A few posts down, I linked to a You-tube video of a fellow base jumping in Antarctica, suggesting that it was something I might like to try in the Kingdom. Contra such imaginings is the video below of another base jumper who finds himself battered against the rocks by the inopportune application of Bernoulli’s Principle to him self and his parachute!
So, “maybe in the Kingdom” is now amended to “probably not, even in the Kingdom,” unless our Lord annuls Bernoulli’s Principle.
Well, The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico should set you straight. From the official Confernece Website, here’s how things went down in Cancun:
The United Nations Climate Change Conference took place in Cancun, Mexico, from 29 November to 10 December 2010. It encompassed the sixteenth Conference of the Parties (COP) and the sixth Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP), as well as the thirty-third sessions of both the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI) and the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA), and the fifteenth session of the AWG-KP and thirteenth session of the AWG-LCA.
So there.
Just in case you thing it was boring, look at how the American representatives from the Sierra Club led their fellow delegates in protesting the no-nothing attitudes of those blithering idiots who think climate change is nothing to get all worked up about. So offensive was this dismissive attitude of the corporate oligarchs of the industrialized world, those money grubbing tyrants who rule the planet to all our detriment, these sensitive delegates had no recourse except to rush to the beaches of Cancun and protect their sensitive brains from beholding the rapine of the world’s environment by these planetary polluters.
… I’ll try this out, I think. Too old for it now, even if G. W. Bush is sky-diving in his 70s. Meanwhile, there’s fellows like this who show us what awaits us for entertainment after Jesus returns (I hope!):
Here, for fun — no matter what “flavor” of Christian you are — is something from Ronald Reagan’s home church when he was governor of California:
Which raises an issue for any flavor of Christian: how do you handle “communal jargon” which inevitably arises in any community? What do you do with it when dealing with people outside the community? As, for example, when you’re speaking to someone outside the faith, to a non-Christian?
The New Testament doesn’t give us a lot to go on here, outside what you might deduce from examining Paul’s preaching on Mars Hill. And, the New Testament epistles don’t give us any exact parallels, since they’re written to already-converted communities of Christians who are predominantly Jewish.
Even when the communities addressed might be supposed to include a majority of Gentiles (Rome, Corinth), Paul deploys the Old Testament in ways that simply borrow the theological iconography of the Old Testament. In other words, he doesn’t do much, if any, “translating” for the Gentiles within his audience. Nothing comes to my mind. How about yours?
What I like best about this satirical video is the way it implies that much of Christian cant is actually meaningless prattle. “The LORD laid it on my heart,” for example, is notable for what it does NOT say while that empty locution is wrapped in self-justifying endorsement. In other words, it translates into this: “I thought of something I decided God was telling me, and now I’m telling you, and you don’t have the slightest standing to repudiate what I’m talking about.”
Christian cant is challenging to avoid. I know, since a parachurch ministry I’ve headed for 20 years now has, as its primary mission, to develop curricula for teaching Biblical doctrine on manhood, womanhood, and how men and women are to relate to one another in marriage, family, church, and society. Any of these curricula might have been written in Baptist Blather, or Charismatic Cant, or Reformed Rigamarole. Instead, we strove mightily to avoid all these sub-dialects within Christendom. It was not an easy project!
And, yet, it is not possible to avoid Biblical categories, Biblical concepts, or Biblical terminology. We gain nothing, as Christians, by rejecting the terms in which our faith is communicated to us by the prophets and Apostles of Christ. And, so, we must use Pauline terms (for so much of the New Testament is written by him!). And, we must acknowledge and deploy Biblical images, themes, and terminology.
And, when we come to address new converts, we must teach them. For many, the first lessons will be rudimentary. “Milk for babes” is the way the author of Hebrews puts it.
And when speaking to those outside the faith? I suggest we take our cues from preachers like John the Baptist.
Tonight the parish is rejoicing at the prospect of the birth of Baby Joseph, the first infant to be born into our parish since its founding. To highlight Baby Joseph’s infant manliness, there will be a number of manly baby gifts (check out the photos in the parish photo gallery which I’ll put up in the next few days). And, the menu for the gala is manly too: Sauerbraten, made with a recipe I got from the Wise Encylopedia of Cookery, as modified by wisdom gained from numerous appearances of that august repast in my kitchen over the past 50 years (yes, I began serious cooking that long ago!).
