"The claim: In Romans, this refers to people deciding to have sex with anyone, no matter their orientation. It does not apply to people whose natural orientation is gay. In the "not inherit the kingdom" one, the word used for homosexual is not the normal one. It is a word normally translated "soft". I was reading Xenophon the other day condemning soft men, but it is plain he did not mean homosexuals."
I do not know of one scintilla of evidence that such a view was propounded by any apostle, any early Church theologian, any synod of bishops - or for that matter any organized heretical "church" such as the Arians or, better, the Marcionites (except, maybe, if we are to believe their critics, some Gnostic groups). If this is true, where did the a gay Episcopal priest(ess) get her notion from? Form her own brain (or, rather, feelings)? From a private revelation from some spirit or other? From the Zeitgeist? In my decades of pondering such matters, including, especially, women's "ordination" I wonder how the so many people can take what I see as the promptings of the Zeitgeist for that of the Heilig Geist.
Hi Linda,
First I am so very sorry for the suffering you and the one to whom you are referring have gone through. It is clear how much you love this other person.
Because it is so painful for you, I’m not sure I should say anything, so please forgive me if I shouldn’t have.
Regarding the Mosaic Law, in Acts 15, the Council of Jerusalem happens where St. Paul argues that the Gentiles should be welcomed into full communion with the Jewish Christians without following Jewish Mosaic Law, such as circumcision. The conclusion, suggested by St. James, was: “It is my judgment, therefore, that we ought to stop troubling the Gentiles who turn to God, but tell them by letter to avoid pollution from idols, unlawful marriage, the meat of strangled animals, and blood,”
Unlawful marriage/sexual immorality is thus considered much more important (like idolatry) than other aspects of the Mosaic Law, which we are not required to follow.
Bishop Barron says that suffering and sacrifice are aspects of a “world gone wrong” that has been twisted out of shape by sin and evil. However, that suffering, when united with Christ’s unimaginable suffering for us, conforms us ever more to His own image and allows us to share in His redemptive mission. As I know from experience, this is very hard, especially when the suffering seems that it will have no end. But the amazing thing is that God, in a way I still truly find mysterious, will turn it to a greater good that you would never have thought possible.
Also, if your friend/loved one is not called to the vocation of marriage, that does not mean that he/she is not called to be loved. In fact, the church has always taught that celibacy is a higher calling than marriage—because it means that that person is being called to an especially deep and intimate union with God.
Your friend may be giving up something that seems to be good, but in making that sacrifice he/she will gain something unimaginably more precious.
I’m sorry to say this but in my experience around gay men there are very few who reside in monogamy. Even if they are partnered it’s not necessarily monogamous. I heard a story on NPR, back when they were soft pedaling SSM on a weekly basis, about a couple who had been together twenty years, had adopted children together even but one partner contracted aids and died from it. I think SSM has been utterly destructive to society and yet I understand your POV.
I know. I have known Christian gay male couples whom I believe to be faithful, but I agree with what you are saying. I'm aware many gay male couples have "arrangements" and allow it, for instance, on a business trip or in other circumstances. But that is not what I consider a faithful same sex relationship. I think the NPR example might have been unfaithfulness, the same as happens in a heterosexual marriage at times.
I'm not taking a position here on SSM. But I am taking a position on what I believe to be terribly wrong, and what I do not believe to be terribly wrong, if at all. Whether it is rare, or common, I think two people in a faithful same sex relationship are not doing a terrible wrong.
I did discuss my suffering friend with the priest when I went to confession after many years, admitting some of the reason I stopped practicing so long was the suffering of the world, yes, but his suffering was there, and I was perhaps angry for a time. The priest was nice, but he did say that some people - meaning homosexuals - choose to disobey God.
Male homosexuals even if they are coupled- I won't say married- are promiscuous. At the end of his life, I'm guessing Sir John Gielgud was no longer promiscuous but he lived into his nineties. Female homosexuals are much more loyal and their breakups tend to be strong in emotional turmoil.
I’m disappointed to hear he was that way. I honestly would prefer not to know anything about my favorite celebs. It’s been a shock to read the horrible tweets from Stephen King and John Cleese.
Re: Same sex faithful partnerships are acceptable to God.
I cannot go that far. But better than "on the down low" promiscuity? Yes. Much in the manner that the remarriage of a divorced person (even if they are not the innocent party) is better than visiting the ladies of the evening or trawling meat market bars for one night stands.
On your church: I think that is closer to an uncomplicated, exact reading of what scripture says. On slavery, if out-of-control capitalism is a horror, it is not said to be acceptable in the Bible. Slavery is.
On homosexuality, you are strawmanning. Calling it inseparable from transgenderism makes me wonder what went on in your mind. Anyway, I was not talking about churches accepting promiscuous homosexuality - none do. I was talking about churches deciding Scripture says they can accept faithful same sex relationships the same way the decided women can speak, we can't have slaves, and divorced Christians can remarry sans adultery/desertion.
Why do three things get to change for almost the entire Body of Christ and we don't say "terrible selfish people who changed them based only on their needs" but this fourth thing has to be terrible?
I don't want the Church to accept these relationships as marriage.
In principle, I would want broad toleration for homosexuals on a civic level. I don't really see the objection to same-sex civil marriage, for example. I tend to feel "live and let live".
However, in practice, it doesn't seem to work like that, and, as soon as homosexuality is acceptable, there's a demand for gay marriage in church, and the floodgates are opened for monstrous evil of all sorts. There does seem to be something about homosexuality that is not just about sex but about alliance with Satan in the scheme to destroy the Church and completely corrupt society. I must say that I've been a bit surprised myself watching this work out.
Well, working out beliefs is good. I am certain no church must ever be forced to perform gay marriages. If a church wants to, well, whether it is right or wrong, I am not sure about forbidding them to. As far as the law, well, that seems to be settled pretty much everywhere in the Western world so if I wanted it to change, I do not think it would. I guess my best hope, the best I think it is realistic to hope for, is for faithful, monogamous relationships to be encouraged as the only right way. I'd tolerate someone who could not have a relationship with the opposite sex and so needed a person of the same sex.
I do not think all homosexuality is about being allied with Satan. Ever listen to Andrew Sullivan? I do agree that anger and fear and resentment are pretty common. The horror of teaching children about it is awful. I'd go back to the days everything was forbidden (even monogomas same sex couples) if it meant the kids would be left alone.
