Tag: Damon Linker

The Healthy Influence of Meredith Kline

Published on by D. G. Hart15 Comments

His Vossian eschatology and two-kingdom outlook gave some of us room to avoid this:

Have you heard of the Benedict Option? If not, you will soon.

It’s the name of a deeply pessimistic cultural project that’s capturing the imaginations of social conservatives as they come to terms with the realization that the hopes and assumptions that animated the religious right over the past 35-odd years have been dashed by the sweeping triumph of the movement for same-sex marriage.

From the start, the religious right has been marked by two qualities: optimism and a faith in majoritarianism. The qualities are connected. Think back to Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. The name conveyed its ideology: A majority of Americans are morally and religiously conservative. To the extent that the nation’s politics and culture don’t reflect that, it’s because they have been co-opted by a secular liberal minority that has placed itself in control of such elite institutions as the media, Hollywood, the universities, the judiciary, and the federal bureaucracy. The proper response is to take back these institutions using democratic means, primarily elections.

In other words, play by the rules of the democratic game, and social conservatives will eventually triumph.

This sounded like a fantasy at first, since the movement began among evangelical Protestants, who never made up more than about 25 percent of the population, and whose style of worship and belief was profoundly off-putting to non-evangelical Christians, let alone to more secular Americans. But ecumenical and inter-religious efforts throughout the 1980s and early 1990s helped to forge an alliance among conservative believers in many faith traditions: evangelicals, but also Catholics, Mormons, Jews, and Muslims. This made talk of majorities at least plausible, and seemed to vindicate the optimism, too.

Is this the thanks Kline gets? Anyone who steers you clear of the transformationalism/sky-is-falling outlook that afflicts various sectors of modern neo- and New Calvinism, a perspective that Kline’s reading of the Bible contravenes, deserves an extra helping of gratitude (if that’s not a dirty word for the Lutheran challenged).

Where Sometimes Is Heard a Realistic Word

Published on by D. G. Hart5 Comments

This is a conversion story that Bryan is not going to feature (I saw this REALLY before sdb commented):

I was raised as a secular Jew in New York City. (No religious education at all, no Bar Mitzvah, etc.) In my undergraduate and graduate education, I learned a lot about Christian theology and always found it impressive as a system of ideas, though I never entertained the thought of converting. That began to change when I taught at Brigham Young University for two years in the late 1990s. I found the Mormon students and faculty there to be extremely impressive — morally and intellectually serious. When I left the university (my non-tenured visiting position came to an end), I felt a loss, like something spiritual had been stirred up inside me that now lacked an outlet. I looked into my native Judaism, but by that point it seemed more foreign to me than Christianity, and especially Catholicism. (My wife is a cradle Catholic.) So I somewhat impulsively decided to convert. I was received into the church during the Easter Vigil Mass in 2001 at lovely St. Mary’s in New Haven, CT. (The long, involved homilies by the Dominicans at that parish spoiled me. I’ve never encountered anything remotely that engaging in the years since.)

To answer one of your questions, politics had nothing at all to do with my conversion — though it’s also true that I applied for and landed a job as associate editor of First Things magazine very soon after I began my RCIA classes, so for a time I wondered if there might be something providential going on there. That was especially tempting for the nine months or so after the September 11 attacks. It seemed like every aspect of my life and identity was related, connected, harmonized: Catholic convert, Richard John Neuhaus protege, ambitious intellectual, Republican, American — and Evil Doers to smite. What could be better?

That’s one of the great Catholic promises, isn’t it? Both/And? Unlike the either/or Protestants, let alone the neither/nor secular liberals, Catholics are supposed to pull it all together, show how it All Makes Sense — or at least how it once did make sense, during the Middle Ages, the high point of Christian civilization, a time of unity and synthesis. Until Occam’s nominalism shattered the great social-intellectual whole, that is. One guy denies the reality of universals and before you know it, you’ve got the Reformation and liberalism and pluralism and After Virtue.

I’m being glib, but I sometimes feel like working for First Things during the religious right’s moment of maximal influence in Washington might have been the worst possible thing I could have done to nurture my nascent faith. I never really had any, but I wanted it very much around the time of my conversion. It began to take tentative root in the months after 9/11. But then it pretty much died. Faith was always going to be fraught for me. I’m too skeptical, irreverent, too much in the habit of doubting authority, culturally too much of a secular New York Jew, to settle in easily to faith, let alone faith in a visible church. But add on priests endorsing military invasions and whispering in the ears of princes? Widespread child rape by priests and its active cover-up by the hierarchy? By the time I quit First Things in a huff in early 2005, I wanted nothing more to do with the church at all.

