The Actual Culture War

So there definitely is a culture war.  It doesn’t take much reading through academic literature and the press to see that discussions of reason and revelation, faith and science, social freedoms, public morality, and sexual identity all attract attention and all cut to the deepest convictions and principles of American society.  And it doesn’t take long to see that America is unsettled on those convictions and principles.  The problem is that this culture war is often pretty mixed up, with participants shooting themselves in the foot as often as anything else.

They say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.  This is true.  People learn a couple of talking points and a few intellectual formulas, and suddenly they think they have profound weaponry for social regeneration.  One example is a billboard on Interstate 55 here in Jackson.  It’s advertising a school which, I’m told, actually does do a good job at placing students into colleges and preparing them for high-paying jobs.  Still, the sign’s faux intellectualism is unnerving.  It advertises that the school will “Teach you how to think, not what to think.”  Now that certainly sounds pious.  This school, unique among all others, will avoid brainwashing its students with socio-political bias and will instead impart to them a view-from-nowhere objectivity that will allow these students to discover the best world and life for each of them, as they freely realize it on their own, with no intrusion from the principalities and powers.

Obviously that’s ridiculous.  

Orthodox Folks I Really Like

To remind myself that I’m not crazy, I wanted to think out loud for a minute.  I really appreciate and have learned from the following authors:

Alexander Schmemann
John Meyendorff
David Bentley Hart
Andrew Louth
Veselin Kesich
Aristotle Papanikolaou
George Demacopoulos
Alexander Golitzin

Of course, I have points of disagreement with each of these authors, but whenever one of them makes a statement, I take that statement seriously.  The only exception is when David Bentley Hart says something about Calvin and Luther.  He typically doesn’t give them a legitimate treatment at all, and so I tend to tune him out there.  But if he wants to talk about the fathers, medievals, or even postmodern philosophers, I’m all ears.

I only even say this because apologetics get me down.  I start to question myself, thinking that maybe I’m just a jerk TR on the inside.  But when I remember that no, there are, in fact, people with whom I disagree but still respect and consider my superiors, things look a little better.

The “America Argument”

This is not a proof of theological principles from civic effects.  It is an argument as to what is and what is not reality.

The middle ages, Christendom, worked because the civic sphere agreed to go along with a concept of reality.  From time to time there were clashes, and from time to time the clerical magisterium won.  Other times it lost.  And after the Reformation, honestly, it did lose.  Here’s how.

Augsburg achieved imperial recognition.  Trent was not wholly received by the empire, mainly because Charles V was at war with the Pope.  Trent was also not received by France.  The rule of cuius regio, eius religio, as well as the Edict of Nantes show that even in non-Protestant lands, a semi-Protestant civil policy was created.  And of course there was England, Scandanavia, and some of the Eastern branches of the Empire who were wholly Protestant.

With this settlement, the Pope is left to be the team captain only because he changes the game.  Under the old rules, he should have won.  He should have dethroned the various heretic monarchs.  Yes there were a few penitential assassination attempts, but they were not terribly successful.  Admit it or not, the Papacy is now a party rather than the party.

And that’s a historical win for Protestantism.  They can exist with this set-up.  And they did.  Rome did not increase the bounds of its empire.  Quite the reverse happened.  With the near (not total!) erasure of the Papal States and the cessation of the papacy’s political influence over other magistrates, the medieval game is definitively changed.

The only reason we are not impressed by this is because we have so made our peace with the civic/religious distinction, something very un-medieval.

And so all my point has to be is that things have changed.  You can say that they haven’t, but then you’re the one electing to work in the alternate reality, not me.  For the purposes of rhetoric, this is worth pointing out.   The Protestant position on the Church, being an outgrowth of the Conciliarist movement, can live with national sovereignty, indeed it demands it.

National sovereignty is our position no matter the challenges that it may occasion.

Who Knew?

It turns out that Energetic Procession guys have been pretty much crazy all along.  Who knew?

The best irony (of the many ironies) in the post was when Perry said he didn’t believe in conspiracy theories.  I suppose he’s no longer such a big Joseph Farrell fan then.

Honestly, none of this is a surprise.  The EP guys have always been a real-life Dungeons and Dragons outfit, and this latest news is simply public evidence of what we already knew.  A normal adult does not go from “Daniel” to “Photios” without a little bit of face paint and a black cape.  The Sith Lord avatars were a perfect fit.

This is a common occurrence with the radical converts too.  They never convert to Orthodoxy in order to meditate silently atop a mountain.  No, they get a wholesale makeover and then begin talk talk talking again.  They shift from Right Wing fundy-extremists to pacifist vegans.  They start talking about “the Jews” this and “the Freemasons” that.  They join Serbian liberation movements.  There’s more than a bit of identity crisis involved here.

I will be discussing this in more detail during my catholicity lectures this weekend.  For now I can just ask that if you are going to do something amazingly irresponsible with your spiritual life, at least have the decency to leave the rest of the world out of it.

For All Interested

If you’ll follow this link, you’ll notice that one of the speakers on Sept. 12 is me.  Of course if you’ve been following me over the last year or so, you know that I’ve been intensely concerned with Protestants leaving for Rome or Orthodoxy in their efforts to find tradition, catholicity, and all-around coolness.  I think I’ve got some helpful material on addressing this problem, with perhaps a better solution to offer in its place.

A more detailed description of my lectures looks something like this:

Lecture #1- Lost in the Shamayim: A Psychology of Conversion
Lecture #2- The Eternal City and the Seven Councils: Just Who is the Church?
Lecture #3- What’s a Reformed Catholic to Do?: Towards an Equilibrium of Christendom

#1 will address why folks convert, debunk some myths, and give some pastoral advice on how to deal.
#2 will tackle specific claims of RC and EO, namely apostolic succession, the “early church” and the “councils,” and the right role of tradition.
#3 will try to give a narrative of “Church History” which includes kings and laymen, as well as technological and social issues which formed Christian epochs.  I’ll conclude with a plea for Reformed Catholicism, giving some pointers on forming a proper identity.

Self-Deception

On my long drive home from a preaching gig this past weekend, I put in some old Greg Bahnsen mp3s.  His Centennial Celebration of Van Til is excellent.

The second lecture in that series is on self-deception, and I appreciated it because the concept is fairly difficult.  If all men believe in God, and the unbelievers reject Him, how is it that they don’t know God?  How is an unbeliever really a believer?  Is he simply lying?  That doesn’t seem to be the case.  Yet how can we affirm that on some level he does know God?

Bahnsen’s answer is that the unbeliever does believe in the existence of God, but he does not believe that he believes in the existence of God.  He affirms one thing about God, but another about himself.

I’d never quite thought of it that way before, but it seems a helpful way to think of it.

Wilson-Hitchens Debate in Christianity Today

This is one of the more exciting things I’ve seen in a while.  Doug Wilson is defending the faith against atheism in perhaps the largest Evangelical magazine, albeit online.  I’m sure that many people will read Wilson for the first time during all of this, and who knows, we might even see him published in the hardcopy CT.

Wilson also shows us, once again, that the medium is the message.  His style is as persuasive as his content, and this is a lesson that keen readers should pick up on.