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National Service Committee of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal: Newsletter, June-August 1981
In digging through some archives, I’ve put together three issues of the newsletter of the National Service Committee of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal for June-August 1981.
There was nothing special in the selection, just what I had available.
There is one noteworthy event covered in the June issue: the meeting of Ralph Martin and other leaders with Pope John Paul II in Rome. I remember seeing a video of the event where Martin knelt before the Pope before embracing him. The newsletter doesn’t show the kneeling. Charismatic leaders at the time made a big deal out of this, although in view of subsequent events I don’t think their optimism was well placed.
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Book Review: Andreas Killen's 1973 Nervous Breakdown
The New York Times‘ Maureen Dowd’s recent comments about the US having a nervous breakdown with the widespread reaction to Barack Obama, the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy and the like makes me think of an era when the country had a real nervous breakdown: the 1970’s. In the wake of the 1960’s, with all of the cultural overturning and the Vietnam War, the US came much closer to coming unglued than most people who came after realise–or most people who lived through it will admit. Sometimes it seems to be difficult to get meaningful discussion going about the era, but City College of New York professor Andreas Killen gives it “the old college try” (sorry!) with his book 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol and the Birth of Post-Sixties America.
Killen’s book starts with the assumption that 1973 was the pivotal year of the decade. He’s got a strong case going for him: it was the formal end of the Vietnam War, the time when the Watergate scandal spilled into American televisions and radios, the first Arab oil embargo which began the wild energy ride that defined the decade economically. It’s as good a point as any to say that the 1960’s officially “ran out of gas” and the culture reached a turning point. For me personally, it was the year I graduated from prep school, a time when my own life was making some significant transitions.
So how well does Killen, who obviously didn’t live through the era, accomplish his task? There are pluses and minuses to his presentation.
First, the pluses: his recounting of the major events of the year is generally good. In addition to the major events I’ve already mentioned, he hits some others, such as the hijacking craze, the first reality show (An American Family), the return of the Vietnam POW’s (including John McCain, who hadn’t run for President at the time Killen wrote his book), the Kohoutek comet (I was amused at this, I went to Texas A&M with a Kohoutek), the Fifties “revival,” and the Symbionese Liberation Army, who kidnapped/recruited Patty Hurst. Throughout his recitation of all of these and other events, he faithfully recreates all of the psychodrama that went with them. That adds an element of realism that’s hard to overestimate: it was an era when just about everything you said was a Freudian slip and everything that you and everyone else did was couched in psychological (real or pop) terms. The whole era was, in many ways, a theatre of the mind, and Killen does a good job recapturing that. He also recaptures the paranoia and conspiracy theory mood of the era on both sides of the political spectrum, something that obviously hasn’t decamped from the American scene.
The biggest minus–and it appears in the middle of the book–is his overemphasis on Andy Warhol. Warhol is definitely an important figure in American pop culture, but by this time he had become a recluse, and in any case there was a great deal more going on than Andy Warhol. That overemphasis skews his whole presentation of the pop culture of the time, which in turn degrades from his attempt to use the various works that he does to portray the times. That’s something that comes off better in a book like Modris Ekstein’s Rites of Spring; Killen’s effort seems both biased and unfocused.
His presentation of the religious trends of the year is mercifully brief. His focus on “fundamentalist Christian sects” includes the Children of God and the Moonies, both of which qualify as cults–in the eyes of their “fundamentalist” counterparts. He notes that TBN was founded in 1973, but “Paul and Ann Crouch” should read “Paul and Jan Crouch.” In any case it’s interesting to note that the 1970’s, which in Killen’s opinion “…for gays, the decade…represented, in retrospect at least, a golden age,” was also a golden age for Jesus Music as well, suggesting a social dynamic that has long decamped from our society. One thing that Christian readers will find disconcerting about the book is the language he sometimes quotes, but, as I found out writing this, it’s difficult to document the era without vulgarity.
The best takeaway from the book is the fact that 1973 was the turning point in our culture from modernity to post-modernity. It’s easy to forget that the 1960’s, which are generally depicted as a revolt from “traditional values,” were also a revolt from modernity. Killen’s illustration of that is the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, that modernist dream in steel and concrete by architect Minoru Yamasaki. (Yamasaki’s other notable project was the World Trade Centre, which suffered a demolition of a completely different kind. I’m tempted to think that Killen originally wanted to draw a parallel between the two events, but his editor put a stop to that.) Students of post-modernity would do well to understand the nature of this turning point.
