Which is the nursemaid and which the mother, the RC Church or the Evangelical denomination?

The great Thomas Howard is one of those Catholic converts who I admire because he doesn't make the cornerstone of his Catholic identity a broadside attack on his own Evangelical background. Yes, the Catholic Church offers the fullness of the Faith in her Sacred Tradition, Magisterium, and 2000 years of fathomless resources. But he would defend to the end the invaluable role Evangelicalism played in his own development as a spiritual nursemaid.

In one way, you would almost have to have "been there" to understand why. But short of talking to Tom Howard yourself, about a good a glimpse into why as you're likely to get is offered by Tim Callies in "The Most Important Thing My Parents Did" (Challies.com, April 9, 2015).

Now if only those managing the stores over at Catholic Inc. [TM] could back off from pushing Care Bears, Jellycats, Pillow Pets, and Barney and Friends long enough to allow their customers to begin to re-discover that their spiritual offerings go a tad beyond feel-good fuzzy plush toys, we might have a fighting chance to stave off complete bankruptcy. As things stand, Latin America is quickly becoming a show case for how Pentecostals and other Evangelicals are harvesting a bumper crop of Protestant converts from the nursemaid of contemporary Catholicism -- or should I say "Catholic Inc. [TM]"?

If my mother were still living and I were to write a Mother's Day tribute to her, what I would say about her (along with my father) would probably be something very similar to what Tim Challies says.

What's right with this? What's wrong with this?

Matthew Milliner, "All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Evangelicalism" (First Things, May 1, 2015). ["Here's one to make Raider Fan a bit ill."] Seriously, though, what's right as well as wrong with this?

[Hat tip to JM]

Being nice but not being clear

Guy Noir, our correspondent, sent a link to Katelyn Beaty's article, "Rachel Held Evans Returns to Church" (Christianity Today, April 16, 2015), which begins:

Four years ago, Rachel Held Evans spent Easter in the apartment of a funeral home. But there would be no candles lit, no feast after the service. Instead, the group of about 10 had gathered to mourn the death of their church....

Noir comments:

I could say a whole lot about this piece in CT. But I guess I can summarize with the line, "Truth matters. Sort of."

This is the mentality that plagues Catholicism as well. History shows that no good comes of it. It is genial but wrongheaded. May we be genial and right-minded. It is good to have a benevolent attitude towards people. It is wrong to act like "getting things wrong" is [comparable?] to preferring the wrong flavor of Jell-0. Let me put it this way:

if you can say the creed and participate in a liturgy, but also believe the wafer might as well be bread as flesh; if you can read the Bible and think it is myth and fable as much as truth and history; if you can look at pre-marital sex, second and third marriages, gay marriages and think they fall more into preference and biology than morality; and if you can look at all religions and think well-meaning people are essentially all invisible Catholics ...

Well, If you can do that, and want to push it, don't be surprised if you effectively let all the air out of your 'religion.' As Flannery O'Connor thought, people can easily think "To Hell With It!"

Meanwhile, I see InterVarsity Press is releasing this little book to further dialog.

Richard J. Mouw and Robert L. Millet, eds, Talking Doctrine: Mormons and Evangelicals in Conversation (InterVarsity Press)

Which makes me another point: At some juncture, if all strange religious beliefs start seeming like your own, it is reasonable to find your own not sounding reasonable but strange. Genesis is myth, the Book of Mormon is bogus but beautiful, and I am supposed to get hyped for Bible Study? I am not so sure...!

"It couldn't happen here" - What we can learn from Evangelicals

Will the Deposit of Faith, the Apostolic Tradition, the settled truth of Magisterial teaching ever be overthrown? Of course not. But we all know Catholic individuals and dissident groups who have rejected much of it.

It's something like this that our underground correspondent, Guy Noir - Private Eye, seemed to be worried about in a message he sent me by carrier pigeon this afternoon. Thankfully, the pigeon didn't leave any droppings behind:

"It could never happen here."

That's the Catholic line as we watch Protestant meltdowns.

And we are naive.

See this extremely disturbing report from TIME Magazine: "Nashville Evangelical Church Comes Out for Marriage Equality" (Time, January 29, 2015). Disturbing for so many reasons [of course, is anything now in TIME not?].

Among them:

1. The call for "Dialogue" and "Times of Listening" on settled doctrine and morals is always a warning sign;

2. Can anyone NOT hear in this sermon all the colors of wind that carries Pope Francis? I know in Argentina he came out hard against Same Sex Marriage, but he claims to have evolved a lot since then;

4. Can anyone not imagine Cardinal Schoenborn or Cardinal Kasper delivering umpteen winsome versions of a similar message?

