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  • The shadow of Pax Romana —Unherd

    To his army of ardent followers, Tom Holland has a unique ability to bring antiquity alive. An award-winning British historian, biographer and …

    The shadow of Pax Romana

  • The Question of a Weltanschauung (Worldview) by Sigmund Freud (1932) — Books and Boots

    The Question of a Weltanschauung by Sigmund Freud (1932)

    This is the last in Books and Boots’ series on Sigmund Freud, where Freud presents one of his most wide-ranging polemics against Christianity. Reviewing that polemic leads the author to find Freud wanting in his critique, to say the last. Although he gives his own reasons, I have a different take on why Freud’s rabidly secular view will always come up short.

    Freud himself admitted that science cannot furnish a Weltanschauung (worldview) because it is not complete. That simple observation eludes people, which is why it comes up again and again in our society. You see it on social media and it was certainly in evidence with the New Atheists twenty years ago, in the early days of this website. To put it simply, science can tell us how and why for the immediate cause but cannot address the issue of either ultimate cause, purpose or goal. That has to come from somewhere else.

    That last point is crucial because Freud and others would like society to be directed in a scientific way to the best outcome for humanity. But what is the best outcome for humanity? The environmental movement has placed a special urgency to this question because it ultimately challenges our right to exist. Would mass suicide and handing the planet back to the animals be the best thing? Our compulsive amour-propre may push back against such a solution, but amour-propre is no excuse in the face of “science.”

    It is also ironic–or maybe predictable–that the era of the zenith of Freud’s influence was, in this country at least, a Luddite nervous breakdown, one from which we have never fully recovered. It was an era which sought return to primitive life, to get away from the repressive necessities of civilisation. But, as Freud observed, without the repressions there’s no civilisation, and we’re too addicted to the benefits of that civilisation to part with them.

    But enough of secular people chasing their tails…the whole business of worldview brings up a favourite topic in Christian circles, namely that of a “Biblical Worldview.” There are all kinds of ways to teaching this and then to disseminate it in society, such as the “Seven Mountains” business. While the essentials of this worldview are fairly straightforward, the details and the implementation method are complicated. To start with, let’s talk organisation (or lack thereof): do we aim towards a state church as we did at the start, or do we somehow rely on a combination of the morass of denominations, non-denominational churches and parachurch organisations under our Constitutional structure to win the day? And then there are hermeneutic issues. Do we enforce New Earth Creationism as Ken Ham insists, or do we let old-earthers like the late Pat Robertson have a seat at the table?

    But there’s one thing for sure: those reborn in Jesus Christ have the best cure for amour-propre out there, and that’s the start to solving our problems.

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  • Future of an Illusion and other writings on religion by Sigmund Freud — Books & Boots

    Future of an Illusion and other writings on religion by Sigmund Freud

    Another (maybe the last) in this series. It shows that, even for people sympathetic with Freud’s project, his atheism doesn’t have as strong of a case as he–or those who continue to make that case–thought it did. Includes a summary of a dialogue with Oskar Pfister, a Swiss pastor’s son who made a case for Christianity. One interesting takeaway from the whole narrative:

    Given Freud’s lifelong animus against religion, it’s surprising that, when he finally got round to writing a complete book on the subject, it turned out to be such a surprisingly bad and unsystematic text. It trots through various arguments for atheism, buttressed by bits of psychoanalytic theory, but is surprisingly ramshackle and unconvincing.

    For me, the Voice of the Believer wins, especially when you consider that, as Freud was writing, some European nations stood poised to experiment with just the sort of alternative, non-religious, pseudo-scientific ideologies to bind society together which Freud appears to recommend: Stalin’s Russia and Nazi Germany.

  • Prayer Walking — Northern Plains Anglican

    Prayer Walking

  • Break the Church? What Choice Did We Have?

    Daniel Martins’ long piece on the road from GC 2003 until the formation of the ACNA–and beyond–ends in this way:

    A priest I know wrote many years ago (and I paraphrase here), “There are two cardinal rules: You don’t change the faith, and you don’t break the church.” The Episcopal Church, in redefining marriage, has changed the faith. Those who departed to form the ACNA have broken the church. Both have grieved the Holy Spirit, and undermined the witness of the gospel. Two decades on, this is the sad legacy of 2003.

    His account of the events that led up to the formation of the ACNA, the expensive and torturous (and unnecessary) litigation over the property is an interesting one, but I think it leaves out a few things.

