Category: Uncategorized

Speaking of the Orthodox, this is Holy Week for them!

Here’s an article on conversions to Orthodoxy.

Here’s something on Greek Orthodox Easter traditions.

(It is also, not coincidentally, Passover of course!)

Christian tradition selector! (To be taken with a grain (or more) of salt of course.)

My results:

1: Eastern Orthodox (100%)
2: Lutheran (94%)
3: Anglican/Episcopal/Church of England (92%)
4: Roman Catholic (87%)
5: Presbyterian/Reformed (53%)
6: Congregational/United Church of Christ (48%)
7: Methodist/Wesleyan/Nazarene (48%)
8: Anabaptist (Mennonite/Quaker etc.) (35%)
9: Baptist (Reformed/Particular/Calvinistic) (35%)
10: Pentecostal/Charismatic/Assemblies of God (35%)
11: Church of Christ/Campbellite (33%)
12: Baptist (non-Calvinistic)/Plymouth Brethren/Fundamentalist (25%)
13: Seventh-Day Adventist (25%)

Reconciliation with Lutherans is close to this pope’s heart:

According to John Allen, the American Vatican-watcher who has kept an eye on Joseph Ratzinger for the past few years and written his biography (Cardinal Ratzinger, Continuum), the Pope’s greatest hopes are for talks on Christian unity with the Lutherans, who number about 60 million.

John at Confessing Evangelical is skeptical.

How about a little book blogging? Robert P. Kraynak’s Christian Faith and Modern Democracy looks like it’ll provide enough food for thought for several posts worth of material.

Kraynak sets out to defend what he calls the dilemma of Christianity’s relation to modern liberal democracy. His thesis is that “modern liberal democracy needs God, but God is not as liberal or democratic as we would like Him to be.” (p. xiii)

In chapter 1, “Why Modern Liberal Democracy Needs God,” Kraynak makes the case for the first part of his thesis. He begins by distinguishing ancient democracy, as we see it in ancient Athens, from modern liberal democracy, as it came to exist in the English, American, and French revolutions. Athenian democracy was aimed as much as anything at providing an arena for the expression and cultivation of manly virtue. It incorporated a blood-and-soil ethos that tended to be both xenophobic and imperialistic.

By contrast, modern liberal democracy seeks to provide a framework within which citizens pursue their own goals and projects, especially those of commerce. Modern democracy was from its inception a bourgeois creed. Rather than basing itself on a particular account of virtue or excellence tied to a particular culture, it takes as its starting point “the rights of man” as set out in the American and French revolutions. Modern democracy, Kraynak contends, is “self-consciously ideological.”

The fact remains that modern liberal democracies have been shaped by philosophical doctrines in a way that previous regimes never were; and the decisive doctrine is the philosophy of liberalism.

If we probe the foundations of this philosophy, we reach the deepest level of modern liberal democratic culture: the new notion of human dignity that underlies individual rights and democratic consent. The modern notion of human dignity has many dimensions. The first is the dignity of the individual, meaning the inherent worth of every person as a responsible moral agent, possessing independent judgment and free will. This could be called rational autonomy, for it implies the capacity of individuals to make choices for themselves; it could also be called willful autonomy, for it often involves raw assertions of the will in creating a unique personal identity. The second dimension of human dignity is political, the dignity of a people or a nation that freely chooses its destiny. This is sometimes referred to (in the language of the United Nations) as national self-determination or (in the American tradition) as republican self-government. (p. 21)

Philosophical liberalism radically calls into question all authority and limits on human aspirations. For this reason it goes hand in hand with self-government as well as “technological mastery and economic improvement” (p. 25). Liberalism tends to have a certain metaphysical view of the world; the universe is, at best, indifferent to human behavior. If there is a god, he doesn’t intervene in human affairs (it’s no coincidence, Kraynak would say, that someone like Jefferson was a deist). Humans must use their reason to discover the rational laws governing the universe in order to improve their lot.

Kraynak sees two major problems with liberal democracy. The fist is that it involves a trade off creating what he calls, following thinkers like de Toqueville and Ortega y Gasset, a debased “mass culture.”

On the one hand, bourgeois civilization increases the material standard of living and economic opportunities to unprecedented heights for the vast majority of people, overcoming the misery and degradation of poverty that most people have endured for centuries. But the negative consequence is a society dominated by the prosaic activities of material production and consumption, usually in the sterile atmosphere of an urban office building and impersonal suburb, where the chief concerns of people are economic security and status, bourgeois creature comforts, and physical health. These concerns are so obsessive that they begin to redefine reality and create a new metaphysical consciousness which turns the bodily/material world into an absolute horizon. (p. 28)

The degradation of mass society is the outcome of the second, and more fundamental, problem with liberal democracy. This is its agnosticism and skepticism about the ultimate ends of human existence. Since the 17th century one of the main arguments for liberal society has been an appeal to skepticism about our ability to determine what the good is. As Kraynak puts it, “the less certain we are about the highest ends of life the more all people gain in dignity by seeking to determine their own identities and becoming the masters of their fate” (p. 30).

