...Christian Smith's "How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps."
I would be very appreciative if you would go here and give me a helpful vote.
A insightful examination of how the way that we look at the world can make a profound difference in what we see.
December 20, 2011
Christian Smith is a sociologist who recently converted from Evangelical Protestantism to Catholicism. This book is principally an account of the causes, phases and processes he went through in making that move.
Because Smith is a sociologist, he organizes his book around the idea of a "paradigm shift" as adumbrated by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. To that end, Smith starts out with a discussion of the worldview that subsists in Evangelical Christianity, then he recounts the many minor, inexplicable discontinuities that he regularly encountered in Evangelical Christianity, then he builds up to the major problems for which he could not find an answer in Evangelical Christianity, and finally he pointed to the paradigm shift which allowed him to see the world through Catholic eyes.
I am a life-long Catholic, and I found it fascinating to hear many of the things I had observed - or seen but couldn't explain - through Smith's Protestant perspective. In this way, Smith's book is a work of ecumenism - bridging a gap that may be more cultural and epistemological than it is theological. I know that I have had many knock-down, drag-out debates that were never resolved; after reading Smith, I realize that because the problem is cultural, it can't be resolved simply by appealing to commonly accepted texts.
For example, I've noticed the following whenever I get told that Catholics won't get to Heaven because of their "misunderstanding" about "justification":
"18. Note your dissatisfaction with the heavily cognitive, often rationalist, nature of much of Protestantism. There is no denying it: Protestantism is a religion of the head. What matters most are holding the right beliefs. And right beliefs are things that reside between one's ears. Having the right cognitions is the essence of Protestantism. So is possessing, professing, and defending the right words. And those words come from and enter into the head as well. True, evangelicalism includes strains of pietism, charismatic tendencies, revivalist emotion, and a love of practical activism that can help counter-balance the heavily cognitive leanings of Protestantism. But in the end, as you well know, what is ultimately important is having the right beliefs, the right ideas, the right words (even if that is in some ways contradicted among the laity by a simultaneous cultural emphasis on the subjectivistic opinions and feelings of individuals when interpreting the Bible, as discussed below in point 25)."
Smith, Christian (2011-06-09). How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (p. 49). Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.
In fact, I recently asked one Evangelical interlocutor if he thought that God gave a test on theology to determine who gets admitted into Heaven.
The flip side is this:
"For most of Christian history, the material and spiritual world was much more enchanted, thicker with spiritual meaning, and full of greater mystery than modern evangelicalism knows. Modernity suffers a "mystery deficit"--an inability to even conceive of unknowns and realities beyond those accessible to rational understanding. Indeed, that mystery deficit is central to the corrosions of secularization. Evangelicalism participates in that mystery deficit."
Smith, Christian (2011-06-09). How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (p. 36). Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.
And:
"The University of Chicago theologian, David Tracy, provides a language for this Protestant-Catholic difference in thought and imagination in his book, The Analogical Imagination. We might think of the general Protestant mentality as mapping onto what he calls a "dialectical" mentality, versus the more Catholic "analogical" tendency which he contrasts.16 The Catholic priest and sociologist Andrew Greeley writes similarly about "the Catholic Imagination" in his 2001 book by the same title, in which he emphasizes the Catholic instinct for seeing the mysterious in the plain, the sacred in the material, the holy lurking just below the surface of the ordinary. In the kind of analogical imagination toward which you need to now shift, everything is not simply what it is, only and literally that, and nothing else. Rather, our understanding comes from seeing how some things are like other things, how certain symbols point to other realities, how differences and similarities can work together to create coherent, harmonized understandings of reality.
Catholics, therefore, are much friendlier to what (for Protestants) seem like contradictions, to both/and understandings, metaphorical images, symbolic representations, and non-literal readings and interpretations. In some sense, Catholicism is more confident than Protestantism in its understanding of its apprehension, definition, security, and coherence of Christian truth--it has, after all, been working with the same basic approach for two millennia, and it enjoys the Church Magisterium to guard the deposit of faith.17 So Catholicism tends to feel more relaxed and at ease with differences, tensions, metaphors, and ambiguities in its thought and imagination. This is, again, a very different way of thinking, which takes a paradigm shift to acquire. So keep working on and praying about that."
Smith, Christian (2011-06-09). How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (p. 104). Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.