3. Ask yourself if you cannot see a future Catholic pope or synod prompting some similar sort of news report. I can.

Here is Carl Trueman on his own peeps: "The Silence of the Gods" (Postcards from Palookaville, January 30, 2015).

Tell me this doesn't make you too say "Uh-oh."

The evangelical collapse is coming. A set of circumstances is conspiring to make it so. The external pressure is easy to identify: the sentiment, the aesthetics and the rhetoric of the wider world are overwhelmingly on the side of change. Then there is the fact that so much evangelical Protestantism does not possess the resources to resist this pressure....

This is not a time for ambiguity. Ambiguity is the luxury of those who do not have to face the immediate harsh realities of life in the real world as experienced by most Christians, or who know that their pensions are safe whatever happens. Nor is it a time for the evangelical elites to fail to call their own to account and to maintain their usual gentlemanly silence when one of their own steps out of line. If I have learned one thing from my dealings with the conservative evangelical establishment in the USA, it is that the silence of friends is always more significant and more dangerous than the noise of enemies. If a major collapse is to be averted, we need strong, vocal leadership from the leaders of Christian institutions -- denominations, liberal arts colleges and the like. And that sentence sums up why I am so pessimistic.

Even if no official modifications of traditional teaching are soon forthcoming, you're crazy if you doubt unofficial modifications are well on their way, blown along on the clouds of a very biblical sounding moral theology of Christ-centered inclusion. Those taking exception will get reactions like this from a com boxer over at G.G. Hart's blog. Brace yourself for being stereotyped as mean ol' men with damaged authoritarian-type personality disorders. (bold mine)

Bobby Posted January 31, 2015 at 1:33 am |

Frankly, like most in my age bracket, I find the hand-wringing over same-sex marriage a bit difficult to understand. The institution of marriage is a far cry from what it was just 100 years ago. Following the romantics’ and the Freudians’ lead, we came to accept marriage as an institution primarily concerned with the expression of heterosexual desire. It’s no wonder then that the church inevitably had to accept divorce and remarriage as part of the package. After all, if heterosexual desire is the fuel that feeds the flame of marriage, we can’t exactly ask Christians to stay married when that fuel is running low. So now we’re forced to ask what we should do with those who don’t feel any heterosexual desire at all, or whose primary desire is directed to those of the same sex. And we rightly look a little silly demanding that they remain lonely and celibate for the rest of their lives.

And don’t get me started with the rather extra-biblical notions of “biblical manhood” and “biblical womanhood.” When you spend time interacting with gay people, especially gay Christians, the topic of sex rarely comes up in their explaining why they identify as gay. Their explanations largely center around a sense of being excluded by the culture’s normative scripts for masculinity and femininity, namely, in that they want to feel a closer bond to men than what the culture deems to be acceptable. But when we look at Jesus or Paul, we don’t exactly see two men whose persona oozes with the SEC frat bot characterization of masculinity that’s promoted by our cousins over at the Gospel Coalition. Maybe it’s our culture’s misinformed notions of masculinity and femininity that are screwed up, and that those identifying as gay may be more normal than chest-thumping blowhards like Mark Driscoll, Denny Burk, Al Mohler, the BBs, etc.

I do think that there’s a certain wisdom in opposite-sex coupling. But I doubt that that wisdom has much to do with sex, except for purposes of procreation. Paul’s reluctant commendation of marriage in I Corinthians 7 in no way endorses marriage in the way that evangelicals, and particularly Reformed evangelicals, have come to construe the institution–as something of a playground of (male) heterosexual desire. Sadly, most 20-somethings considering marriage would do far better reading Gary Becker than any of the litany of books authored by evangelicals. Or maybe they should consider the wisdom of Nietzsche: “When marrying, you should ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you are going to enjoy talking with this woman into old age? Everything else is transitory, as most of the time that you’re together will be devoted to conversation.”

I understand why many would accuse evangelicals of opposing same-sex marriage merely out of anti-gay bigotry. After all, evangelicals don’t have a very consistent ethic of marriage. But I think that that criticism is too simple. Rather, I’d suggest that evangelicals actually have no ethic of sexuality, marriage, and family. Sexuality is messy and complex. Heck, if we’re honest with ourselves, none of us fits neatly into John Piper’s ridiculous scripts for “biblical manhood and womanhood.” But evangelicals like clear answers. So, we lay out a formula, and then try to cram ourselves into the roles demanded by the formula, all the while hoping that no one discovers that we’re frauds. And we also fear the disorder that could ensue if people started going off script.

I suspect that the storm and drag over same-sex marriage has little to do with deeply felt objections to gay sex. Rather, it’s something more akin to a fear that calamity will ensue if the prevailing script is deconstructed and dethroned. These folks probably have high F-scores on Adorno’s test for authoritarian personalities.