Re: as soon as homosexuality is acceptable, there's a demand for gay marriage in church,
Where is this happening? I mean on any significant scale, not occasional oddball stuff that's pretty much inevitable in a huge population where anything that doesn't violate the laws of physics will happen.
I am glad that slavery is dead in most of the world but always remember that serfdom existed for centuries in Europe. Most posters on this board have serf ancestors.
The canonical text on this matter is Belloc's Servile State. A free peasantry in Europe was the direct result of Christian civilization. Slavery is the default position of humanity, and has a strong case. There are elements, and very powerful ones today, who would bring it back, though of course they would eschew the word.
The end of serfdom was aided by the Great Plague of 1348-1353. Supply and demand of agricultural labor.
The Greeks and Rim,ans initially had a free peasantry too. Economic developments (ironically urban prosperity) and for the Romans widespread conquests with captives replaced much of the free labor farming with slave labor.
As Derek also notes below the Black Death did much to eliminate "hard" serfdom in western Europe. And at the end of the Roman Empire the Plague of Justinian had a similar effect so that the Byzantine Empire in its heyday was based on freeholders who had a stake in their lands and formed the backbone of the empire's military caste.
Andrew Gold recently posted an interview on hisYouTube Heretics channel with Andrew Wallis that is a must watch on this topic. Modern slavery is alive and well. I had to listen to it in chunks because it was just overwhelming to think about.
Re: and seems to be in practice inseparable from transgenderism
Huh??? Really, major "huh"?
The two strike me as antithetical since homosexuality affirms, by definition, the reality of gender divisions and transgenderism denies it.
One would think that, yes, but it’s not how it seems to be working.
Don't confuse the elite activist class with the rank and file. You won't find very many gay (not bisexual) men who have any desire to take on a FtM "boyfriend", and lesbians are pretty resistant to "MtF" demanding to be dated as women. The activists no more represent all gay people than BLM represents all black people, or rad feminists represent all women.
you do have a point
I was going to respond that the "alliance" of homosexuality with transgenderism was a political one, and a power play. I think the power play came from transgender activists though.
But I have seen tweets from gay men that lament they (homosexuals in general, not the activists) never could have forseen the consequences of such an alliance. And now, they regret mocking the crackpot Christian fundamentalists who warned about slippery slopes back in the elder days of 2015.
All of this to say, I agree with your first sentence there. I was simply pointing out the "in practice, inseparable" statement might be meant in this way.
Gads, I need to go back to college. But I'm almost the same age as you are, so maybe not {grin}
“…a choice to sin or to be forever alone and tormented for all your life.”
I think this is a false choice, and the idea that being single means to be forever alone and tormented is one of the most vile pernicious lies that modern society has started telling.
I’ve been single since leaving my husband in 2018. While I theoretically could date (am Catholic, received annulment), I have found that my demographics make me undateable. Catholic men are largely uninterested because of my age and my child (even much older men on Catholic Match are usually looking for someone to have their babies, and I was once directly told that no one wanted “used goods”); secular modern men are *totally* uninterested because absolutely no sex is on offer until marriage (I live in a very secular area of a very secular American state).
Would I prefer to have a relationship? Yes. Do I feel sad and lonely sometimes? Also yes.
Is my life an unremitting torment of loneliness and despair? Absolutely not; that’s ridiculous nearly to the point of offense. Do I think my life is harder or sadder than someone who bears a different cross, like infertility, or the too-early death of a loved one, or chronic illness? Also absolutely not. We all grieve for might-have beens, all struggle, all suffer at times, all have parts of our life to which we say, “I wish that had been otherwise.” Can I look ahead for the remaining years (decades, God willing) of my life, imagine myself as single throughout, and accept this as the will of God? Yes, with prayer, I can.
Singleness is a normal state of life and often a holy and fruitful one if we let it instruct us. I’ve been able to give time to prayer and charitable work I never could have if still married. I’ve grown deeply in my faith. I think I’m a better person for it. And I have a rich, happy, interesting, full life that isn’t a horror show of thwarted desire.
The world lies, and lies, and lies to us when it claims that romantic love — and only romantic love! — is the key to a happy life, and to end up otherwise is to end up in despair. We all need to unlearn that lie.
This is lovely. And you're doing your child a favor. A friend of my wife's, an acid-tongued Irishwoman, often said that the first thing she thought about when confronted with a divorced woman dating was, is this dude more interested in the kid?
I worry about this, yes. There is a shocking increase in risk of abuse if a non-biologically-related man lives in the house.
In the BIPOC community it's been an epidemic for 50 years, but that's a matter of violence, especially baby shaking. Among whites the abuse would be sexual.
Thank you, I appreciate this post, which was from your heart and with which I could surely identify. I am happy, God has at last granted that grace, and I have no one. But I am not gay.
I am thinking of one example, but this example is typical of millions of people. There was no marriage gone bad with a child to have and love. There never would be, could never be, and that hope was gone. There was a spirituality that absolutely sang to God "Holy is your name" and a self-condemnation for feelings unchangeable. Hope can bring joy while young, but there was no hope of a blessed life here. There was never the ability to even try for love without sin. There was the torment of being misunderstood and condemned (or trying to hide) for an attraction that could not be changed, a torment you and I do not face. And worst, worst of all - there was the belief that "homosexuality is an abomination" and hell awaits if it cannot be resisted. For most men, (98 percent or so?) a complete lifetime without sex is too much of a challenge, yet they believe God condemns then to an insurmountable challenge. Hell on earth.
Hell awaits only one thing, absolute refusal to admit you are a sinner and submit yourself before a Holy God as such and accept God's Grace. We all deal with sin and have our own private battles.
"Too much.." Says who? Christ enables us to overcome all. The refusal to submit such before God is from the pride of human beings, nothing more. That is any sin, not just homosexuality.
You are not condemned for feelings. You are condemned for dealing with it on your own terms, rather than submitting them to God.
And Rosemary is right about the primacy that culture lays upon romantisexual relationships and and activities and how you are somehow incomplete without them. It is a lie from the depths of Hell. With the damage done clear. And not just on this subject.
Even in a properly done man/woman relationship, under Christian auspices, it needs to be submitted prayerfully to God, and He takes center stage, not either one of the couple.
