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  • Those Needy Pentecostals

    One of the things I heard frequently as a NOM (Novus Ordo Missae, as opposed to a Trad or Rad Trad) Catholic was the phrase “your needy people.” This was generally rolled out when same needy people were about to “come to the table” (which they really didn’t.)

    And yet…somehow, the whole concept of “needy people” didn’t strike a chord. Almost all of the Catholic parishes I haunted were nice, middle class places where the people around me didn’t look too needy, even though Roman Catholicism wasn’t an upper middle class WASP ghetto like the Episcopal Church. The only time I detected serious neediness was when our prayer group leader, under attack by their own church for being Charismatic, admitted that they couldn’t afford to send their eight kids to Catholic school. That incident ultimate broke my relationship with the Catholic Church and its whole obsession with “social justice.”

    All that changed when I married and joined a Pentecostal church. It’s true that the one I’m going to is somewhat “privileged” because the educational level of the congregation is higher than most Pentecostal churches. (The congregation is also well endowed with educators from kindergarten to graduate school, which guarantees the income doesn’t match the education.) Even with that, for the first time I found myself going to church with people who were either poor or who had come up from poverty.

    And that’s where things get interesting. One thing that has irritated me for a long time about our ministers is the constant message–usually implicit, occasionally explicit–that the purpose of our gathering on Sunday is to get enough “victory” to get us through to the next Wednesday or Sunday, at which point we’ll be recharged again. Coupled with a focus on getting from God what we need to get from now until then, it’s a fairly short-term focus on what I always thought was a long-term deal from where we are to eternal life. People who adhere to this are truly “needy people.”

    To illustrate this, about twenty years ago I co-authored a book entitled Ministering at the Altar. In the last chapter I took on this issue, starting as follows:

    Our Lord Jesus Christ taught us to be persistent in prayer. He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared about men. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’ For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care about men, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually wear me out with her coming!’“ And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth”? (Luke 18:2-8). Unfortunately some people, in the course of their persistence, come to the idea that all of God’s blessings are so transitory that they can only get enough at one time for a short period.

    Ministering at the Altar

    My approach was through this classic quotation from Hebrews, followed by a brief history of salvation:

    Therefore, since the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us be careful that none of you be found to have fallen short of it. For we also have had the gospel preached to us, just as they did; but the message they heard was of no value to them, because those who heard did not combine it with faith. Now we who have believed enter that rest, just as God has said, “So I declared on oath in my anger, ‘They shall never enter my rest.’” And yet his work has been finished since the creation of the world. For somewhere he has spoken about the seventh day in these words: “And on the seventh day God rested from all his work.” And again in the passage above he says, “They shall never enter my rest.” It still remains that some will enter that rest, and those who formerly had the gospel preached to them did not go in, because of their disobedience (Hebrews 4:1-6).

    I thought this was a sound approach, but my co-author had a hard time understanding this. I ended up rewriting it (with a nifty closing quote from Bossuet) but the lesson was learned: this transitory view of the blessings of God is deeply ingrained in the mentality of Pentecostal churches.

    Now I’m sure that many (especially the Reformed types) will say that it is because of our bad doctrine. But ministers of all types, if they want to communicate the truth they have, will aim their message to their audience. I think that the Pentecostal view of the persistence of God’s blessings comes from our ministers’ understanding (and in many cases their own experience at the margins of society) of life from a secular point of view. They know instinctively that their congregations are made up of people who live on the edge of disaster, that they couldn’t get through anything else.

    Such a mentality is not a product of our own times or even those just before us. Consider this in France of the ancien regime:

    Fear and insecurity were the experience of everyone: fear of the dark, of solitude, or unknown places, of death, of evil spells, of the devil’s work, of marauders and beggars in this world…Who could feel secure when the vital harvests were subject to the ravages of storms, and plagues were still endemic?…Living so close to the breadline, people were callous, fatalistic and yet highly strung, their emotions were more volatile and, on the evidence of literary texts, tears flowed more easily than in our culture today.

    Peter Robert Campbell, The Ancien Regime in France

    It’s sad but true that much of our world’s population lives in a state not as much advanced from this as we would like to think. Getting through the week is a major chore; a religion that makes its appeal on this basis is bound to be attractive.

    So how do we proclaim Christ’s work as finished in a credible way to people who don’t think much of anything is finished, other than them? I’m not sure I’ve got a good answer to that. I think an emphasis on discipleship (which is just about becoming a must in our post-Christian culture) would go a long way, even though the process is a “nine yards and a cloud of dust” business. That’s ongoing in my denomination at least; I’m glad to say that, in my last years at the denomination’s men’s ministry, we shifted towards a more discipleship-based ministry model.

    But wait: why is it that, in a country where church is as class stratified as it is here, that only the churches for “them” have to change? We have to deal with two facts:

    • Churches with people with a higher socio-economic level find a more static approach to life and life with God easier to understand, but…
    • It hasn’t been that long since these same churches understood that life was an uncertain business, something COVID has taught us with a vengeance.

    As an example, consider this part of the Litany from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer:

    One thing’s for sure: a church which beats Satan down under its feet is more likely these days to be Charismatic than to be a part of the Anglican/Episcopal world.

    I think some “meeting in the middle” is in order here. Doing that would go a long way to bringing us together again and also back to reality. And perhaps we wouldn’t have so many “needy people” as we have now.

