Tag Archives: church politics

Back Again Into the Wasteland

17 Wednesday Feb 2021

Posted by in Church/State, Lent, poetry, Tolkien

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The Hollow Men 5A note from Neo

Well, I’m back again, not that I really left, I’ve been posting on the Neo blog, as many of you know, because that has been more appropriate to my thoughts lately. I have been thinking of you though, there are a fair number of us here, but we tend to be, I suspect a good bit alike, and if you’re like me, you feel very much like a sojourner in a strange land.

Today is, of course, Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, when we traditionally give up things by which we commemorate Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, as we prepare ourselves for Easter.

I first republished this article of Jessica’s on Ash Wednesday in 2015, it is from 10 March 2013 originally on NEO and is quite similar to the one here also on 10 March 2013 called Mere Anarchy. I found the NEO version a bit more understandable, but I link them both because you may well differ. At the time I reblogged this well, it was a troubled time in my life, you who knew Jessica then will know that this was while she was at the Convent recovering from cancer, and our contact was severely limited. But God be praised that worked out. Here is Jessica’s post.

Into the Wasteland

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

The opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s 1925 poem speak with eloquence to any age and people who feel disconnected from what they feel is a calamitous and collapsing socio-political world.

Eliot was writing in the aftermath of the most catastrophic war in the history of the Western world. It was the war when hope died. How could one believe in progress after the Somme and the horrors of the Western Front? And what had all of that slaughter been for? A settlement at Versailles which few believed would really bring peace to the world.  Men like Wilson and Hoover, or MacDonald and Baldwin, seemed small men facing giant problems, and sure enough, within fifteen years the world had once more descended into the abyss.

Does the fault lie in our leaders? They do, indeed, seem to be hollow men, with heads stuffed with straw. The words of Yeats’ Second Coming seem apposite to our times:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

Writing in 1919, Yeats wondered:   

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand

But it was not so. In Lord of the Rings, Frodo tells Gandalf that he wishes he did not live in the time he did, when such dreadful things were happening. Gandalf’s reply is for all of us:

So do I,’  said Gandalf, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’

It is not for us to decide such things. All each of us can do in the end is to decide how we live our lives and by what star we steer. Those of us with a Christian faith, like Tolkien himself, know we are strangers in this world, and we know by whose star we steer. We can rage all we like against the way the world seems to be going, so did our forefathers, and so will our descendants. Eliot ends with a dying fall:

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

But Yeats, in best prophetic mode wondered:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

For me, Eliot’s words in Ash Wednesday ring truest:

Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

That’s pretty much what the world feels like, increasingly to me, at least, it seems that we may have to simply burn it down and try to rebuild in the ruins. but I continue to hope not, so we will see.

In many ways, Kipling asked the question I think our political, and a fair share of church, as well, leadership should have to answer

I could not dig; I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

But as Jess said above, we don’t get to pick the era in which we live, we are simply called to do the best we can. And so we shall, God willing.  NEO

Saturday Jess: Taking sides?

14 Saturday Nov 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Church/State

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As some of you know from my occasional contributions to Neo’s blog (what do you mean you haven’t read it! Golly, here’s the link, though those of a liberal frame of mind may need a trigger warning, but more of that in a moment) I am by way of being an Americanophile. I spent a year in the mid-West when I was ten, and fell in love with small-town America. There were no fewer than ten churches in a town of about ten thousand people, and I loved the Episcopal Church at which we worshipped. But there is one aspect of American culture which I wish we had not imported – the so-called “culture wars.”

I suppose I come at this from what I’d call a Church of England direction. I was brought up to believe that the Church of England has a mission to the whole country. As I grew up I came to value that side of things more and more. Regardless of creed, class or colour, the doors of our churches are open to all who want to go there (well, okay, they were, but don’t start me on Mr Johnson and his government). I don’t take the view that religion has no place in public life, and I value the role that the Church plays in this country. It is not just (although it is also) the work done selflessly and quietly locally through foodbanks, or through hospital and university chaplains, it is that local presence.

As a politcal näif, it came to me but slowly that there were “parties” in the church. At university I went along to some Christian Union meetings, but soon retreated to the calm of the College Chapel. I’ve never been one for jumping up and down and proclaiming my thanks for my salvation. C 451 tells a story of a politican who, on being asked by a Street Preacher whether he was saved, said “yes”, only to be asked “why are you not proclaiming it?” To that he responded as I would: “It was a close shave so I don’t like to shout about it.”

