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How the Church attacks its own — UnHerd
When Anthony Trollope submitted the manuscript of Barchester Towers, the publishers rejected it as over-the-top. They thought the Church of England couldn’t possibly behave in this kind of way. 1,495 more words
How the Church attacks its own — UnHerd -
Why the Ukrainians Didn’t Evangelise
In 1988 my church aided (that’s an understatement) the resettlement of twenty-four Ukrainian Pentecostal refugees. For me it was part of the experience of a lifetime: I had my first contact with the Soviets on a commercial level the previous year, and visited Moscow and what was then Leningrad in April. Getting to know the Ukrainians was both educational and heart-warming. After years of reading and hearing about the persecuted church, to actually get to know people who had experienced it was not to be missed.
What we found was a people who had been through a lot but were a lot more fun than we expected. What they went through depended upon the generation. The older people had it very hard, quite a few of them had done hard time in Siberia or ended up in “orphanages” because their parents were in prison. The younger people had had it easier: the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years saw the easing of persecution, but they were still barred from higher education unless they became communists (on the outside at least, there were many opportunists in those days) and joined the Young Pioneers. Most did not, but they had no problem participating in the “underground” economy, which came as a surprise for law-obsessed Americans. Life was not bad but they left because they never knew what would come next.
It’s fair to say that, from an activity standpoint, American Evangelicals have two “pillars”: stewardship and evangelism. The Ukrainians were innocent of both. I discussed in my piece Losing the Church Property, or Why the Romanians Don’t Tithe the reasons why Christians in countries like the Soviet Union and communist Romania did not practice stewardship as we have understood it. It seemed strange that something like evangelism, which has such strong support in the New Testament, wasn’t on their agenda, or at least not on their agenda in the way we thought it should be.
But it wasn’t strange. Christianity, certainly the way they practiced it in underground, unofficial churches, was illegal in the Soviet Union. In the later years the police turned a blind eye to what they were doing (they were unable to do that with the way they drove their cars) but the spectre of being shut down was there all the same. They had to be guarded in what they said and to whom they said it. They were marked people, and in some ways that was their evangelistic technique. But their house churches were free from state control (which is more than the Russian Orthodox Church could and can manage) and enough people were either born or converted to get church growth even in the circumstances they were in.
Today we’re told by people like Tim Keller that we need to be “winsome” to evangelise those around us. Stepping away from the class problem, for our Ukrainian friends, it was simpler: the state was against them, they had to fly under the radar. In this country (and how this works out depends upon what part you’re in) we live in the anarchists’ dream, one I described in my piece Why the Spanish Civil War is Still Important:
To these a great new truth seem to have been proclaimed. The State, being based upon ideas of obedience and authority, was morally evil. In its place, there should be self-governing bodies–municipalities, professions, or other societies–which would make voluntary pacts with each other. Criminals would be punished by the censure of public opinion.
Today we have the same type of enforcers, using public opinion as a backstop, intimidating the rest of us. How this will translate into legal force remains to be seen, although as they rise in the system it is inevitable. (It’s hard to make a clean distinction between the two, in the Soviet system snitches and public opinion could be brought to bear as well.) Those who simply live the commands of Our Lord will be subject to disadvantages, just as their Ukrainian counterparts were.
How people like Keller–to say nothing of those who teach more conventional soulwinning–plan to deal with this problem is hard to say at this point. Widespread evangelism, like revival, requires a fairly open society, and that’s what’s slipping away these days. It’s certainly not the end of the spread of the Gospel, as the Chinese and Iranians know all too well. But it’s a game changer for everyone.
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The Wetland Way, Week 2, Sunday: Lunch with the Canon — Chet Aero Marine
When Serelia became a nation, King Albert—for reasons as mysterious as Constantine—decided to break with the Masonic tradition of Beran and adopt a form of Christianity in Serelia. So bishops and clergy of the Anglican Communion from Verecunda came in and formed the Church of Serelia, with himself as its head. It became and continued […]
The Wetland Way, Week 2, Sunday: Lunch with the Canon — Chet Aero Marine -
What Do You Expect? This is Russia!
My family business‘ adventure with the Russians began in 1987, when I went to Washington to visit, with my first Russian representative, the then Soviet commercial consulate. The two of us met in the same hotel where Ronald Reagan had been shot six year earlier; the consulate was just around the corner. While walking here we discussed the scandal they were having over the Soviets using the consulate as a listening post. His opinion? “What do you expect? This is Russia!”
That’s the sentiment I’ve had in reflecting on George Weigel’s piece on Fr. Alexander Men and the current state of Russian Orthodoxy:
In the last decades of the U.S.S.R., Fr. Men became a prominent reformist voice in Russian Orthodoxy, a spiritual adviser to Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, and a magnet for conversions to Christ among the Russian intelligentsia. Communism, Men preached, was a “colossal historical pathology” that had “virtually destroyed” Russian culture; the damage it had done “lives on in people’s souls.” To help repair that damage, a post-communist Russian Church had to repent of its degrading cooperation with Soviet power. Out of that repentance, he hoped, would come a Russian Orthodoxy whose Christocentric voice would help build a renewed Russian civil society.