If I ever do marry, she needs to be somone who loves God even more than she loves me. And the same needs to be said for me. And the relationship is not based on feelings, which come and go and change form through time. But a commitment, blessed by the Holy Spirit, whose bond becomes stronger under that arrangement. It is not based on tingles or butterflies or some such nonsense. But a deep, holy commitment, made before a Holy God, who will be with us every step of the way in this life.
So you've never been married?
No.
So then I need to look deeper in my heart if I had assumed you have not walked a mile in the shoes of the suffering homosexual. At least partly you have, whilst converted, and though you have hope yet, you've given your age. Also, you are not condemned by society as much as a gay person. Yet we both know Americans condemn the never married over a certain age who are not gay.
Anyway, my 2 cents which you probably get all the time - plenty of good Christian women fish in the sea if you are searching and it is God's time. I pray for the best for you.
It’s definitely the responsibility of anyone small-o orthodox on matters of sexuality to be very careful about not reinforcing damaging and incorrect teaching. It sounds like your friend was a victim of much of that. That’s awful and I’m sorry.
Feelings and aren’t sinful, and no one should ever be taught that they are.
Chastity as taught by the Church is really, really hard and almost everyone struggles with it. Someone who desires the same sex definitely shouldn’t feel any more guilty or ashamed than someone who really wants to use contraception, or someone tempted by pornography, or somehow who wants to have sex outside of marriage. It’s absolutely normal to be tempted in these ways.
God knows that we’re going to fail and sin, and he loves us through it all. While perfection is certainly the ultimate aim, the daily call is simply to confess failures, repent, and strive for more faithfulness.
I get that to some it feels impossible. To me the call to martyrdom both impossible and also unfair, but God does in fact sometimes ask this of us, and many have been obedient unto death. Similarly, there are many, many examples of men and women who have led lives of lifelong chastity (and many more, like Augustine, who led chaste lives after a decidedly unchaste youth) and while certainly a hard ask, I think the witness of the saints shows us it isn’t actually an impossible one.
But I’ll definitely offer my prayers today for you and yours because I hear the pain so clearly, and it shouldn’t be hand-waved away.
Thank you, Rosemary, for a beautiful post.
For many years I thought my friend was condemned if he did things he really could not be expected to resist. I do not believe all homosexuals are granted the gift of chastity like those people with callings to vocations are. But it is an alternate explanation and very close to what CS Lewis believed about inability to change homosexual orientation, yet requirement to live chaste.
Chastity is a virtue for all people, though most people do sin against it at times. Celibacy is a much rarer ascesis, and IMO it should never be forced on anyone who is unwilling.
The very word slavery conjures up thoughts of masters beating slaves and mistreatment of those to whom they deny freedom. But there were several types of slavery in the ancient world. I remember in Ancient Greek history the professor reading a complaint from an Athenian citizen that the slaves had more rights than they. St Paul was only saying that master and slave should treat each other fairly and as brothers in the Lord. In Christ they were free! Both of them free!
It was also possible to become part of the household of a master; to be like family and to be adopted. Certainly to be part of a household of a Christian master following the Lord would have been a blessing compared to the alternative, especially if you were a prisoner of war. To argue that the Church changed its position on slavery is to miss the point regarding stopping the mistreatment of each other, which was primary, versus changing societal economic systems, which was secondary.
Regarding human sexuality and being born this way, we live in a fallen world. None of were intended to be born this way! That is why we must be born again!
Regarding slaves: As stated, the Bible allows all types of slavery, including telling Christian slaves to cheerfully endure beatings, and sending Onesimus back, not free, though plainly willing to be a free servant.
I do not want to mess up anyone's faith because the Bible does not condemn slavery. I came at last to see (and admit on a certain day in a certain coffee shop) that logic is not always going to work in matters of faith. Scripture is inspired, God is love, my sprit tells me that. That is what I believe. (I did not mean your faith, Mark, but it troubles some.)
Regarding being born again -yes. But a homosexual orientation is not changed when a person is born again.
To be born a new creature also means to grow. This growth is not without growing pains and struggles. Some are born with other propensities to sin and their struggles can be just as difficult as homosexuality. But this argument is about individual struggle. The argument that people are born this way as a justifiable reason for Church splits and changing Methodist church doctrine is invalid.
With respect, I do not think you have walked a mile in my shoes nor in the shoes of one who cannot change a homosexual orientation. You do not know the lifelong suffering. I would not want my friend to have died from a disease, but I would have had less pain that way than to have seen this.
And you do not know anyone else's life. Everyone deals with something. And that's the problem with some engaging in homosexual advocacy, that they are somehow unique and the rest of the world has it easy. And of course, all of that completely misses the central message of Christ. That their sin struggle is somehow unique, deserves unequaled sympathy and also gets a free pass.
All of humanity, all people, deal with something.
No one has walked a mile in your shoes, nor you theirs. And either is completely beside the point.
I do not believe in genetic determinism as an excuse for any behavior. In fact, I believe that even our genetics are subject to change. But, let us look at the current state of the UMC. From arguing for lesbian and gay, Methodists have now gone to full LGBTQIA+. Many of those letters stand for fluidity, not born this way! For Methodists to split over this only adds to the confusion over the issue. For ministers to have taken oaths of ordination to uphold Methodist beliefs and simultaneously conspiring to change Methodism, that showed a serious lack of integrity and honesty. Such ministers put themselves on pedastals above those that went before. As leaders, they now promote heresy and mislead. But no problem there! Society looks at such churches and proclaims, “We don’t need such Churches! In fact, you are only now believing as we do because we pulled you along kicking and screaming! Away with you!”
Well, as I said, I will have to stay in the traditional church. You say "Methodist ministers", not qualifying the words, so all Methodist ministers lack integrity and honesty. Can you not imagine maybe some went through a very big challenge to their beliefs, like I did. I don't lack integrity and honesty. - - And did I say genetic determinism is an "excuse"? Well, that is complicated. One basic answer is that in theory it is possible for a homosexual to have no sex in life. Thus no loving relationship, no family, no children, a terrible life, alone. No hope of change, ever. Go on having no question in your mind that a loving God condemns people to that. I used to, until I saw the suffering close up, and realized.
Returning to "genetic determinism", there are indeed people who cannot control themselves - talking mentally ill here. God is the judge and He does not condemn the mentally ill.