    The first one is that what happened to the Episcopal Church long antedates the crisis detonated by V. Gene Robinson in 2003. It goes back to at least the 1960’s and the church’s failure to deal with serious problems such as James Pike. As I noted in this piece, the Episcopal Church blinked because it was more concerned about its image than in defending the faith that was entrusted to it. And that was in the 1960’s.

    After all that–the erosion of belief in the objective reality of God and the Scriptures, WO, and last but not least that dreadful 1979 BCP–things settled down in an Episcopal Church that had already shrunk from its 1960’s high water mark. Martins, by his own admission, says that “While there were many openly gay and lesbian priests in the Episcopal Church by 2003 (though not without significant controversy from the 1970s to the 1990s), no bishop had been so open when elected.” Why he wouldn’t expect the next stop to be taken–and succeed–is hard to understand. But succeed it did.

    I thought at the time–and still do–that it’s a sad commentary on a the Episcopal Church that had been on the track as long as it has–and longer than people like Martins cared to admit–had so little substantive pushback, either by those who left or those who stayed, until 2003. To some extent how far to port that things were in the Episcopal Church depended upon where you were and at what level you operated. Parishes went on as they were for years (a few still are) unbothered about what was going on “upstairs.”

    But to say that the people who ultimately formed the ACNA–to say nothing of other groups or even the Continuing Churches which barely made a dent in the 1970’s–were guilty of “breaking the church” is a stretch. There were those who were moving in for vainglory or a purple shirt. As Greg Griffith noted nine years ago when he and his family swam the Tiber:

    …the promise of the orthodox Anglican movement outside of The Episcopal Church never materialized either. Populated as that movement is by many good people, it has the institutional feeling of something held together by duct tape and baling wire. It is beset by infighting and consecration fever, and in several of its highest leadership positions are people of atrocious judgement and character.

    But that’s the nature of church politics. The Episcopal Church ultimately broke itself. To blame those who departed for “breaking the church” in this circumstance is unfair.

    Since were on the subject of “breaking the church,” how about those of us lay people who, when faced with the choices given us–and without the option of starting a new denomination–we had two choices: stay and experience the rot of our faith or leave and try to grow in grace somewhere else. It would take someone deep into what we call in the Church of God “preacher religion” to completely discount the schismatic nature of leaving a church, but it is in reality a chip in the glass. When it happens often enough–and the Episcopal Church has seen that over the least half century plus–we have a large breakage. But again we come back to who really caused it.

    At the time I began my own exit from the Episcopal Church, I wasn’t told I was breaking the church, but I got some interesting responses. One of the rectors at Bethesda, sagely noting that the church was about people (the truth of this didn’t come through to me until I worked here) then informed me that I needed to forgive, effectively casting it as a personality conflict. While there were certainly elements of that, I was on a quest for answers in life and a church which would furnish them, and honestly the Episcopal ministers on either end (church or prep school) were not furnishing them.

    After I began the Tiber swim, things shifted. To some extent going to the Roman Catholic Church from the Episcopal one is playing a trump card, as I pen in this dialogue from my fiction:

    “Is there any question about the validity of the sacraments of the Roman church?” Julian asked.

    “There’s never a question there—it’s ours that seem to always be in doubt,” Desmond answered.  The Bishop glared sourly at Desmond.

    “No, dear Julian, there isn’t,” the Bishop admitted.

    But then I started getting the usual Episcopal canard: “You’re not allowed to think as a Roman Catholic.” (I’ve heard my fellow Palm Beacher George Conger repeat that on occasion.) Growing up in a very authoritarian home, that wasn’t much of a change of scenery, but I found Catholicism has a very deep intellectual tradition and furnished answers to many of my questions. It also never seems to occur to Episcopalians that Anglican Fudge and fence-riding aren’t very good alternatives to serious answers.

    But I digress…many things have occurred to all of us since that time. I joined the Anglican blogosphere because I sensed that, finally, someone in the Episcopal church wanted to really stand up for the faith and do something about it. That fact that it ended in the formation of the ACNA–and the jury is still out even after all this time as to whether that body will fulfil its mission–was in my mind unavoidable if dreadfully unpleasant. Again, to accuse people in this circumstance of “breaking the church” is unfair, although the process is certainly painful, as the Episcopalians and Anglicans know and the Methodists are finding out.

    In the years I’ve been active in this world I’ve had the chance to meet online many people, some of whom a) have stuck it out in the Episcopal Church and b) retained their orthodoxy. It’s too bad these people (or people like them) weren’t in my life when I was making the decisions I did; I would have liked to have them as Rector and still would under different circumstances. When messy situations arise like this, people are forced to make all kinds of hard decisions. Ultimately the bar of eternity is where we account for those. But had the Episcopal Church focused more on that destination, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now, would we?

