Author: Lee M.

CT interviews philosopher Antony Flew on his recent “conversion” to deism. It’s pretty retro to be a deist, isn’t it? Very 18th century. Of course, Flew is also a devotee of 18th century political philosophy, so there you go. (Yes, I know Locke is technically 17th century, but the high-water mark of the influence of Lockean political ideas was surely the 18th century.)

Love ‘im or hate ‘im, John Derbyshire remains the most elegant and interesting writer at National Review (though I would also give props to Jay Nordlinger). Anyway, here’s his rather gloomy piece on the legacy of John Paul II:

So far as it makes any sense to predict the future, it seems to me highly probable that the world of 50 or 100 years from now will bear a close resemblance to Huxley’s dystopia — a world without pain, grief, sickness or war, but also without family, religion, sacrifice, or nobility of spirit. It’s not what I want, personally, and it’s not what Huxley wanted either (he was a religious man, though of a singular type). It’s what most people want, though; so if this darn democracy stuff keeps spreading, it’s what we shall get, for sure. If we don’t bring it upon ourselves, we shall import it from less ethically fastidious nations.

In that context, the late pope will be seen — assuming anyone bothers to study history any more — as a rearguard fighter, a man who stood up for human values before they were swept away by the posthuman tsunami. There is great nobility in that, but it is a tragic nobility, the stiff-necked nobility of the hopeless reactionary. You might say that John Paul II (who, you do not need to tell me, would have pounced gleefully on that word “hopeless”) stood athwart History crying “Stop!” Alas, what is coming down History Turnpike is a convoy of 18-wheel rigs moving fast, and loaded up full with the stuff that got Doctor Faustus in trouble — knowledge, pleasure, power. They ain’t going to stop for anyone. Homo fuge!

Via Jonathan at The Ivy Bush comes this interesting article on a discussion between two Methodist theologians arguing that the UMC needs a greater emphasis on doctrine. Though I don’t know much about John Wesley, what struck me in the article’s description of his theology was how much he drew on other Christian traditions, and not just those of the Reformation.

For instance, it suggests that Wesley had a somewhat Catholic view of the relationship between justification and sanctification, and that his views on original sin were closer to Eastern Orthodoxy than the Western Augustine-influenced tradition (the Orthodox believe, I think, that we inherit a tendency toward sin, but not the guilt of our ancestors’ sin – i.e. we are not born guilty as some in the Western tradition seem to have held). And I think I recall reading elsewhere that Wesley was a lifelong high-church Anglican with a strong Eucharistic piety who believed in receiving the Sacrament frequently (not exactly common practice in today’s Methodist churches, I believe).

I guess my point is that there’s been a lot of interest in some Protestant quarters for recovering some of the treasures of the pre-Reformation (and pre-schism?) church. Could Wesley be a resource here?

Anyone else seen the ads for this? It looks kind of like Left Behind meets the Da Vinci Code if you can believe that (crossing the red/blue divide!). The one thing that puzzles me is that based on the TV spots, it seems to be implying that the Second Coming involves Jesus coming back … as a baby. Huh?

Although I have had a soft spot for Bill Pullman ever since Spaceballs…

This post on Anglican theologian R.R. Reno’s recent conversion to Catholicism got me to thinking about what it means to seek (and possibly find) the “true church.” Arguments about the claims and counter-claims of various churches can involve a complex set of interlocking historical and theological considerations (see, for instance, any number of comments threads at Pontifications), which makes choosing a church seem like an unbelieveably complicated thing to do.

I don’t mean to disparage these kinds of discussions, but after a while the average layperson might be forgiven for concluding that the only way to discover the “true” church would be to take advanced degrees in history, theology, comparative religion, philosophy, philology…

It hardly needs pointing out that this kind of inquiry could be undertaken only by a very small minority of Christians. And, more to the point, it is no doubt extremely atypical as a means by which people are drawn into any particular church. Personally, my entrance into the ELCA was almost embarrassingly haphazard. It didn’t involve long hours poring over the Book of Concord and doing an exhaustive study of Reformation history let me assure you. And I’m probably atypical among laypeople in being as interested in this stuff as I am.

Doesn’t this suggest, then, that the way we think about what constitutes the “true” church should be guided, at least in part, by how people actually come to enter faith communities? Given what seems to be involved in certifying the claims of any given church (according to some), only a tiny minority would ever be intellectually justified in picking one church over another! But surely that can’t be how God intended it to be, can it?

I guess this is part of the reason that I remain a kind of Lewisian “mere Christian” – Lewis believed that the various church communions were like rooms in the same house, all of them particularized ways of living out the central truths of the Christian religion. But to take this position is already to be a Protestant since it involves a rejection of any claims that the true church subsists in any one institutional expression. Or to put it another way, it suggests a principle of latitude with respect to who’s part of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. (Which is not to say that any church is as good as any other.)

The bottom line is this: Our personal commitment to Jesus is a poor substitute for His personal commitment to us. The gospel is not an exhortation to take Jesus as our personal savior. It is the stunning proclamation that in the gospel events, He has taken us as His personal sinners. It is that proclamation that pure doctrine is meant to serve. To represent the Lutheran confession of the biblical faith of the church catholic is to make that case.