College chapel was like home – Alternative Service Book, decent sermon, seemly and, well, for me, a bit boring. Being an inveterate church hopper, I found one which was not boring. The Blessed Sacrament was reserved, there was incense, and the Book of Common Prayer was used. It wasn’t long before I’d bought my first mantilla and Rosary, and I asked Father to bless the latter – and he blessed the former too. I found a spiritual calm there which neither the College Christian Union, nor the Chapel gave me. But it never occurred to me to think that my preference was somehow “better”; it was different, and difference was, I thought, and still think, good.

Some at the Church I attended would refer to what had happened at the time when the Church of England had ordained women in the way that you might refer to a great disaster. As I came to know more, I realised that my Church was part of a group called “Forward in Faith“. There was considerable hostility among some of my fellow worshippers to those who, in their view, had “betrayed” the Church by agreeing to the ordination of women. Meanwhile, talking to friends at College, where I still attended early morning prayers in the Chapel, I encountered a similar hostility to the “dinosaurs” who opposed the ordination of women. As a woman, I was expected by my peers to share that view, and I was asked more than once “how I could bear” to “worship with those people?” I had a very good (male) friend in another College who was a keen Evangelical, and he used to ask me how I “could bear to worship in Laodicea”; he never darkened the door of the College Chapel.

It may just that I am a wishy-washy liberal sort of woman (guilty as charged by the way, and proud of it), but I did not see then, nor do I now, why they could not all “live and let live.” My other half (who only takes an interest in these things insofar as living with me requires it) asked me last night why I ran a “conservative blog” if I favoured the ordination of women and thought that LGBTI+ Christians should always be made welcome in church. I tried to explain that my Catholic views on the sacraments and the nature of the Church were not “conservative” to me, and constituted no bar to an inclusive view of that Church. I am not sure they were any the wiser, or even better informed.

On both sides of the Atlantic we seem to be living in sharply divided political cultures where the traditionally intolerant attitude by conservatives to things like gay rights are reciprocated on the left by a “cancel culture” to anyone with non-progressive views. This does seem to be an import, and it exacerbates existing divisions. In my own church it can seem, sometimes, as though those taking a traditional view of marriage and other social issues, are being marginalised. I was struck, as I thought and prayed about this, puzzled as to what a Church which has a national mission should do, by what Canon Angela Tilby has written in the latest Church Times: “we can take on that protective task only if we resist a too-easy identification of progressive causes with the values of “the Kingdom”.

It is a timely reminder that balance is one of the great virtues of Anglicanism, and so I leave you this Saturday, with her wise words:

We should nourish more diversity of thought, a wider theological intelligence. Scriptural truth, after all, is multi-layered. We misread our mission if we think that it is all about us and our personal preferences. In the same spirit, we should ensure that the conservative-minded among us are not driven to the edges, not only because this could encourage animosity, but because they retain insights that we need. We will engage effectively with secular society only if we know where our roots lie

Enjoy your Saturday!

Something in the Air

13 Friday Apr 2018

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Education, Faith

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Several things caught my eye in Philip’s excellent article the other day. I hate writing posts in commboxes (although I do it far too often), so I thought I would discuss it here.

The first comes from the Catholic Herald, always a good source of information.

[O]n 8 April, I made the 2.5-hour drive to the National Shrine of Divine Mercy Shrine in Stockbridge, Massachusetts for Divine Mercy Sunday. And how could I not? Judging by the licence plates in the parking lots, pilgrims travelled from every corner of the United States. According to the programme, many more flew over from Europe. I practically live down the street.

It was a deeply moving occasion, despite Mother Nature’s lack of cooperation: it was finger-numbingly cold, with snow flurries dropping in and out. Yet 15,000 pilgrims descended on the little mountain town, bundled in parkas and blankets. Some charitable souls drifted through the crowd passing out hand warmers.

Aside from the official proceedings, what struck me most was the demographic make-up. There were Hispanics, Filipinos, Africans, and Chinese – but hardly a Caucasian in sight. That’s grossly unrepresentative of the national Catholic population: 59 per cent are white, 34 percent are Hispanic, 3 per cent are Asian, and 3 per cent are black.

Of course, this has nothing to do with race and everything to do with trends in migration. Immigrants, whatever their faith tradition, tend to be more devout than their native-born counterparts. This is true even in countries like Sweden, where predominantly-white immigrants from Poland are contributing to a boom in the Catholic population.