Here, then, is the current version of Sauerbraten as the recipe has stabilized over a half-century. You sauerbraten purists can keep your comments to yourself. Any observant web-surfer can verify that the recipe varies considerably in the details of the spices. The recipe I use is uncommon (from what you’ll see in a survey) in using beer rather than wine in the marinade.
Begin with a beef roast (supposedly, the original sauerbraten was made from horse meat!) equal in weight to a half-pound per person to be served. This recipe is correct for a 3.5 to 4.0 pound roast. Scale the recipe below as needed for larger amounts of meat.
Sauerbraten works very well with tough roasts (e.g. arm roasts). I prefer bottom round roasts. Do not use fatty roasts such as chuck, as these completely fall apart during cooking, and you’ll wind up with sauerbraten-flavored beef stew instead of a roast.
Rinse the meat and pat dry with paper towels. Rub lightly with salt and pepper. Set aside while you prepare the marinade.
The point of marinade is to soak the meat, optimally on all sides at once. So, the final marinating container should be something that allows the roast to be covered by the marinade — something like a 2-gallon ziplock bag. Or a straight-sided utility bucket made of plastic. Or a 2-gallon straight-sided jar (e.g. a smallish kitchen crock) made of glass or ceramic. DO NOT USE METAL CONTAINERS. The marinade is acidic and will react chemically with metals, imparting a horrid flavor (and metal-salts) to the dish.
For a 4-pound roast, I used a 5-quart, straight-sided bucket I purchased from the cleaning aisle of the grocery store. Covered with plastic wrap, it’s working quite well. Also, a 5-quart plastic mixing bowl with a snap-on cover holds a second roast (we’re preparing three roasts for tonight’s feast).
Place the roast into the container. If you’re using a very large ziplock bag, place the bag containing the roast into a large mixing bowl to help support the bag as you compose the marinade.
Pour over the meat the following:
Add to the container, poking them into the liquid around the sides of the meat, the following:
That’s it! Add just enough water so that liquid covers the meat. Cover the container, or close the ziplock bag, and set into the refrigerator for at least three days. Marinate four days if the roast is large, if the meat is tough, or if you want a spicier roast.
If you wish to turn the meat once or twice a day, that’s okay. However, it won’t be necessary if the meat is completely covered in marinade. Also, the meat will turn a ghastly grey color. This is normal. No problemo. It will look lovely when cooked.
Remove the meat and pat dry with paper towels. Strain the marinade and place into a dutch oven.
Heat a couple of tablespoons of shortening in a skillet and brown the meat well on all sides. This is NOT the “cooking” step. You are giving the exterior of the roast a lovely brown color, and the portion of the meat that is browned will contribute to the final savory flavor.
When done, pour off the excess shortening, and if there is any meat brownings remain in the bottom ofthe skillet, return the skillet to the heat and add a few tablespoons of marinade to loosen this tasty browning residue. Once that is done, empty the skillet back into the marinade in the dutch oven.
Place the browned roast into the marinade in the dutch oven. Heat to just below boiling. Then put the cover onto the dutch oven and turn the heat down to simmer. Let the roast simmer in the hot marinade for three hours. If the roast is large or a tough cut, let it simmer four hours.
While the roast is simmering, use a rolling pin or a kitchen mallet to thoroughly pulverize 10 gingersnaps. If the gingersnaps are already crisp, pulverize away. If your grocer only sells the “soft and chewy” gingersnaps (they’re not Really “snaps” of course), then you should let them sit out on the counter for the three days you’re marinating the meat, so they can dry out.
At any rate, you’ll want the pulverized gingersnaps ready by the time the meat is finished simmering in the broth.
Also set aside an 8-ounce tub of sour cream, so it can reach room temperature.