That proved too hasty. Unlike my friend Rod Dreher, who left Catholicism for Eastern Orthodoxy in aftermath of the sex-abuse scandal, I stayed put. I slowly returned to the church over the next few years, and we eventually resolved to raise our kids in the church as well — though it’s been a challenge at times. Neuhaus liked to say that the Catholic Church is “the Church of Jesus Christ most fully and rightly ordered through time.” That sounds nice, doesn’t it? I can’t even begin to imagine how someone could believe that.

Bursting this bubble hastens feasting on other sacred cows:

Clearly, we need to recognize that it took something like 1,700 years or so for Christian civilization to begin to develop norms and institutions that facilitated the transfer of the church’s theological-anthropological teaching about human dignity over to the political realm. And I’m inclined to give a lot of credit for that to the Protestant innovations that came about in the century or so before liberalism began to develop as a theory of government. So I guess you could say that even at this deep level, Protestantism has shaped my thinking more than Catholic political thought.

At a less fundamental level, I’d also say that I tend not to find Catholic political thinking especially helpful for guiding us through the most fundamental problems of our time. One of those problems is how to conceive of a society that no longer shares a common culture — that’s “centerless,” as I’ve sometimes put it in my writing. Catholic thought always seems to presume that political communities are unified moral wholes. Then when it looks at modern liberal cultures that clearly aren’t unified in this way — their wholeness is highly differentiated into a pluralism of sub-cultures that don’t agree with one another about the highest good — Catholic political thinkers kind of short-circuit. That’s why they’re fond of decline narratives and stories about the Great Fall from medieval Christendom. Brad Gregory’s big book about how all our problems can be laid at the feet of the Protestant Reformation (The Unintended Reformation) is just the latest in a very long line of such accounts. Let’s just say I don’t find arguments like that particularly useful.

Callers' Cognitive Dissonance

Published on by D. G. Hart623 Comments

Ross Douthat wrote recently about the odd reaction of liberal Roman Catholics to the notion that Pope Francis may change church teaching. He referred to Damon Linker’s surprise when doing an NPR talk show and a liberal Roman Catholic caller indicated that Linker was wrong to think that Francis changing the church’s stands was a potentially big deal:

After reading an endless stream of gushing commentary by liberal Catholics on Pope Francis, I’m beginning to wonder if they ever really cared about reforming doctrine in the first place.

The seeds of doubt were planted a couple of weeks after my TNR essay was published, when I appeared on an NPR radio show to discuss the pope. I repeated my argument, but then a caller challenged me. Describing herself as a progressive Catholic, she dismissed my skepticism about the likelihood of Francis reforming church doctrine. “Doctrine for a Catholic, now, is not even an issue,” said Trish from Kentucky (you can listen to her beginning at 24:43). “Catholics do not care about doctrine,” she said, adding, “It’s irrelevant. It’s a non-issue for Catholics.”

That, to be honest, is something that I hadn’t considered when I wrote my essay. As I indicated in my remarks responding to Trish, I had assumed all along that liberal Catholics wanted to liberalize Catholic doctrine — that they wanted to bring the church, as I wrote in TNR, “into conformity with the egalitarian ethos of modern liberalism, including its embrace of gay rights, sexual freedom, and gender equality.”

But here was a liberal Catholic telling me I’d gotten it all wrong. The pope’s warm, welcoming words are “everything,” Trish said, because doctrine, including that covering contraception and divorce, is “useless.”

Douthat concedes that this form of liberal Roman Catholicism may be more prevalent in U.S. circles than he had imagined (though you’d never know that from CTC):

The Commonweal-reading wing of liberal Catholicism would certainly reject the latter idea [i.e., “Roman Catholicism” just happens to be the name of the stage on which your purely individual spiritual drama is taking place], but the kind of “post-Catholic Catholicism” Linker describes is clearly more of a force in our culture today than it was during the early days of the American Church’s post-Vatican II civil war (it’s hard to understand the controversy over American nuns, for instance, without recognizing its impact), and the Trishes of the culture have a strong wind at their back in a way that would-be reformers of the old, 1960s-era school of liberal Catholicism arguably do not.

But Douthat is hopeful of another way of reading the situation, one he found among Jewish Americans whose conflicted and at times hypocritical observance of Judaism’s norms translated into children more observant than their parents.

[The problem is] how to make its hardest rules seem like aspirations rather than just judgments, and how to deal with the many fine personal gradations that can exist between orthodoxy and apostasy, fidelity and dissent. And I suspect there are many Catholics who would be classified as “liberal” who want . . . room to dissent from a teaching or fail to live up to it in practice, but they don’t necessarily want the church to change that teaching so that the dissonance or tension they feel simply goes away. Hence their positive reaction to Francis’s rhetorical shift and their lack of urgency about actual doctrinal change. They aren’t necessarily all Trishes who have decided that they don’t care about what the Catechism says. Some of them, at least, might be more like the Orthodox Jews who parked their cars around the corner without demanding that the rabbi be okay with it, and whose children turned out to be more observant, rather than less.

