Category: Modern Church

P&W, the Next Generation

Published on by D. G. Hart45 Comments

At roughly 2:30 of <a href="

“>this video, which is very, very good, the Lutheran Satirist makes reference to Lutheran youth leaving contemporary worship services for Presbyterianism. News alert: God’s frozen chosen have been defrosted ever since the First Pretty Good Awakening inflamed the English-speaking Calvinist soul.

Aside from what this video may say about Presbyterians, it does raise questions about the generational divide of contemporary worship. Steve Thorngate thinks the video’s point about using contemporary music to attract the young misses the point of contemporary worship. First he quotes the creator of the U2charist:

The U2charist is a demonstration of one way that liturgy can bring people together to celebrate what God is doing in the world to bring justice for the poor and reconciliation for the world. It is by no means the only way to do so, or even necessarily the best way for your congregation. If your congregation doesn’t really know or like U2, it may feel forced and awkward to use their music without substantial adaptation in liturgy — and if it feels forced and awkward for you, that’s probably going to come across to anyone who does visit your church for the first time for a U2charist. That probably wouldn’t be the best sort of circumstances in which to try such a service; there’s little that’s cool or fun about a bunch of people doing something that they think is no fun at all because they think it would look cool to others.

Thorngate chimes in:

The people I know who have planned and executed U2charists, etc. aren’t thinking primarily about outreach-to-the-kidz either. Neither are the people I work with in my side job as a church musician, where we do several such events each year.

Now, this is a church where youngish adults are already overrepresented, and where the musical culture is nontraditional and eclectic. This is key: the pop-star-themed services are organically related to what we do every week, not some gimmicky departure from it. The morning service makes enthusiastic use of a wide mix of pop music. A U2charist makes sense there, and they’ve done several. The evening service—the one I help lead—is more invested in folk, roots, and country-rock music. A Dylan-themed service (Bob, not Breuer) makes more sense in our context, and I’ve planned and led a couple. We’ve also talked about doing a Johnny Cash-themed service sometime.

Attendance always goes up for these services. But that isn’t really the point. The point is to proclaim the gospel from a new angle, to engage in a fresh way—by taking something that is already part of what we do and giving it a one-week special focus, as other churches do with any number of things. In a context where popular music styles are the norm, and where we decline to observe a strict separation between the sacred and secular when choosing source material, this is a very natural thing.

Thorngate is probably right. Contemporary contemporary worship is no longer aimed at teens. It is now the accepted form of worship for former teens who have now become adults. And that’s why the worship wars are over. We have crossed the rubicon and entered the world of eclectic liturgy, sort of like the United Colors of Benetton.

Still, the Lutheran Satirist is right that contemporary contemporary worship is still cheesy and that the key to retaining the youth is faithful parenting and faithful preaching. If that happens, young people and adults aren’t gullible about the appeal of U2 or LeCrae or Faure in worship.

What Must I Think about America to be Saved?

Published on by D. G. Hart211 Comments

Contrary to Jason and the Callers, the fault lines in U.S. Roman Catholicism are not between traditionalists and liberals, but between American exceptionalists and those skeptical about America. Here is how Patrick Deneen describes the division:

On the one side one finds an older American tradition of orthodox Catholicism as it has developed in the nation since the mid-twentieth century. It is closely aligned to the work of the Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray, and its most visible proponent today is George Weigel, who has inherited the mantle from Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Novak. . . .

Proponents of this position argue that America was well-founded and took a wrong turn in the late-19th century with the embrace of Progressivism (this intellectual position, closely associated with intellectuals at Claremont McKenna College and Hillsdale College, was briefly popularized by Glenn Beck. It has been developed not especially by Catholics, but by students of Leo Strauss, but has been widely embraced by Catholics of this school). The task, then, is restore the basic principles of the American founding—limited government in which the social and moral mores largely arising from the familial and social sphere orient people toward well-ordered and moral lives. This position especially stresses a commitment to the pro-life position and a defense of marriage, and is generally accepting of a more laissez-faire economic position. It supports a vigorous foreign policy and embraces a close alignment between Catholicism and Americanism. It has become closely aligned with the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party.

Those are the Americanists (psst — Leo XIII, yes the very one of Rerum Novarum fame, branded Americanism a heresy; some Old Schoolers would agree). On the other hand:

On the other side is arrayed what might be characterized as a more radical Catholicism. Its main intellectual heroes are the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre and the theologian David L. Schindler (brilliantly profiled in the pages of TAC by Jeremy Beer). . . . The “radical” school rejects the view that Catholicism and liberal democracy are fundamentally compatible. Rather, liberalism cannot be understood to be merely neutral and ultimately tolerant toward (and even potentially benefitting from) Catholicism. Rather, liberalism is premised on a contrary view of human nature (and even a competing theology) to Catholicism. Liberalism holds that human beings are essentially separate, sovereign selves who will cooperate based upon grounds of utility. According to this view, liberalism is not a “shell” philosophy that allows a thousand flowers to bloom. Rather, liberalism is constituted by a substantive set of philosophical commitments that are deeply contrary to the basic beliefs of Catholicism, among which are the belief that we are by nature relational, social and political creatures; that social units like the family, community and Church are “natural,” not merely the result of individuals contracting temporary arrangements; that liberty is not a condition in which we experience the absence of constraint, but the exercise of self-limitation; and that both the “social” realm and the economic realm must be governed by a thick set of moral norms, above all, self-limitation and virtue.