Personally I found the book fascinating; Killen brings up events that I had not thought about in a long time and brought up some that passed me by when they happened. After ending my secondary education in that fateful year, I went on to Texas A&M. The conservatism of that school, and the general unreality of being a traditional college student, made me oblivious to many (but not all) of the trends going on around me. When I graduated and entered the workforce, I began to realise that something profound had changed in our society. Killen helps to make that change more identifiable.
At the end of the book Killen tells us that “…the crises of the 1970’s are not so easily buried; indeed they have reemerged with new intensity in our own time.” Our renewed national upheaval underscores that fact. 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol and the Birth of Post-Sixties America isn’t the definitive book on the era, but it’s a reasonable start.
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Catechises, the Preparation for Baptism and Discipleship
This is the third in a sporadic series on the Catechetical Lectures of St. Cyril of Jerusalem. The previous article in the series is Catechises and Baptismal Regeneration.
In the last piece, I discussed the whole issue of baptismal regeneration and how belief in same was not incompatible with a true transformation of the person through the power of Jesus Christ provided it wasn’t mixed with infant baptism. Now let’s turn the tables and look at this from the other angle: do those who practice believers’ baptism really accomplish what they say they do by restricting it to those who have, in someone’s opinion, made a profession for Christ?
Most churches which do not practice pedobaptism will tell you that they only baptise after a person is saved. But how do they know this? I think it’s fair to say that, in the US at least, most attempts to ascertain that a person has experienced the rebirth are perfunctory at best. Pentecostals love to parody the Baptist process: a person goes forward, shakes the preacher’s hand, joins the church and is baptised. And that’s it. If we accept the Baptists’ usual theology which combines an Arminian view of election with a Calvinistic view of predestination, that really suffices. Pentecostals and others in the Wesleyan Holiness tradition don’t, but their connection of a salvation experience and baptism is frequently casual, undermining the significance of the latter (and the latter cannot be made light of in view of the New Testament.)
Cyril’s view of the matter is entirely different.
To start with, in spite of all of the long term effects of Constantine’s legalisation of Christianity, in Cyril’s day becoming a Christian was still regarded as a serious business. Years of persecution—especially in the last half of the third century and the beginning of the fourth—made it necessary to make sure that those who wanted to profess and call themselves Christians were intent on doing so. Added to this was the simple fact that the Roman world was, from a personal morality standpoint, an open sewer. Those who became Christians were expected to renounce that kind of behaviour. The disputes between the orthodox churches and groups such as the Montanists and the Novatians were in part concerning the rigour of the renunciation, not its necessity.
Baptism at a minimum entailed three things: renunciation of the world, an infusion of grace and formally joining the church. Serious sin after baptism was seriously punished. That’s why even the Emperor Constantine waited until he was nearly gone to be baptised; he was afraid that he would transgress the laws of God in the course of his life and actions as Emperor. (And his life demonstrated that his fears were justified.)
All of this being the case, ministers of the Gospel such as Cyril took care in preparing the catechumens for baptism. The lectures that have come down to us are part of that care, and they were not only instructions in doctrine; they were part of the discipleship of the catechumens.
But, as is the case with any good programme of discipleship, it wasn’t just a series of lectures either, but included the following:
- Repentance and Confession: “If any here is a slave of sin, let him promptly prepare himself through faith for the new birth into freedom and adoption; and having put off the miserable bondage of his sins, and taken on him the most blessed bondage of the Lord, so may he be counted worthy to inherit the kingdom of heaven. Put off, by confession , the old man, which waxes corrupt after the lusts of deceit, that you may put on the new man, which is renewed according to knowledge of Him that created him. Get you the earnest of the Holy Spirit (2 Corinthians 1:22) through faith, that you may be able to be received into the everlasting habitations. Luke 16:9)” (I, 2) “The present is the season of confession: confess what you have done in word or in deed, by night or by day; confess in an acceptable time, and in the day of salvation. (2 Corinthians 6:2)”. (I, 5)
- Exorcism: “Let your feet hasten to the catechisings; receive with earnestness the exorcisms : whether thou be breathed upon or exorcised, the act is to you salvation. Suppose you have gold unwrought and alloyed, mixed with various substances, copper, and tin, and iron, and lead: we seek to have the gold alone; can gold be purified from the foreign substances without fire? Even so without exorcisms the soul cannot be purified; and these exorcisms are divine, having been collected out of the divine Scriptures.” (Procatechesis, 9) This may sound extreme, but virtually all of Cyril’s students were converts from paganism. As such, they had at one time or another been bonded to one or more gods, and ejecting these beings from their lives was a necessary prerequisite for becoming a Christian. Although the concept of exorcism has suffered from the “demon under every rock” theory beloved by many Charismatics, getting them out up front certainly saves the headache of having to deal with them later.