But are these new Catholics a permanent feature of American and Western European countries? That seems doubtful. A new Gallup polldemonstrates that the rate at which Catholics attend Mass continues to fall since 1955, from 75 per cent to 39 per cent. This, despite the fact that the nominal Catholic population has grown considerably thanks to mass immigration from South America. Meanwhile, attendance at Protestant services has remained fairly stable.

The lack of Protestant immigration actually gives them an advantage with this metric. The children or grandchildren of immigrants who stop practising the faith are more likely to identify – if only nominally – with their family’s religion. Because Catholic immigration is so high, there are many “cultural” or “lapsed” Catholics: those who identify with the Faith, but don’t attend Mass. Meanwhile, Protestants who have “un-churched” are more likely to identify as irreligious.

True enough, out here the Catholic Church is made up of probably close to a majority of Hispanics, of all ages, and who are treated quite badly by the established Anglo congregations, to the point of nearly two churches in one building. A good many of the Anglos strike me as mostly CINO’s (Catholics in name only). Given it is Hispanic immigration, I don’t see it as much in the Protestant churches but suspect it is mostly a lack of Hispanics not a difference in attitude.

The funny part is, Islam also has this problem, they too are losing the immigrants’ children.

Here, again, Pew’s study of Islam in America is enlightening. Nine per cent of ex-Muslims converted to a different faith, and one per cent said they were actively searching for a spiritual path. That means only 10 per cent remain open to engaging with organised religion. The other 90 effectively become secular or “spiritual-not-religious”, which usually amounts to the same thing.

Apparently, it is something in the air in America. part of it, of course, is the churches themselves, I’m not a particularly regular attendee myself. My local church is good on liberal platitudes, on real (what some call, muscular) Christianity, not so much. Other choices such as LCMS are quite inconvenient for me, perhaps it will solve itself, or God will show me a way, but for now, that’s how it is.

In a Federalist article, Mathew Cochrane notes that one of the weaknesses of our churches is that we are driving away men. He quotes Ross Douthat’s “God and Men and Jordan Peterson” New York Times column to good effect.

The men fled; the women stayed.

That’s the story of Easter weekend in the New Testament. Most of Jesus’ male disciples vanished when the trouble started, leaving his mother and Mary Magdalene and other women to watch by the cross, prepare his body for his burial, and then (with the men still basically in hiding) find the empty tomb.

Male absence and female energy has also been the story, albeit less starkly and dramatically, of Christian practice in many times and places since.

Except that is not true, all concerned missed the real story, didn’t they? How many times had Jesus told them he would rise from the dead? None of them, not a single one, believed Him – they went to the tomb to properly prepare his corpse and were gently chided by the Angel:

“Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise” (Luke 24:5-7).

There is also this,

As one blogger quickly pointed out, two key issues with Douthat’s presentation of the story highlight a disregard for men. First is the enormous factual error: Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, both men, were actually the ones to prepare and bury Jesus’ body (John 19:38-42) while the women watched (Luke 23:55-56) and returned with additional spices several days later. Unlike Douthat, Mark the Evangelist is quite right to observe that Joseph “took courage” before going to the guy who just had Jesus executed and asking him for the corpse (Mark 15:43).

Yep, that’s how you are going to attract men, NOT.

Tradition

15 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Faith

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This morning I’m blogging on NEO about Neptunus Lex, a legend on the Milblogs, the American blogs that deal with the military, almost all of us read him until his untimely death on 6 March 2012. But what death of an honored leader is ever timely?

In any case, of all American services, perhaps the Navy and its Marine Corps are most cognizant of its tradition, and that transcends the military to many other things including the faith. Lex wrote this:

So, we were 231 years old yesterday. And still have our hairline, most of our own teeth, and a good resting heart rate. And we’re still at sea, or getting ready for sea or coming back from having been at sea, pretty much all the time. Being, you know: The Sea Service, and all.

Which, in terms of enduring connections to our storied past, is worth keeping in mind. There’s a tendency for people inside institutions to lose the big picture sometimes, a tendency to look back at some memory-shrouded and idealized past, or look forward to some hazy, perfectly realized future, if only this decision had been made or that program had been supported, or if that other institute of higher learning could be shut down until it had been re-habilitated until it once more clove to our own concept of the ideal.

