This saddens but does not surprise me.
As I read Trad Christians, I constantly find the question recurring: How long can it be before they realize they have picked the wrong religion?
For some it is the monotheistic Omni-God who created everything from nothing; and who demands submission and obedience above anything else.
Such Christians can only find an essential and defining place for the work of Jesus Christ, by regarding him as a Trinitarian aspect of the One God: so that Jesus is asserted both to be, and not to be, simultaneously a unity with the Creator and a person separate.
But (for Trads) God's indivisible one-ness is always regarded as primary and foundational.
How much clearer, simpler - and more honest! - simply to assert the single, oneness of God!
(And regard Jesus Christ as ultimately-inessential.)
For other Trads; their most viscerally compelling wish is for a particular, hierarchical and patriarchal, relationship between men and women; here-and-now - in this mortal life and world.
This is a thing that some Trad Christians apparently desire more than anything else in the world (considering that they Never Stop writing about it).
Yet it is a situation that has never been implemented by Christianity as strongly or as thoroughly as by an already-existing and expanding other religion.
How long will it be before before the Trads abandon Christianity altogether; and join the existing major and growing world religion that already and unambiguously provides almost-exactly what they really most-want?
15 comments:
i can speak from experience, since in a way i became an apostate from the churches - after a point, i had no desire to be part of one. despite my doubts - or rather, certainties - about the churches, i never abandoned - and i feel i could never abandon - my commitment to Jesus, as a person. this goes beyond rational explanation of course, but as i left the institutions behind i kept trying to find some way of following Jesus. and for many reasons, i felt this could not be done in the churches but also not as part of other religions, so other than dabbling a bit in esoteric stuff until i found something that made sense to me (Mormon theology, it turns out), i did not become hindu or muslim or neopagan. i suspect, and i hope, this will happen to others as well, though if their commitment to omnigod theology or to throne and altar is really so all consuming as it seems sometimes, then some will indeed cease for good, not only just in practice but even in name, to have Jesus as the center of their religion.
A trad might point out that the medieval church did fine against that alternative religion.
But I'm not a trad. It's a larp. They choose their religion. But the historic church was able to command the devotion it did because it wasn't chosen. People were born into it. And unless you can find a way to be born a medieval peasant, you can't pretend to his unthinking faith or devotion.
Still, taking trads at their best rather than at their worst, they are grappling with hard questions. Normal men and women are suited to mostly but not wholly different spheres. They are thrust by modern life into hierarchical structures that are continuously eroded by the fundamental contradiction. Hence the prevailing modern state that no institution works any longer.
Trinitarian belief is harder. It's a doctrine with the historical purpose of erasing Jesus the man by making him one manifestation of the Godhead. That solves certain fundamental problems with early Christianity. Eg., how can someone who is fundamentally a man do anything about the problem that Jesus has solved: death?
But Christianity is fundamentally personal. C.S. Lewis coped with this by making Jesus the most important (by far) figure in his personal Trinity. That's probably why evangelicals like him, despite his tradyness. Still, it's not exactly a defensible position.
What amuses me about Trad Caths is that in spite of all their talk about 'Tradition' and the 'True Church', with their condemnation of the Novus Ordo Mass and their hatred of Pope Francis, they come across as Protestants-in-the-making.
Karl - we are all Protestants now. Not kidding.
Joel - good comment. The loss of the ecclesiology is unavoidably going to take a chunk of the theology with it. And most people aren't contemplative, high-g intellectuals who can craft their own unique theological schema.
There has been some migration from various forms of Christianity into that other religion in internet circles I follow. The common denominator seems to be a deep longing for an impersonal God.
I can't say that I find the above - apparently a-historical and negatively-defined - usage of "Protestant" to be helpful in our current situation - it is, indeed, actively misleading.
At any rate, the deep and insoluble metaphysical problems/ incoherences of classical Christian theology; are of essentially of the same nature for self-identified Protestants, as they are for Eastern and Western Catholics - and indeed for most of the newer (mostly American) Christian churches.
@Mia - I haven't seen it myself - but would does not surprise me. It is probably only inertia and a kind of national and cultural (hence labile) sense of alien-ness and disdain that maintains many Christian self-identifiers. This could change very quickly if it became intellectually fashionable; or up-front advantageous in terms of status, power, prosperity - or sexual gratification - to convert.
In reply to Joel, I don't think the medieval church was as theologically monotheistic as the Trads are today. With the belief in the saints and the healing power of sacred objects, the beliefs of the average medieval Christian were spiritually pluralistic.
Theology came to the forefront only gradually, first with the Gregorian legal reforms and universities, but mostly only after reformation.
As a response to the criticism of the protestant reformers, the theology of the Catholic Church was considerably sharpened and followed Cartesian lines towards strong dualism of the spirit and matter (and God being the only actual spirit). The medieval pluralistic spiritual practice had to gradually be abandoned as the philosophical controversies became acute and there was no philosophy or theology in the defense of pluralism.
Trinitarian belief is much easier to swallow once you realize Jesus is mentioned in the OT frequeny & the Holy Spirit less frequently but still there.