But once ultimate ends are banished from the public sphere, the blandishments of consumer society rush in to fill the void. Instead of a society of daring non-conformists we get a society of careerist-consumerist drones. The problem, Kraynak insists, is that liberalism can’t provide a satisfying account of the human dignity it supposedly exists to protect.

Kraynak surveys the major schools of liberal thought: the rights-based liberalism of Hobbes and Locke, the utilitarianism/pragmatism of Bentham, Mill, and John Dewey, the idealism of Kant, and, finally, the postmodern anti-foundationalism of thinkers like Richard Rorty, and the contractarianism of John Rawls. All of these perspectives fail to provide a secure grounding for human dignity due to their skepticism and subjectivism. They attempt to ground human rights in the shifting sands of desire or self-interested reason while maintaining a scrupulous agnosticism about the ultimate value of human life. None of them provide compelling reasons for thinking that humans posses the dignity which is supposed to ground liberal democracy.

Rorty in particular Kraynak takes to represent the reductio ad absurdum of liberalism, since Rorty frankly admits to being a “freeloading atheist” living off the moral capital of Christianity and its insistence on the dignity of each individual. This leads to Kraynak’s conclusion that the “moral assumptions underlying modern liberal democracy cry out for religious and metaphysical assistance” (p. 37).

The kind of assistance liberal democracy needs is a compelling account of human dignity. None of the philosophers of liberalism have provided good reason why, in a materialistic world, human beings should deserve any special treatment. How do bits of swirling atoms come to be endowed with dignity?

Though Kraynak doesn’t mention it in this chapter, we could point out the further issue that liberalism faces, namely, deciding who should count as persons in the first place. Having abandoned any notion of human beings as created in the image of God, some thinkers have tried to ground human dignity in certain faculties possessed by (at least some) human beings such as rational thought. This has resulted in the development of so-called personhood theory where it isn’t enough simply to be a human being in order to posses dignity. Instead, one must have attained a certain level of rational thought or “self-consciousness” or some other property that supposedly secures “personhood.” On this account certain “marginal” human beings (the unborn, the mentally disabled, even healthy newborn infants) no longer qualify as “persons” in the full sense and are, correspondingly, owed a diminished amount of moral consideration. This indicates that what began as an egalitarian creed may, having lost its metaphysical or religious underpinnings, end up justifying the oppression of the weak by the strong.

Having concluded that liberalism needs some religious underpinning, Kraynak is going to turn to the question of whether Christianity in fact entails, as so many have contended, support for liberal democracy.

One of the most despicable smears frequently employed against opponents of wars is that they are “really” rooting for the other side. We saw this during the run-up to the Iraq war, where anti-war types were routinely characterized as being “pro-Saddam.”

Fortunately, military men are often more sensible than civilian laptop bombardiers so eager to send them into action. Here’s an interesting recollection from a Vietnam vet reflecting on the very different kinds of anti-war activism practiced by Jane Fonda on the one hand and Joan Baez on the other:

For those who don’t quite understand, being in favor of one side over another in a war is not “anti-war” activity. To the contrary! The articles about [Fonda] and her “apology” (for choosing the wrong vehicle of publicity, not for her position in favor of the enemy) should not continue repeating the canard that she engaged in “anti-war activities” when she so clearly sided with a party to a war: North Vietnam. She absolutely refuses to acknowledge that she wasn’t just a part of the anti-war or pacifist fringe in the United States at the time, but was in fact a true believer and supporter of North Vietnam during its war with the United States.

By contrast, look at the trip to Hanoi that famous folk singer Joan Baez, with Brigadier General Teleford Taylor (well-known Nuremberg war prosecutor) made just two and one half months after Jane Fonda’s notorious propaganda visit. Ms. Baez and Gen Tayor were trapped in Hanoi during the entire “Linebacker II” Christmas bombing raids over and around that city–in which I again was heavily involved. Ms Baez made no bones about her pacifist beliefs and her hatred of wars. Yet, even after suffering through some of the most intense bombing raids of the entire Vietnam War, when asked by her hosts/watchers to make anti-US statements, she stuck to her beliefs, saying she hated all war by all sides, no matter what. We fighting men heard Baez’s statements as soon as they were made. Somehow, we ignorant warriors were sophisticated enough to recognize the difference between Baez’s anti-war statements and Fonda’s open promotion of North Vietnamese victory–an apparently too-subtle distinction that has escaped the press even today. Most of us respected Baez’s view, even if we differed with it–and acknowledged her right as an American to express that view even during a war. I was able to talk personally to Ms Baez about that several years later; she was pleased that we warriors certainly understood her point.

