Author: D. G. Hart

Folded or Dirty

Published on by D. G. Hart180 Comments

It’s still laundry that most of us don’t get to see. It’s a little old at this point, but the exchange between Ross Douthat and James Martin, editor at large of America magazine, displayed an honesty that conversations between conservatives and liberals in American Protestantism never revealed. It also exposed us outsiders to a range of views that Jason and the Callers keep under wraps (whether out of duplicity or ignorance is anyone’s guess. Here are a few highlights:

Douthat admits that papal supremacy won’t fix what ails Roman Catholicism (contrary to Jason and the Callers):

. . . to the extent that some conservatives ultimately find themselves in sincere disagreement with statements this pope makes, or experience sincere disappointment with some of his appointments, that experience might help cure them of the unhealthy papolatry that sometimes built up under John Paul II, and help them recognize the truth of a point that more liberal Catholics have often raised—that the Vatican is not the church entire, and that many worthwhile experiments in Catholic history have been undertaken without a stamp of approval (quite the reverse, indeed) from the hierarchy.

But with all of this said, on some of the issues we’re debating right now, I think there’s also an important asymmetry between the position of progressive Catholics and conservative Catholics vis-à-vis a pope who might seem at times to be on the “other team.” By this I mean that for Catholics who desire some kind change in church teaching around sex and marriage and the family, by definition the continuity and integrity of the current teaching isn’t essential to their understanding of what the church is, why it’s worth belonging to, and so on. As much as they may have been disappointed under the last two pontificates, that is, their fundamental reasons for being Catholic were not shaken by what John Paul or Benedict taught or said on divorce or same-sex marriage or other issue, because they had already decided that what any specific pope says about sex or marriage can be taken as provisional, subject to the future revision by the Holy Spirit.

Martin identifies the bottom line for Roman Catholic progressives (would Jason and the Callers agree?):

I can surely understand the frustration of some who feel that what they view as essential is up for grabs. Seeing something that you deem essential being held up for debate would be disturbing indeed. But, for me, the essentials are contained, first, in in the Gospels and, second, in the Nicene Creed. So no pope—no Christian—could say, “There is no need to love your enemy, to forgive, or to care for the poor.” Nor could any Christian say, “Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead.” After the Gospels and the Creed, I look to the whole rest of our church tradition, through the lens of the hierarchy of truths, understanding what has a greater level of authority over us.

That’s a brief answer to a big question, but as for the essentials, I would—and I’m not being metaphorical here—die for them.

One more — Douthat identifies the state of U.S. Roman Catholicism (and makes me wonder whether Jason and the Callers are calling to this communion):

These are all clearly persistent temptations for the church—a version of the commercial temptation helped bring on the Protestant Reformation, after all—and much of what we think of today as liberal Catholicism was forged in reaction to their pre-Vatican II manifestations. The ritualistic spirit of Eat meat on Friday, go straight to hell, do not pass go, the God-as-accountant image inherent in say these seventeen different prayers to thirteen different saints and receive in return exactly 4,544 days off Purgatory, the culture of shame and silence around sexuality, the punitive visions of hell immortalized by James Joyce, the pomp and circumstance embraced by princes of the church…these are stereotypes, of course, of a richer and more complicated reality, but they are grounded in real aspects of the pre-1960s church, which were in need of correction and reform.

But as someone who came of age long, long after the battles of Vatican II, I simply don’t recognize the Catholic culture that many liberal Catholics seem to believe they’re warring against or seeking to undo or overthrow. The “traditionalist” church, the church of lace and legalisms if you will, that the current pontiff is particularly quick to critique, is simply not part of most American Catholics’ everyday experience. It may exist in some parishes and precincts, or among certain bishops or cardinals. But the dominant experience of Catholic life, Catholic liturgy, Catholic preaching, has nothing in common with the stereotype of a Pharisee lecturing people about their (mostly sexual) sins.