There were liberal Christians at the time of the Civil War who argued that if the Bible truly defended slavery then "away with the Bible!" This is one of the things that prompted historian Mark Noll to argue that the Protestant debates over slavery presaged the later fundamentalist/modernist arguments.
The debates over slavery also put a total kibosh on the notion that Scripture is crystal-clear on such matters. It obviously isn't, or else there wouldn't have been such strong disagreement on it with both sides attempting to proof-text the other to death.
That is so interesting, Rob. Can you say a little about how you deal with the notion that Scripture is not crystal-clear, in you life?
I believe that there are many things that Scripture is clear on and can be taken more or less at face value. On issues that are less clear I defer to the teaching of the Church. On some of these matters the Church has spoken definitively, or there is a consensus of the faithful, but others are seen as theologoumena or "indifferent" issues which are open to more than one interpretation. The thing to remember is that it's the Church and not us that decides what's important and what isn't. I am not free to dismiss as unimportant what Tradition has deemed to be otherwise.
I'm reminded of a story about St. Jerome, a Church Father who had a very high view of Scripture, perhaps among the highest along with St Augustine. A monk or student came to him with a question about a certain passage of Scripture, asking Jerome if it could interpreted in some certain way. He responded quickly and directly, "No, because the Church does not allow that intepretation." That's the importance of Tradition in a nutshell, coming from a Church Father whose love and respect for Holy Scripture cannot be gainsaid.
Ancient slavery could be surpassingly cruel too. But it had the one great virtue that it had no connection to an ideology of racial supremacy. Anyone could become a slave. The philosopher Plato was sold into slavery by a tyrant he had annoyed (luckily a friend bought him out of it).
Basically true, although the root word of "slave" in most European languages is "Slav." See David Levering Lewis's "Islam and the Making of Europe" on the massive trafficking of Slavs across the Mediterranean world. The Caliphs of Cordoba staffed whole armies with them, and the Mameluks were basically a mix of Slavs and Turk sold into slavery, who after a few generations took control of one caliphate themselves.
Your point is subject to some criticisms, many of which are valid from the perspective of traditional Christian morality, but on the practical/optical/human level it has always seemed likely that your point is what will prevail in most of Christianity outside of the kind of enclaves I mention in my other comment today. It won't happen overnight, but it likely will happen because of the same line of reasoning, I think, which works on a human level.
My own issue is that it is impossible for me to see God, as I conceive of him anyway, blessing a man placing his sexual organ inside the rear-end of another man, or placing this kind of activity on anything like a similar level to the conjugal union of male and female which is at the core of all Christian understandings of marriage historically. To get there, it seems to me, you have to smudge that away and just say "well, at it's best this should be the validation of an emotionally committed relationship that includes the sexual relations you prefer", but that isn't at all what the Church has understood about marriage over the course of history, and I simply can't believe that the kind of sex, at least as practiced by male homosexuals (which is all sodomy, either way) is to be placed on the same level, or blessed in any way, by God or the Church.
But, as I say, on a human level, because our culture now widely -- Christian or not -- views marriage as the validation of an emotionally committed relationship that involves as much sex of whatever type the parties mutually agree upon, it makes little "sense" to exclude gay people from this. This is why, in the end, the arguments against civil gay marriage fell flat -- the culture around marriage had changed for everyone, including for almost all Christians, in terms of how they actually understood marriage, regardless of what the Church, of whatever stripe, has taught about marriage historically. And I think it's just a question of time, therefore, until this becomes generally applied through most American Christianity (again, outside the traditional enclaves) for the same reason -- almost all of the people there view marriage in a way that is compatible with same sex marriage, regardless of what the Church has historically taught about marriage (or may even "officially" still teach).
Thanks - great post. OK, response.
Paragraph one: True. And I am going to have to learn to function among people who believe all homosexual activity is sin. Because the churches who accept faithful same sex relationships all accept many other things. That will be a hard thing in my life. Whether to stay silent or live by a lie. I've just refused to lie here. I think it was brave if I do say so.
Paragraph two: I thought this was a great paragraph and was glad you did not shy away from the physiological. In my posts today, I've differentiated spiritual-metaphysical sex that makes two people one and placing the penis in the anus, etc. I don't think that makes two people one. I presume a faithful partner-relationship has both sex and love, but I do not think the sex is the same as spiritual-metaphysical-oneness sex.
Paragraph three: I'm not sure I catch your point. You mention "involves as much sex of whatever type the parties mutually agree upon". I speak of two married people, of course. Is the point here that "sodomy" (mouths, anuses) are forbidden. I don't see that in Scripture. Is the further point that therefore we are more likely to allow homosexuality because we allow those things. If those are the points, then I disagree. Two adults who are married should have as much fun between them as they can as long as no one is harmed and consent for specific acts in mutual and uncoerced.
Linda,
I have read your posts and the responses with great interest, and I appreciate your courage to discuss this on a substack where most of the readers are traditional or orthodox Christians of some sort.
Suffice to say that this particular issue is one of several that troubles me at an emotional level, even though I accept the Orthodox church's position.
Some questions: (maybe this is far too late into the discussion)
You said this: 'Because the churches who accept faithful same sex relationships all accept many other things'. At this point, I think all the mainline churches officially are on-board. And from what I gather, SSM acceptance is making inroads into the Evangelical churches (Rob Bell comes to mind). I am personally glad you are staying where you are (Orthodox?), but today there certainly are plenty of churches that one can attend that are LGBTQ friendly.
My questions (1) why does SSM acceptance seem to come as a package deal with a general watering down of the faith? (2) If this particular change was in response to the gentle nudging of the Holy Spirit, and not just capitulation to the zeitgeist, why are we not seeing growth in the churches following this path? All churches outside of the 3rd world seem to be in decline, but I'm pretty sure the statistics show that the mainline churches are in virtual freefall. The statistics are not great for the Orthodox churches, but I have seen more catechumens the past few years than when I first was chrismated.
Well, you have just forced my brain into admitting what it did not want to - that I can either go where I feel the Holy Spirit, and same-sex monogamy is rejected, or where I don't, though it and much else is accepted. I'm Catholic, btw, but could be Orthodox if services here were in English.