After the roast is finished and set aside where it can remain warm, place the remaining broth/marinade in a saucepan and heat to nearly boiling. Whisk half the crushed gingersnaps into the hot broth/marinade and cook until thickened. If the consistency is thinner than you would like, whisk in additional gingersnap crumbs in small portions until you reach the consistency you prefer.
Add the sour cream and whisk smooth.
Using a very sharp knife, slice the roast into serving slices. Platter them, and drizzle gravy onto the slices. Serve the remaining gravy at the dining or buffet table.
Saurbraten is usually served with plain boiled potatoes. More ambitious cooks may wish to prepare potatoe dumplings (in the photo above), or fried potato cakes (yummy, but a cook’s assistant is nice for getting everything to be finished at the same time). A good, strong-flavored beer goes very well. If you wish to serve wine, pick a robust, chewy red. Anything less ambitious will be silenced by the sauerbraten’s fortissimo flavors.
It’s understandalbe (though often tragic) when a toddler runs out into the street into the path of an oncoming car. But, what can you call it when an otherwise sane-sounding adult does the same thing.
Metaphorically, that is. The result is as metaphorically horrendous as it is unmetaphorically idiotic.
Those aspiring to the emotional roller-coaster thrills of Chicken Little, I recommend you dive into the pool of alarm over at The Green Prophet, a site riddled with visions, advice on eco-friendly shopping, eco-recipes, news about fashion contests ,and skin-blistering, brain-pickling horror stories. Among the latter is this one , which provides serious competition to the grisliest scare-passage from your favorite Stephen King novel:
In some places, 2010 was the hottest year on record. Saudi Arabia – with its enormous swath of desert – was particularly hard hit, while Egypt stewed during a series of blackouts amidst heat that singed skin and pickled brains. The discomfort of those painful summer months may have dissipated as temperatures begin to dip, but prepare yourself: in the next few decades, particularly around the Mediterranean, our skin and brains could shrivel to nothing under heat and drought that our planet may never have experienced before.
So, that bastion of high-tech energy delivery — Egypt — had some blackouts in the summer. It must have been horrid for those saps in California.
And it got hot in the Saudi desert???
For crying out loud, why aren’t they touting the temperatures in Death Valley? Or in the burg of my birth —Needles, California —where the summertime termperatures today are pretty much what I grew up with for the first 12 years of my life (check out the daily averages and record highs here ). I used to work on the railroad in Needles during the summer when I was in university, and temperatures on the train platform at 3:00 PM were usually over 140 degrees. All that concrete, basalt, creosoted wood ties, and steel rail are fantastic heatsinks, dontcha know.
I guess my skin was really singed and my brains really pickled!
The Scientific American has an idea for addressing global warming (or, if you prefer, climate change; whatever): contraception and abortion, The goal: reduce the earth’s population and, therefore, the “carbon footprint” left by all those babies who are never permitted to get outside the womb alive.
David Bielo begins the article with a breathlessly delivered statistic and a hopeful prognostication:
An additional 150 people join the ranks of humanity every minute, a pace that could lead our numbers to reach nine billion by 2050. Changing that peak population number alone could save at least 1.4 billion metric tons of carbon from entering the atmosphere each year by 2050, according to a new analysis—the equivalent of cutting more than 10 percent of fossil fuel burning per year.
There are so many ways this could be lampooned, the mind boggles.
First, there’s the whole climate change folderol, which in another decade will be the butt of endless jokes, except for Al Gore and his enviro-nuts who have drunk uncounted gallons of the kool-aid.
Second, there is the link between population and the so-called carbon footprint. On one hand, the advanced nations are already in population decline (a fact ignored by Bielo in The Scientific American), a decline so severe that it is nearing irreversibility in Russia, Italy, and the Netherlands. A panicked South Korea, where three out of every four pregnancies ends in abortion, has decided to begin enforcing a long-ignored ban on abortions because of its now-irreversible population implosion, a fate also facing Japan.
According to The Scientific American, this is all a very good thing and needs badly to be replicated in the United States and in those parts of Europe not already in precipitous population decline.