What it has more in common with, and I speak from experience, is certain forms of Mainline Protestantism and megachurch evangelicalism: Notwithstanding what still emanates from the Vatican, we’ve become a church of long communion and short confession lines (and you’re more likely to find me in the first than the second), of Jesus-affirms-you sermons and songs, of marriage preparation retreats (like mine) where most of the couples are cohabitating and nobody particularly cares, and of widespread popular attitudes toward the divine and toward church teaching that mostly resemble H. Richard Niebuhr’s vision of a God without wrath, men without sin, and a Kingdom without judgment.

Would that we would ever hear this kind of frankness from Jason and the Callers (and the entire team of apologetical salesmen).

Back to the Regularly Schedule Outrage

Published on by D. G. Hart39 Comments

So as I was cooking yesterday morning in preparation for last night’s congregational hymn sing and December (near Christmas) pot providence supper, I had NPR on with Diane Rehm leading a group of men through a discussion of the Senate’s report on CIA torture. And I’m thinking, first Ferguson, then Ray Rice, then Eric Garner. How do I manage my outrage?

Well, in the world of grief followed by getting on with life, the way Diane decided to ease her listeners back from a view of the CIA far too close to Homeland was by devoting the second hour to Mr. Rogers? Imagine how African-American listeners might have felt if Diane had decided to follow an hour-long discussion of Ferguson with a segment on holiday weight-gain. Would that topic trivialize the injustice?

Maybe you devote two hours to U.S. intelligence and its abuses.

Or perhaps, if you have a job to do and you put together roughly 250 programs a year, you don’t feature outrageous events all the time. After all, with all the sin, misery, and injustice in the world, we could be outraged most of the time (as the missus suspects I am). The fact that we are not more outraged more of the time may be an indication of how relatively good life is this side of glory. As anyone who grieves the loss of a loved one knows, the world doesn’t stop and you don’t get a day off from adult responsibilities just because dad died. Maybe even the day after you observe the burial of your father you clean the bathrooms. Does that trivialize the grief? Or is it possible to live a life based on intense grief (or outrage)? Experimental Calvinists please don’t answer.

Upon further reflection, though, with help from Ross Douthat, John McWhorter, and Diane Rehm, I have come to wonder whether the extensive discussions of race relations and police brutality disguise a much bigger problem — the use of force by people whose self-interest coincides with justifications for it.

Ross Douthat, for instance, thinks that Ferguson does not make the case for improved policing policy that many do:

Ferguson is turning into a poor exhibit for the policy causes that it’s being used to elevate. We will never know exactly what happened in the shooting of Michael Brown, but at this point the preponderance of the available evidence suggests that this case is at the very least too ambiguous, and quite possibly too exculpatory of the officer involved, to effectively illustrate a systemic indictment of police conduct. Meanwhile, while I continue to believe that the looting and vandalism in Ferguson do not, by their mere existence, prove that a full-metal-jacket police response to the protests was wise or productive — quite the reverse; I still think it contributed to a dynamic of escalation — the fact remains that if you’re trying to make a case to anyone on the center-right (or the non-ideological public, for that matter) that American police forces have become too aggressive, too armored-up, too bullying, a story in which they ended up failing to prevent the destruction of businesses and property is not necessarily the ideal exhibit to introduce.

Douthat points to John McWhorter, always a good read, who thinks the Brown and Garner incidents point to a problem about police-community relations:

The right-wing take on Brown, that he was simply a “thug,” is a know-nothing position. The question we must ask is: What is the situation that makes two young black men comfortable dismissing a police officer’s request to step aside?

These men were expressing a community-wide sense that the official keepers of order are morally bankrupt. What America owes communities like Ferguson — and black America in general — is a sincere grappling with that take on law enforcement that is so endemic in black communities nationwide. As Northwestern philosopher Charles Mills has put it, “Black citizens are still differentially vulnerable to police violence, thereby illustrating their second class citizenship.”

This is true. It is most of what makes so many black people of all classes sense racism as a key element of black life, and even identity. Now, some suppose that the reason for what Mills refers to is black people’s fault, that black people are just too dumb, lazy, and immoral to understand what it is to be decent citizens. Most would disagree, however, which logically implies that something has gone terribly wrong from the other end — from law enforcement itself. The President’s statement on the verdict got at this point: what we must get past is larger than the specifics of what happened between Wilson and Brown.

