Jello Salad in the Public Square
I have been chided, in a not overly gentle manner, for not being enthusiastic enough for some recent declarations. One such declaration called "Manhattan" was full of things with which no one with a human nature could rightly disagree. I demurred in my response, mainly suggesting that making declarations is either like Diogenes doing barrel rolls down the Corinthian hillside. Or it is like operating a Baptist booth on the public square with jello salad and koolaid for sale, while everyone else is hawking draft beer, sausage and onions, kapusta pirohi and slivovica.
I also thought that the Declaration, as well as most declarations, was missing a lot on the menu: there were appetizers and dessert, but the main course (you know, the meat-and-potato part that actually explains things) was left ambiguous. It tried to be robust and prophetic, but ended up coming out "prophet lite," mostly pop and carbonation.
These days, it is the fashion in Christian quarters to claim to be a Prophet, or at least to use a Prophet or the whole lot of them (or the Apostles) as precedent for a thought or fuzzy impression about which one has grown excessively fond.
Prophets can be found in surprising places. I find them prophesying in daily, mundane conversation. One of my favorite dead giveaways is: "I'm really a great judge of character." By this expression, the Prophet means that his judgments about the quality of another individual should be taken as Gospel, or even more seriously than that.
I have found that they who claim such extraordinary powers are usually deficient in that very ability. "Great judges of character" are usually blind to the sordid character around them. Meanwhile, saints who possess real clairvoyance would never make such claims.
Or how about this variety of pop-prophecy? "I have a vision." Or, "I'm vision-casting." Or, more explicitly, "I feel the Spirit [Who happens to be agreeing with me] moving." I heard this last line in an ecclesial discussion some months ago about an issue no less captivating than a consideration of new funding proposals.
I'll be blunt: the Holy Spirit does not manifest prophecies about funding proposals, whether they refer to the protestant tradition of tithing or the newfangled Aladdin's Lamp of "proportional giving." (cue whispered crowd gasps of ooh's and aah's).
The Holy Spirit does prophesy – a lot – about deification. In fact, that is simply the content of all prophesy. There is no prophecy without theosis as the critical concern.
Most "visions" are tricked-out New Age versions of "plans" or "goals." Visions of this sort are grammatically (and thematically) similar to the Mission Statement of Ronald McDonald. They generally, even in church, have to do with corporate growth (so does McDonalds), customer satisfaction (so does McDonalds), and employee morale (so does McDonalds).
On the other hand, real visions are received by real saints: and even in this case, visions are not pursued, and they are certainly not broadcast.
The Prophecy Generator
And this brings me to the custom of claiming the prophets or apostles as precedent. The madlib "Prophecy Generator" formula for such precedent-rhetoric goes as follows. "I want (insert ideal, like "world peace" or "lower taxes") or I am against (insert dastardly diabolical conspiracy, like "fundamentalism" or "healthcare") and that is why I am (insert appropriate protest activity, like "holding breath and stomping" or "being Christopher Hitchens"). I am perfectly in my rights for (insert participial form of appropriate protest activity), because I'm only following the example of (insert Prophet or Apostle who has at least a dim, fuzzy analogous link to your situation – the fuzzier the better, like "the Apostles said, 'We should obey God rather than men'").
I feel sorry for all the Prophets – the Apostles in particular – because so many things are done in their name. So many institutions (or "centers" or even "headquarters") carry the term "apostolic" or "prophetic" before some corporate term, most frequently the word "ministry." So many actions are justified by their legacy, despite the fact there is no succession to substantiate this legacy: in fact, it is likely that there is a denial of the need for any succession or continuity. So many "words of knowledge" are pronounced, even on Sunday morning, that have to do with "sacrificial giving" or some particular monetary figure ("The Spirit says that someone in this room has ten thousand dollars to give").
These are all egregious examples, I admit. But there has been much that has been egregious. This is not even my main point: but let us consider the strong likelihood that God has no particular will for particular financial offerings. To press this point, perhaps painfully, it turns out that we cannot command a tithe. I don't know how this happened, but "tithing" appears to have been brought into the Church's ascetical catalog along with Sunday attendance, prayer and fasting: but tithing does not belong there. Look in the New Covenant for the "tithe" and you won't find one (except for a few withering comments like Luke 18.12 and Matthew 23.23).
Equality and Stewardship
Instead of tithing, what you find instead are requests from the Apostles (and later the Bishops) for Christians who have more to share with those who have less. The whole (and entire) principle of that thing called "stewardship" is summed up neatly in St. Paul's words from his second letter to the church in Corinth: For if the readiness is there, it is acceptable according to what a man has, not according to what he has not. I do not mean that others should be eased and you burdened, but that as a matter of equality your abundance at the present time should supply their want, so that their abundance may supply your want, that there may be equality. As it is written, "He who gathered much had nothing over, and he who gathered little had no lack" (2 Corinthians 8.12-15).
You'll find this principle all through Holy Tradition. But you'll find this verse remarkably passed over in the shadow of the Reformation, and especially in the slum-zone tenancy of the evolution-cult of secularity (the blood theurgy of Meon, i.e., "non-being"). What happened to this verse? What happened to the simple ideal of equality, where the old memory of Manna in the Desert is archetypal for both the Eucharist and the only true Christian understanding of economy?