The fact is that we’ve never had a perfect Navy, and we have never all of us been content. Our ships and aircraft have never been perfect, and the vagaries of fate may mean that fools will rise further than they ought to while good men are all too often left behind. But we have always been better than the sum of our individual parts and always the mission has remained. We have always accomplished that mission effectively, even if not always perfectly, if not always efficiently. Being an interlinked and interdependent pyramid of imperfect beings, our vision is clouded at times; we see the world darkly, as through a glass. We err.

We have a grave responsibility to the republic, and it would be irresponsible of us not to focus on our imperfections – although, perhaps we might not do so on our birthday, but never mind: While doing so, we should always strive to maintain a decent degree of humility and proportion. We must see ourselves in the mosaic.

There are activist legal scholars who discover to their gratified amazement that their personal policy preferences were enshrined in the Constitution all along, that they had been secretly encoded. Not unlike them are many of us who love our service so well. We often think that we could love it just that little bit better, if only it would be more like we would like it to be. More ships, better airplanes, a couple of those submarine thingies. SEALs. CB’s. EOD. More nearly perfect.

It’s necessary to remember though that we are but ghosts and we pass through, leaving only traces behind. The institution endures, the mission will be accomplished.

It strikes me that this is even more true for us, as Christians, our mission is 2000 years old instead of 240 and change. It strikes me as unlikely that the same thing that appealed to King George II will appeal to a young woman in 2017, so perhaps the message must be repackaged, with all due respect to our beliefs and traditions.

Chalcedon’s report from Flame strikes me as that. The same message, but repackaged for a new age. And that’s the thing:

The Mission goes on, it always will.

“If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes.”

26 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Lent, poetry, Politics

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t_s_eliot-still_point

T.S. Eliot wrote that: “If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again and you cannot put on a new culture readymade. You must wait for the grass to grow …”

The classic liberal secularist response to this is summed up here:

There is, of course, a double dishonesty in all of this. There is the assumption that it is not possible to retain, in a secular society, those values which we have learned as matters of good sense from a Christianity in which they were supported by revelation; it is a standard trope, unsupported by reason of modern conservatism that if we discard part we stand to lose all of our historical culture – and Eliot was too clever a man not to know that this was, and remains, mere assertion.

The burden of proof here rests, it seems to me, on the person making the assertion. Values need to be rooted in something. Christianity values the family and all human life, and if I ask whether this society does so I would query a positive answer, and more than that, I would point to the breakdown of the family in the UK and America and ask how far many of our social ills stem from that? I would also ask how far a society where the public discourse has become as crude as it has, has been coarsened by its attitude to the unborn and the elderly, where it seems that a more utilitarian attitude now prevails – one where sentimentality scarcely conceals a selfish desire that the individual’s own comfort should come first? These are important parts of our historical culture, and the fact that they are attenuating most where Faith has vanished most, may be a coincidence, but it suggests that the optimism of the critic is unfounded. In Eliot’s day this process was not very far advanced; it is now. But Eliot saw clearly that:

“a society has ceased to be Christian when religious practices have been abandoned [and when] when behaviour ceases to be regulated by reference to Christian principle, and when in effect prosperity in this world for the individual or for the group has become the sole conscious aim” (Christianity & Culture, 9–10).

The critic’s other caveat of Eliot’s position is one I think we should take more seriously:

The other dishonesty is that Eliot’s Christianity, like that of many rightwing intellectuals, is an underpinning of the status quo rather than a force for social justice or the ecstatic joy of Easter Day for believers.

If by ‘social justice’ is meant a bias to the poor and a concern for them, then it is, alas, true that too many conservative Christians react to this as though someone were suggesting that Jesus was a communist. His concern for the poor and the marginalised is not one which conservative Christians tend to stress. As for the joy of the Resurrection, again, the critic has a point. To what extent does the experience of the Resurrection inform our attitude to others and to the world? Do we express that optimism that in the end all will be well, and all manner of things will be well, or do we retreat into an entrenched conservatism which rejects the world because it cannot cope with it and prefers to see it as the enemy rather than as a target for conversion?

How, though, does, or should, our Christianity inform our cultural encounters? How do we hold on to the best that Christianity has given our culture without also insisting that there is only one way – a conservative way – of portraying this? It is to some of those questions that I hope to return during the Lenten period.