Whatever this post may indicate about the more than cognitive dissonance — call it denial — that Protestants-turned-Roman Catholic must face when seeing how broad the spectrum of Roman Catholicism in action and possibly wondering why nothing of consequence happens, it does lead to a curious point that many miss about Protestantism, Douthat included. I can actually imagine describing the OPC as the kind of place where the room for dissent that Douthat imagines exists — a church that makes room for dissenters to turn into people with children who become much more disciplined in their observance. After all, we have plenty of public disputes in Reformed circles about the application of redemption, about the law, about biblical interpretation. An ordinary church member doesn’t need to worry about any of this, but also may follow the latest blogs with great zeal. At the same time, our officers know the procedures for negotiating such dissent. We have well prescribed rules and frameworks of jurisdiction that allow for discipline to be real and serious. If you cross the line as an officer, you will suffer, and the people who can make you suffer know what to do. As a lay person, if you don’t adhere to church teaching (as long as you don’t sin), you simply can’t teach Sunday school. Sabbath observance is arguably the best case of this. In many congregations, if you don’t attend both services you won’t be considered for special office. If you don’t return to church at night, no one is going to shame you into a puddle of remorse. Sanctifying the Lord’s Day is the norm, the standard, and it may even be an aspiration. Either way, the rules governing church discipline — which is in the hands of a variety of officers at a number of levels, thus insuring mixed government (hello, ecclesiastical subsidiarity) — give officers a clear sense of how to enforce the norms, even supplying a dose of wisdom by forcing an officer particularly zealous about the Lord’s Day to calculate how his charges against a fellow church member will go with other members of session, presbytery, and even General Assembly.

What Rome seems to lack, in contrast, is any mechanism for dissenters, bishops, priests, Knights of Columbus, Nancy Pelosi to know how to process dissent and its flipside. The Vatican has the levers of power but they are remote from ordinary priests, lay people, religious. In which case, dissent becomes as much a piece of ecclesiastical furniture as papal power. Dissent and papal power are there, but it’s just white noise. There’s no manual for how to adjust the volume or turn off the machine. (And what’s particularly odd about this state of affairs is that Rome has had over a millenium to try to figure this out, and with all that charism no less!)

Thanks to Calvin’s Ecclesiastical Ordinances (based on Scripture, of course), Presbyterians have the instructions.

Postscript: Here’s an example of the kind of white noise that dissent and authority comprise for the superior mechanism of an infallible pope. It is from John Allen’s story about papal representatives’ testimony in Geneva before the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Church about the child-abuse scandal:

Second, most of the immediate blowback against Thursday’s presentation by Tomasi and Scicluna focused on the claim that Rome is not responsible for supervising the more than 400,000 Catholic priests of the world, which falls instead to local bishops and religious superiors. Repeatedly, Tomasi and Scicluna offered statements of principle as to how the church ought to operate, but were then forced to concede that implementation varies widely at the grassroots.

Critics found the claim that the Vatican can’t take direct control of the situation disingenuous.

“We’re very saddened that such a huge and powerful church bureaucracy continues to pretend it’s powerless over its own officials,” said a statement from the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

In fairness, insistence on the autonomy of the local church is perfectly consistent with both official Catholic ecclesiology and actual practice in the church. It’s worth noting that a federal judge in Oregon, who’s a Mormon with no dog in Catholic fights, took a close look at the contention that priests are “employees” of the Vatican in a lawsuit related to the abuse scandals in 2012 and ruled that they clearly aren’t.

Nevertheless, the skepticism those claims elicited Thursday illustrates the uphill climb the Vatican faces in trying to persuade people that it couldn’t impose its will if it really wanted to.

In truth, this has long been one the paradoxes generated by the sex abuse mess. For decades, church reformers (especially on the liberal end of things) have clamored for greater collegiality in Catholicism, and they applauded vigorously when Pope Francis pledged support for a “healthy decentralization” in his recent document, Evangelii Gaudium. Yet when it comes to sex abuse, they seem to want the exact opposite — they want the long arm of the law to reach down from Rome and crack heads.

What this perhaps suggests is that theologians working on the nature and limits of papal authority and the relationship between local churches and Rome need to sit down with the child protection people to make sure that the real-world experience of the abuse scandals is brought into the conversation.

The truth of it may be that a strong pope is a bit like a lawyer — everybody loves to complain until they need one.

Turns out that papal authority is great for apologetics, not so great for running the church.