Finally, if one reads between the lines, it is not hard to find an anti-human, pro-anything-but-human ethic behind all this. Jeff Poor, commenting on The Scientific American article for the Media Research Center Network, notes that even more radical ideas are out there:
Paul Watson, founder and president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in 2007 called for the world’s population to drop below 1 billion, meaning roughly 5.7 billion people would have to go away.
Okay, that’s radical, I suppose. But it is any more radical than agitating for increasing the number of abortions, already in the tens of millions annually? Is it any more radical than agitating for entire nations to commit demographic suicide?
[This blog is cross-posted to Faith and Gender.]
When most people think of liturgy, what they’re really thinking about is the order in which things are done in a worship service. The short-hand term for this is “order of service.” This was the subject of the previous blog in this series on liturgy.
All orders of service are useful. They have a logic that’s important to know. I’ll discuss this logic in later blogs. But, for now, and for the discussion in these blogs on liturgy, I am using the term “liturgy” to name something different from an order of service.
One person cannot do a liturgy for the same reason that one hand cannot clap. It takes two hands to clap, and it takes two or more people before one can “do” a liturgy. In other words, liturgy is communal.
But, there’s more than mere numbers involved here. It is possible to have a great number of people assembled in one place without a liturgy “happening” or “being done” by them. Two more things are required besides numbers.
First, all the participants in a liturgy must be doing the same thing. Second, all the participants in a liturgy must be doing that same thing together. It’s important to distinguish between these two things when trying to understand liturgy. Let’s conduct a thought experiment from the realm of dancing.
Can a single person dance? Of course.
Can two or more people dance? Again, the answer is obviously “yes.” But, to say “yes” overlooks something significant about dancing when it’s a group of people doing it. So, let’s imagine several different kinds of dancing that can take place when a group of people are dancing.
Individuals dancing individually: This is the sort of activity you’ll observe at parties, school dances, holiday gatherings where a dance band is featured, and so forth. The dance floor may hold dozens of people at the same time. Every person on the floor will be dancing. But, the only thing shared by these people is time, venue, and activity.
This is quite a lot of things shared, of course. But, consider: the activity of each person is no different (or not significantly different) than what it would be if he were alone in his bedroom, dancing to the music pouring out of the iPod stuffed into his ears. And (back to the dance floor), though the dance floor at the party is composed of couples (mostly), each member of the couple is still dancing to his or her own notions of the moves, rhythms, and embellishments that are deemed by that dancer alone to be appropriate, desireable, and expressive. The “partner” is actually nothing more than an audience of one. “Let’s watch each other dance while each of us is doing his own dance” pretty well describes what goes on out there on the dance floor.
Individuals dancing in pairs: with this kind of activity we move a thousand leagues toward something that is truly comparable to liturgy. And, what we consider now is something like you see on a ballroom dance floor, where everyone is dancing in pairs (as before) but now they are doing specific dances: foxtrot, walz, polka, quick-step, tango, samba, rhumba, or pasa doble.
Think, for a moment, about how these ballroom dances differ from the “everyone doing his own thing” sort of dancing described previoiusly. When individuals are dancing ballroom dances together in pairs, they dance to prescribed and predetermind steps, using specified rhythms, movements of the feet, often movements of the arms, and specified postures toward the partner.
And, here is a fascinating paradox: while ballroom dances – compared with individual free-style dancing – has far less “freedom,” it is usually a lot more fun to do and certainly a lot more fun to watch.
It is NOT true that the pre-specified features of a ballroom dance detract from the beauty of the dance. Moreover, when a couple are dancing a walz, we no longer have two dancers dancing at the same time. No, we have a couple dancing together. And those two individuals, dancing as a couple, create a “dancing entity” that is more than the mere addition of the parts. A couple may be two people, but a couple dancing is more than two people dancing. The individual dancers are still “there.” They are still distinguishable, but the individual dancer is no longer dancing – or perceived as dancing – as an pure individual. He and she are parts of a whole greater than the mere sum of them.
Perhaps it is ice-dancing that affords the greatest range of possibilities for a couple to unite as a pair in dance. To see what I mean, revisit Torvill and Dean’s unsurpassed ice-dance to Ravel’s Bolero at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo.