And in that vein, as someone who has written in ardent sympathy with the Ferguson protests, I find this hard to write, but I have decided that it would be dishonest of me to hold back. As I have written endlessly, America will never get past race without a profound change in how police forces relate to black men.

The one point of disagreement I have with McWhorter stems from the reality that today U.S. police forces include many African-American men and women. This is not like the televised incidents of white police beating up protesting blacks in urban neighborhoods on fire. African-Americans are now — can you say President Obama? — on both sides of the law. In which case the issue of race may actually cloud the matter of privilege. Do Bill Cosby or Jesse Jackon’s children face the same relations with people who enforce the law as do Michael Brown and Eric Garner? And do the poor white residents of Hillsdale, Michigan fare better with the local police than the children of African-American University of Michigan professors do with Ann Arbor’s finest? Of course, in some parts of urban America, African-Americans are disproportionately situated in communities that police treat differently. But is that merely a function of race or is it much more a case of wealth?

Irrespective of the incidents in New York and Ferguson, the United States faces a much bigger problem — perhaps the granddaddy of them all — a branch of the federal government that has almost unlimited power (in the name of national interest) to brutalize people. But before we let ourselves off the hook as innocent bystanders to these incidents, Noah Millman has a useful reminder that many of us asked for this after 9/11:

I’ve written before about the overwhelming fear that afflicted the country in the wake of 9-11, and how, perversely, exaggerating the severity of the threat from al Qaeda helped address that fear, because it made it acceptable to contemplate more extreme actions in response. If al Qaeda was really just a band of lunatics who got lucky, then 3,000 died because, well, because that’s the kind of thing that can happen. If al Qaeda was the leading edge of a worldwide Islamo-fascist movement with the real potential to destroy the West, then we would be justified in nuking Mecca in response. Next to that kind of response, torture seems moderate.

Willingness to torture became, first within elite government and opinion-making circles, then in the culture generally, and finally as a partisan GOP talking point, a litmus test of seriousness with respect to the fight against terrorism. That – proving one’s seriousness in the fight – was its primary purpose from the beginning, in my view. It was only secondarily about extracting intelligence. It certainly wasn’t about instilling fear or extracting false confessions – these would not have served American purposes. It was never about “them” at all. It was about us. It was our psychological security blanket, our best evidence that we were “all-in” in this war, the thing that proved to us that we were fierce enough to win.

You can probably make a similar point about the police and community relations. Lots of Americans, black and white, vote for candidates who will be tough on crime. When that toughness becomes something from which we would prefer to avert our eyes, do we side with candidates who say, “let’s treat criminals charitably”? I don’t think so.

And maybe that is why Diane Rehm has a nationally syndicated radio show and I don’t. You program both outrage and sunny-side up sentimentality. That’s how we get through the g-d day.

The Call Goes Only So Far

Published on by D. G. Hart74 Comments

To communion but not to education:

The ascendant liberalism at modern Catholic colleges is a problem that has perplexed parents with traditional Catholic beliefs for decades now. Bishop Sheen went so far as to recommend that Catholic parents steer their children toward state and private colleges rather than Catholic institutions, contending it would be better to have their faith ignored at a secular college than actively undermined by liberal Catholic professors at a Catholic college.

Not everyone agrees with Sheen. I can remember an exchange on this topic in Triumph magazine back in the 1970s. I can’t recall who it was who disagreed with Sheen’s position, but his point was that even a Catholic college with a theology and philosophy department dominated by liberation theologians was a better choice than a secular college. The writer in question contended that the odds were good that a student would be able to find at least a few professors loyal to the Church at liberal Catholic colleges to help them grow in their faith, something not likely at secular colleges. Beyond that, he felt that spending four years in a Catholic atmosphere of available daily Masses, and the trappings of stained-glass windows and statues of the saints would have a favorable influence on the spiritual life of young people of college age.