I don’t think that either Weigel or Men had it quite figured out.
The first problem is with Orthodoxy itself: it was born in Caesero-Papism and it endured in this state for over a thousand years. The fact that today we find Orthodoxy divided by ethnicity doesn’t change that heritage. As Moscow observed many years ago, it is the “Third Rome,” which has achieved what the first two have lost. Adding to that problem is Orthodoxy’s concept of itself. If you listen to really serious Orthodox people long enough, you come to realise that their idea is that Christ didn’t come to save people as much as he came to start a church, and if you’re outside of that church, you’re outside of Christ. (Thus, the Russian troops burning Bibles in the Ukraine.)
In the early years, the relationship between the Tsar and the Russian Orthodox Church was more symbiotic. When the Church, for example, decided that they were not “the Joneses” of the Orthodox world and decided that one should cross oneself with three fingers and other practices, people like Avvakum and the Old Believers took it hard from Tsar and Patriarch alike.
It was Peter the Great who made the ROC a department of the state. He saw the Church as an impediment to the westernisation of the country. His model was none other than the Church of England, which he noted was under the “broad seal” of the monarch. He came back to Russia, the Patriarch died, and he abolished the Patriarchate, replacing it with the Holy Synod. This state of affairs persisted until 1918, when the Tsar was gone and the Patriarch was restored, just in time to be bulldozed by the Bolsheviks.
Now of course we have the best (or worst) of both worlds; the ROC is ruled by the Patriarch, but the Church is very much a department of the government. Russia’s two attempts at democracy in the last century failed miserably. Democracy just doesn’t happen: it is the result of a long process of change in a country, and neither Russia (or China) were able to get it off of the ground. The fact that Americans, who are in serious danger of losing their own democratic system, are completely incapable of understanding this, and continue to make mistakes pursuant to this error, only show that we have wasted a great deal of time and money raising up the elite that we have.
The United States has two options: it either needs to understand that certain parts of the world will be under some kind of autocracy, or it needs to be prepared to spend blood and treasure to change things. Given that many of these places have nuclear weapons (we have facilitated Iran in that regards) the results of that campaign are unthinkable. (The fact that we can’t afford such a campaign should also give us pause.)
Alexander Men was a brave man who gave his life for what he believed in, but the history of his church and his country was against him from the start. My second Russian rep told me that he didn’t think that Russia would change because it was too “Orthodox.” Now everybody knows what he was talking about; the serious question now is what to do about it. Our elites have messed this situation up; we need to look elsewhere for answers.
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Bishop Rick Stika Keeps His Priests Down
The cry for relief goes unanswered:
Priests of the Knoxville diocese asked a papal representative last year for “merciful relief” from the leadership of Bishop Rick Stika. More than six months later, they have received no response to their request, and there has not been any conclusion to a Vatican investigation into Stika’s leadership.
“Our experience of our appointed bishop varies among us, but the undersigned do share a common awareness that the past twelve years of service under Bishop Stika have been, on the whole, detrimental to priestly fraternity and even to our personal well-being.”This isn’t normal in an episcopal type of church government, even with the mediocre quality of bishops we have these days. I wrote about Stika’s profligate ways last year, both fiscally and otherwise. At the time I noted the following:
This is a key issue for Ultramontane Roman Catholicism in general. When bad things happen, there are few places to turn because the famous Catholic penchant for subsidarity isn’t reflected in their own structure. The result is that bishops and parish priests can become “little Caesars” with limited accountability to those whom they’re supposedly serving–the people of God.
That’s certainly playing out here. Getting “redress of grievances” in a system like this is difficult at best, especially with the current Occupant of the See of Peter being the “biggest little Caesar” of them all.
Personal note: I have a friend who is active in the Knights of Columbus. His council (and a few others) still have their own council buildings. The Diocese has expressed an interest in taking this and moving them to diocesan venues, but he and his fellow knights know better. Truly “worthy knights” indeed.
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The Wetland Way, Week 1, Tuesday: Independence and a Meeting
It was a fine day to become a nation, and the Drahlan Kingdom wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity after a long war of independence. The sun was …
The Wetland Way, Week 1, Tuesday: Independence and a Meeting -
It’s Time for “The Wetland Way” — Chet Aero Marine
This week I’m starting a blog of the “central” part of the Island Chronicles: The Wetland Way. It’s bracketed between its prequel The Ten Weeks and its immediate sequel At the Inlet. The published version of this–both paper and ebook–are in preparation and I’ll post information about this later. The original narrative started on Shrove […]
It’s Time for “The Wetland Way” — Chet Aero Marine -
Hard Currency, Soft Currency and Dollar Hegemony — vulcanhammer.info
In its dealings with first the Chinese and later with the Soviets, one of the first things Vulcan learned was the difference between hard and soft currency. That was true both in the travel expenses and in the process of selling equipment (and later buying equipment and technology.) Let’s start with the Chinese: this notice […]
Hard Currency, Soft Currency and Dollar Hegemony — vulcanhammer.info
Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Positive Infinity 