I reckon that Dominion by Tom Holland is a great book - a must read on the history of Christianity and the history of the world since Christ. For all sorts of reasons. I may draw attention to some of these in coming posts.
Meantime, here is Tom Holland writing a snapshot or three from his book for a UK magazine, with a nice riff on a famous line from The Life of Brian.
6 comments:
Stanley Hauerwas
On pluralism
https://youtu.be/sViQjvFITPc
On leadership
https://faithandleadership.com/multimedia/stanley-hauerwas-what-only-the-whole-church-can-do
BW
Secular Anthem #1
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_SQ4ogstDVE
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-oUbGCGlrQ8 Streisand with lyrics.
Secular Anthem #2
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z3qgRvMHCU
BW
Secular Anthem #3
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-3LTR32dMgI
Secular Anthem #4
https://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/jesus-is-a-jew/
BW
Secular Anthem #5
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fLDnhL648qI
Secular Anthem #6
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zhGPItQd47U
BW
Apologetics
In some conversations, I have found it helpful to cut two exaggerations of religious pluralism down to size.
(1) More individuals do indeed practice non-Christian religions. But insofar as they have social stances, most of these are adapting to the Christian social and civilizational ethos hereabouts by adopting it. Militant secularists are indeed among those conforming most to the received civic ethos which evolved in Christendom. So a decision to practice say Wicca is not only not a decision against the received ethos, but is plausibly dependent on that ethos. It is, for example, hard to practice in Iran or Saudi Arabia.
(2) Here and on most of the planet, the choice is between Christianity and, not an idealized atheism, but Islam. Ironically, the causal effect of arguing against revelation to chip away at Christianity is to open more space for a proselytizing Islam which simply ignores such arguments as the *jahiliyyah* of a decadent faith.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jahiliyyah
These matter when my interlocutor and I compare estimates of what is actually at stake in our conversation. There was a Christendom in which, apart from the Jews, church and realm entirely overlapped; that Christendom is long gone, and arguing for or against it is a discussion of history. But the pluralism that we might have expected from secularity has been severely limited by the actual genius of the other cultuses for arranging persons, interpersonal relations, social worlds, political institutions, and intercultural norms in a unifying civilisational matrix. Only Hindus, Confucians, Christians, and Muslims have done this on a large scale, and with the minor exception of ISKCON, only the latter two are proselytising in new territories.
BW
Does the Body in a decadent society need less theological renovation or more?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/opinion/sunday/western-society-decadence.html?
When Christians who read books have been sure that Progress was happening in society at large-- I have the American 1950s-70s in mind, but others may think of other places and times-- they have often been fidgety to see something like Progress happen in religion too. "Cars are already being supplanted by hovercraft, and soon we will all be flying about with jet packs on our backs," said the fidgets, "yet we still speak of God as *up*. Surely we must overhaul our liturgies to rid them of this confusing and embarrassing archaism!" Some of them even fretted that ol' Wippell was so slow to offer a cassock and surplice that could be worn decently 200 metres off the ground. As it turned out, few found this to be a grave problem.
https://www.wippell.com/
Fidgetry is the compound of three delusions: (a) Progress in society at large is continuous and unstoppable; (b) the expected goods of progress are not mixed with complicating evils; and (c) the gospel is a thin message-- a sweetly edifying Twitter tweet-- enculturated by modeling the Body's inner life on a given society's culture. Once one notices that anything deep changes slowly if at all, many surface changes hurt some even as they help others, and man cannot live by a tweet alone, one will cease to be a fidget in good faith, although one can shamble on as a fidget in bad faith to the end of one's days.
For Anglicans-- here up yonder and perhaps too down under-- it may be especially hard to be a clear-thinking former fidget. Progress was the burden that Kipling's white man took up for the sake of empire, and so a habitus of over-confident fidgetry marks the identity of imperial societies and classes to this very day. Since Anglican churches often belong to them, it follows that following the Lord out of fidgetry toward a less simplistic faith is close to being led out of at least the mindset of one's dear local church. Just as one cannot talk an insecure bully (eg the 45th POTUS) into having ego defenses that are mature and resilient, neither can one reassure one's beloved fidgets that their lives still have God, gospel, and calling even though their precious Progress is as purely ideological as the divinity of the Emperor of Japan. It is one thing to discover the delusion; it is something else to grow past dependence on it.
Concretely, the General Convention's rationales for setting the 39A adrift, developing the 1979 BCP, ordaining women, and solemnising SSM were mostly fidgetry. The results have been mixed-- mostly as good as the fidgets expected, but occasionally also as bad as their critics feared. But TEC's bitter enmity toward the unpersuaded minorities was and is a mainly non-theological and social reaction against persons who could no longer believe Yankee verities about Progress. Or conversely, that the so-called *Anglican Continuum* up here is the jumbled reliquary of past Anglicanisms that it is because (c) is so much easier to disprove soundly than to replace with an integrating culture that cannot come from the society at large. Although in different ways, each side is challenged by the patent implausibility of the idea that the passing years are bringing us all closer to God.
At the link up top, Ross Douthat argues that societies like ours are not only not making Progress, but are actually settling into a long autumn of Decadence. Assuming that he is right-- he often is and may well be here-- Anglicans who read books have an obvious problem with the springtime churchmanship of Progress. Not only must we accept that we are not and never will be bearers of Progress as our forebears were, but we must understand theological discovery, churchly creativity, and missional enculturation as something other than the fidgets' never-ending task of *marking to market* beliefs and practices that progressing societies disvalue.
BW
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