The Gospel Preached to the Patriarch Abraham
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Tuesday, March 20, 2018
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10 comments:
Off topic, but our boy Matthew Heimbach is in deep trouble after beating up his father-in-law.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5498547/White-nationalist-leader-arrested-assaulting-father-law.html
Matthew Heimbach is not my boy. The last I heard that despicable bigot has been barred from communion. The only thing I am interested in hearing about him is that he has repented of his vicious racism.
Not that the growth of secularism doesn't concern me, but when put in terms of Christianity as a "default," I remember Kierkegaard's great protest, that if one is a Christian simply by being born into a Christian society, Christianity is then drained of its meaning, becomes a rather bitter joke. We are all born secular, little heathens each and every one, which is why we need baptism and instruction and example and encouragement. I don't pretend that my faith is entirely my own individual doing. But I also hope I didn't "default" to it. And I suspect that even in the so-called "Age of Faith" there was infidelity comparable to that which is so openly proclaimed today.
It's sarcasm, understand.
To return to the topic, I can't help but feel hopeless about the thing. Wherever Christianity establishes a foothold, it seems that eventually it gets snuffed out. This, coupled with the PRC's overt imperialism, is why I don't believe the hype that China is going to be the next Christian stronghold.
Rick,
We're entering a stage in which being a "Christian" confers no advantages. Soon, being a Christian will confer every disadvantage conceivable. To cling to the Faith when there is no discernible (secular) advantage in doing so is an act of boldness, and, dare I say, faith.
Remember that Christendom grew like gang-busters whilst confessing to be a Christian was detrimental to one's health.
rick - "Christendom," a physical territory occupied and defended by Christians, was a very real thing for most of Christian history, and far more than just an individual steeped in doctrine (much of it incredibly arcane). I'm tending to the other view: Christianity needs a Christendom, otherwise it's just a matter of individual discernment and there's no need for a physical and hierarchical Church which we are told is a theological impossibility.
Bruce Charlton has been making this point: nobody alive today has any comprehension of the Church qua Church as the Apostolic Fathers had. There are thousands of competing, fluid sects of equal dignity which leaves the individual to navigate the religious bazaar and select according to personal preference. Christianity becomes merely an ideological litmus test subject to whatever whims we moderns can dream up.
Our predecessor in the Faith considered Baptism a physically real thing: the child, born into a sinful world, needed to be washed in blessed water. The sponsors literally spit at the Devil. If Christianity is pure ideation, then these are just empty rituals. The sponsors can just say, I dub thee Baptized, and we can go home. If Christianity has no physical expression in people and territory and their buildings, then I don't see how it's anything but just a really, really good idea.
Who says that a physical and hierarchical Church is impossible? The Church is, inter alia, a visible society with a unique (some of us would say divine) constitution. Always has been. But that's not the same as "a physical territory occupied and defended by Christians." Christ's kingdom is not of this world. Unless Jesus was just stringing Pilate along.
The Church, we are taught, is the Bride of Christ and exists in physical time and space, because Christians--Her constituent elements--exist in physical time and space. If the Church is a mere metaphysical construct we can dispense with the corporate fictions and the expensive buildings and vestments and professional clergy, confident that the Church is somewhere out there on the metaphysical plane. That's how you get the atomized modern with his Bible while the agnostic secularists do the real work of society.
As an aside, the end goal of the Benedict Option cannot be merely a plea to be left alone in exchange for paying our taxes. If the end goal of the Benedict Option is not a Christendom where daily life is structured around the liturgical offices and the Feasts and Fasts and children and the simple are protected from error, then it's just a book club.
Again, of course the Church is not a mere "metaphysical structure." It exists in time and space and always has to have some relationship to the governing authorities. When the social and political establishment tries to take over the Church, or co-opt the Church, or suppress the Church, as it tends to do (often at the behest of sincere but clueless Christians), the Church must resist and often suffers. That is pretty much in line with what we are told in the New Testament will happen to us. We can't be blamed for trying to establish a political order where we are free to practice our faith. But that's a far cry from transforming the faith into a national-political ideology.
(And, if anything, the Nation has always been a more metaphysical construct than the Church,.)
The Benedict Option? I haven't read it. But that question of how Christians can be "in the world but not of the world" is a persistent and vital one that every generation of Christians must resolve in the particular world we are born into.
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