  • Free to Do Otherwise [Commentary on Browne: Article X] — The North American Anglican

    Free to Do Otherwise [Commentary on Browne: Article X]

    Long-time followers of this site know that this is a very serious issue with me. As I explained in my post/video Liturgy, Pentecost, Wesley and the Book of Common Prayer, Part I: What is a Liturgy?, I do not believe that Anglicanism–and by extension those churches founded on Wesleyan theology, such as Holiness and Pentecostal churches–can be considered truly Reformed. By that I mean that both election and perseverance must be absolute. If nothing else the existence of penitential rites (a common feature of Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer and the Holy Communion) mitigates against absolute perseverance. I look at this issue from a slightly different perspective in my post What I Learned About Approaching God From the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.

  • The Question of Lay Analysis by Sigmund Freud (1926) — Books & Boots

    The Question of Lay Analysis by Sigmund Freud (1926)

    This is probably as good of a summary of Freudianism as I have found. What we would probably call today “Cultural Freudianism” was the most powerful force driving American thought (such as it was) in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. I also think it has ruined our culture by turning life into a hypersexualised mind game. The rule of our society by an elite whose main goal in life (beyond self-perpetuation in power) is to get “laid, high or drunk” is buttressed by Freudian concepts, and our shift to a therapeutic society certainly has its roots in Freudian psychoanalysis.

    It’s interesting to note that the article states the following:

    The odd thing is that those feelings go into abeyance at about age 5 and are suppressed. Much is forgotten or loses its attraction during this period, the latency period. During the latency period the child builds up what we call reaction-formations, of disgust and shame, which combine with what it is told by parents to form a ‘morality’, something missing from the first five years as any parent knows and hard enough to instil into the older child.

    This is the period when rules of behaviour, when ethics and morality, when right and wrong are instilled into the child who is repeatedly told that the simple gratification of its wishes (as in the early years) is ‘dirty’, ‘naughty’, ‘bad’ etc. From an evolutionary point of view you can see why the tribes who managed to do this to their young probably functioned better and survived.

    We believe what happens is that the child needs a respite between the purely instinctual development of the early years, and the eruption of strength and renewed desires and lusts at puberty.

    Civilization, therefore, is based on the effective repression of individual desires. A good citizen represses their desires effectively; a bad citizen either gratifies themself in an anti-social way, or falls prey to the kind of illness we began by looking at.

    The sexualisation of life at all phases–including this one–has been the goal of cultural Freudians and their paedophilic allies for a long time, and we see that coming back with a vengeance these days in the trans movement. But civilisation indeed depends on the suppression of these desires; no suppression, no civilisation, which is where we are headed without a jolting course change.

  • This Ends Here — Northern Plains Anglican

    This Ends Here

  • Eat, Pray, Get Cancelled — Unherd

    This week has brought mixed news for beleaguered Ukrainians. Their army’s counteroffensive is taking a heavy toll on its own troops; there have been …

    Eat, Pray, Get Cancelled

  • Giving Rick Warren the Final Boot

    And they did:

    Nobody expected Rick Warren’s appeal to be successful—not even Rick Warren. But he still stood up in front of 13,000 Southern Baptists gathered in New Orleans to make his case.

    “No one is asking any Southern Baptist to change their theology! I’m not asking you to agree with my church,” he insisted, reading from a printout at a microphone on the floor of the convention hall during a three-minute speech. “I am asking you to act like a Southern Baptist, who have historically agreed to disagree on dozens of doctrines, in order to act on a common mission.”

    For messengers at the SBC annual meeting, employing women pastors was not an agree-to-disagree issue. A vast majority—88 percent—voted to uphold the decision made back in February to disfellowship Saddleback.

    Southern Baptists Reject Rick Warren’s Saddleback Appeal

    The blunt truth of the matter is that large churches like Saddleback really don’t need a denomination to thrive. These days denominations generally exist to support their medium and small size churches. The fact that the SBC has several large churches in its stable is a testament to a century and a half of evangelisation and organisation. Whether it’s going to be able to use either or both to break out of its ethnocentric and respectability trap and reach out again in a meaningful way is a whole different issue.

    It’s worth noting that many of the churches which have defected to the Global Methodist Church are the UMC’s larger churches. Although denominations primary serve their medium and small size churches, they need their larger churches for financial reasons. Given their structure and strength, the SBC, IMHO, is in a better position to survive the loss of one large church like Saddleback than the Methodists several.

    Rick Warren and his church should have taken their defenestration like Markov and moved on. But he instead chose to waste his time–and ours–on making himself and his church the issue.

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