My own view? I went back on forth on the question, but I did send my daughter in the 1990s to a Jesuit college that I knew was far more liberal than the Jesuit college I attended in the 1960s. She learned little about Thomas Aquinas and Jacques Maritain while in attendance, but I did not regret my decision. I am convinced that the Catholic cultural environment in which she was immersed was a healthy influence on her spiritual growth.
I was recently surprised to discover that there are professors at Catholic colleges these days who ponder this very issue, who worry about what it will mean if the Catholic identity of their institutions is lost.

Why don’t Jason and the Callers ever talk about Boston College?

Building Bridges or Revoking the Call

Published on by D. G. Hart123 Comments

Rick Warren thinks he is trying to find common ground between Roman Catholics and Protestants. He doesn’t realize he just cut off Jason and the Callers at the knees:

Warren, whose Purpose Driven Life and Purpose Driven Church books have sold millions of copies around the world, recorded a video interview for the Catholic News Service in which he said: “We have far more in common than what divides us.”

He continued: “When you talk about Pentecostals, charismatics, evangelicals, fundamentalists, Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians … Well they would all say we believe in the trinity, we believe in the Bible, we believe in the resurrection, we believe salvation is through Jesus Christ. These are the big issues.

“Sometimes Protestants think that Catholics worship Mary like she’s another god. But that’s not exactly Catholic doctrine.”

He also referred to the Roman Catholic practice of prayer to the saints, which Protestants reject, saying: “When you understand what they mean by what they’re saying, there’s a whole lot more commonality.

“Now there’s still real differences, no doubt about that. But the most important thing is if you love Jesus, we’re on the same team.”

He said that Church unity would realistically be “not a structural unity but a unity of mission. And so, when it comes to the family we are co-workers in the field on this for the protection of what we call the sanctity of life, the sanctity of sex, and the sanctity of marriage. So there’s a great commonality and there’s no division on any of those three.”

I wonder why Rick Warren is on Pope Francis’ A-list but not Bryan Cross. Audacious?

New Calvinism is Warmed-Over New Evangelicalism with a Hint of Hipster

Published on by D. G. Hart42 Comments

John Turner’s post about Henrietta Mears reminded me of a thought I have had for some time — namely, that the New Calvinism and Gospel Coalition are simply trying to do what Carl Henry and Harold John Ockenga were trying to do in the world of Protestantism outside the mainline churches. Mears was arguably the most important force in Sunday school curricula during the post-World War II era. And her outlook and energy prompted Turner to characterize neo-evangelicalism of the Billy Graham era along the following lines:

▪ Biblicism. This may seem obvious, but lost in discussions of the divergence of “new evangelicalism” from old-style fundamentalism is the fact that the new evangelicals remained biblicist to the core. Henrietta Mears revamped Sunday school education at Hollywood Presbyterian because she did not like the existing “grasshopper approach to the Bible. The children were not taught that God had a plan from Genesis to Revelation but were taught only stories. As one of the children said, ‘Sunday school gets dumber and dumber. The same old stories all the time.’” It occurs to me that the story of Jesus welcoming the children over the disciples’ opposition is indeed overused!

▪ Optimism. Certainly American evangelicals were alarmed, even paranoid at times, about various threats to the church and their nation. Communists, union leaders, juvenile delinquents — evangelicals were never at a loss when it came to finding something ominous on the country’s horizon. At the same time, they had tremendous faith that God would perform miraculous works through their ministries. It is no accident that Henrietta Mears helped mold Bill Bright, the Campus Crusade for Christ founder with a vision to “change the world.” Mears dreamed big. Evangelicals today are more chastened. We read about declining evangelical clout and the growing number of religious “nones.” Evangelical celebrities come to town for a night or two, not for six- or eight-week crusades like Billy Graham’s. A more realistic, even chastened approach is probably wise, but we could sometimes use a dose of Henrietta Mears-style dogged optimism.