So, what’s the next stage in this thought experiment? We’ve considered individuals dancing as individuals, individuals dancing together in pairs; what’s next?
Individuals all doing a single dance together: here we no longer have couples considered only as couples. Certainly, this kind of dancing is not the “every one doing his own thing” sort of dancing. No, in this sort of dancing, more than one, more than two are dancing the same dance.
Sometimes these sorts of dances are very simple, and the best example is any of the so-called “line dances.” These dances are composed of lines of dancers or pairs of lines, which the Wikipedia describes as “dancers facing each other, or a line formed into a circle, or the line follows around the dance floor. The dancers may hold hands with their neighbors, or use an arm-on-shoulder hold, or hold their neighbor’s belts.”
These sorts of dances are quite old, originating in folk dancing at community festivals and celebrations. English Country Dance is an old version that is still done today. More commonly known are square dancing, or contra dancing. Cowboy-style line dancing includes things like the cotton-eyed joe, boot-scootin’ boogie, and tumbleweed. Here’s a You-tube video of a large group of people doing one form of line dance that combines both Irish and Cowboy elements:
Here’s an example of four couples doing a folk dance called the Brandy Frotte.
And, here is one more You-tube video showing amateur dancers having fun with what is called contra dancing:
The most elaborate form of group dancing is the ballet. What’s important for us to consider here is this: a ballet (e.g. Swan Lake) is a very complex “liturgy” that organizes and directs many dancers and also a full orchestra at the same time.
May an individual play music? Of course. May more than one play at the same time? Doh.
But, as we saw in dancing, so also in instrumental performance of music. A string quartet is NOT simply four musicians playing music at the same time. A band is NOT simply 30 or 50 or 150 musicians playing the same number of individual musical performances at the same time.
No, a band or an orchestra is a thing. It’s a thing comprised of many individuals, but the individuals are not nearly so important or prominent as what they create when unified. That u nity is is larger than the individual selves added together. And, what this thing (which we call a band or an orchestra) does is to play a piece of music called a march or a symphony. Even if a concert hall performance features one intrument in a highly “visible” role – say, for example, a Rachmaninov piano concerto – the pianist’s virtuosity is embedded in a matrix composed of himself and the rest of the orchestra. If we were to hear only the piano part of a Rachmaninov piano concerto, it would sound unbelievably weird. We would not be hearing the concerto at all, of course. The concerto is something we hear ONLY when the piano and the many-membered orchestra are all playing together as prescribed in the musical score.
The “plans” or “rules” or “steps” are what constitute a corporate dance. The technical name for all these things is the choreography. The orchestral or band score are what constitute a performance by a group of musicians. A choral score is the sum of all the vocal parts – words and notes – that welds a group of individual singers into a choir or choral ensemble.
And, so, what is a liturgy? It is all the prescribed actions and words that weld a group of individual worshipers into a single worshiping body, which as a body offers worship to God.
With the above notion of liturgy, it is now easy to identify when and how liturgy is happening in a worship service.
Worship where singing is the only liturgy: In the church of my cradle faith, only one thing was liturgical: the congregational singing.
How so? Well, when hymn singing is happening in a worship service everyone is singing the same song. Everyone is singing the same words, to the same tune, at the same time. The stanzas and music lines in the hymnbook are what weld all the hymn singers into a body which as a body sings the hymn. No one who hears the song pays any attention to any individual singer; what any listener hears is the group. In fact, if you CAN hear a single singer in the crowd of singers, it’s likely distracting. A singer in a congregation who “pokes out” of the crowd is like a single member of a marching band who hops up and down while everyone else keeps in step.
Worship where everything is liturgy: On the other end of the liturgical spectrum are Christians whose entire worship service is a liturgy. It has an order – that is, there are a sequence of parts, and the sequence has its own “logic” and meaning. But more than just an order, a worship service that is entirely liturgical has “parts” which every person present “plays” at the appropriate time, in the appropriate way.
The worship service that is completely liturgical is like an orchestral score, or the choreography of a complex ballet. A worship liturgy is likely less complicated, because the “actors” or “performers” in the liturgy are fewer. Sometimes they are no more numerous than “The Officiant” and “The Congregation.” There may be other minor “actors” or “performers” such as an acolyte, or someone who collects alms, or musicians (an organist, or pianist, or choir members).