The Refugee Resettlement Business

18 Saturday Feb 2017

Posted by in Church/State, Consequences, Politics

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screenshot-syrian-refugees-germany-pixlr-440-x-294A word of explanation because I realize many of you have never heard of PumabyDesign 001. She is one of my oldest blogfriends, who I met nearly a year before this blog even started. I have always found her posts to be well researched, and more to the point, true. In this one, she gores the oxen of all of those who act like our organized churches, and their corporate outreach. I’ve done a bit of research, and what I found corroborates what she says. Mind, this is US based, but I suspect that you would find much the same in the UK. Here’s byDesign…

Social justice evangelicals and church leaders across the United  [States] wrote a letter to President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence asking that the executive order implementing extreme vetting of individuals traveling from jihadist breeding nations and the 90-day moratorium on Syria be rescinded.

CBN News

More than 500 evangelical leaders from all 50 states signed a letter to President Trump asking him to reconsider his controversial executive order. The letter included the likes of Ann Voskamp, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary President Daniel Akin, and Open Doors USA President and CEO David Curry.

While they acknowledged the order could prevent bloodshed on American soil, America should still be a nation of compassion….

The letter points out that thousands of churches have welcomed and sheltered suffering refugees through the Refugee Resettlement Program[…]

Continue Reading

“thousands of churches….”

Pope Francis once said that many Christians are Christians in name only, “People who go to church on Sundays, but spend the rest of the week cultivating their attachment to money, power and pride are pagan Christians…“

For obvious reasons, the social justice warrior in the Vatican who has labeled the rejection of refugees “an act of war” overlooks those organizations under the umbrella of Christianity receiving hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars from the refugee resettlement program beginning with his own U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The USCCB received $80,733,062 in federal grants (2015) and $79,590,512 in federal grants (2014) which accounts for more than 90& of their revenue stream but they’re not alone.

Many of the organizations who partake in the refugee resettlement programs are Christian in name only and for the love of financial gain have no problem quoting parables from the Bible and demanding compassion for refugees whose sole agenda is to convert infidels and/or chop off the hands that feed it.

The letter/petition signed by Tim Breene, CEO, and Scott Arbeiter, new President of World Relief and supporters starts off ironically enough with these two paragraphs:

As Christian pastors and leaders, we are deeply concerned by the recently announced moratorium on refugee resettlement. Our care for the oppressed and suffering is rooted in the call of Jesus to “love our neighbor as we love ourselves.” In the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), Jesus makes it clear that our “neighbor” includes the stranger and anyone fleeing persecution and violence, regardless of their faith or country.

As Christians, we have a historic call expressed over two thousand years, to serve the suffering. We cannot abandon this call now. We live in a dangerous world and affirm the crucial role of government in protecting us from harm and in setting the terms on refugee admissions. However, compassion and security can coexist, as they have for decades. For the persecuted and suffering, every day matters; every delay is a crushing blow to hope….

World Relief (full name: World Relief Corp. of National Association of Evangelicals) is a social justice organization corporation whose survival and existence is SOLELY dependent upon a steady revenue stream of taxpayer dollars.

For the year ending 2015, World Relief’s “most recent Form 990 …had a total gift/grants income of $58,487,081 and $42,589,050 was provided by you, the US taxpayer, making their federally-funded share of their budget 73% taxpayer funded….” See: Ann Corcoran’s post entitled, “Federal Refugee contractor World Relief (Evangelicals!) has a new Prez.”

As confirmed by the chart below from Charity Navigator:

Notice the lack of fundraising in the graph above? Namely, that tiny slither of orange in the second graph under “Expenditures Breakdown 2015.” Theirs is a sense of entitlement.

Private foundation supporters include the Vanguard Charitable Foundation, Mustard Seed Foundation, Soros Fund Charitable Foundation, Pfizer Foundation, Global Impact and many others. [Source: CapitalResearch.org]

In addition to World Relief Corporation and US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) mentioned above, below are the major refugee resettlement businesses who receives tens (if not hundreds) of millions of taxpayer dollars for their doing their part in the Hijra with the blessings of Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama and Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan.

Again, notice the lack of fundraising in the graph above? Namely, that tiny slither of orange in the second graph under “Expenditures Breakdown 2015.” Simply put, theirs is a sense of entitlement

If you know me at all, you know that I have a properly developed sense of compassion and charity for those caught in a war, or simply down on their luck. So do most Christians. I have little compassion for so-called Christian organizations who bleed the people of a country, of tax money to presumably resettle people in our countries. I agree with this, though,

Washington, DC – U.S. Rep. Brian Babin (TX-36), who has been a leading critic of America’s United Nations (UN)-led refugee resettlement program, issued the following statement today in support of President Trump’s executive order on extreme vetting:

“I commend President Trump for delivering on his campaign pledge to put a common-sense pause on a broken refugee program and immigration system that has serious national security gaps and is in desperate need of repair….