— The Rev. Dr. Louis A. Smith, Pastor Emeritus in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America

Here’s a pretty snide article on Jim Wallis from the Weekly Standard (well, what did you expect?). One interesting thing that comes through is that Wallis seems to have become less radical over the years. I mean, if you go from being an outspoken pacifist writing for a journal called the Post-American (the predecessor to Sojourners) to meeting with Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid, you must be doing something right (well, if getting access to the corridors of power is doing right, that is).

Also, I’m not one to hold people too strictly to things they said 25 years ago, but did Wallis really say this about the Vietnamese boat people:

“Many of today’s refugees were inoculated with a taste for a Western lifestyle during the war years and are fleeing to support their consumer habit in other lands.”

Yikes!

Here’s a fine piece of criticism by Marc Cooper taking on the theories of Berkeley linguist George Lakoff, who has become something of post-election guru for dispirited Democrats. Lakoff argues that the Dems simply need to “re-frame” the terms of the debate so that their policies will be more appealing (e.g. Republicans say “tax relief,” Dems should say “investing in America” or “membership fees”).

Cooper, himself a man of the Left and an editor at The Nation, says that this is really just liberal self-pity in the guise of political strategy (“There’s nothing wrong with us, it’s just that the stupid masses have been suckered by those evil Republicans!”). Instead, Cooper suggests, liberals and Democrats might want to consider making some actual changes in policy.

Not, of course, that future popes (including the next one) may not be Europeans, but that the concerns of the papacy will tend to shift away from Europe, the USA, and our “culture wars” and toward issues of pressing concern in the “2/3rds world,” where global Christianity’s center of gravity is shifting to. That, at least, is Ross Douthat’s contention:

[D]espite the Pope’s efforts to propose an alternative path for the West, it seems likely that the Christian story in Europe is nearing an end. What was once the heartland of Catholicism is the most secular continent in the world, a place where churchgoing is the province of the aging and eccentric and where the birth rate has dwindled (save among Europe’s rising Muslim population). The picture is more encouraging for Catholicism in America–but even the disproportionate influence of the United States in world affairs cannot mask the fact that American Catholics constitute a small and shrinking percentage of a huge global faith.

So Christianity’s center of gravity will shift, inexorably, away from the West, and with it the concerns of the Church and of the papacy. The next pope may well be a European, but the realities of demography and devotion will force him to be far more engaged with developments in Africa or Latin America, India or China, than with the controversies that have so exercised the Pope’s Western critics. It’s not so much that the influence of the developing world will push the Vatican to continue emphasizing doctrinal orthodoxy and traditional teachings on sexual matters–though it almost certainly will. It’s that the shape of global Christendom will require future popes to spend far less time arguing with the declining population of the secular West, and more time dealing with the concerns of a world in which, by 2050, only a fifth of all believers will be non-Hispanic whites.

Thus, debates over Catholic relations with other Western faiths will take a back seat to combating syncretism in South Asia and promoting religious liberty in China. The rise of Pentecostalism in Latin America will pose more of a challenge than the question of homosexuality or women’s ordination. And above all, the conflict with Islam in sub-Saharan Africa will likely come to dominate the Church’s agenda–and the numbers and the stakes involved will make disputes over divorce and contraception feel like a sideshow.

This is largely, of course, a reiteration of the Jenkins thesis. As far as the church is concerned, the West is not necessarily the center of the world anymore. However, it will still be the case that, for the foreseeable future, the West (though perhaps increasingly places like China and India too) will remain the center of political and economic power, which is not something the church can afford to ignore.

Inevitably, folks want to claim as renowned a personage as John Paul II as one of their own – as favoring their own particular political program. With that caveat in mind, here are a couple of interesting pieces on John Paul and his relation to American politics:

• Justin Raimondo, “In Defense of John Paul II, Peacemaker” at Antiwar.com
• Max Sawicky on “The Gospel of John Paul II”

From the latter:

The viewpoint least congenial to the Pope’s views happens to be the faux-libertarian/jingoist mindset prominent in Blogistan (the right-wing hemisphere of the blogosphere). After all, by their standards the Pope was quite the “idiotarian.” He was wrong on their favorite issue — the War on Terror. Not only did he oppose the Iraqi invasion, he also opposed the first Gulf War and the Clinton Administration’s Serbian venture. Morever, this opposition was not founded on some Democratic ‘realist’ interpretation of the national interest, but of a more-or-less pacifist framework. Violence, bad.

Of course, insofar as the faux-libertarian view extends towards abortion, stem cell research, the Schiavo case, etc., the Pope was at odds there as well.

Meanwhile, in the category of “Love the Pope, Not the Papacy,” Confessing Evangelical and Here We Stand both post on the limits of Protestant admiration for popery (See here, here & here).

John at CE makes the astute observation that some Protestants have perhaps been too eager to elevate co-belligerence on “culture war” issues over genuine theological disagreements that remain between them and Rome.

For my part, I’m sort of ambivalent about the papacy. As a Lutheran I naturally can’t accept the claims that it makes for itself. And yet, it does seem to me to be a good thing that there is an instutionalized trans-national Christian witness that isn’t beholden to any one national or secular political agenda (as the World Council of Churches all too often seems to be). Is there a form of the papacy that Protestants could accept – one divested of its claims to infallibility, say?