Second Terrace

Converts and conservatives

One of the many reasons why I left the Protestant community for the Orthodox Church was the latter’s conservatism. It wasn’t the main reason, but it was certainly one of the important ones.

I suspect that the same goes for many of my fellow wayfarers – the clump of ex-protestants that streamed into Orthodoxy from the mid-eighties to 2000. Then, Orthodoxy had that hothouse spritz of the nouveau and exotic. Now, one can detect – amongst the convert community – a sort of fatigue setting in, seemingly from wan habituation and disenchantment.

Nevertheless, we are still conservative, and we are still true. The real enchantment obtains, despite the disappointments of the flesh. Orthodoxy, for all the apparent faults of the present community, is the reality of the Body of Christ. It is the revelation, and practice, of the Apostolic Church.

This next thing I suggest will sound a bit garish, so I beg your pardon in advance. Let me preface the offense with an avant-propos. Since I was allowed in the door (and I mean no irony here, because I really wanted in, and I was – and remain – happy that permission was granted), I have wondered why the Lord has beset the Orthodox Church with so many of us former evangelicals. Truth be told, we are not easy to manage or to get along with. Some of us have transmuted our protestant legalism into Orthodox legalism. Others of us have retained our congregationalism, and have attempted to import guitars and pastoral-search committees. Still others have complained loquaciously about ethnicity and a Balkanized jurisdictional Bayou, despite the fact that this very mess was what brought them the Gospel in the first place.

So I asked God this: “Why do You punish them with us? Wherever we go, we cannot let things alone: in our wake, we spread commissions, projects, marketing strategies, growth campaigns, and even blog sites (like this one). We don’t know the ways of the old country, and we bumble and stumble every time we try to trill our r’s. Why have You inflicted us on them?”

Indeed, we have even cajoled some of the “Cradle” Orthodox (whatever that means) into thinking that we are a blessing. Some time ago, I read, with a heavy squint, a nice Eastern European lady suggesting that the Orthodox community should jettison its old world ways and learn from the ex-protestants – the sooner, the better. She extolled the converts’ bent toward stewardship and community outreach and evangelistic programming.

Flummoxery and bamboozlement.

How mightily we “converts” have talked our revivalist game, and have published our glossy pages, and have duplicated our cassettes and CD’s, and have advertised the wondrous fair invention of this dispensation: the "workshop."

(How’s this quote, lifted from Stefan Beck’s article in the new New Criterion?

If there’s one word that sums up everything that’s gone wrong since the War, it’s Workshop.

[from that wordsmith extraordinaire, Kingsley Amis, in Jake’s Thing])

But enough of the proem: here’s the real goop and bit of garishness:

There is something that the converts have brought to the Orthodox Church, like a dowry. Despite the WASP-y awkwardness, and the ever-ready (and irritating) urge to smite custom into policies and agenda items, we do have our uses.

We have come to be saved, first and foremost. Let us never lose sight of that brightness.

But what can we bring, we poor bumpkins, to the Great House of the Ages?

We have come to help keep you conservative. For we are time travelers, arriving haggard from a possible and sans-Tradition, liberal future.

We know, from our protestant childhood, what the National Council of Churches is, what it looks like under the stump, what it tastes like and how it smells. Nice people sometimes, but as an organization? – nothing to look up to. We saw what the liberalizing elite of a central administration can do to an entire denomination – no matter what the people in the pew want, or sing on a Sunday (after all, many Methodists still sing “Just as I am”). We know, first hand, what happens when a seminary (dressing up for the University) jerks theology out of headship, and shoves it under the tail of philosophy – whether the tail belongs to the Arian hegemony of Tübingen, or the pandering crowd-control of the Fuller Brush Institute.

And even though we don’t like to admit it, we know what happens, inexorably, when the canons mandating chastity and male ordination are shelved. Ask any Episcopalian, former or no.

We have witnessed the results of every heterodox departure, and we were blessed with big numbers at every liberalization of those stodgy rules. When tradition bound us, we paid obeisance to the bottom line: we adjusted, fudged and dispensed with the old, and the bottom reared up, the people applauded, and we heralded ourselves as the anointed.

Sure, we had nice people, and a lot of our social needs were met. Sure, we had our thumb on the pulse of the market, we knew what people wanted (childcare, Starbucks in the Atrium, interest groups, no church on Christmas). Sure, we felt up-to-date and relevant.

But we also felt devolved.

So here we are with our poor gift, but we often don’t know what we have to give you – you who are blessed more than we in the sheer fact that you are cradle-born. I look up to you who are infant-baptized, chrismated in your godmother’s arms, and taught the Sign of the Cross before you spoke. For you, Orthodoxy is second-nature if not the first, and don’t you ever tell me again that I, as a convert, am better off because I am not like you.