I suppose I could say there is nowhere (no church) that accepts same-sex monogamy without adding other things that they should not. But of course, it makes me wonder. Then again, all the other changes - women can now teach, divorcees can now remarry, slavery can be forbidden - it took a long time for those things to change. Over 1800 years, almost 2000 for two of the three.
So the only answer I can give is that the time is not yet, to allow faithful same sex partnerships in Catholic/Orthodox - and the various non-modernist churches, it if it to be. I cannot go with the modernist churches. They really are doing just about what Rod said - doing whatever they think sounds right. (I don't question the motives of all of their priests and congregants- I would think most think they are helping people unfairly rejected.)
What is really good is that no one here said "You hypocrite, get out of the Church, get out of here" because I can't see my way, at present, to accepting one traditional tenant, the forbidding of faithful monogamous same sex relationships. I do promise to pray and seek God and ask that He show me if I'm wrong.
I thought your post was outstanding, Ralph.
Re: it is impossible for me to see God, as I conceive of him anyway, blessing a man placing his sexual organ inside the rear-end of another man
I find this sort of hyper-focus on physical details irrelevant. Sex is kind of gross no matter how it is done. Sometimes I think of it as a bit of a jest God plays on to keep us in our place by reminding us that we are corporeal beings made up of crude matter.
I hear you, Linda. I don't quite know how to say it yet, but my feeling is that -- in this time when many are (rightly) so anxious to hold onto tradition -- there is also such a thing as remembering *too* much. I'm a strong believer in Dunbar's number; cognitively, we can only handle about maybe 50 real relationships. I wonder if there is such a thing as Dunbar's duration, too: We can only handle about *this* much of history, continuity, etc. I think of the many Jewish sects in 1st century Roman occupied Palestine, all the many ways of trying to hold onto Moses while also coping with here and now, and...it's just too much, man! You go psycho trying to hold it all. And one of the beautiful things about Yeshua, of the infinitely man, was he identified the core: "Love God with all your heart" + "Love God by loving your neighbor, who is yourself." And he lived that love in a way that was profound but also understandable, graspable. And the hard diamond core that he carried forward shed light on the entire Mosaic tradition, gave it immense new depths. But that was only possible by letting so much go. "The Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath..." (As the rest of this thread so aptly illustrates, we get kind of lost inside our sacred texts, and we get lost trying to hold it all...)
Well, yes, the many Jews were quite shocked that Christ told the healed man to take up his bed and walk, on the Sabbath. That was forbidden. They could have thought Christ healed through a demon. - - But for now, without Christ coming again, I want to be very, very careful of any change. I've given three examples (women, slaves, divorce) of things that I think were not really changes to what God wants, but without saying anything in Scripture should be overturned, as Christ overturned many laws. I've questioned, in godo faith, whether there is yet a fourth example. I am not 100 percent sure there is. But it is hard for me to believe there is not.
It is Christ's job to do such. Not yours. And he made it clear what he "overturned," and why.
None of us can perform miracles by our own power. But doctors and nurses do labor on the Sabbath in mundane acts of healing-- and they should. "The Sabbath was made for Man not Man for the Sabbath".
It is Christ's job to declare what Jewish laws are actually God's laws, and what are the cumulated conceit of the Pharasees, Jon. Aka "tradtion." That's what was at dispute.
Ecclesial decline appears to be taking place across the board at this point. It isn't the 1990s or the 2000s any longer, when one could say that the liberal mainlines were in decline while conservative Evangelicals were waxing. Today the situation is that religious affiliation is in decline, across the board -- liberal, conservative, etc.
There are enclaves that are developing -- Latin Mass Catholics, Eastern Orthodox (who are small enough to be an enclave in the Western context), small congregation traditionalist Protestantism, smaller Protestant denominations like LCMS and so on -- but these are enclaves in the context of the broader Christian demographic, at least in North America. The bigger picture is that Christian affiliation is declining across the board generationally in very stark terms.
Traditionalism won't stave that off, it is being caused by larger factors than a distaste for traditional religion per se -- it's a complex set of factors arising from technology, movements in the popular culture, and socio-political changes, among other things. That doesn't mean that traditionally-minded Christians won't find their way into one of the enclaves -- they likely will, at least in many cases, do so -- but it means that Christianity as a whole is declining regardless.
Evangelicalism is an interesting case study in how this is likely going to play out. Right now there's a lot of tension in Evangelicalism about how to proceed given the growing disaffiliation from religion. Some wish to remain "traditional", in the evangelical sense of traditional moral teachings on things like sex, but a lot, especially in the leadership level, are concerned about remaining relevant to the broader culture so as to not endanger the evangelism-oriented focus of many evangelicals (the idea is that more you go against broadly accepted social settlements relating to sex, gender roles, marriage and so on, the harder it is to evangelize people). Right now there is a movement, for example, for evangelicalism to switch gears from being largely complementarian (gender roles, but often under the rubric of "servant leader" ideas) to being egalitarian (no gender roles), and to basically hive off the resistant complementarians as present-day "fundamentalists", thereby taking one of the issues that mainstream cultural people who are evangelism targets may have with evangelicalism. Aaron Renn has written about this at points during the past year or so, and it's well worth reading (I am not evangelical and have no personal insight into these matters, but Renn's writing on them and the sources he cites about it are well worth reading given the footprint that Evangelicalism has in American Christianity).
So a part of what is happening is also that "traditional Christianity" is becoming less traditional, as well, and this is being in fact supported by a variety of different people, both in the existing leadership set and among younger evangelicals and many evangelical women as well. The upshot of that is that soon there will be even fewer places that are "traditional", and that this will likely continue to morph over time -- that is, the "line" of what traditionalists have "given up" on, versus what they continue to remain steadfast on, will continue to move and shift over time, such that after enough time has elapsed, what remains "traditional" is not at all recognizable as such to anyone using that term today. In that way it's very much like what one has seen in American political conservatism, where the "content" of what the movement seeks to "conserve" changes over time to gradually include progressive "advances" that the conservative movement itself used to oppose. This seems to be a strong cultural current across the board in American culture, one that isn't confined to politics.
> But I still don’t understand why some Protestants are so resistant to schism. Yes, there are the normal things — for example, I can easily imagine that some friendships in the Methodist church in my hometown were damaged by the break-up — but as a concept, Protestantism was born in schism over principle. It’s in the blood.