- Renunciation of the Devil: This, done at baptism, is a follow-up to the exorcisms: “First ye entered into the vestibule of the Baptistery, and there facing towards the West ye listened to the command to stretch forth your hand, and as in the presence of Satan ye renounced him. Now ye must know that this figure is found in ancient history. For when Pharaoh, that most bitter and cruel tyrant, was oppressing the free and high-born people of the Hebrews, God sent Moses to bring them out of the evil bondage of the Egyptians. Then the door posts were anointed with the blood of a lamb, that the destroyer might flee from the houses which had the sign of the blood; and the Hebrew people was marvellously delivered. The enemy, however, after their rescue, pursued after them (Exodus 14:9, 23), and saw the sea wondrously parted for them; nevertheless he went on, following close in their footsteps, and was all at once overwhelmed and engulfed in the Red Sea.” (XIX, 2) This is enshrined in liturgies such as the 1662 BCP, but I’ve never been to a Pentecostal baptism where those about to be baptised were required to explicitly renounce Satan (and all of the works associated with him, as Cyril notes,) all of the talk of spiritual warfare notwithstanding.
- Profession of Faith: “Then you were told to say, “I believe in the Father, and in the Son, and in the Holy Ghost, and in one Baptism of repentance. ” Of which things we spoke to you at length in the former Lectures, as God’s grace allowed us.” (XIX, 9) These days sometimes one sees a profession of faith from the baptised, and sometimes one does not…
All of this shows one weakness of the concept of “believers baptism:” in currently fashionable concepts of salvation, the idea that one needs to be a believer first before baptism robs the whole process of baptism as a discipleship opportunity, irrespective of whether you believe in baptismal regeneration (which is a misleading phrase in many ways) or not.
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Burqas One Day, Shirtlessness the Next: The French Practice Égalité
The Fifth Republic forces its people to stay in the middle course:
Male tourists in France were being threatened with $48 fines for walking around without their shirts on, The Independent reported Monday.
Locals in seaside resort towns including Cannes and St. Tropez demanded the move after they were sick of seeing Brits and other tourists displaying their “hairy chests” in the streets, the newspaper said. Inland cities such as Perpignan, in the south of France, followed the move and introduced a dress code banning bare chests for the first time.
Women wearing bikini tops in the streets could also face the fine if they failed to cover up when asked to by cops, authorities said.
The tough laws came into force after locals were shocked by a group of British rugby fans who took off their shirts while watching a match.
Coming on the heels of outlawing the burqas, this shows that la République is trying to strike a balance. Perhaps those who have lost use of their burqas could ship them to le Midi to help those who are that region’s descamisados. (I’m sure the Peronistas would protest this, as going shirtless for them is a political statement.)
It’s noteworthy that the Brits are at the bottom of the problem. They’ve gotten themselves into trouble in Dubai for unlawful conjugal relations (outside of marriage) and insufficient clothing as well. If Dubai and France can be working in parallel like this, there has to be something to the situation.
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Victory at Last: You Learn More Away from Harvard, But…
The Washington Post, an elite institution in its own right, breaks down and admits the truth:
A study scheduled for release Monday about the value of a college education, at least when it comes to the basics, has found the opposite to be true in most cases. Forget Harvard and think Lamar.
Indeed, the Texas university, where tuition runs about $7,000 per year (Harvard’s is $38,000) earns an A to Harvard’s D based on an analysis of the universities’ commitment to core subjects deemed essential to a well-rounded, competitive education.
In other words, Lamar requires courses that Harvard apparently considers of lesser value. These include six of the seven subject areas used in the study to gauge an institution’s commitment to general education: composition, literature, foreign language at the intermediate level, U.S. government or history, economics, mathematics, and natural or physical science.
This is amazing. So why do Ivy Leaguers dominate our government? It’s simple: in politics, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, and the who you know starts with who you go to university with. And that, in no small measure, explains the quality of our government…
I’d like to note two institutions that made the list of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) “A” list:
- Texas A&M University, my own alma mater. My decision to pass up the Ivy League for it is documented in my piece It’s Not What School You Went To, It’s the Kind of Person You Are.
- Lamar University, mentioned above, is the home of the Kairosingers, an excellent group whose album I host for download in one of my music pages. One of the performers was Charlie Balsam, now Director of the Jason’s Deli Leadership Institute.
Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Positive Infinity 