“As I have been saying for nearly two years, the refugee resettlement program poses a clear and present danger to the American people. We were told by President Obama’s own DHS, FBI and DNI Directors that U.S. intelligence officials cannot properly vet or screen refugees coming from Syria and other terrorist hot spots. We have seen the deadly consequences in Europe as ISIS has already successfully infiltrated its refugee population. Why repeat the same mistakes here?

“As a compassionate Christian, I believe we can and should help displaced refugees by caring for them in safe zones near their own countries. In fact, for the cost of bringing one refugee into America, we can help at least twelve refugees in safe zones….

From: That Sense of Entitlement: Social Justice Evangelicals, Church Leaders, Refugee Resettlement Biz. By permission, and do read the whole thing.

This is, of course, what Britain was originally doing, but it seems that it has succumbed to pressure (from what I read) to concentrate on resettling the unfortunate people from their home countries to the UK, as our church organizations here in the US have. I don’t think this is good for either our countries (especially since no vetting is really possible) nor is it good for the refugees (if many of them are, in fact, refugees, and not merely economic immigrants).

I hate to sound like Bosco, but our friend has a point about how our churches can easily be corrupted, by the fool’s gold of the Second Kingdom.

In short, we are commanded to be charitable, but we are not entitled to steal (and government funding for other than the proper purposes of government is just that) from others to fund our charity.

And that doesn’t even start to address the problems of the introduction of immigrants culturally incompatible with our culture into our countries. I note that Chancellor Merkel is now hoping to bribe her immigrants to go away, I doubt that will work since it is not in their best interest. And who will guarantee that they will not return, perhaps with another name, since many have no reliable documentation anyway, directly thereafter.

 

What do we have in common?

05 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by in Anglicanism, Bible, Faith, Lutheranism

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communion

In a comment on yesterday’s post on ‘Virtue Signalling’, Fr Malcolm wrote something which struck a chord:

It seems to me these days that there are conservatives and liberals in all churches.. I have more in common with some Catholics, Lutherans, Presbyterians and Methodists, to name a few, than the liberals in my own Church.
I can think of liberals in the C of E who have more in common with liberals in other churches than with conservatives in their own church.
The real divide these days is between are those who believe the Scriptures and those who don’t.

It would be interesting to hear from others on how they feel on this one. I must say I recognised it. Those in my own Church who want abortion, contraception, women priests and the rest of the ACTA agenda have far less in common with me than those from my own former Church who don’t; I feel much the same way about Evangelical Christians. But does that mean we all ‘believe in the Scriptures’ and others do not?

I would begin with the assumption that all who claim the name Christian believe in the Scriptures, and yet, as Fr Malcolm implies, that covers a multitude of definitions of what ‘believe’ and ‘Scriptures’ mean. Do I think the exact dimensions of Noah’s ark would ensure that it floated? Do I think that a serpent in the Garden of Eden talked to Eve? Do I think Genesis is a Primer which describes in accurate detail how the earth was created? In all three cases, I suspect not, because I think that Genesis is best read as a poetic account of Creation. Do I think that everything described in the Book of the Apocalypse will come to pass, or do I think that it, like other examples of Apocalyptic literature should be read less than literally? I’d incline toward the latter. The Bible is a book containing many genres of literature. God speaks to us in many ways, He does not just dictate a book of rules and regulations, and He has revealed Himself to us definitively in the Life and Work of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Christ founded a Church. There was nothing to stop Him dictating a book to the Apostles, but He chose not to do do. The maker of all things, visible and invisible, knew His creation well. Give us a book of rules and we’ll either bind ourselves so tightly by it that we will end by obeying the letter and missing the spirit, or we will so explain it away with caveats, that we will end by obeying neither the letter nor the spirit, but the devices and desires of our own deceitful hearts.

So where do I end up? Probably having more in common with some liberals than I should have thought had I just applied the labels, but still far more in common with the conservatives, to whom, spiritually and intellectually, I feel more akin. But even that amount of commonality with so-called liberals, reminds me of the breadth of the Christian community. With those who cannot avow the Trinity or the Nicene Creed, I cannot say that I have communion, with a small or a a large C, though I know at least one fellow Catholic who does not believe in the Creed literally (and I’m not sure what other sort of belief in it one can have); but with Trinitarian Christians, I, like Fr Malcolm, can hold spiritual communion and learn much.

