Tag Archives: Modernism

How unbelievable?

02 Tuesday Mar 2021

Posted by in Anglicanism, Faith

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They are at it again, I thought, when I read (and thank you C451) the Rev Marcus Walker’s stirring piece in The Critic on the Church of England. Not, I hasten to add, the good Reverend himself, who is a candle in the darkness, but the usual suspects.

After more than forty years presiding over a decline in parishes across the country, the Rev David John Keighley has come up with a cunning plan to reverse the decline – intensify the causes of it! I jest not, you can read it all here, though it would take a heart of stone not to alternate weeping and laughter. What does he want to do? There may be a familiar ring to it, so apologies to those suffering from PTSD on this: sell off many of the churches for housing (erm, I thought we’d been quietly doing that?); get rid of outdated doctrine and historic prejudices; (by which he seems to mean the idea of the bodily resurrection of Christ and the Virgin birth, and the miracles (erm, we’ve had forty years of doing that too – just saying); and he is convinced that:

the idea of God as some kindly, bearded patriarch sitting on high in Heaven, while the Devil resides below in Hell, is ill-suited to the modern, critical mind.

Golly, how original! Well it was back in the nineteenth century or so!

The good Rev appears to think that junking all of this will bring young people into the Church. Well I guess I am no longer “young” being in my late thirties, but this sort of stuff almost drove me out of the church when I was, and I can’t imagine it would bring anyone over the age of 70 into it!

The best antidote to this stuff is to read what Marcus Walker writes. It hits home. He rightly points out that:

If you find a priest crossing his fingers during the creed or wincing at the mention of the Virgin Birth it is likely he was ordained many decades ago and is now floating around the edge of retirement. It is also very likely that he is a he, as at the height of the modernist movement only men could be ordained in the Church of England.

That has certainly been my experience, and may well be part of why the Roman Catholic Church, which is full of such old men (including the Pope) has the same problem. What he writes next cheers me up and certainly reflects my own lived experience (as they say):

Younger priests just don’t have this affliction. They may be dripping wet, they may preach about Brexit or refugees, they may not know their way around the Prayer Book, but you really can’t say they don’t believe. The vision of the Church of England as primarily a social organisation is one which, while still live in the public imagination, simply does not match reality.

That is my experience. It boils down, as he says, to the fact that where, once upon a time there was a social cachet to being a member of the Church of England, that has quite vanished:

It has never been cool to go to church, but now it isn’t even really respectable. There is simply no market for a church which doesn’t really believe in God. If you’re going to take the social hit of admitting to being a Christian, you might as well actually be a Christian. 

Quite so. It has been our younger priests who have been at the forefront of further efforts by the old men to go further down the modernist route – which is, as C451 once put it to me “a one way line to perdition”. More than not, it is often younger priests who oppose a continuation of the bankrupt policies of the past few decades:

And of the younger priests, it’s the gay ones who are often at the forefront of the battle to defend the creeds and Christian orthodoxy (if my more traditional readers can park, for a moment, their disbelief in the separation of questions of sexuality from orthodoxy). A study by the Dean of Virginia Theological Seminary showed that, across the American church, “our LGBT seminarians are not interested in a vacuous liberal theology that has no authority, no God, no Christ, and no sacraments”.

As Marcus Walker puts it:

Once again we see that if you’re going to embarrass yourself in front of your peers by being a Christian, you might as well actually find God in the process 

This certainly matches my experience. The American “culture wars” is American, and I can’t speak for those experiencing it, but what I can testify to is that in the Church of England, not least among priests of my generation and younger, there is a real commitment to the Creeds. We don’t cross our fingers when reciting it, neither do we think that “science” has disproved God. I can’t quite get my head around a charitable explanation as to why a retired priest who believes that

the teachings of Jesus provides just one of many ways to experience ‘God’, and that progressive Christianity is focused on creating a community that is inclusive of all people, regardless of sexual identity and even if they are “questioning sceptics or agnostics”

stays in the Church. He imagines that the “product” behind the Church remains “woefully out of date”. I have bad news for him and those of his generation who think likewise – it is they who are out of date. Those of my readers who are of that generation are not, I know, of his persuasion, so take heart, the cause for which you have fought is alive and well and prospering, It may be that on some matters we look to you “unorthodox”, but when it comes to the Creeds and belief, we are Christians because we are. We stand here and can do no other because whatever the Rev David John might believe, we believe in God, the Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth, and in Jesus Christ his only Son … and all the rest of it.