Protestantism was born in schism over principle, but Evangelicalism was born to be a big-tent coalition that wouldn't schism because their identity was a shared commitment to missions and that common Christian core that made society functional, contra the Fundamentalists who were fully occupied with fighting among themselves due to their more detailed theological identities. (I'm currently finishing up "The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism," where this is a big part of the story.)
Schism just isn't part of the Evangelical culture, and dealing with the damage would *at minimum* require an admission that people can a) say they believe the Bible while b) their private interpretation is completely wrong and c) they resist correction. Some Evangelicals have made that concession, but it's not an easy one to make.
Rod "who knows how to second-line". Now that would be something to see - our host's sick dance moves grooving down the street to a New Orleans brass band.
When is it time to schism? Sometimes it doesn't take much. Arguing over the date of Easter, for instance. Not just in antiquity either - I'm told that the two Ukrainian Catholic churches just four blocks apart on Oakley Street in Chicago's Ukrainian Village neighborhood used to be a single parish until about 1980 when an argument over when to celebrate Easter split them.
From what I understand - and I worked for a UCC organization for nearly three years - the story isn't quite that simple. St. Nicholas is the much older parish, the cathedral, and they have the established school, etc. At some point, they went to the new calendar, which resulted in the infamous incident one year where some people were at church for Theophany and some for Nativity, and things got so heated that the police had to be called.
Ss. V&O was established, in large part, through the work of Cardinal Joseph Slipyj, who, after having received release from captivity by the Soviets, in large part due to the Vatican's entreaties, spent the last twenty years of his life evangelizing the Ukrainian Catholic cause throughout the whole world. (IIRC, he was 70 when he was released, and the Soviets seemed to think he'd croak soon anyway.) Slipyj is a controversial figure to the Orthodox, in particular, because it does seem like he was very anti-Orthodox, and did things like turn over Orthodox believers to Soviet authorities because they were Orthodox and not Ukrainian Catholic. In any case, there was a good deal of Ukrainian nationalism that was mixed in with his message, and when he got to Chicago, it seemed like he was very upset that the main Ukrainian Catholic parish would be new calendar, etc. And so V&O was built, literally within a 3-minute walk of St. Nicholas, to kind of "stick it in the eye" of St. Nicholas. Last I knew, V&O is the largest Ukrainian Catholic Church in terms of membership in the US, but St. Nicholas is still there, is still the cathedral church of the eparchy, and as far as I know, still runs its school and everything because there are enough Ukrainians in the area to support both (at least there was a few years back though). However, even when I was working over there, 40 years after the split, there were still issues that were sore spots to people who had lived through that time. (Then again, we were using two accounts for deposits because there were factions of the community aligned with MB - which had Ukrainian leadership at one point - and Selfreliance, who saw themselves as the financial institution of the Ukrainian community. Because, you know, Ukrainians. )
Thanks for the more complete background. I recall there being two different Ukrainian street festivals as well, but I don't know if either or both are sponsored by the parishes or some other group. I've been to services at both St Nicholas & St V&O. Of the two, I found V&O to be borderline xenophobic - almost the classic Chicago "We don't want nobody that nobody sent" treatment.
"To schism" is not a verb. The verbal form is "to schismatize".
Be sure to let Rod know he needs to change the title of today's missive then as well, I guess.
Re: The modernists, by contrast, more or less disbelieve that the material world has a telos
Well, I have a problem with using the singular in that formulation. The matterial world has telē, plural, as it has multiple possible futures. Which does not mean anything and everything is a telos, or that anything is possible. But Time is multivalued, and without that there could be no freedom of the will-- we would all be puppets of God's thought.
I wish you and Matthew and great and relaxing time on your vacation.
It's been a long time since I read Eric Metaxas' biography of Bonhoeffer, but I remember I came away with the idea that one of the central themes of the book was this idea of "What is the Church"? On one hand, Bonhoeffer was a devout Lutheran and didn't want schism, on the other hand, he ended up establishing a network of churches that became known as the "Confessing Church" because he felt like the Lutheran Church had allowed itself to be co-opted by the Nazi government, which he considered to be 100% wrong. This tension was never resolved in Bonhoeffer's lifetime, and it would have been interesting, had he lived, to have seen whether the Confessing Church churches got folded back into the Lutheran Church after the war, or if Bonhoeffer would have ended up leading them to a different direction.
True, in that sense it's similar to the situation with post-Revolutionary Russian Orthodoxy, where the "Synod", which became the ROCA or ROCOR, adamantly opposed all relations with the Moscow Patriarchate in the post-Revolution period for similar kinds of reasons. Of course that was eventually resolved after the collapse of communism, but settlement kept the structures of the ROCOR intact, and so it continues to operate as an autonomous church under the aegis of the MP. It's interesting to think if the German Lutherans would have come up with a similar kind of thing had there been two churches for an extended period.
The whole history of it is fascinating. In the US, there were all sorts of issues regarding property ownership, etc. with a lot of the old "Russian Mission" churches, which is one of the reasons why, I believe, many old churches didn't belong to the jurisdiction, but to the parish brotherhood. Nowadays, a lot of people think that's weird and/or borderline heretical, but in its place, it makes sense. The ROCOR/MP split makes a lot of sense in its historical setting, but even now that there's reconciliation, it's weird to have MP and ROCOR churches in the same place, like in Munich, where I was. Even before reconciliation, though, there were certainly people who kind of bounced back and forth there (it didn't seem like there was any ill will between the congregations). But now having OCA, ROCOR, and MP churches in the US? This is kind of crazy! Even the Serbs had their split in the US - now reconciled - about whether it was permissible to send money to the Serbian Patriarchate with a communist government in power, which one knew was going to take it's share of the riches of America sent back by the expat community.
Bonhoeffer had a really good relationship with the Roman Catholics, and had he lived, I wonder if there may have been some work or leaning in that direction. (I don't think he was particularly fond of the Orthodox, at least that was my impression from Metaxas.)
My wife and I live Schismatically as Latin Mass Catholics. My own pastor, Father Ringrose, explains several times a year that the Novus Ordo is a new religion created out of Vatican II and it is not just a new Mass. Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI acted as bridges between the Latin Mass and the Novus Ordo because both preferred the Latin Mass themselves. Pope Francis I has obliterated the bridge into a thousand bits. So be it. Schism is in the cards because the Latin Mass and the Novus Ordo Mass, cobbled together by Archbishop Bugnini and several Protestant scholars, are two different religions that can not be reconciled.