All of this is tied into this gem of an insight:
"Protestantism itself was a crucial force setting modernity into motion. The birth of Protestantism marks the onset of the early modern period in history. And Protestantism in all of its forms has grown up entirely within the developing modern world. There is no such thing as pre-modern Protestantism. Protestantism has no authentically Protestant references, resources, or formations that predate modernity.
Now, start to suspect that a Christian church tradition that is of modernity will eventually be consumed by modernity and postmodernity. The signs of that are already evident, for those who have the eyes to see them. Begin to wrap your mind around the idea that if the Christian church is to survive modernity it very likely needs to have spiritual, intellectual, theological roots that predate modernity. To be of modernity is to be captive to modernity, not just its ways of life but its basic presuppositions and instinctive outlooks. By this I mean things like autonomous individualism, Enlightenment skepticism, distrust of tradition, moral relativism, consumerist materialism, knee-jerk hostility toward authority, the market's colonization of non-economic spheres of life (such as church), and the domination of mass media, advertising, scientism, and rationalism.
In contrast to Protestantism's position, Catholicism goes back to the very beginning with deep roots in the ancient world. That provides references and resources that enable modern Christians to potentially transcend modernity and so perhaps to resist its corrosive effects."
Smith, Christian (2011-06-09). How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (pp. 67-68). Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.
By the way, the idea that modernity and Protestantism are twin births from a common cultural moment is not unique to Smith; Alister Mcgrath makes a similar point, albeit in a more upbeat way in Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution--A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First.
Finally, since I have often noticed the tendency of Evangelicals to overuse the word "just" - which I assume is Koine Greek for "We beseech thee, O Lord" - I found this observation worth a chuckle:
"Those around you and maybe you yourself pray with a lot of particular, but by now so-familiar-that-they-usually-go-unnoticed, phrases, such as, "Father God," "we would lift up," "I just have a heart for," "as unto the Lord," "knit our hearts together," "we are convicted," "if it be your will," "pray a `hedge' around," and "in Jesus' name." About 10-20 percent of the words used in the informal prayers of more than a few of the people around you consist of the one word "just"--as in, "Lord, we just ask that you just give us the eyes just to see you, Lord." Your community believes in praying authentic, spontaneous, personal prayers--not rote, ritualistic, formal, dusty, traditional prayers. It once occurred to you, however, that most people's spontaneous, personal prayers sound an awful lot alike. They actually seem to follow standard formats. You yourself wish you could be a better pray-er--and might have some books on your shelf about improving your prayer life--but you usually fall back into your old habits and familiar prayer wordings."
Smith, Christian (2011-06-09). How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (pp. 21-22). Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Smith's book will undoubtedly offend sincere Protestants, and to that extent it is performing a "prophetic" function of having people face their shibboleths. It performs the same function for Catholics. Recently, I found myself quoting this bit to a fellow Catholic:
"Do not become Catholic because you think it will give you certainty. Some evangelicals find Catholicism attractive because they think it offers them certainty about Christian beliefs. Previously, they thought an inerrant Bible alone provided certainty. Then they began to see the real problems with that approach, some of which we have noted above. What then to do? Looking to Rome, some decide that the Catholic Church Magisterium provides the epistemic certitude that conservative Protestantism taught them to desire. Catholicism appeals to such people in these cases because it seems to provide that absolute certainty.1
Don't do that. Don't think that way. Establishing certainty is a distinctively modern secular project, not a Christian one. It was Descartes, empiricism, scientism, and the logical positivists who taught us to prioritize and search after an indubitable and universal foundation of certainty in human knowledge (which only fairly recently we have realized actually does not exist). Christ, by contrast, calls us to drop what we want and expect, to believe, and to learn the truth from and follow him. So, do not become Catholic in order to replace a misguided theory about the Bible with a misguided expectation about the Church Magisterium. The main attraction of both of those, of course, is to make people feel more secure about what they think they know. But managing feelings of (in)security is not what Christian faith is about. So don't replace an old foundationalist Protestantism with a new (falsely) foundationalist Catholicism.2"
Smith, Christian (2011-06-09). How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (pp. 151-152). Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Amen to that.
This is an insightful book, and it is insightful because it was written by somebody who did the hardwork of honestly thinking about the issues. As such, I highly recommend it.
Posts