But help me, and the rest of us bumpkins, give you what we have. Turn off our PowerPoint projectors. Drag us from our workshops and our book-signing tables. Don’t listen to our nasal dismissals of all things ethnic and good. Overlook our boorishness.

But let us instead warn you of the days to come, and the Number of the Beast.

Let us tell stories of fractured faith and smorgasbord creeds. Let us recount tales of intellects gone awry when wrenched from apostolicity and theoria. Let us sing the dirges of reformations that spiral down into existential skepticism and fundamentalist ghetto.

Let us prove the impossibility of belief, apart from apostolicity, in the Holy Trinity. Let us catalogue the many phases of degradation resulting from anthropology automatized and atomized, shadowed from the light of ecclesial doctrine.

Let us carefully distinguish the difference between the conservancy of Holy Tradition (which is us), and the politics of conservatism (which is not necessarily us). Let us discern the non-conservative, consumptive character that inhabits the core of both national socialism and multi-national capitalism.

Let us remind you why we came, pounding on Noah's doors, as deluvian refugees.

And above all, let us, together, discover Orthodoxy as the stalwart redoubt of humanity against the approach of Leviathan. For it comes, its golden harbingers calling for license and leveling, and a negation of all custom and tradition, and an enthusiastic embrace instead of rational, totalitarian control.

One of these days, someone else will be able to say, once again,  “L’État, c’est moi.” But this time, he won't be a little man, his hand cozied in a waistcoat.

And the only ones who will notice will be Orthodox, and conservative, in the very best senses of the words.

The Catechetical Mutterings of Tiresias

Great Captain, a fair wind and the honey lights of home
are all you seek. But anguish lies ahead;
the god who thunders on the land prepares it,
not to be shaken from your track, implacable …
One narrow strait may take you through his blows:
denial of yourself, restraint of shipmates.

-- Tiresias to Odysseus, in Homer, The Odyssey, XI

News in Orthodoxy has not been idle, despite the fact that idle news is probably the best news. Henry James said it best that journalism is “the criticism of the moment at the moment.” The attention of the news is rarely good attention. Only the mentality of Barnum (and his circus sycophants in Madison Avenue) could conceive the notion that “any news is good news.”

It is a tragedy that Orthodoxy has been in the news with hijinks here and abroad.

It is, as most news is, a mummery, for the harlequin is fast at performing his greater works in the wings. The critics are fulminating. But they have noticed only the masque, and have been played the fool. They have been enraged by the fuddled inanities of the ill-advanced, and they launch tirades at tired old men.

But the criticism "sins," in the old archer sense of "missing wide the mark."

While the aged retreat into cloister, and rummage through shoeboxes of old accounts, and while the internet ecclesialists eructate into curmudgeon-space, Attila is at the gates. The Horde fills the horizon. The red dusk colors the dome of Hagia Sophia. And it is not a good sign today, as it wasn’t then long ago, on another evening in May.

What will happen?

Russia (and even Greece) will go the way of the West. Despite thousands in attendance at glorious liturgies, with the ecclesial pomp that warms the heart of even a former anabaptist bumpkin like me, there really has been no effective catechesis. It will be found that Schmemann was way off in his view that western-style education structures are oofy. It is not enough to call attendance at Divine Liturgy, Vespers and Matins a sufficient “multi-generational educational experience.” Because there was little practical age-based curricula and – gasp – Church School classes, two generations of Orthodox youth now lie completely vulnerable to the wolf-pack of egotistical materialism, which is now ravenously streaming into the confines of Mother Russia (and Rumania, Bulgaria, and much of the rest of the East of old).

The Evangelicals are looking at Russia even now as a mission field: and in their perspective – and mind you, as one of their former own, I know it well – they see Russia and the Slavic East as a people who are crying for their aid.

And they will go in. Like gangbusters. With youth programs. Sunday Schools. Modern Christian music. The usual upscale WalMart mega-church rot. Christian colleges and seminaries. Daycare centers. Hospitals and healthcare centers. Nursing homes. Bill Hybels will be invited to consult on the construction of Russian Willow Creeks.

If I were an Evangelical mission think-tank (these things do exist, by the way), I would design a campaign which involved big audience-draw things like celebrity speakers and Christian rock bands, and a concomitant flurry of new-church starts, each one of which should be an attractive blend of self-improvement and wealth-enhancement, evangelical kitsch, and a dose of icons and troparia to provide just enough familiarity to make the baba’s happy.

Oh, I’m sorry, someone beat me to the punch. The thing’s already being done.