Still, a completely liturgical service has a place for everybody present, and everybody has a part to play as he participates in the liturgy.
To sum up: a liturgy is a script of actions and words, assigned to individuals assembled for worship, so that they are unified by their actions and words into a body which offers worship God the Father, through His Son Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit.
There is a lot packed into this definition of liturgy, and it will be unpacked in stages in later blogs. Stay tuned.
Today, a friend emailed me one of those frequently-forwarded notes detailing news I might have overlooked. In this case, I had: the death of Anne Roche Muggeridge, wife of her far-better known husband Malcom Muggeridge. Mrs. Muggeridge was author of The Desolate City: Revolution in the Catholic Church [HarperSanFrancisco 1990], which details the turmoil within post-Vatican II Catholicism, particularly in Canada. The note on her death included a quote from the introduction to her book.
Several statements in that quote got me to thinking. So, let me begin with those statements, for it turns out that Mrs. Muggeridge (a Roman Catholic) said some things that are pertinent to understanding modern evangelicalism.
First these things:
Catholicism is not just a religion: it is a country of the heart and of the mind. No matter how resolutely they turn their backs on it, people born within it never quite shed their accents.
and shortly thereafter she wrote this:
“I belong to the race of people,” wrote the great Catholic novelist Francois Mauriac, “who, born in Catholicism, realize in earliest manhood that they will never escape from it, never leave it. They were within it, they are within it, and they will be within it for ever and ever.”
Now, why did this get me to thinking about evangelicalism? Well here’s why …
My wife’s paternal ancestors were Apostolic Christians who settled in Illinois in the middle of the 19th Century, immigrants — religious refugees, actually — from Switzerland. Their ecclesiastical patriarch was a man named Samuel Heinrich Froelich, whose pacifist religion brought him and his followers into conflict with the civil authorities. Hence, their immigration during the 19th Century from Switzerland to various parts of the world including Japan(!), as well as North America, Mexico, and Paraguay. Barbara’s great-great-grandfather and his brother settled around Roanoke, Illinois, purchasing thousands of acres of swamp land for a pittance, draining it (they had learned their agricultural hydrology in Switzerland), leaving themselves owners of exceedingly rich farmland. They bequeathed to their sons large prosperous farms and businesses in town.
What’s this got to do with Mrs. Muggeridge? Well, hang with me a bit longer …
Some years ago, my wife Barbara was speaking in a church up in that area, and her host (a cardiac specialist) had been born and reared in the Apostolic Christian Church (same group as Barbara’s father’s family). He married a lovely AC lass, and during their marriage they migrated outside the Apostolic Christian fold for less sectarian climes. When my wife and her hostess met, they wondered if they might be related (ACs mostly marry only other ACs, and so everyone eventually gets related to everyone else).
As the two women were comparing notes, the subject turned to “leaving the AC fold,” and the hostess remarked to Barbara “It’s like leaving the Roman Catholic Church for most of us.”
Intrigued, Barbara drew her out on what she meant. It turns out that what she meant is pretty well captured by that French Catholic novelist Mrs. Muggeridge quoted in the introudction to her book. And, even though a few born into the Apostolic Christian fold eventually depart from it, it remains true that (to borrow Mrs. Muggeridge’s phrases) the AC Church is not just a religion: it is a country of the heart and of the mind. No matter how resolutely they turn their backs on it, people born within it never quite shed their accents.
Barbara’s father departed the AC church when he moved to Texas as a young man, seeking his agricultural fortune. But, he never quite “shed the accent” he acquired in his AC cradle. Indeed, he retained a pretty pronounced accent, even though educated at Wheaton in the 1930s.
Now, the point: whatever else Mrs. Muggeridge is talking about in her book (I haven’t read it), I expect she’s discussing the comprehensive and coherent Roman Catholic culture that began to be trashed after Vatican II. I know that many conservative contemporary Catholics whom I read complain about this more or less constantly when the subject comes up. And, those discussions always remind me of that hostess and her observation of her and her husband’s migration from the AC church into evangelical Protestantism (which, in those days, was equivalent to or kissin’ cousin to fundamentalism).