 

What Newman really stood for

16 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Newman

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img_0009I don’t have a lot to add here, which in fact, surprised me. On first read, I thought I’d have a wall of text of my own with a much shorter quote. But as I read through it a few times, I found it less and less necessary to pick it apart. But it is still important. There’s something here that speaks to me as a conservative both in the church (although neither Rome nor Canterbury) and as a politically aware American conservative.

I wrote the book Newman on Vatican II for two reasons. First, I hoped to settle once and for all the question that always hangs around Newman: was he a conservative or a liberal theologian? Once Newman has been canonised – which is likely to be soon now that he has been beatified – it is certain that he will be declared a Doctor of the Church, and the question therefore becomes all the more pressing.

The reason why this question comes so regularly to the fore is that it is all too easy to quote Newman selectively and out of context, especially since he expresses himself with such vigorous distinctness and trenchancy.

For example, one can quote his forthright statement in the Apologia that dogma was the “fundamental principle” of his religion – “I know no other religion”, or his insistence in the speech he made on being made a cardinal that “for 30, 40, 50 years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion” – and conclude from these two uncompromising statements that Newman was extremely conservative and traditionalist.

On the other hand, one might quote Newman’s famous words, “I shall drink – to the Pope, if you please – still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards”; or his downright assertion: “Theology is the fundamental and regulating principle of the whole Church system” – and conclude that Newman was a forerunner of the liberal, “spirit of Vatican II” kind of theologian who justifies dissent from Church teachings and advocates a parallel magisterium of the theologians.

The truth is that Newman was neither simply conservative nor liberal. He is best described as a conservative radical or reformer. This is true both of his Anglican and his Catholic periods. For example, his first book, The Arians of the Fourth Century, was clearly aimed at their contemporary equivalent, liberal Anglicans and Protestants, in cahoots with the Whig government that was threatening to force reforms on the Church of England. And yet the conservative editors of the theological library for which the book was intended were alarmed by the radicalism of several of Newman’s ideas. Similarly, the last chapter of the Apologia on the one hand unequivocally upholds the authority of the magisterium, but on the other unequivocally defends the legitimate freedom of theologians.

Well, OK, but I think the author misses something in his definition of conservative. Conservatives usually are quite willing to change things, that need to be changed, it’s the principles that we cling to. Maybe that’s why, Catholic or Protestant, we admire Newman so.

Newman’s conservative, as well as radical and reforming, theological stance was consistent with his view that the Church “changes … in order to remain the same”. In other words, he would have said the Church changed with Vatican II in order to remain the same, not to be different. To test whether a change was a development or a corruption, he proposed seven notes, which have been routinely dismissed by his commentators but to which he held fast, and which beautifully illuminate how the most controversial of the conciliar documents, Dignitatis Humanae, the Declaration on Religious Freedom, was certainly a major change but a change in continuity.

via What Newman really stood for – CatholicHerald.co.uk

There is a discussion of the seven notes here, I won’t go into them here, or we’ll have a book, but I will list them for you.

  • The First Note: Preservation of Type
  • The Second Note: Continuity of Principles
  • The Third Note: Assimilative Power
  • The Fourth Note: Logical Sequence
  • The Fifth Note: Anticipation of Its Future
  • The Sixth Note: Conservative Action on Its Past
  • The Seventh Note: Chronic Vigor

I have read the link, but have not digested it yet, but on first reading, it strikes me as a very viable set of rough principles in accommodating changes. Or at least I think so, which may be why I’m a blogger and someday (fairly soon) Newman will be a Doctor of the Church.

And in truth, I find them just as persuasive in a political context, perhaps especially the American one, which features unchanging dogma (so to speak) of its own, and still must always change.

Doctrine Really Does Matter: So Does Evangelization

15 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by in Consequences, Faith, Prayers, Salvation

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This is very interesting, although I’ve heard this anecdotally for years, here are some real results. From On Religion via The Catholic Herald.

When they set out to find growing mainline churches, sociologist David Haskell and historian Kevin Flatt did the logical thing – they asked leaders of four key Canadian denominations to list their successful congregations.

It didn’t take long, however, to spot a major problem as the researchers contacted these Anglican, United Church, Presbyterian and Evangelical Lutheran parishes.