Was this Christian ideal of equality (i.e., ισότης) later submerged under and distorted by degenerate, hysterical forms? Surely, one of the myriad casualties of Marxism (and its many predecessors, including the Peasants' War and the Munster Rebellion) is the Christian word "equality," and the wider concept of "stewardship." Stewardship used to be the North Star for Christian ethics. It used to guide our spiritual and material care of the faithful, our generosity and charity to the poor outside the Fellowship, our critique of the government and the powers and principalities, and our care for the whole Creation (i.e., just like Adam's abdicated task in Eden).
Now we are left with the wrecked, simpering topic of "stewardship" that is exhausted by credit and debit figures, asset reports and the "balancing of the books" – oh, and I almost forgot the worst, "Capital Funds Campaign."
It is because of these twin bastards of materialism – Marxism and Capitalism – that we are left with the boorish topic of stewardship as it is usually presented in adult study groups on Wednesday nights. One can always tell when there is a shortage of money at the front office: there are posters, the obligatory web site (with bells and whistles and "virtual chapels"), pledge cards, and "curriculum" for adult discussion groups that is written in the most somnolent, English-destroying language known to man.
What you will not find in Tradition are words like "pledges," "dues," "pledge drives," "seed money," "endowment," "investment portfolio," "proportional giving," "raffle," "bake sales," "sales," "campaigns" (accompanied by the obligatory thermometer-graphic), "300 or 700 or Century or Millennium Club," or "Founders Circle."
As is too common these days, you will find many things done by Christians that are not rooted in Tradition. I do not mean to say that these things are wrong (though I suspect that some of them are). I feel toward a term like "dues" the same way I do toward a term like "corporation" – not wrong, but not right, either. Perhaps acceptable or permitted, but certainly not noble, or lovely or of "good report."
What is praiseworthy is a prophecy that enjoins giving so that there is no lack of goods, for anyone, in anyplace. A kind reader, Joshua, once offered a lovely snippet from St. Theophan the Recluse:
'No one who loves his neighbor is wealthier than his neighbor.'
Now that's a "word of knowledge" you don't hear everyday. Neither is it a popular interpretation out of a torrent of tongues.
The Run of the Mill
And you don't find it much in today's political declarations either. Political statements (which are "secular prophecies") are usually run through a cliché mill that forces an opinion to come out into one of two sets of possible positions. On one hand (I don't need to say which) you have "prophecies" that insist on civil rights, economic fairness, and concern for the poor and oppressed. On the other hand, you have a prophetic posture that denounces not so much immorality and apostasy from orthodoxy, but profligate spending and apostasy from industrial tycoonism.
The problem with such a run of the mill "prophecy generator" is that the penchant for trite thought really does produce a crock pot of stupidity. It is almost as though the boredom of cliché produces cantankerous idiocy if only for sheer excitement. An apparatus like this is bound to churn out increasingly noxious positions: both sides violate the peace of humane community, and insist on distortions of nature and human nature. Both instrumentalize human life. One wishes to engineer new psychologies (i.e., the liberal establishment of just any sexual and familial order). The other wishes to engineer new ecologies (i.e., the radical industrialization of the earth).
What we are left with is a single coin of despair: heads I win, tales you lose.
Thus you have, on the heads side of the coin, Senator Barbara Boxer, who is living proof that neither Democrats nor females should be allowed in government: she managed to emit, in the last week, the contention that healthcare should cover women for abortions since it covers men for the use of erectile aids (does that mean that if we get rid of Viagra then we can get rid of abortion? What a deal! I suggest, at the same time, that we reduce the need for erectile aids by getting rid of pernicious PG13 & R pornography: of course, that would put Rupert Murdoch and a lot of Wall Street out of business).
And, on the tails side, you have ex-Vice President Dick Cheney (thank God for that first prefix), who is living proof that neither Republicans nor males should be allowed anywhere near capitol buildings or underground bunkers or red glowing buttons: in the same week, he extruded the thought that by setting up a terrorist trial in New York, the current President of the United States was giving "aid and comfort to our enemies."
Both trite postures are prominent in the Christian community, and they are both the result of failed stewardship. Both have failed to wage the whole prophetic critique against the generation. Both are stunted and cowardly. Both fail theology and anthropology. Both conflict with the possibility of personhood and fellowship.
Both blaspheme God and the holy earth, and the neighbor's face.
Why? Because they have forgotten the touchstone and source of true prophecy. I will not say that this standard is the Church, because to say so is an unhelpful simplicity – and such a statement is compromised by too many extra-Traditional behaviors of this particular ecclesial generation.
Touchstone, Truly
To escape this conundrum, I would rather say that the standard of stewardship and equality, and the clarion of prophecy from which all true Prophets speak, is theosis.
We used to know, in the good old Orthodox days when doctrine still mattered, and praxis still flowed from apostolic liturgy, that God's Will is simply deification. It is not a particular career or whether you should move in with the pygmies. It is not how much you should give to a fund drive or who you should marry. Or, as had been explained to me on one particularly depressing occasion, just which stock option to pick up.
These are all questions that pertain to augury, not God's Will.
God's Will is for you and for me to participate in Triune Fellowship, in His own Divine Nature, to be transformed and inducted into the Healing Light of His Uncreated Energy.
To see this, and nothing less, and to recognize every creature's destiny therein, and even the vectors of politics, is the work of Prophecy. No less.
Next up: a Non-Profit (truly) Corporation