Unfortunately, We're Not all Christians

Just read this, from the Salt Lake Tribune: 

We’re all Christians
First published Oct 22 2011 01:01AM
Updated Oct 22, 2011 01:01AM

Some Evangelical Christians are noising it about that Mitt Romney’s Mormonism is a new and frightening cult, far removed from traditional Christianity.

In fact, Mormons represent a tradition that was present in the beginning of the Christian faith. Mormons believe in a separation of the personalities of God the Father and the Son, while most Catholics and Protestants believe they are one and the same.

This idea of physical distinction between the two deities goes back to the early Christian church’s Arian wing, which was a quite large minority segment of Christianity. At times, Arians were the established or preferred denomination of Roman and Byzantine emperors and their realms.

When politically motivated church people wag tongues and shake fingers today at Mormons, making them seem like second-class citizens, they display a degree of ignorance of this history. They also act like religious bullies, lording it over a minority just because they can. This invites the question, are they truly Christian?

Kim Shinkoskey
Woods Cross

This is my response:

Wow. Arius was twice deemed a heretic, first by the First Council of Nicea in 325, and then again by the First Council of Constantinople in 381. How very postmodern of this writer to think that just because Arianism was a "marginalized" view that it should be approved. By this reasoning, the LDS should abandon their views and embrace the RLDS/CofC understanding of the Trinity as three persons in one substance, their refusal to baptize the dead, and their conviction that men do not become gods. The CofC is, after all, a minority compared to the LDS! 

That said, I think it is quite possible that we will see our Mormon friends at the great feast...it's just that I don't think they are justified in saying that they represent traditional, orthodox Christianity.

For more information about the differences between the LDS and RLDS/Cof C, look here

Correcting an Increasingly Common Misconception

Here are my comments on Chad Estes' review of Rachel Held Evan's Evolving in Monkeytown:

Thanks for your review...but I'd like to address one part of it. I know it's popular nowadays to see postmodernism as the "synthesis" of premodern mysticism and modernist reason, but this reveals a shallow understanding of history and philosophy.

Chad, where did you get your information about the Middle Ages? Unless you take the Middle Ages to be a 300 year period from 500-800 AD, it wasn't "all mysticism, all the time." Among other scholars, Charlemagne brought Alcuin of York to start his Palace School and other schools (particularly in the Frankish empire), develop a standard curriculum, edit corrupt manuscripts, standardize Latin, introduce the Carolingian miniscule (that later inspired Renaissance Italic). These folks weren't just praying and doing Gregorian chants all day!

Scholasticism was huge throughout the Middle Ages,and it was a LEFT brain enterprise that focused on analysis, definition and verbal clarity. Every educated person had to study dialectic as part of the Trivium. Only then could they move on to the Quadrivium, which included the hardly-mystical study of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.

We can thank the Middle Ages for the invention of the university, and the dialectic practiced in places like the Universities of Paris, Bologna and Oxford was a method of thinking that proceeded as follows:

1. The Question to be determined
2. The principal objections to the question
3. An argument in favor of the Question, traditionally a single argument ("On the contrary..")
4. The determination of the Question after weighing the evidence. ("I answer that...")
5. The replies to each objection

This is exactly how the greatest philosopher/theologian of the Middle Ages-- Thomas Aquinas-- structured his magisterial Summa Theologiae. And I haven't even begun to discuss science...for that I refer you to Edward Grant's The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages.

I hope I've made a case that as well as being an age of faith, the middle ages were also an age of reason. In fact, it was the only time in Western Civilization when the two were in such equilibrium. Nothing would please me more than for Postmodernists to rediscover that equilibrium...and admit that they weren't the first to achieve it. ; )

Wright on Christianity and genocide

Bradley Wright is associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut. After receiving tenure, Brad switched his academic focus from crime to religion in order to research American Christianity. He received his PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin, the topranked sociology graduate program in the country.

I look forward to reading his upcoming book, Christians are Hate-Filled Hypocrites....and Other Lies You've Been Told which will be available in July.

Here he counters the critics in his blog post:

Enough of the Inquisition! Christianity and genocide

Some time ago, I was having lunch with a good friend. The conversation turned to Christianity, and he asked me what I thought of it. I mumbled though my sandwich some generally affirmative answer, and he responded with utter conviction: "But what about the Inquisition?" In his mind, this Christian-based atrocity (which executed three to thirty thousand people) constituted sure proof against the validity of Christianity.

Ugh... This fellow is a good friend, and he's very bright, but what a knuckleheaded thing to say.