The Russian Church will be diminished. It will shrink, institutionally, to a proportion very similar to Orthodoxy in America.

Eastern Europe will go the way of the West. Secularized. Islamicized. Evangelized. And we will have found, in Orthodoxy, that the exclusive choice of choirs over plain chant was a mistake; that the eschewing of Church School classes in favor of “multi-generational family unit” experiences did not answer; and that the insistence of St. Dionysios the Areopagite of the clerical orders corresponding to the three stages of spirituality should have been attended to.

But there’s another thing, closer to home. There is, under cover of critique, a creep of secularized ecclesiology into the big conversation. There has been an admirable (give the devil his due), constant advancement of feminism in church culture: witness the cause of the female diaconate. There also have been demands for American corporate-type decision-making and administrative structures in the Church. There have been clamors for regional and interest-group representation to be wedged into the center of “policy-making structures.”

There is a desire to sidle up with prominent blueblood mainline “Christian” institutions like the National Council of Churches. There is a wish to be current and well-respected in academic circles. There is the nodding of heads, like automata, at the mainline sniffings against creationism and pro-life hyperbole.

If we were old enough, and wise enough, as an American Orthodox community, we would recognize this sort of accommodation as just another in the line of many institutional appropriations by the culture of industrial finance capitalism. Every institution of the past -- rurality, small towns, the family farm, the pub, the club, the beaux arts, the belles-lettres -- is being consumed by Leviathan. After all, it was President Coolidge who once remarked, “The business of America is business.” Institutions that aid and abet this mission will be encouraged and appropriated. Those that do not, will not be.

There is much to say about the need for Orthodox Americans to mature, as a community, in their love for and ministry to America. Suffice to say, for now, that there is little understanding of America in Orthodoxy. There is, to be sure, a lot of accommodation. But understanding and accomodation are not the same, despite the claims of liberalism throughout the ages (well, at least since Robespierre and Foucault).

For the moment, it is clear, were the shady Tiresias to appear (and I, for one, do not wish to observe the ceremonies), he might say that catechesis is the thing. Not the Rogerian excresence that passed for catechesis during the sixties. But real practical stuff that, say, actually focused on the Creed … or centered on the physical acts (like making the Sign of the Cross) and explained them theologically … or told Bible stories and Saint stories dramatically enough so that kids could remember … or debunked crap like The Da Vinci Code or excreta like The Gospel of Judas.

Catechesis is just the thing for catechumens: why do we forget this? Frankly (sorry for the pun, Fr. Romanides), the catechumenate for all of us should have produced a class of Christians that knew their doctrine, and were practiced in the art of winning the struggle with the passions.

People who are co-opted by materialism (as they are here and in Russia) are people who know nothing about this struggle.

“Denial of yourself, restraint of shipmates.” Indeed.

Do Atheists Exist?

It is no difficult thing to believe that God is real. This is no philosophical achievement. That simple fact is why the whole apologetic enterprise gets a pretty ambivalent, ho-hum review from theology. It is not so much that it is possible to prove God. It is rather that it is impossible to disprove Him.

So the question is not "Is theism tenable?", as if it were possible to ask "Is theos real?" It is not possible to ask this reasonably, in the context of Christian belief. One might as well ask a Christian if he himself exists. If Christianity is true -- which I cannot conceive of it not being true -- then a Christian must -- and I mean must -- look upon the latter statement as a problem stemming from mental illness rather than philosophical inquiry. Given his peculiarly spiritual epistemology, a Christian, after all, is more aware of God's existence than that of his own self. He is aware that his own reality is a corollary of God's.

Moreover, it must be said -- with a nod to St. Dionysios -- that it is really foolish to speak of God existing at all, since God must exhaust all names and categories.

So, if a Christian cannot -- not will not, but can not -- admit the non-existence of God, he must necessarily recognize the question of contemporary atheism as pathological in nature, or -- at the very best -- a question arising from distortions in language.

Thus, the question is not "Is theism tenable?" Rather, the question -- for the Christian who is honest about thinking as a Christian -- is "Is atheism tenable?" In other words, "Do atheists exist?"

It goes without saying that there are many Christians who do not think as Christians. Most of these do so because they do not want to discipline their thinking. This has nothing to do with intelligence or schooling. In fact, the evidence of Christian history suggests that the unschooled Christian has probably done a better job at thinking as a Christian. Because of this "orthodoxy of the unschooled," the perennial movement of the elite academics away from orthodoxy has not had the detrimental effect it might have, had the laity listened to the smart people as much as the smart people thought they should have.

This "perennial movement" of the elitists has been called, very aptly, the "divorce from the laity," and it is chronicled nicely by John Silber.