“Few, if any, of the congregations these denomination’s leaders named were actually growing,” said Haskell, who teaches at Wilfrid Laurier University in Branford, Ontario. “A few had experienced a little bit of growth in one or two years in the past, but for the most part they were holding steady, at best, or actually in steady declines.”

To find thriving congregations in these historic denominations, Haskell and Flatt, who teaches at Redeemer University College in Hamilton, had to hunt on their own. By word of mouth, they followed tips from pastors and lay leaders to other growing mainline churches.

The bottom line: The faith proclaimed in growing churches was more orthodox – especially on matters of salvation, biblical authority and the supernatural – than in typical mainline congregations. These churches were thriving on the doctrinal fringes of shrinking institutions.

“The people running these old, established denominations didn’t actually know much about their own growing churches,” said Haskell, reached by telephone. “Either that or they didn’t want to admit which churches were growing.”

I found that fascinating, the growing churches, are simply putting their head down and growing the church, but they are not really telling the hierarchs what they are doing. I can’t say I’m surprised, though, I can remember when I was a trustee of my home church, even the council paid no attention to the mission fundraising, we were a fairly conservative E & R church in the maelstrom of the UCC, it was not a happy combination. You know, we traditional types were not enamored of supporting Dr. Jeremiah Wright, who was and is a part of the UCC. Continuing:

In growing congregations, all the clergy interviewed said it was crucial to encourage non-Christians to convert. In declining ones, only half the clergy agreed.

The study found that, in growing churches, pastors were even more orthodox than their congregations. In declining ones, the pastors were even more liberal.

Growing congregations were likely to be younger and have more children.

via On Religion – Canadian researchers find that doctrine really does matter, in terms of church growth – Columns

I don’t really think I have much to add to that, except that I told you so, and so did a lot of others here. A lot of the mainstream churches have become political clubs, or as I said once, coffee shops full of do-gooders, not houses of God. Well, the ones that remember the mission seem to be progressing in the mission.

Funny how that works, isn’t it?

Does democracy have a future?

25 Friday Nov 2016

Posted by in Church/State, Faith, Politics

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god_father_guercino

There’s an old Brechtian line to the effect that ‘the people have failed us, time to get a new people’, and it comes to mind almost every time I read anything on Brexit or Trump. The liberal elite feel that they have been failed by the electorate. Rowan Williams, a thinker for whom I have a great deal of time, has even recently suggested that a ‘humane alternative’ might be needed; wisely, he does not suggest how any polity might move from Mass democracy to something less risky. He does suggest, and here he has a major point, that given the complexity and deep-rooted nature of the problems we face, it is unlikely that Trump can deliver what he has promised. Here in the UK we are currently undergoing an unreal debate in which certain newspapers simply refuse to accept any ‘economic facts’ they do not like; but Government borrowing goes up all the same, and real wages fall in value. When we start rejecting ‘facts’ because they are incompatible with a particular world-view we have entered the world of ‘Newspeak’ with a vengeance.

The notion that something called ‘education; can solve this problem can, as Williams points out, become yet another hostage to fortune if what is being said is that young people have to be taught to think the same way. It leads to lurid headlines about the ‘snowflake generation’, but under that, young people remain what they have always been, rebellious and sceptical about the settled convictions of the older generation. Williams suggests that the sort of education that matters is real life experience of politics at the local level, and he is right, but as anyone who has ever been involved at that level knows, it takes a lot of time and attracts very little interest from the particular electorate involved unless it involves something controversial.

We come back to the issue of shared values. Human beings need to belong to something, to have an allegiance to someone of something higher than the self. In our secularising Western world, it seems as though increasingly that ‘something’ is the nation state. It is no accident that Trump’s slogan was ‘make America great again’, or that Brexiteers emphasised the nation-state and the threat to it from supra-national entities. It looks quite like the same impulse that gave rise to the Protestant revolt against the Catholic Church in England and on the Continent – and we see it in the Catholic Church currently with some of the attitudes toward a Pope whose views seem too aligned with those of a certain generation of liberal Catholicism.

Our hearts, St Augustine told us, will be restless until they find their goal in Christ. It is not accidental that at a time when the great god of the State has been shown to be the falsest of idols – unable to deliver its promises of prosperity and safety from the cradle to the grave’ – that its devotees should turn to find substitutes. But these, too, will prove false idols. And so on it goes, and the gods of the copybook headings will have their revenge.