Early jews noticed this & discussed the 2 godheads or 2 Yahwehs in heaven. By 2nd century AD this theory was dropped by the rabbis in response to the Christian sect that used this as apologetics.
A great part of drive behind the Trad phenomenon (and, in the United States, the tying of Christianity to contemporary “nationalist” sentiments) as well as the possible impending migration toward that other religion is a desire to “win”, defined in extremely worldly terms.
Even though the trad and nationalist movements, which are largely motivated by a rejection of various depraved and corrupt material / worldly aspects of Clown World, yet they are turning not so much towards deep Christian spiritual truths but towards another type of worldliness. It may be on some level a more commendable type of worldliness, a worldliness that is more in touch with truth and nature and more conducive to human flourishing, but ultimately the fundamentally worldly focus renders it “Not Christian” in its motivation, focus and likely outcomes. This is yet another example of the kind of thing Bruce has blogged about where the reaction against a negative tends toward another negative, while not even considering or being aware of Third Ways that present a truly positive and good alternative.
Christianity as practiced has always perforce had a worldly aspect to it: Hierarchies, crusades, moral and social teachings whose goal is (this-worldly) social harmony and order, but at least prior to the Protestant Reformation there was still a fairly robust spiritual tradition in monasticism, heremeticism and lay spiritual practice that was prominent enough to remind people of what Christianity was really about. And Orthodoxy today still retains some of that spirit.
But today’s trad and nationalist movement is mainly about “winning”, about creating a “Christian society”, and is thus largely focused on _forcing other people to live according to Christian norms_, whereas the deeper true Christianity is about reforming _ourselves_. Just as much of Christian prayer has been inverted from praying that the Father’s will be done, to praying that our will be done (i.e. Luciferianism), likewise the metaphysical understanding of Christianity has been inverted from the view that “My [Christ’s] Kingdom is not of this world”, to the view that establishing a kingdom on earth is the primary aim of Christianity. Again, I don’t think it is overstating things to view this as a _total inversion_ of Christ’s message.
(I don't believe that the point I am making is one that advocates for total pacifism or passivity; rather it is the identifying of Christianity with material, worldly warfare and action. There is a place for conflict and action, and one that is informed and influenced by one's Christianity, but one cannot confuse such activities with the goal and purpose of Christianity.)
@Daniel - I suspect that the making of Heaven on Earth project goes back to very shortly after Jesus's ascension. If, as I believe, the Fourth Gospel was the first and most authoritative - then (comparing the IV Gospel with the rest of the New Testament) it seems that all kinds of other and this-worldly agendas attached themselves to Jesus's teachings almost immediately.
But it is Not a matter of Christianity rejecting this mortal life and being "other worldly" - because that is done better by Neo-Platonism and the Eastern religions.
That is what it I find it difficult to hold-onto and nigh impossible to communicate - given the strength with which the two (false) alternatives of this- or other-worldly are held and asserted - and that these had been in place all through human history.
It's not that what Jesus said was complicated; but that people are so keen to co-opt it to serve Other (and perhaps valid, perhaps praiseworthy - in a lower way) projects.
They won't do it because that other religion is also the historical enemy of what they also care about, i.e, the "Christian West".
I think the eternal legitimacy of this-worldly effort has to do with having children who have children who have children, etc; not because of mere genetic reproducing, but because of the profound transformation the parenting experience brings to our eternal perspective in our understanding of God's purposes and methods.
As a mom of many youngsters, I often consider how frightening is all the trouble that is built into this mortal experience for youngsters. But I would not want to remove the chance of my children having children.
This has been a pivotal tactic of the devil, to chase well-intentioned mommies to cut off the project of teaching children to have children, out of fear and despair. I feel it even more acutely now as my children reach adulthood, that I have the opportunity to either encourage them in marrying and having children, in a time of trouble, or to do the opposite.
I think the trads are wrong, but not for wanting space to have children who have children, which I suppose may be the very definition of winning biologically, at least for the individual.
@Ranger "what they also care about"
I would say that it is what they Most care about.
In the past it was not really possible for Man's consciousness to separate the Christian West from Christianity - but now they are separate. The most Christian places - even in Trad terms - are non-Western.
For instance the Fire Nation : the most Christian it becomes, the less Western.
Or: more Christians in the Earth Kingdom than Europe: https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2012/07/70-million-christians-in-china-and.html
Of course I feel the nostalgic tug of historical Christendom - but things have changed - in the churches as with the universities, or science, or All Western institutions.
The challenge of our times and place is that the incompatibility of our priorities are ruthlessly exposed - we cannot "have it all" (this world, and Heaven) in one package anymore, and even to strive for it is corrupting.
@Lucinda - It certainly isn't wrong to want a world with long term prospects for children, and children's children!
But this good desire is exploited by those are actually working for the opposite - all their plans and strategies are covertly destructive.
I can't see any viable alternative than trying to think and do what is right here-and-now; and trust God to take care of the long term; rather than trusting (or choosing between) the human schemes of our actual leaders, and would-be leaders.
But what good God can do In This World is constrained by human choices - now as always.
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