So cheer yourself up by reading Marcus Walker!

Modernism: Pascendi Dominici Gregis

12 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Faith, Newman, Pope

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John-Henry-Newman

‘Feed my sheep’, the Lord charged Peter. That injunction formed the title of Pope St Pius X’s 1907 encyclical, in Latin Pascendi Dominici Gregis. Here the enemy is in plain sight, and it is to be found within the Church, and its fundamental mistake is identified as agnosticism

According to this teaching human reason is confined entirely within the field of phenomena, that is to say, to things that are perceptible to the senses, and in the manner in which they are perceptible; it has no right and no power to transgress these limits. Hence it is incapable of lifting itself up to God, and of recognising His existence, even by means of visible things. From this it is inferred that God can never be the direct object of science, and that, as regards history, He must not be considered as an historical subject

As the then Bishop of Limerick pointed out at the time, such a way of thinking was profoundly foreign to Newman’s ideas, which saw theology as one of the natural sciences, and denied that materialism was the sole mode by which man proceeded intellectually. As he put it in his Idea of a University:

religious truth is not only a portion, but a condition of general knowledge. To blot it out is nothing short, if I may so speak, of unravelling the web of University Teaching

Those who wish to proceed in such a way can, of course, do so, and will, but they can claim neither Newman’s support, or that of Catholic teaching.

Newman’s very definition of religion was the antithesis of the subjectivity characterstic of modernist teaching: By Religion I mean the knowledge of God, of His Will, and of our duties to Him. Contrary to the protestations of modernism, which held that God could not be apprehended through nature, reason or history, Newman argued that there were:

‘three main channels which nature furnishes for our acquiring this knowledge, viz., our own minds, the voice of mankind, and the course of the world, that is of human life and affairs.’

That did not mean, neither did St Pius X mean, that there could only be one school of Catholic theology, but it meant, as the Pope meant, that all those schools had to submit to the Magisterium – there was and never could be a dictatorship of relativism within the Church.

In terms of dogma, the Modernists held it did not transmit absolute truth. This was the opposite of what Newman believed:

Newman held that the Christian revelation was made by Christ our Lord to His Apostles; that He, in human language, conveyed His teaching to them; that the definite body of doctrines which He thus taught to the Apostles is the total and complete Christian revelation which was then made, once for all

That did not mean that the Creed appeared magically, but it did mean that it was contained in Scripture and that as enunciated by Christ’s Church, it must be believed in every aspect; that was divine truth and we were bound to hold it. Christ was truly human and divine, he was crucified, did die, was buried, did descend into hell, did rise on the third day and did ascend into heaven, and would come again to judge the living and the dead. These things were not symbols, signs, allegories or contrivances of human ingenuity – they were historical facts and to be believed as such in the eye of faith.

Faith, in its beginning and its end, was, like salvation, a gift which we in no manner deserved by nature:

There is no truth, my brethren, which Holy Church is more earnest in impressing upon us than that our salvation from first to last is the gift of God. It is true, indeed, that we merit eternal life by our works of obedience; but that those works are meritorious of such a reward, this takes place not from their intrinsic worth, but from the free appointment and bountiful promise of God; and that we are able to do them at all is the simple result of His grace. That we are justified is of His grace; that we have the dispositions for justification is of His grace … He holds the arbitration of our future life in His hands; without an act of His will independent of ours we should not have been brought into the grace of the Catholic Church, and thus, as I began by saying, our salvation from first to last is the gift of God (Perseverance in Grace).

In the long list of the sins of modernism, there is nothing there which can plead Newman in its defence – quite the opposite.