But there are other Christians who pretend, for a while at least, to not think as Christians. This is the province, of course, of the schooled Christians (many of whom are fairly called "divorcees"), who think it necessary to act the part of a philosopher who is willing to start from the impossible mindset of having no presuppositions. I am not speaking here at all about real apologists … especially those like St. Justin Martyr, John Henry Cardinal Newman, G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis. I am referring here, instead, to Christian scholars and scientists who divide their mind into professional (i.e., “scientific”) thinking, and Christian thinking. They allow their professional thinking to start with the materialistic suppositions provided by their non-Christian peers.

Once again, the question remains – for these professional “scientific” Christians – whether even this sort of “provisional” atheism, let alone the more honest, thorough atheism, is at all possible.

I suggest that while atheism is really not tenable, it is certainly promulgated. The Prophet Isaiah took great pains to show that the idols of his age were not real. Nevertheless, "idolatry" certainly did exist as an opinion. Nevermind the fact that it is sloppy to say that opinions "exist." It is like describing the soap suds in a bathtub as "solid."

So we refine the question further. Instead of asking "Do atheists exist?," perhaps it is better to ask "Just why would they want to?" Exist, that is. What do atheists "get" out of saying something so deeply, so ontologically foolish, so mentally ill? What is the "pay off" for even "going along" with one's peers in the marketplace or the laboratory, supposing an impossible circumstance where God is not real even in the strictures of materalistic measurement?

The real reason why an atheist (or "provisional atheist)  does not want to believe in God is not because he positively believes that God does not exist, as this is impossible. Rather it is because he ends up being afraid that He does not.  Concomitantly, the atheist perceives a dim, aching awareness that evil is energetically present without essence. He is then compelled by a converse protest -- it is better to discard the entire category of the non-material than to permit the horrific possibility that evil exists, and God does not.

In other words, atheism is opted as a defense against evil. It is better to disbelieve in God, because such provisional atheism is a comfort against the possibility of ghosts.

But there are ghosts and demons. Science, truth be told, is chock full of spooky things -- and such phenomena are not spooky simply because they are not yet fully understood. Some phenomena -- like transcendental numbers -- become spookier the more one knows about them.

It may very well come to pass that scientists will find, if they haven't already, ghosts in their machines. And these ghosts will not be manipulatable, not like rats in a maze. No, these ghosts wil be of the transcendent sort, the kind that react, unseemly, against the very act of measurement. And it will appear, even to the most skeptical sort, just who is in the maze of material, and who is outside.

As progress marches on inexorably, scientists will never prove or disprove God in their laboratory. But they will -- mark this -- deduce the Devil. Evil, as a retrogressive mode of being, is eminently prove-able. And as such, the Beast will undoubtedly be, if he isn't already, a quite onerous ghost of machines built by atheists.

The irony of it all is that the proper response to the fear of evil is to run toward, not deny, the God Who overcomes all death. Evil, like all cancers, cannot be invented away by the sophisticated denials conjured up in the alchemy of atheism.

Randy Boyagoda on George Weigel’s The Cube and the Cathedral on National Review Online

Link: Randy Boyagoda on George Weigel’s The Cube and the Cathedral on National Review Online.

Europe's ongoing rejection of the Church is manifested by the EU Constitution's Christophobic amnesia, and by the calculated disregard of the old Catholic community -- a community bound together by Latin, pilgrimages, Councils and Christian culture. Now look. Hyper and post-modern structures like cubes have eclipsed cathedrals (those messy, gothic, unbalanced and fecund-looking things -- so very outre for the pomo savant).

Here's an arresting thought: Though it would take decades for such a situation to develop, a Europe potentially defined -- from its leadership down -- by a broadly anti-Western Muslim majority would pose striking civilizational challenges to the U.S.

Has any of Chesterton's fans out there noticed how wonderfully precogniscent is his book, The Flying Inn? Especially the last chapter. And this was written when the most threatening Muslim power was Turkey.

Not to mention any link between the rejection of the Church, and the current drought and locust barrage.

Is the Reformation Over? - Books & Culture

Link: Is the Reformation Over? - Books & Culture.

Though the authors mention Orthodoxy (as in "Eastern Orthodoxy") only once or twice, the reasons for leaving Evangelicalism and entering the Great Church (whether Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic) are trenchantly described. Despite the  well-meaning nostalgia of folk like R. C. Sproul, and rescuscitative attempts like ECT, and mean-spirited flames like Chick Books, the title (and essay) insinuate an unsettling answer.

Of course it's over. The Reformation was over as soon as it became schismatic. The only unity that bound the Reformers together was their common origin and continued, implicit fellowship with the Catholic Church of East and West.