Robert P. George on the American phenomenon of Billy Graham

Robert P. George, "'America's Pastor,' About Billy Graham, by Grant Wacker" (Sunday Book Review, December 19, 2014):

I grew up in West Virginia as a Catholic in a Protestant culture, the kind we would today describe as evangelical. We Catholics had the pope — but he was a distant and, to be blunt, foreign figure. Our Protestant neighbors had Billy Graham, the friend of presidents, business magnates and celebrities, who through the magic of television was a frequent, familiar guest in the homes of ordinary people; and he was as American as apple pie....

Read more >>

[Hat tip to JM]

Is Catholic culture feminine? Is Evangelical culture masculine?

Upon reading Mark Shea's "Masculine and Feminine, Evangelical and Catholic" (NCR, December 11, 2014), Guy Noir immediately picked up his sharpened quill and wrote:

Heaven help me, but this piece by Mark Shea is actually very good. Even if I still find him to be a jackass.

Also, I think it ignores a rather key factor, and that is Scripture, in its presentation of prayer, certainly seems to favor a masculine approach. That does not mean Marian prayer is thus anti-scriptural, but it does mean the gender classification, though interesting, may be somewhat artificial. I think Fulton Sheen and JPII's prayers seem Marian and rather masculine. The other element he plays fast and loose with is this: Catholics do not worship Mary, but we pray to her. Essentially. For Protestants, that is basically the same thing as worship. Lastly, if Catholic culture is feminine, we would have to ask, "Why?!" Especially given an all male priesthood. If its focus is Christ, and not Mary, and we pray to God the Father, and the priests are all male, how on earth could it be construed as a feminine spirituality?

Meanwhile, given I still think the piece is pretty good, does this mean I might have found Louis Bouyer a jackass?! I hope not! I mean, he was French. I cannot imagine him not finding Shea painfully bourgeoise. I have no room to talk, but still, I laugh ...

Rob Bell as Oprah's Homeboy

From Guy Noir:

Elsewhere in the world of inclusive and welcoming rhetoric...

Laguna Beach! Wow. Really, this all sounds too much like an aspiring L.A. Guru on the make to chart with the fabulists. Another "You can't make this stuff up" episode.

Labels were invented to assist people in identifying and organizing things. When labels start being derided as limiting, start worrying about identity crises.

Indeed: Sarah Pulliam Bailey, "From Hell to Oprah: What Happened to Rob Bell?" (On Faith, December 2, 2014).

Ugh!

Discerning the Church

Our undercover correspondent we keep on retainer in an Atlantic seaboard city that knows how to keep it's secrets, Guy Noir - Private Eye, writes:

John Thayer Jenson over at Called to Communion posted this fine comment:

I remember saying to my wife once, when [we] were in via, that I had felt my life as a Christian, which only started when I was 27, had been like a man walking through a fog – occasionally glimpsing some Shape appearing through the mists, and then disappearing – and wanting to know more about It – then one day things cleared more than usual and I realised that what I had seen all along was the Catholic Church.

It made me think of David Mills recent piece in NOR, "The Whole House" (New Oxford Review, October, 2014):

Some Catholics speak of sharing their faith with others as if being a Catholic were secondary and relatively unimportant, as if by being or becoming any sort of Christian a person has arrived home. I’ve heard this from Catholics of all sorts, often in reaction to something I’ve written on apologetics. Catholics have told me they would not even think about discussing Catholicism with their evangelical friends, whose faith they believe to be complete as is. I have been told twice, once by a very conservative priest, to beware of “Catholic chauvinism” because I’d suggested that, all things considered, being a Catholic is better than not being a Catholic. A goodly number of Catholics have disparaged even the idea of arguing for the Church, explaining that Catholics should witness by the way we live and that arguments will only drive people away. Some have even suggested that the Church “forbids us to proselytize,” defining the word very broadly.

... But the Catholic must still, when he can, tell his Protestant friends that they should complete their faith by entering the Catholic Church. They are in sight of home but are not home.

In the preface to Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis described the Church as a house with various rooms occupied by different traditions, including Catholicism. It’s not that good an image, even from his point of view, but it does give us one way of understanding our relation to our Protestant friends. Lewis would not have accepted this reimagining of his metaphor, but Catholics, who know that the Church isn’t merely one denomination among others, will know that the Catholic Church is the house, and the rooms are occupied by the various rites within the Church. To enter the house, one must be a member of the family. Friends may set up homes in the yard. They are within the pale, the relation the Church calls “real but imperfect communion.” Read more >>

[Hat tip to G.N.]