 

Modernism: Lamentabile Sane

11 Monday Apr 2016

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Faith

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One of the many unattractive things about the Internet for a Catholic is the presence of those who insist on a hermeneutic of rupture. At its most extreme are those who claim the Seat of St Peter has been empty since some date in the past. These people not only claim to be Catholics, but they claim to be the only Catholics and to offer, to them, infallibel ‘proofs’ that they are right.. Does the Magisterium of the Church say otherwise? Do those set in authority above them say otherwise? Does the global Catholic Church say otherwise? Well, no matter, as with all conspiracy theorists, these people will claim it all ‘proves’ they are right. With this there is no argument, and frankly, best not to have any engagement. If they have invented a virtual Catholic Church which excludes the actual Catholic Church, and they are happy with that, all that is to be done is to pray for them and to marvel at the mindset which allows anyone to imagine they have a unique access to a ‘truth’ which only their fellow-conspiracy theorists buy.

Not quite so far along the spectrum on that hermeneutic are those who claim that the Church has been captured by ‘modernism’. The Papal encyclical Lamentabile Sane provides 65 propositions which, one might take to be characteristic of ‘modernism’. This is not, I fear, as clear as it might be, but before moving on to an encyclical which is, let’s see why that is. If we take proposition number 2:

The Church’s interpretation of the Sacred Books is by no means to be rejected; nevertheless, it is subject to the more accurate judgment and correction of the exegetes

What is meant by the first clause? Where is one to find ‘the Church’s interpretation of the Sacred Books’? Does it mean that, wherever that is to be found, nothing anyone had written since 1907 should be considered? That would put all Catholic theological teaching on the subject out of business – assuming, of course, that one could locate this elusive place where the interpretation of the Church is stored. It seems clear that what is going on here is that in the early twentieth century some Catholics were worried that Bible study was leading people away from the Church and wanted to close the stable door lest the horse bolt. In practice, the Church and its theologians and Bible scholars have continued to apply the eye of faith to study of the Sacred Texts, and all have benefitted from this. There is never any need for the Truth to fear the intellect – as, indeed, condemnation 32 suggests is the case.

Or let us take number 22:

The dogmas the Church holds out as revealed are not truths which have fallen from heaven. They are an interpretation of religious facts which the human mind has acquired by laborious effort

Again, it is quite hard to know what such a loose formulation of words mean, or even what the first sentence and the second have to do with each other. They are, at best, uneasily juxtaposed: why do the dogmas of the Church have to be one or the other. If they just ‘fell from heaven’ one might expect to see the Apostolic Fathers enunciating the Creed as the Fathers at Nicaea did, and indeed, for the Fathers at Constantinople to have simply reiterated it. Instead, we see a developing understanding of what, for example, St John meant when he said that the Word was in the beginning with God and the Word was God. Now, that process was not in any way analogous to what the second sentence says. There was a divine mystery given us in Sacred Scripture, and the moving of the Spirit in the Church led it to a greater appreciation of the Truth which came to be embodied in the Creed. So, yes, one might well say that in this way ‘the fell from Heaven’, but that would be a crude way of describing an inspiring – and inspired – process.

Read through the list as you might, I cannot find where any of the post-1958 Popes have signed up to any of the proportions. Of course, one sees very clearly that many of those errors are there in our society as a whole, and perhaps there are individuals in the Church guilty of them – but I should be interested in a demonstration as to which of the 65 errors listed have been espoused by a modern Pope, or, indeed, in an authoritative document from the Magisterium. But perhaps I am missing the point?

Is ‘modernism’ simply a ‘boo word’ for those whose preferred style of Catholicism is that they think prevailed at some point at which they think the world was better ordered? Nostalgia is a powerful thing – but I am not sure it should be allowed to detract from the real hermeneutic of continuity in the Church. Sometimes, if you find yourself asking how x can be reconciled with y, the answer might not be ‘it can’t the Pope is a heretic’, but ‘better and more Catholic minds than mine see no opposition, perhaps I am missing something? What was that word, docility, wonder what it meant?’

This, however, is but a prelude to a much better Papal document on the dangers of Modernism, Pascendi Domenici Gregis, which unlike this one, sets out a clear target and some excellent arguments in favour of its case. Not all Papal documents are equally lucid.

We’re all modernists in the West?