As near as I can tell from the outside, the Romans and the ACs were alike insofar as each religious community effected a comprehensive, coherent, soup to nuts, cradle to grave culture, a world-view that included everything. No upper-story, lower-story notions of truth and reality for them. And, the respective and comprehensive world-views each possessed was different from what one found out in the world, even the far more “Christian” world of 19th century America.
This sort of feature common to the Romans and the ACs can also be detected in the long-forgotten enclaves of simple Anglicans, to judge by what I read of Anglican history, though Anglican culture of the genuinely orthodox kind seems to have been concentrated in the sub-suburban and rural parts of England. You can hear the same observation made about conservative Lutherans whose German roots are still sprouting shoots in many LCMS parishes to this day. And, you can add to this group any number of ethnic enclaves of Eastern Orthodoxy which flourish mostly unobserved in religiously polyglott America.
Compared with these ecclesiastical communities all of which sustain a comprehensive and coherent world-view that is maintained in opposition to “the world,” the garden-variety evangelicalism one sees today is as stable as jello. Maybe even less so, for jello remains … well, jello … while evangelicalism is continually reinventing itself into ever-novel iterations of worldliness, bereft of guideposts, paths, even lacking greater sorts of landmarks such as sudden valleys or distant mountains.
The whole enterprise of modern evangelical religion is less like the City of God and far more like a rock concert and the fluid culture surrounding it, or the Jay Lenno show and the generation of TV fans who channel surf from one late-night one-man show to another. In those rare times I stumble across pop-culture religion — religion that is “consumable” as any pop-culture is supposed to be — it’s as if I had wandered into the aisle at JoAnn’s or Hobby Lobby where you can find (as I did yesterday) displays of crosses in a bewildering variety of styles ahd shapes, all made of poly-resin, and as affordable as anything else that is made in China.
Perspective adds its own twist to these sorts of thoughts. Mrs. Muggeridge appears to be lamenting the movements of the Catholicism she knew as liberal Catholic bishops strove (and still strive) to turn Roman religion into liberal Episcopalianism. On the other hand, Christians within the matrix of K-Mart Protestanism who sense that the Church at worship ought to somehow look, sound, and feel different than the world, will view post-Vatican Catholicism as a treasure-trove of classical Christianity.
When I’ve read the testimonies of evangelicals who have poped, many acknowledge up front that doctrine was NOT prompting their move into the Roman Church. After all, evangelicalism these days doesn’t put much store in doctrine, right?. No, it was this cultural dimension to things that persuaded them that the “evangelical” churches they inhabited were not really a Christian home, but rather something far, far off the reservation of anything that looked like, acted like, or sounded like the Church they encountered in the Bible or in the past 2,000 years of Western Christianity.
And, so, these evangelicals — finding themselves homeless in their evangelical churches — went looking for something within professing Christendom, something that said “home” to them, rather than “the world.” At a minimum, they sought a church that bore at least some resemblance to what they read about the church in the history books.
For those who had this fuzzy sense that they were off the reservation and who stumbled across the Christian Classics Ethereal Library online and got to reading the Fathers of the second, third, and fourth centuries — well! They sometimes turned into fervent evangelists for Catholicism or Orthodoxy. And, just as often, they became fire-breathing opponents of Protestantism, equating the latter with the only expression of it they’d ever known (e.g. modern evangelicalism).
One aspect of a Christian’s life in this world is captured in the life of a pilgrim, a nomad, one who is passing through but not attaching to the environs he inhabits. But, are Christians to feel themselves to be pilgrims within Christendom itself? I confess to feeling like a stranger in a strange land when I walk through the doors of most of the kinds of churches that I ought to feel some kinship with. Mrs. Muggeridge felt that way about Catholicism in Canada at the end of the 20th Century. What she may not have realized is that others, Protestants, evangelicals (or, those who used to identify themselves with that term) — all these too lament the way “home” now feels more and more like a circus.
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