The logic of this church-morality argument goes like this: The Christian Church should be perfect, and the Christian faith is invalid if the church displays a grievous moral failure, which it has done many, many times. This argument is inconsistent with Christian beliefs, let alone common sense, both of which hold that the Church is not perfect.

This argument is not apostasy, it's bad social science.

If one wanted to judge Christianity by participation in atrocities, one should compare the Church's participation in atrocities versus that of other religious and secular institutions. As data for this comparison, here's a list of the worst genocides of the last 100 years:

China (1960s, 1970s), 30 million dead
USSR (1920s, 1930s, 1940s), 2 0 million dead
Germany (1930s, 1940s), 11.4 million dead
Japan (1930s, 1940s), 10 million dead
Pakistan (1970s), 3.1 million dead
Sudan (1960s, present day), 2.8 million dead
Nigeria (1960s), 2 million dead
Afghanistan (1980s), 1.8 million dead
Cambodia (1970s), 1.7 million dead
Turkey (1910s, 1920s), 1.5 million dead
Indonesia (1970s, 1980s), 1.2 million dead
Rwanda (1990s), 1 million dead
India (1940s), 1 million dead
(Source: Barbara Harff, National Geographic, Jan 2006, p. 30)

Okay, I don't think that counting up atrocities is a useful way to judge religions, but if one is going to do so, at least do it accurately. From the above list, it appears that most of these terrible atrocities have been committed by governments or institutions rooted in belief systems other than Christianity. By the logic of this argument, then, Christianity is supported.

Continuity or discontinuity? Defoliation or Weeding?

I've discovered a deep, challenging, humorous and scholarly blog by Tim Enloe entitled Societas Christiana: Adventures in Medieval Protestantism. I really appreciate his historical expertise and am grateful that he is "carrying on his education in public" because I'm eager to learn from him.

To whet your appetite...

What was the Reformation

Protestant apologetics against Catholicism seem in our day to be dominated by the assumption that arguing from historical and theological discontinuity is simply “the” Protestant way of doing things. Many of the “top names” in Protestant apologetics tell a story about the 16th century reformation which I believe gives away the store to the Catholics–who are, if nothing else, unembarassed by the history of the Church and claim it all as their own. By contrast, the typical Protestant story about Church history is founded upon embarassment–embarassment about the “dirtiness” of the pre-Protestant era Church, and a concomitant willingness to embrace all manner of arguments which seek to distance the Protestant reformation itself, and we as its heirs, from the majority of what had come before. I believe that this way of looking at the Protestant reformation is the historiographical equivalent of the very much un-reformational theological approach to the Scriptures which takes the distinction between Old and New Testaments and hardens it into a division across which very little can transfer and even less is really “relevant” to our lives today. In this post I would like to tell a different story about the Protestant reformation, a story not driven by the assumptions of perfectionism to embrace discontinuity and cut ourselves off from the bulk of God’s dealings with His saints in history.....


...No indeed, the Protestant reformers were not Moderns in the sense that the Evangelical Modernists think they were. On the contrary, the reformers thought like Medievals, they acted like Medievals, and they need to be analyzed as Medievals. This means sometimes they challenge us, their self-proclaimed heirs, in ways that make us extremely uncomfortable....

Defoliation or Weeding: Some Problems With the Radical Vision of “Reform

....Nevertheless, is there not a vast difference between weeding the garden (helping it to thrive) and defoliating it (preventing it from thriving)? The history of Radical reforming movements more easily lends itself to the defoliation metaphor than to the weeding one. Some Anabaptist groups dumped everything that had been handed down to them from previous generations and reformulated the Faith from scratch on the basis (they claimed) of “the Bible Alone.” Rationalists such as Michael Servetus eliminated the doctrine of the Trinity and sought a Faith that was so pure it was no longer even Christian. Centuries later, groups from the Campbellites to the Mormons severed themselves from all existing churches on the pretext that they were all “corrupt.” Their answer to the “corruption”? Restarting the Faith from scratch, in its pristine, pure, root form (as they, unaccountable to anyone outside of their own generation, understood that).

Parallel groups can be found in abundance today, not only in backward Fundamentalist sects but in many Evangelical groups as well. The citation above, from a major Evangelical advocate of the Radical program, reveals a concepts of “reform” more akin to defoliation than weeding. For all the appeals to Christ and the Apostles VS. “tradition,” the polemic against “tradition” seems often shallow and forced because of the assumption that “tradition” is all of a piece and always to be suspected of trying to sneak in while no one is looking and “make the Word of God of none effect.”