01 Friday Apr 2016

Posted by in Bible, Faith

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I’ve often maintained, not least when my posts are the ones prompting them, that the comments section of this blog is sometimes the best part of it. Our Orthodox commentator ‘No Man’s Land’ was, as I suspect Orthodox Christians would be, amused by the use of the word modernist:

I find it amusing when modernists, pejoratively, call other modernists modernists. I guess it only serves to show how far the West really is from a patristic and medieval hermeneutic, theology, and spirituality

and when I said it did have its amusing side, he added:

Particularly exegetically. How the West reads Scripture, at least generally, is very modern, even amongst those who think they are anti-modernists. And by that I mean that one of the primary components of modernism is that the whole meaning of a text or the brewing of coffee or of anything rests in what we can know about it literally i.e., historically or scientifically. To put it in terms of Aristotelian causality, everything is material and efficient in the West, nothing is final or formal anymore.

That set off a train of thought which, as perhaps with all my trains, came off the rails and may not have been going anywhere anyway, but let me try to see if it will.

The relationship between Church and Scripture is a complex one, because they are to parts of the same phenomena – the way in which God conducts his relationship with saved sinners, and the way in which he draws the unsaved to him. As Jock MacSporran has recently reminded us, the Bereans did not simply receive the word from Paul, they strove hard with their God-given brains to study it in relationship to Scripture. The implication seems to be that they knew Paul was telling the truth because they found infallible signs in Scripture. Given the date, this is unlikely to mean they were perusing the Gospels or any of the NT, because for the most part, those texts did not exist – so they were probably studying the Jewish Scriptures, and, of course, Jesus do often referred to them as the evidence that he was the Messiah. So, they received what Paul said orally and in writing, but they used their intellects to test it – to sift the evidence if you will.

My own Church has long maintained that a combination of Scripture, tradition and intellectual examination are the three legs of the stool upon which we stand as Christians; it is hardly a novel conclusion, and all churches have used some version of this paradigm. Tradition covers a variety of things. On the one hand you have things like the threefold model of holy orders, the Eucharist, the Creeds, which to our way of thinking, are foundational; on the other, you have other things, such Marian veneration, which many of us consider a good things, but which at times, and in places, can get out of hand and lead to excesses; too often a failure to distinguish here can lead to the sort of things Bosco writes about Our Lady – proper, holy love for the Mother of God is as far removed from idolatry as one can imagine; but like all good things, it can be taken too far and end up looking like it – the answer is reform, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The Latin West has long had a different habit of mind than the Greek East. It seems to have been the nature of the Roman temperament to define, to codify and to make laws; in all of this there is much that is good – but taken too far it can look like excessive legalism and lead to comparisons with Pharisaical attitudes toward spirituality. As one of our commentators, No Man’s Land pointed out the other day, from the point of view of the Jewish Law the Pharisees were actually right in objecting to what Jesus was doing on the Sabbath and in terms of table fellowship; that ought to make us think a bit about the place of law and how it balances with love and mercy. For the Greek East, there was less of a desire to define and codify and more of a willingness to accept great Mysteries without the need to define them – the bread and the wine are the body and blood of Christ – how that happens, what happens to the bread and the wine are, no doubt matters of interest to minds which need to think that way – but that is the same mindset which led the west to where it is now. The Greek and Russian East have only had to deal with modernism as a phenomenon of the West – it did not arise from their way of doing theology – it arose from the West’s need to define and measure. It is no accident that the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment came out of the West and not the East.

I am not an intellectual historian, I am neither an historian nor an intellectual, but it seems to me there are interesting questions to be asked about the roots of modernism in Latin theological methods. For, either a form of thinking newly arose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which had nothing to do with the dominant mode of thinking – theology – or the roots of modernism lie in a way of doing theology taken too far?

Lurking behind all of that is another question. For many centuries the Churches were able to work with society and to use its philosophical and ethical notions and infuse them with Christ’s teaching. Did there come some point at which that became impossible? Or was it simply that some churches were so deeply entrenched in a defensive posture by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that they preferred to reject rather than adapt modern ideas?

As I have more questions than answers, I’ll stop there.