TomDispatch has the second part of its series of exceprts from Andrew Bacevich’s New American Militarism.

Can’t believe I forgot St. Anselm’s feast day! As penance, we can read this article from CT on why he’s as relevant as ever. The article also suggests that Pope Benedict XVI may be willing to relent on the filioque clause in the Nicene Creed, the clause which Anselm himself defended (although, the article does identiy Anselm’s atonement theory with the penal substitution theory favored by evangelicals, something I’ve griped about before) .

If that doesn’t slake your Anselmian thirst, consider reading the Proslogion; the ontological argument ought to keep your wheels turning all weekend at least.

Received an email today from Melissa Rogers, who’s a Visiting Professor of Religion and Public Policy at Wake Forest University Divinity School. Prof. Rogers sent a link to an op-ed she publised in the Baltimore Sun on the preposterous attempts of Sen. Frist and other GOP senators to paint Democratic opposition to President Bush’s judicial nominees as an attack on “people of faith.”

Here’s Prof. Rogers:

I am a churchgoing, Bible-believing Baptist, but I recently learned that I’m not a Christian. Indeed, I’ve not only learned that I’m not a Christian, I’ve also learned that I’m anti-Christian and hostile to religion. Why? Because I dare to disagree with a certain political and legal agenda.

That’s the message that is scheduled to be preached in a Kentucky church Sunday, at an event sponsored by the Family Research Council and joined by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. The event is titled “Justice Sunday: Stopping the Filibuster Against People of Faith.”

[…]

There is no “filibuster against people of faith.” Religious people are on both sides of the debate about the filibuster and certain Bush-nominated judges. And it’s wrong for one of the country’s foremost political leaders to lend legitimacy to a contrary notion. Just as no one should have to pass a religious test in order to hold political office, no one should have to pass a political test in order to claim religion or morality.

[…]

Just as the government always perverts the faith it promotes, politicians cheapen the religion they seek to embrace when they push partisan politics in churches. When Jesus cast the moneychangers out of the temple, He said, “My house shall be called the house of prayer.”

Read the rest, as they say.

Regular readers know that this is a hobbyhorse of mine; the attempt to identify any particular political agenda as the “Christian” position (much less the “pro-faith” position – what does that even mean?) does not take seriously the distinction between the City of God and the City of Man.

Thanks to Prof. Rogers for sending this along.

Relatedly, Sen. Frist’s church – the PCUSA – is apparently none too happy about his participation in this farce.

This is nuts. But waitaminute! I thought Pres. Bush=Hitler? Get your story straight, guys.

(via Pontifications)

When we talk about ecumenism and pray for the unity of the church, what kind of unity are we looking for? I don’t have any well-thought out ideas on the matter, but Josh left a comment outlining his idea of what unity might look like that I think merits a post of its own (edited slightly):

1) Any christian, of any church which can be said to be rooted in historical orthodoxy (as represented in the creeds, and the Councils of Nicea I, Constantinople I, & Chalcedon) can participate in the sacraments in any other Christian church on the planet. I think this might be expanded to include the Eastern dissident churches as well, due to their antiquity, and possibly Unitarians and Universalists since their roots are in the 16th century Reformed churches. This might also include Quakers but would probably exclude Mormons, JW’s etc.

2) Easy transfer of membership from one congregation to another. If I want to start going to another congregation of another denomination, I should be able to just get a letter or better yet electronic transfer of membership to my new congregation without having to go though a new membership process to get plugged into the ministries of my new church home.

3) Greater co-operation in evangelism, relief and health care work, education, economic development, leadership development, and other global missions activity. This might take the form of a global missions fund or series of funds all denominations contribute to and draw from.

4) Limited clergy sharing. In groups with few real doctrinal differences like Methodists and Episcopalians or Presbyterians and Congregationalists, there should be complete sharing. For other groups there could be limited sharing, at the discrecion of the bishop, presbytery or whatever in a particular locality.

5) A recognition of the see of Rome as the primus inter pares (nothing more), not only among the bishops per se but among individual church bodies.

6) All current denominations would maitain their individual seminaries, ecclesiastical bodies, magisteriums (sorry my Latin is rusty) and polity.

7) A new TRULY ecumenical council to iron all this out and find common ground on which to base this new unity, like the scriptures, Justification by grace through faith, the creeds, love, the Holy Spirit, Christ, etc. There should also be smaller synods to meet in various nations and regions from time to time and perhaps a regular schedule of councils to meet regularly.

Any thoughts?