Latin Mass Catholics who wish to be in unity with the Novus Ordo Church have been showed the door by Mr. Bergoglio. Mr. Bergoglio attacks the Latin Mass and has had his bishops ghettoize it. For instance, the Diocese of Arlington, led by the soft-speaking, feminine-sounding Bishop Burbidge, has reduced the Latin Mass from 21 places of worship to 8. All 8 are consigned to outer buildings not part of the actual church. The Archbishop of Washington, the sissy-speaking Archbishop Gregory, has reduced the Latin Mass to 3 locations. He closed the highly-attended St. Mary's Latin Mass(attended by Pat Buchanan by the way) despite it being the most well-attended Mass in the archdiocese just out of spite. It isn't hard to see where this is heading. Mr. Bergoglio or his successor will smother the Latin Mass within the Novus Ordo church completely dead in a few years. The indult Latin Mass is doomed.
And how is this working out for the Novus Ordo religion? The Archbishop of Baltimore is reducing parishes from 61 to 21 over the next couple of years. True, Baltimore has had an eighty-year flight of white Catholics from the city leaving many nearly empty church buildings in Baltimore but the Archdiocese extends into nine counties that includes the suburban counties where the whites moved. The Novus Ordo's decline is similar to the decline of the Mainline Protestant churches in America and Europe.
One of the really unpleasant things that Bergoglio has done is encourage liberal Catholics (of the National Catholic Reporter and America variety) to show their claws--as well as their inability to mount a coherent argument. Just hectoring and nasty. My problem with sedevacantists is that they can be even nastier, if smarter, and more learned (I'm not talking about you or your priest, of course, just the breed available online). I would have to take a very deep breath indeed before agreeing that a Novus Ordo Mass is invalid.
As for Bergoglio, he's headed for his eternal reward. The odds are from those who know on somebody in the middle who will make nobody happy in the long run but who will avoid a schism, somebody like Dolan, or Gomez had he a red hat. If somebody like Sarah gets the job, JPII will have retrospectively "grown" since his death.
Unpleasant, but useful to see everyone lay their cards on the table. Fr James Martin played it straight until Papa Frank came on the scene.
Sedevacantism is the ditch opposite the modernist one; hard to stay on the road, pocked and crumbled as it is by those who were supposed to maintain it.
Yes, the next pope is likely a non-American compromise candidate. Cardinal Sarah is too divisive and severe to be pope. His role in the Sacred College is to be a John the Baptist figure calling out the 'broods of vipers'.
"Schismatically". Are you SSPX?
I've pondered the argument that Vatican II (or at least what followed in its wake, as much of that was not envisioned by the council fathers or its sixteen documents) made a 'different' religion of Catholicism. Even if one claims the doctrines haven't changed there's no question the lived practice is different from my grandparents with the near elimination of fasting & meatless Fridays, Rogation/Ember days, Corpus Christi processions, Adoration/Benediction or even just sacred architecture as something built in the last 60 years probably resembles an airplane hangar.
Yet, even without Vatican II, a lot of this goes by the boards due to changes in society. Vatican II was an failed attempt to address the challenge of modernity. Yes, part of this failure is its partial hijacking by Bugnini & company as an excuse to do things not foreseen or even opposed to the council. To that extent, Vatican II became a springboard for the wreckovators to get ahead of schedule. That said, even a perfectly orthodox and wise council could not have stopped modernity's onslaught. Slow the bleeding for a while, perhaps.
By extension, one could argue that any form of today's Christianity is a 'different' religion than what was known / practiced in antiquity. This is not necessarily bad, the Gospel being 'ever old,
ever new', adaptable to all times and places, but mileage varies wildly. I do wonder about the 'tracking error' between what Christ intended and what His even his best-intentioned modern interpreters would have us believe.
I attend an independent chapel, St. Athanasius, which used to be very friendly with the SSPX. In 2015, our pastor thought that the head of the SSPX, Bishop Fellay, was playing footsie with Mr. Bergoglio of Rome. So he started The Resistance. Attendance is down by half since then. The SSPX has started two parishes since to compete with St. Athanasius.
Maybe someone on this thread knows. Are there any books to recommend that compare the before and after of Vatican II and maybe make a case that the religion changed?
I recommend Anne Muggeridge's "The Desolate City" which came out about 1986. She's a wonderful writer and the daughter-in-law of Malcolm Muggeridge. Sadly, she was afflicted by Alzheimer's when she was about sixty and died about ten years ago. She was interviewed by Michael Davies way back in the early 1990s, an excellent interview.
Thank you.
Dietrich von Hildebrand was theologian held in esteem by Popes JPII and BXVI. He wrote some critiques of Vatican II, "Trojan Horse in the City of God: the Catholic Crisis Explained" (1967) and "The Devasted Vineyard" (1973). The titles give the game away; he wasn't a fan. Too close to the actual event for a long-term view, but shows what one thinker saw in its immediate wake.
Thank you.
I am very lucky to attend a Carmelite mission church, served by Carmelite priests, and offering both the new mass (in three different languages!) and the ancient Carmelite Rite, which was not suppressed by TC. Our bishop has been enormously supportive, even subbing in to offer Latin mass for us when our pastor has been out on vacation or with a family emergency.
Maybe the charism of the Carmelites is the magic sauce holding us together, but it really does feel to me as if we are one “parish” (well, mission church, but you know) practicing one religion. I’m personally devoted to the ancient rite, but doctrinally I see no daylight between my fellow “parishioners” (I’m just going with it lol) who attend any the other masses. We all socialize together, so these are folks I know pretty well and with whom I can talk real issues of substance. I do find that the Latin crew trends sort of “nerdier,” for lack of a better word — deep into Latin and history and 19th century manuals of prayer — but definitely no doctrinal issues.
I listen to Larry Chapp a lot (he’s one of my favorite Catholic thinkers around today) and he talks about a hermeneutic of continuity vs a hermeneutic of rupture. I’m pretty convinced that a hermeneutic of continuity is the right way to look at things and idk I guess all of this to say you are clearly arguing for a hermeneutic of rupture, and I’m just not there! I think Vatican II gave superficial license for a lot of heretics to pop their heads out and sing, but I think they’re mooooooostly flushed out by now and that their way of thinking is on the wane.