Because of these positions, the “radical” position—while similarly committed to the pro-life, pro-marriage teachings of the Church—is deeply critical of contemporary arrangements of market capitalism, is deeply suspicious of America’s imperial ambitions, and wary of the basic premises of liberal government. It is comfortable with neither party, and holds that the basic political division in America merely represents two iterations of liberalism—the pursuit of individual autonomy in either the social/personal sphere (liberalism) or the economic realm (“conservatism”—better designated as market liberalism). Because America was founded as a liberal nation, “radical” Catholicism tends to view America as a deeply flawed project, and fears that the anthropological falsehood at the heart of the American founding is leading inexorably to civilizational catastrophe.

Michael Baxter, identified sometimes as one of the “radicals,” puts the issue this way:

“It has been a greatly providential blessing,” John Courtney Murray, S.J., observed in We Hold These Truths, “that the American Republic never put to the Catholic conscience the questions raised, for instance, by the Third Republic. There has never been a schism within the American Catholic community, as there was among Catholics in France, over the right attitude to adopt toward the established polity.”

However much this statement was true in 1960, it is not true today. Now the politics of the American Republic does raise questions of conscience for Catholics. Now a schism has arisen within the Catholic community in the United States over the proper attitude toward the established polity. The schism is between those Catholics in the United States who identify with liberal politics and those who identify with conservative politics in the secular sphere. The division is pervasive and deep, and it is tearing the U.S. Catholic community apart.

The division between these groups of Catholics is a consequence of Catholics’ performing the role Father Murray assigned to them. He believed that the United States was exceptional among modern states. Unlike France, it was founded on principles inherited from Catholic political theory. This meant that Catholics could carry out the crucial task of transforming public discourse with the principles of natural law and returning the nation to the consensus on which it was founded. Father Murray, a long time editor at America, was aware that this “American consensus” was crumbling in the nation as a whole, but he was confident it would remain intact within the U.S. Catholic community. What he did not foresee, however, is how this consensus would fall apart even among American Catholics; how, in attempting to transform the nation, Catholics would become politically divided and therefore incapable of performing their pivotal role as, in his words, “guardians of the American consensus.” Without that role, his story of Catholicism and the United States falls apart.

An outsider wonders whether these folks sometimes discuss the significance of baptism for justification, how long one can expect to stay in purgatory, the benefits of indulgences, the mystery of transubstantiation, or the power of bishops. It does seem that as big and pretty good and powerful as the U.S. is, its import vanishes beneath the weight of eternal considerations about judgment day.

Even so, Baxter issues a caution that neo-Calvinists, theonomists, and TKNYers should well consider:

The problem is that in setting out to transform politics [me: or cities or culture] in the United States, Catholics have been transformed by it. Like mainline Protestants, they have succumbed to the molding pressures of state-sponsored bureaucratic power—not the overt and direct power of Fascism and Communism or the militant secularism of European democracy (as in France), but the more subtle workings of indirect power, which domesticates any and all subordinate groups by dissolving their ability to resist the authority of the state and by co-opting the well-intentioned efforts of good people, good Catholics, into conforming to the polarized political culture of the nation.

A Genie Out of the Bottle

Published on by D. G. Hart218 Comments

What Jason and the Callers don’t understand about history, historical consciousness, or what happened at Vatican 2, they could well learn from Mark Massa, a Jesuit and Dean of the School of Ministry and Theology at Boston College. Particularly instructive is this excerpt from the conclusion to his book, The American Catholic Revolution:

. . . there are at least three lessons to be learned from the Catholic sixties in the United States. . . . First, it seems highly unlikely that historical consciousness — the awareness that everything, including the Church, changes as history unfolds — can ever be effectively explained away again. True, some whom the secular press term traditionalists have been attempting that very thing since shortly after the Second Vatican Council closed. Those on the extreme end of these efforts view Vatican II as an anticouncil; that is, they see that even of 1962-65 as not being a real council of the Church at all, but rather an event abetted by the Forces of Darkness against the Fortress Church of Pius IX and Pius X. This group has always constituted an interesting but numerically insignificant group of Catholics.