▪ Bridge-building. Perhaps Henrietta Mears has given me a somewhat overly irenic sense of mid-century evangelicalism, but she seemed to get along with nearly everyone who even approached the nebulous borders of the evangelical world. In terms of theology, I understand Mears as rather close to a Keswick-style approach to surrender, holiness, and empowerment for service. In her ministry, however, she cooperated with mainstream-to-liberal Presbyterians, Keswick-oriented speakers, and dispensationalists. She would not invite Pentecostals to Forest Home, but she did invite Oral Roberts’s family to her own home and befriended the Oklahoma evangelist. As a “Bapterian,” she did not worry overly much about an individual’s precise place in the patchwork world of evangelicalism. Like Billy Graham, she could work with anyone dedicated to bringing young people in particular into a deep, abiding relationship in Jesus Christ.

That also seems to apply to the New Calvinism — not wanting to be too bound by theological systems, optimistic about all works of God (especially the New Calvinism), and willing to cross sacramental (think baptism) and spiritual-gift (think tongues) lines.

The only aspect of New Calvinism that is different is the attempt at urban hipness that sometimes surfaces among its proponents (think Greg Thornbury and image of TKNY). Henry and Ockenga had their urban moments, whether Los Angeles (okay, Pasadena), Boston, or Washington DC. But they were more earnest about the truth than being relevant. But with the success of TKNY has come the notion for some of the New Calvinists that you can be Edwards in Manhattan. For some reason, the New Calvinists don’t remember that Edwards’ earnestness landed him on the Massachusetts’ frontier trying to evangelize the Native Americans. In other words, earnestness and hipness don’t mix (which may explain John Piper’s remarkable indifference to Christian urbanism).

All that Flesh, and No Where to Put It

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Mark Jones departs from the Puritan opposition to Advent and Christmas by posting about the incarnation. But once again his excitement to make a point may get the better of him:

This shows us just how much God loves “flesh” (i.e., human nature). God is forever identified with humanity because of the incarnation. Thus, heaven will be a “fleshly” place. Not at all “sinful,” but certainly a place where we will be more truly human than we are now. If our bodies and souls are to be redeemed, Jesus had to possess a body and soul, since whatever is not assumed by Jesus cannot be healed. One is not more important than the other, as though we yearn for the day when we can shed our bodies and live as “free-floating” souls. Far from it. We yearn for the day when our bodies and souls are both transformed into the likeness of Christ’s glorious body (1 Jn. 3:2 “…we shall be like him”…).

Funny thing is, this will be an odd sort of fleshly existence where men and women won’t have an obvious reason for those parts of the human body that Paul says are “unpresentable” (1 Cor 12:23).

How about Every Single Second of Every Single Day?

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

Tim Challies would have us believe — channeling John Owen — that temptations to sin come in seasons, the way the leaves turn colors:

We live in a world that is full of temptation. There is no rest from sin and no rest from temptation to sin. There is not a single moment when we can relax our vigilance. As John Owen says, we can leave sin alone when sin leaves us alone, and that will not be until we are on the far side of the grave.

Temptations can be like the waves of the sea as they break along the beach—they rise and fall, they ebb and flow. Yet temptations are not entirely unpredictable, and there are certain times in life in which they are more likely to press hard than in others. Here are 4 times or seasons in which you need to be especially vigilant against temptation.

TMI about (all about) me, but I wish temptations came so seasonally. But if every time I leave the house I’m annoyed if someone gets in my way (on the road, sidewalk, stairs, hallway, or cafeteria line), how gradual is that?

And I thought these guys were the great explorers of the soul’s depths.

Where's the Rigidity?

Published on by D. G. Hart34 Comments

Before the discussions about marriage become stale, perhaps a question or two are in order.

John Allen, my favorite reporter on the Vatican, wrote that annulment reform was something that the Bishops who gathered in Rome wanted:

Recently, however, I got one thing right. On Sept. 15, I published a piece under the headline, “Annulment reform a smart bet at looming Synod of Bishops.”

The forecast was based on the idea that making annulments faster and simpler would offer a natural compromise between those wanting to allow divorced and civilly remarried Catholics back to Communion, and those opposed. It allows each group to address its core concern: defending the permanence of marriage, and showing compassion for those in broken relationships.

An annulment is a finding by a Church court that someone’s first union wasn’t a sacramental marriage, because it didn’t meet a test for validity such as psychological capacity to understand the requirements of marriage. If granted, an annulment allows someone to get married again in the Church.

