I think message boards in front of churches are lame. Unless your church uses its message board simply to announce service times, or unless the person responsible for your pithy messages is Samuel Johnson, your church is probably broadcasting inanity. There was a church where I used to live which for a long time had the following message on its board: “Drive friendly”. 2,000 years of Christian enlightenment and struggle, and this is all they’ve got?
Recently, a church I drive past frequently has posted the following: “God is giving us a fresh new vision. Come check it out.” Christianity has a name for fresh new visions, and that name is “heresy”. Not really the sort of thing you’d want to advertise.
Of course, these people probably aren’t formally heretical (but who knows anymore?); they’re probably jumping on the neo-church bandwagon of the Emerging Church movement. The primary tenet of EC seems to be that the way things have been done is bad because, well, it’s the way things have been done. The past is practically anathema for these EC folks, and while there’s a good deal of stupidity mixed in with “the way things have been done”, this view neglects the Catholic consensus that Holy Tradition is the voice of the Holy Spirit. It’s not usually the Catholic consensus that the EC folks are trashing; it’s usually the Protestant consensus (if there is such a thing).
Evangelical Protestantism seems to have been stuck for about a century in the end of the 19th Century. When Evangelicals talk about “that old-time religion”, that’s what they mean. They’re not talking about incense and icons, but about brush-arbor revivals and teetotalism. They’re basing themselves within a certain web of assumptions and practices the most consistent application of which is found among the Amish.
These assumptions and practices have left Evangelical Protestantism open to a lot of attacks from what we might call the left and the right From the left, it has been riddled by and reacted against biblical criticism, and by social pressure to accept divorce, homosexual practices, female ministers, and contemporary worship schemes. From the right, it has been attacked by Calvinists for its lack of theological rigor, and by pressure to embrace contemporary worship schemes.
Contemporary worship is urged upon Evangelical Protestants by everyone, and the practice has been more or less fully accepted. This is probably the greatest inroad into the orthodoxy of the Evangelicals. The feminization of the Evangelical clergy got its start in the feminization of Evangelical worship, and a whole host of assumptions and practices fell in its wake.
From the Catholic point of view, the undoing of the 19th-century mindset of the Evangelicals can be a good thing if it drives them to re-examine the “old-time religion” in ways that makes them more open and sympathetic to the Catholic consensus. It can be destructive if this undoing takes with it the underlying orthodoxy once held by the Evangelicals, and so removes our points of commonality.
Lent is a good time to think about these things. Lent is anything but a “fresh new vision”; it’s a hoary old vision, as old as fallen human nature. Lent is very un-contemporary, in that it involves an acknowledgment of our wretched sinfulness, our lack of penitence, and our absent-mindedness regarding God. These are acknowledgments that contemporary culture not only refuses to make, but from which it strives to keep us distracted.
The search for novelty is one of the hallmarks of our culture’s mortal illness, and it has infected many, many formerly orthodox Christians. The stale practices of Catholic Orthodoxy are powerful antidotes against this symptom. I say “stale”, because that is how the cure appears to our jaded, wounded vision: our spiritual cure looks tedious and troublesome, and it’s so much easier simply to ignore it, pretend we need no cure, and spend our time searching for fresh new visions.
No one who is truly immersed in Catholic Orthodoxy can mistake the old, the tried and true, the ancient cure of souls, for something stale and hidebound. The twitchy innovators may make this mistake, and as they appear entrenched in their restless quest for novelty, perhaps it’s best to raise against them the standard of the stale, the dusty, the hoary, the old. They won’t get it, of course, but it’ll make a good talking-point. So here’s to the stale old vision. It’s probably best contemplated in the company of an old, old whisky.
Recently, a church I drive past frequently has posted the following: “God is giving us a fresh new vision. Come check it out.” Christianity has a name for fresh new visions, and that name is “heresy”. Not really the sort of thing you’d want to advertise.
Of course, these people probably aren’t formally heretical (but who knows anymore?); they’re probably jumping on the neo-church bandwagon of the Emerging Church movement. The primary tenet of EC seems to be that the way things have been done is bad because, well, it’s the way things have been done. The past is practically anathema for these EC folks, and while there’s a good deal of stupidity mixed in with “the way things have been done”, this view neglects the Catholic consensus that Holy Tradition is the voice of the Holy Spirit. It’s not usually the Catholic consensus that the EC folks are trashing; it’s usually the Protestant consensus (if there is such a thing).
Evangelical Protestantism seems to have been stuck for about a century in the end of the 19th Century. When Evangelicals talk about “that old-time religion”, that’s what they mean. They’re not talking about incense and icons, but about brush-arbor revivals and teetotalism. They’re basing themselves within a certain web of assumptions and practices the most consistent application of which is found among the Amish.
These assumptions and practices have left Evangelical Protestantism open to a lot of attacks from what we might call the left and the right From the left, it has been riddled by and reacted against biblical criticism, and by social pressure to accept divorce, homosexual practices, female ministers, and contemporary worship schemes. From the right, it has been attacked by Calvinists for its lack of theological rigor, and by pressure to embrace contemporary worship schemes.
Contemporary worship is urged upon Evangelical Protestants by everyone, and the practice has been more or less fully accepted. This is probably the greatest inroad into the orthodoxy of the Evangelicals. The feminization of the Evangelical clergy got its start in the feminization of Evangelical worship, and a whole host of assumptions and practices fell in its wake.
From the Catholic point of view, the undoing of the 19th-century mindset of the Evangelicals can be a good thing if it drives them to re-examine the “old-time religion” in ways that makes them more open and sympathetic to the Catholic consensus. It can be destructive if this undoing takes with it the underlying orthodoxy once held by the Evangelicals, and so removes our points of commonality.
Lent is a good time to think about these things. Lent is anything but a “fresh new vision”; it’s a hoary old vision, as old as fallen human nature. Lent is very un-contemporary, in that it involves an acknowledgment of our wretched sinfulness, our lack of penitence, and our absent-mindedness regarding God. These are acknowledgments that contemporary culture not only refuses to make, but from which it strives to keep us distracted.
The search for novelty is one of the hallmarks of our culture’s mortal illness, and it has infected many, many formerly orthodox Christians. The stale practices of Catholic Orthodoxy are powerful antidotes against this symptom. I say “stale”, because that is how the cure appears to our jaded, wounded vision: our spiritual cure looks tedious and troublesome, and it’s so much easier simply to ignore it, pretend we need no cure, and spend our time searching for fresh new visions.
No one who is truly immersed in Catholic Orthodoxy can mistake the old, the tried and true, the ancient cure of souls, for something stale and hidebound. The twitchy innovators may make this mistake, and as they appear entrenched in their restless quest for novelty, perhaps it’s best to raise against them the standard of the stale, the dusty, the hoary, the old. They won’t get it, of course, but it’ll make a good talking-point. So here’s to the stale old vision. It’s probably best contemplated in the company of an old, old whisky.
Back during the ealy '60s, when I was serving my aaprenticeship in Miami, I would see the lage card adverts in local buses.he ones that stick in my mind were in English and in Spanish: Senor, que quieres que haga?---Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do? To this day, that question sticks in my mind.
ReplyDeleteIf we are to put anything on the outside board besides name, service times, etc, it must be something to make us think, reflect, contemplate. Domine, quid me vis facere?
In +,
Benton