In reality, “tradition” in the New Testament is not quite so simple an affair. Sometimes it is something added to what has been written, something done in contradiction to the written Word by people who nevertheless represent the written Word correctly and who are to be obeyed on that score (Mt. 23:2). Other times “tradition” seems to be verbal teaching purporting to give the sense of the written Word but actually entirely distortive of it (Mark 7:13). Still other times Christ Himself enjoins actions which appear to be contradictory to the written Word, but which actually correctly give the sense of it, even apart from its “plain” meaning (Mt. 12:1-8). “Tradition” is not automatically a suspect category.

In other words, Christ did not command His followers to spend their lives frantically looking for creeping error and always trying to restore things to an original, pristine, undeveloped condition so that said errors would not become a “great tradition” that, just because it is a “great tradition,” makes Scripture of none effect. On the contrary, Christ did not command suspicion of tradition as a mere category of thought and life. Whatever one may think of the content of Paul’s “traditions” in 2 Thess. 2:15, the fact that he positively speaks of things handed down and enjoins obedience to them runs contrary to the Radical’s ingrained habit of instantly suspecting anything which he himself does not see when he “compares it with Scripture.” Indeed, it may be that this entire way of thinking is itself a “great tradition” and an instance of an error that has crept in and failed to be recognized by those who most deeply believe themselves qualified and able to recognize such.

In conclusion, then, the Radical manifesto cited above is untrue to the Scriptures. Watching out for error does not automatically entail defoliating the plant of “tradition.” There is more going on in the New Testament polemic against bad traditions than the defoliation metaphor can handle. This is the fundamental problem with the radical mode of reform. Digging ruthlessly for the root it carelessly uproots the fruit. Nobly seeking reformation it ignobly produces deformation. Chasing hard after purity, it at last grasps only sterility.

Noll on the Characteristics of American Christianity

The American tendency has been

to see authority as self-created rather than inherited;

to read the Bible for oneself rather than just to accept biblical interpretation from others;

to create organizations to meet a need rather than simply to inherit organizations;

to empower laypeople, first laymen and then laywomen, as opposed to being super-clerical;

and to use the forces of the market for the church rather than to worry about the forces of the market.

The American tendency has been populist, and sometimes democratic, rather than aristocratic."

--Mark Noll Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame

"Does Global Christianity Equal American Christianity?"
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/july/19.38.html?start=2

Looking Backwards or Remembering forward?

The past matters.
But it also matters what we do with the past.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the biblical distinction between looking backward and remembering.

Remembering

Scripture calls on us to do a lot of remembering. But what is it we are called on to remember? Not our past defeats or even our past victories. Instead, we are called on to remember Who God is, what He has said and done, and what He intends to do. When we remember our sins, it is for the purpose of being forgiven by Him. When we remember how we have been sinned against, it is so He can show us how to forgive. When we remember our hurts, it is so we can receive His comfort.

Psalm 77:11
I will remember the deeds of the LORD; yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago.

Psalm 78:35
They remembered that God was their Rock, that God Most High was their Redeemer

Psalm 105:5
Remember the wonders he has done, his miracles, and the judgments he pronounced,

Psalm 119:52
I remember your ancient laws, O LORD, and I find comfort in them.

Psalm 119:55
In the night I remember your name, O LORD, and I will keep your law.

Psalm 143:5
I remember the days of long ago; I meditate on all your works and consider what your hands have done.

Luke 24:6
He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee:

Luke 24:8
Then they remembered his words.

2 Timothy 2:8
Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David. This is my gospel...

Revelation 3:3
Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard; obey it, and repent

Simeon and Anna are models to us for how to deal with the past. As they see the baby Jesus, Simeon remembered the promises of ancient prophecy, and Anna "spoke about the child to all who were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem."

However, to remember the past apart from the Lord's thoughts and actions puts us in the position of "looking backward" and tempts us to acedia.

Jeremiah 7:23-24
23 but I gave them this command: Obey me, and I will be your God and you will be my people. Walk in all the ways I command you, that it may go well with you. 24 But they did not listen or pay attention; instead, they followed the stubborn inclinations of their evil hearts. They went backward and not forward.

The point of remembering is, paradoxically, to be able to better focus on God, so that we can continue moving forward toward a deeper relationship with Him through His Son and the Spirit. In this way, the past propels us to our proper end.

Looking backward

But as sinful creatures, we do not always allow the past to function positively. Instead, we ignore it or twist it so that the focus is on ourselves or on worldly matters, instead of on the Lord. Scripture calls this "looking backward," in contrast to "remembering."

Luke 9:57-62
He said to another man, "Follow me." But the man replied, "Lord, first let me go and bury my father." Jesus said to him, "Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God."