But why is a reform necessary when it seems the Bishops already have a high degree of flexibility? Consider the case of Teddy Kennedy:

A statement that Senator Edward M. Kennedy had his second marriage blessed by the Roman Catholic Church after a 1982 divorce has revealed wide confusion among both Catholics and non-Catholics about the church’s policy on annulments.

Catholic teaching does not allow remarriage after divorce unless a spouse has died or the earlier marriage is annulled, meaning that it was found to have been invalid from the beginning.

The question of whether the Senator’s 23-year marriage to Joan Kennedy had been annulled was raised when he received Communion at the funeral of his mother, Rose Kennedy, on Tuesday, normally an indication that a person is in good standing with the church.

A spokesman for the Senator, a Massachusetts Democrat, told The Boston Globe that the Senator’s marriage last year to Victoria Reggie in a civil ceremony was eventually “blessed by the church,” which set off a flurry of inquiries into the church’s policy, Boston newspapers and church officials said.

Or, what about Nicole Kidman?

Nicole Kidman’s wedding to country singer Keith Urban in Sydney at the weekend drew plenty of media attention.

But some Catholics will have looked on perplexed at how the former bride of actor Tom Cruise managed to tie the knot for a second time, in a Catholic church.

It was widely reported in the run up to the weekend wedding that Ms Kidman had received an annulment for her previous marriage – the Catholic Church’s procedure for allowing a follower to wed again.

Father Paul Coleman, who conducted the latest nuptials, was said to have advised the Oscar-winning actress on the dissolution.

In fact, Kidman didn’t need an annulment for one simple reason: in the eyes of the Catholic Church her 10-year union with Tom Cruise, a renowned Scientologist, never happened.

I understand the need for transparency (and that’s what’s happening under Cardinal Pell with the Vatican Bank). But if you write procedures then you have less flexibility, right?

Do You See What I See?

Published on by D. G. Hart115 Comments

Haven’t heard the carol yet, but I’m sure it’s coming.

This post from Guy Noir at the Pertinacious Papist brought the Christmas carol to mind and it concerns our peaceful interlocutor, Bryan Cross, and why he doesn’t see what others do.

First Guy quotes a critic of Called to Communion but does not link to his source (and yes, I had hoped it was — all about — me):

I think the point is that Bryan Cross and the whole Called to Communion project is almost entirely out of step with modern Roman Catholicism post-V2. … It’s why you don’t see very many cradle RCs calling us to communion. They understand that the Vatican now sees us as true Christians, having in practice renounced the anathemas of Trent even while still nominally claiming them. The religion that Bryan and CtC promote is very heady and not at all in touch with the average RC in the pew. …[T]he church basically renounced its earlier doctrines and practices at V2… Bryan et al don’t see it at all, which is why we get 10,000 word tomes trying to make the square peg of Tridentine Romanism fit the round hole of post-V2 RCism. The blindness of CtC is seen in their refusal to admit that if Francis and any nineteenth century pope sat down together, neither one of them would recognize each other as a true RC.

Then Guy comments, I think in support of both the critic and of Bryan Cross (though I may be mistaken):

I really don’t know. Does proposing something that seems simply beyond the pale — just because it seems beyond the pale — make a suggestion out of the question? If a nagging suspicion or claim won’t go away, is the best policy simply to ignore it? If Francis to so many Catholics sounds unCatholic, isn’t that a reason to address to underlying issues, versus continuing to exist in a faith-anestithizing environment where we just pretend it ain’t so? And while I am at it, since when is a Pope who talks like Universalism is an option and Being Good is good enough, a pope than evangelicals think sounds evangelical?! B. B. Warfield and Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, please call you offices, stat!

In which case, it looks like Bryan doesn’t see, contrary to what his paradigms tell him, either what the state of affairs is in the contemporary church or who his allies are in the contemporary church. One thing I do know — it would be worth the price of admission (a cheap bottle of Irish whiskey?) to be around the Callers when they read Crux and National Catholic Reporter.