Larry Chapp does an admirable job of avoiding undue cheerleading or blasting. His thoughtful analysis avoids the excesses of church libs and those who think the last good pope was Pius X or Clement XIV.
So this kind of attitude is why I am a little suspicious of the TLM enclaves. I notice more and more there is this sentiment that the Novus Ordo Mass is illegitimate. Not that it is aesthetically inferior or in bad taste, but that it is actually part of a false religion.
This is a pretty incredible claim and honestly makes Francis's crackdown make a ton of sense. Why would you support a tiny minority of Catholics who are rejecting the other 99% of the faithful, including a valid Mass and sacraments? People like this Fr Ringrose seem to have elected themselves as the Pope and Cardinals of their own little fiefdoms, but cry fowl when the actual hierarchy uses the same rhetoric on TLM that they use on NO?
And besides which, as nice as Latin Mass sounds, the truth is that form is a relatively *modern* invention, solidifying around the 16th century--i.e. 15 centuries(!) after Christ. It's 3 times closer in age and practice to 21st century Masses than it is to the early church. In that light, treating its existence as a celebrated form seems a bit silly, early Christians did just fine the centuries before it was even established.
Finally, I also don't really believe the whole idea that TLM will explode in a revival while NO wastes away. The simple fact is that roughly 0.4% of Catholics attend TLM. By contrast, last year there was a 1% increase in NO Catholics by infant baptism. TLM churches are a tiny little slice of the Catholic population that has an overestimated presence thanks to the internet. But every boom among Latin Massgoers is just a drop in the bucket compared to the billions of NO catholics around the world. TLM is and will remain a niche community, assuming it even lasts into next century, which I doubt
This is very sharp. But you're giving Francis way too much credit. It's precisely a "breakout" of TLM into the larger Catholic population that he's afraid of. I've aired in the past my distaste for Traddies and won't go through it again, but there is also in TLM attendance a leaven of fine people who should be models to us all in charity, good sense, and balance. They're the ones that Bergoglio and his goon, Artie Roche, are afraid of. Also, I bet I'm older than you, and you perhaps don't remember the spite with which Novus Ordo got imposed. And how is it that Corita banners, the music of Schutte, and clown masses are ok and TLM is verboten? Doesn't add up.
Oh I certainly agree Francis isn't acting in good faith. And if TLM communities were filled with the James Martin's of the world, he would no doubt be trumpeting them from the rooftops tomorrow.
That said, I also think it's very easy to jump from the frying pan into the fire with these sorts of scenarios. Martin Luther did have very legitimate grievances against the Pope in his day, but we see how quickly that went off the rails when he decided to take up the mantle of pontiff in his own way
Well-argued post. However, I think there are many more Latin Mass Catholics than you suppose as a percentage. In France, where Catholicism is dying, half the weekly Mass attendees are Latin Mass Catholics. The percentage is not so high in America. But the Catholic Church in America is being dishonest when they claim 80 million or so adherents. How many go to Mass every Sunday barring illness? Perhaps 15 million. And how many are heretics like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi? Are they even truly Catholics? I would think not.
The left is much better at politics than the right. That is why the modernist left was able to use bureaucratic skills to create a revolution in the church in the 1960s. By the end of the revolution, most Catholics left the pews. The remnant that stayed attend the Mass out of habit. When I used to go to the local Novus Ordo Mass, I was struck by how old the attendees were. What happens when they die? Parishes are closing all over Europe and America.
If you're asking "Is it time to schism?" it's probably time to schism. It's definitely time to start figuring out how to do it peacefully or in a manner that minimizes collateral damage.
We rarely do this, of course, whether it's religious schism, divorce, or the dissolution of nation states. We believe that the heretics will repent. We stay together for the kids. We destroy our empire while trying to preserve it's myths.
We drag out the inevitable until it can't happen without lots and lots of pain, be it spiritual pain, emotional pain, or physical pain and death. We're so afraid of how awful it will be that we delay taking action until the situation and what results from the actions we are eventually forced to take are usually worse than what we were initially afraid of at the beginning when we first recognized that there was a problem.
Unfortunately, that's just how people seem to be.
My sister was a longtime very active member of a United Methodist congregation. When the vote came over whther to remain with the United Methodist Church a lot of people who rarely if ever attended but were on the books suddenly showed up to vote in the favor of remaining. Subsequently a lot of the active members, herself included, left.
This. Structure and membership in Protestant churches is fungible. Ross Douthat wrote about how this unstructured-ness allows Protestants to innovate and experiment more than Catholics and Orthodox who had episcopal hierarchies and rules.
The downsides can be just as spectacular, as you point out.
To use a political science analogy, two-party systems and single-party rule stifle competition while promising stability (for as long as the powers-that-be hold things together). Multiparty democracies lack that stability--see how unwieldy the coalition governments in Italy and Israel can be, for example. Or how Geert Wilders and Sinn Fein can win a plurality of votes but still be locked out of power...But hey, they're not shoehorned into a rigid system, eh?
What happens in Protestant churches when things don't go your way is how Rod describes St. Francisville: people go their own way. Sometimes people start their own church, with varying degrees of success. Or they simply go church shopping. That's a lot easier than it used to be when denominational identities meant more.
I remember going with my Mom to different churches in town after we moved. We mostly looked at different low-church denominations, all Baptist and Pentecostal. One Baptist church stood out to me because they served cookies after the service and I pushed for it on that basis (I was seven).
Re the Marxist guy who celebrated Christmas because he loved being Italian: while attending the local community college, my daughter had a professor who was an atheist. Not sure how this came up in class but anyhoo, she arrived for class one November 30 to find him attired in a kilt. What’s that about, the students wanted to know. He replied that it was St. Andrew’s Dsy & he was of Scottish ancestry. So my daughter said “Dr. ____, you’re an atheist & you’re celebrating a Christian saint?” But it was a national pride thing. Well, honey, I said, how many people drinking green beer & making fools of themselves on March 17 are honoring St. Patrick? The professor was not one of those obnoxious militant atheists & wasn’t offended.
It reminds me of CS Lewis’ recollection of his tutor who was an atheist. But coming from an Ulster Scot background, he gardened on Sunday in a better looking suit.
The question is what happens when even the cultural Christianity goes away?
Circumspice, dear lady.