Still another said, "I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say good-by to my family." Jesus replied, "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God."

Here, both men are captives of their past, and so are unable to be captivated by Christ. It is a familiar situation. The following passage presents yet another way fixation on the past-- instead of fixing on the God who Was and Is and Is to Come--can prevent us from reaching His goal for us. :

Numbers 11:4-6
The rabble with them began to crave other food, and again the Israelites started wailing and said, "If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost—also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic. But now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna!"

Here the Israelites are not actually "remembering," but are rather "looking backward," as evidenced by the object of their attention: fruit and vegetables, instead of God. But the classic text of a backward-looker, however, is the story of Lot's wife:

Genesis 19: 24-26

Then the LORD rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the LORD out of the heavens. Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, including all those living in the cities—and also the vegetation in the land. But Lot's wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.

I can imagine Lot's wife, overcome with memories of the past, mourning her lost home and friends and market stalls. Against the men's specific warning not to look back in v. 17, she does look back. Furthermore, she doesn't just give a quick glance; she gives a long, dwelling gaze (as I have been told is indicated by the Hebrew text). Spiritually, if not physically, she is turned away from the Lord and focused on herself, on her own loss and pain. The consequences are fatal.

Conclusion

History is neither to be ignored nor idolized. Both can be means of "turning away" from God. It is impossible to faithfully live for the Lord in the present if we ignore the past. It is similarly impossible to live a life in step with Him, if in looking backward we are frozen by our own concerns.

The trick is to keep in step with the Spirit, who enables us to simultaneously move forward and remember:

John 14:26

But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.

The Future lies in the Past

Deuteronomy 32:7,29
Remember the days of old; consider the generations long past. Ask your father and he will tell you, your elders, and they will explain to you. ...They are a nation without sense, there is no discernment in them.

If only they were wise and would understand this and discern what their end will be!

Romans 15:4
For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.

2 Peter 3:2
I want you to recall the words spoken in the past by the holy prophets and the command given by our Lord and Savior through your apostles.

"We need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.

A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many timeas and therefore is in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

--C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, "Learning in War-time," p. 28-29.

"By studying the past we can learn not only historical but metaphysical or transcendental truth."

--C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, p. 174.

A couple of weeks ago Ted showed me this article in CT: Chris Armstrong's "The Future lies in the Past."

Yesterday, my colleague Bonnie at EBC told me about hearing Leonard Sweet speak recently about the need to rediscover the past. (Wow. Has he ever done a 180 since Soul Tsunami. Forgive me, but my skepticism is surfacing here. Why is it that I am having such a hard time not believing that he hasn't sniffed where the publishing and speaking winds are about to blow, and so is poised for profit? )

Phyllis Tickle is blogging about the ancient future church.

The Spirit is on the move! Among a postmodern people who idolize their present experience, He comes to remind us that "that history is a story with a divine plot." You can't have a Story without a beginning, a middle and an end.

And if Hauerwas is right in his damning criticism of postmodernism,"Who told you the story there is no Story?" then the only way to make sense of our present experience is to re-discover the metaphysical and transcendent truth inherent in the past, and see how it relates to the Divine Plot.

I hope Louis Bouyer is able to see all this.

I hope I live long enough to see it develop and flourish.

A Blog that is Grateful to the Dead

Here's a blog worth exploring: Dead Christians Society. It is written by Chris Armstrong, Associate Professor of Church History, Bethel Seminary; and Senior Editor, Christian History & Biography. Armstrong subtitles it "A tribute to Antony, Gregory, Dante, Margery, John, John, Charles, Amanda, Charles, and Dorothy." I can't wait for his book to be published!

According to his Bethel bio,

He is a member of several professional associations related to church history and the Wesleyan and Pentecostal movements. Armstrong’s research foci include religion and emotion, Christianity and literature, and the Christ-and-culture conversation. His doctoral work focused on the 19th-century holiness movement, and his current research interests include the British “Inklings” authors and modern appropriations of medieval ideas and practices. He is currently finishing a book with the working title Patron Saints for Postmoderns.

T.E. Lawrence on the progression of Christianity

from Seven Pillars of Wisdom:

"..And then Christianity had had the fortune of later architects of genius: and in its passage through time and clime had suffered sea changes incomperably greater than the unchanging Jewry, from the abstraction of Alexandrian bookishness into Latin prose, for the mainland of Europe, and last and most terrible passing of all, when it became Teuton, with a formal synthesis to suit our chilly disputations north. So remote was the Presbyterian creed from the Orthodox faith of its first or second embodiment that, before the war, we were able to send missionaries to persuade these softer Oriental Christians to our presentation of a logical God."