More numerous — and more influential, at least in Europe — are those Catholics who even in the 1960s and certainly in the contemporary Church wish to claim Vatican II for the side of continuity and ahistorical Catholic truth: no “Rupture” did — or could — emerge from the implementation of the reforms of the council because the Church cannot change. But more to the point, they argue, is the fat that the council fathers implementing the reformed intended no such rupture with previous councils or Church practice. The efforts of this group — some in key hierarchical positions of authority — to ignore the genie let out of the bottle, or at least to act as though that genie offered nothing new and important, have found powerful spokespersons in the highest levels of Church government. But their arguments ignore the perspicacious law of unintended consequences, a law provable to the extent that it provides intellectual clarity on what in fact happened in the Catholic sixties. Mainstream Catholics in the United States, after the sixties, have come to understand their own revered brand of Christianity as having undergone historical development and change. The law of unintended consequences goes a long way in explaining why that perception has triumphed so broadly in the American Catholic community. Whatever the strengths of the arguments offered by the group attempt to claim Vatican II for the side of continuity, their failure to take into account the clear results of that law undercuts the important aspects of their position. Whatever the intentions of the bishop passing the conciliar decrees, the resulting documents sponsored a revolution that took on a life of its own, just as all events in history have a tendency to do. . . .

Second, the widespread acceptance of the seemingly self-evident truth that things change will make it increasingly difficult to propound or defend Church teaching and practice by appealing to timeless, static categories of propositional truth. This applies most particularly to the intellectual tradition of scholastic natural law, which the Catholic tradition has relied on for presenting its most important teachings since the thirteenth century. The fractious nonrecption of Paul VI’s encyclical on birth control, if nothing else, illustrates this with startling clarity. Whatever the truth of Paul VI’s teaching, the massive noncompliance accorded his encyclical shows that the great majority of American Catholics did not form their consciences along the lines of such moral reasoning, and have not since. There are of course many possible reasons for this lack of compliance on the part of the vast majority of practicing Catholics on an issue that the hierarchical Church has termed “serious matter.” Some of those reasons may indeed involve personal ignorance, sinful willfulness, or just plain selfishness. But an important reason for that noncompliance, what I would label as the main reason, is that the classical unchanging world it presupposes no longer makes sense to the vast majority of the faithful in the United States. What Bernard Lonergan so elegantly called the “transition from a classicist world view to historical mindedness” in fact describes the intellectual revolution that mainstream Catholics underwent during the sixties.

Whatever the strengths of that older classicist worldview — and it served the Catholic Church extraordinarily well for centuries — it can no longer provide plausible explanations for Church teaching . . . . The older intellectual categories of scholastic natural law, first enunciated so brilliantly by St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, appear unable to accomplish that now. Perhaps the intellectual justification offered in its place to explain Catholic teaching will represent the most important long-term fruit of the intellectual revolution sponsored by historical consciousness in Catholic Christianity. Time will tell.

The third lesson that Massa draws is that the labels conservative and liberal no longer make sense of Roman Catholicism:

What the historical consciousness allows us to see is that none of these figures [Bernard Lonergan, Avery Dulles, the Catonsville Nine] can be appropriately understood by the application of political labels. What they had in common as central players in the socioreligious drama I’ve termed the Catholic sixties was a deep appreciation of how the religious tradition to which they all belonged had undergone historical evolution and change. That appreciation was as Catholic as it was modern, in the sense that Pius X so feared. At its core was the radical recognition that what faithful Christians did and believed in the mid-twentieth century was not always a faithful replication of what the early Christian and the medieval builders of the great cathedrals had done and believed. Sometimes this recognition was good news; sometimes it was a cause for reform. . . But at its root was an appreciation of disruption, discontinuity, and evolution as part of the very fiber of the Catholic tradition. Change was not foreign to the Catholic tradition: it defined it.

This is why the bumper sticker line, “This is the church Jesus founded,” can no longer be uttered with a straight face. (And for those who want to claim with a straight face that Rome is the church Christ founded, they need to consider that Massa’s book came out five years after Benedict XVI outlined the hermeneutic of continuity by which the magisterium was going to read the history of Vatican II. Apparently, Massa, an official at a prominent Roman Catholic university, did not get that memorandum.)

Who Said Calvinism Was Fair?

Published on by D. G. Hart18 Comments

Great. Would be Calvinists get Mark Driscoll. Meanwhile, Lutherans get Nadia.

Nadia Bolz-Weber bounds into the University United Methodist Church sanctuary like a superhero from Planet Alternative Christian. Her 6-foot-1 frame is plastered with tattoos, her arms are sculpted by competitive weightlifting and, to show it all off, this pastor is wearing a tight tank top and jeans. . . .

In her body and her theology, Bolz-Weber represents a new, muscular form of liberal Christianity, one that merges the passion and life-changing fervor of evangelicalism with the commitment to inclusiveness and social justice of mainline Protestantism. She’s a tatted-up, foul-mouthed champion to people sick of being belittled as not Christian enough for the right or too Jesus-y for the left.

Is the Roman Catholic equivalent Stephen Colbert? Or Garry Wills?