  • The Passage from Jerome that Landed @bethallisonbarr in a Mess

    It’s this one, from Jerome’s Letter 108, his panegyric to Paula at the time of her death:

    Inflamed by their virtues she thought more and more each moment of forsaking her home. Disregarding her house, her children, her servants, her property, and in a word everything connected with the world, she was eager — alone and unaccompanied (if ever it could be said that she was so)— to go to the desert made famous by its Pauls and by its Antonies. And at last when the winter was over and the sea was open, and when the bishops were returning to their churches, she also sailed with them in her prayers and desires. Not to prolong the story, she went down to Portus accompanied by her brother, her kinsfolk and above all her own children eager by their demonstrations of affection to overcome their loving mother. At last the sails were set and the strokes of the rowers carried the vessel into the deep. On the shore the little Toxotius stretched forth his hands in entreaty, while Rufina, now grown up, with silent sobs besought her mother to wait till she should be married. But still Paula’s eyes were dry as she turned them heavenwards; and she overcame her love for her children by her love for God. She knew herself no more as a mother, that she might approve herself a handmaid of Christ. Yet her heart was rent within her, and she wrestled with her grief, as though she were being forcibly separated from parts of herself. The greatness of the affection she had to overcome made all admire her victory the more. Among the cruel hardships which attend prisoners of war in the hands of their enemies, there is none severer than the separation of parents from their children. Though it is against the laws of nature, she endured this trial with unabated faith; nay more she sought it with a joyful heart: and overcoming her love for her children by her greater love for God, she concentrated herself quietly upon Eustochium alone, the partner alike of her vows and of her voyage. Meantime the vessel ploughed onwards and all her fellow-passengers looked back to the shore. But she turned away her eyes that she might not see what she could not behold without agony. No mother, it must be confessed, ever loved her children so dearly. Before setting out she gave them all that she had, disinheriting herself upon earth that she might find an inheritance in heaven.

    As J.N.D. Kelly notes in his biography of Jerome:

    If the rhetoric seems overdone, it remains a fact that the break she was making with home and family cut far deeper than any sacrifice of his (Jerome’s.)

    As I noted here, making a major renunciation like that for God is deeply alien–and incomprehensible–to American Christians on both sides of the debate.

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  • Back in the Day, They All Hated Science

    Another one of those “inconvenient truths:”

    Embracing the science he hated until a year ago means that like a whole lot of partisan people, he only pretends to accept it because the issue is political. Writing in The Daily Beast, Louis Anslow reminds the public that just a few years ago Young released a whole album devoted to undermining the same biotechnology that is saving the world in 2022. He even named it “The Monsanto Years” and it was bought by people who think Science Is A Vast Corporate Conspiracy and still do – unless they can dunk on Republicans about being anti-science. 

    The simple fact that the 1960’s revolution (for lack of a better word to describe it) was deeply Luddite and anti-science is a simple fact that those who have survived the era until the present time are working hard to forget. That’s true even when their embrace of the ethos continued until nearly the present, as is the case with Neil Young. That Luddite streak extended to such things as the space program and nuclear power. The latter is really handy now that we need carbon-free power generation, but it’s still an uphill battle to get people to see daylight on this issue. (The Germans, in the face of dependence upon Russian gas and massing military might on the borders of Ukraine, shut down their nuclear power plants, as if to underscore their stupidity.)

    You can only cover up so much ignorance with self-righteousness…

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  • The Left Pushes Back Against Vaccine Mandates

    Yes, they do:

    As writers from the Left, we are disturbed by this turn of events. We don’t think there is anything progressive about the current move towards compelled — and in places mandatory — Covid vaccinations. These are discriminatory against minority communities, many of whom for historical reasons are suspicious of medicine and the state, and have had lower vaccine take-up rates. They are enormously costly, not only in economic terms, creating huge profits for the pharmaceutical companies rolling them out, with BioNTech, Moderna and Pfizer making between them over US$1,000 per second, but also in human resources terms — with thousands of health workers being pulled out of (already understaffed, in many cases) hospitals to run mass vaccination centres.

    The difference between these people and those who run our government are twofold.

    The first is a realisation between real social justice and that which is promoted by our moneyed interests. It should be obvious that the latter is artificial, but in the “party line” that gets put out these days does its best to hide this simple fact.

    The second is that no solution is going to be perfect, especially in the Third World. This was the point I tried to make in Teaching Secular Blasphemy, but that reality hasn’t percolated to our conceited, unscientific elites.

    If enough people on both sides will refuse to be bought off so easily and have a reality check, we just might get this fiasco under control.

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  • “Getting to Know You”: My Profile for UTC’s College of Engineering and Computer Science

    It’s not often that someone else does a write-up about me, but where I teach (at the University of Chattanooga’s College of Engineering and Computer Science) they did a profile of me in their series “Getting to Know You.” You can read it all here.

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  • Leaked Emails, Leaked Viruses: The Sad Trail of Fauci, Collins and COVID-19

    It’s not easy, but we’re getting closer to the truth:

    Now a string of unearthed emails—the most recent being a batch viewed by the House Oversight and Reform Committee and referred to in its January 11, 2022 letter—is making it seem increasingly likely that there was, in fact, a conspiracy, its aim being to suppress the notion that the virus had emerged from research funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), headed by Anthony Fauci. The latest emails don’t prove such a conspiracy, but they make it more plausible, for two reasons: because the expert virologists therein present such a strong case for thinking that the virus had lab-made features and because of the wholly political reaction to this bombshell on the part of Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health.

    There’s a lot to unpack here:

    • I’ve commented before about the moral hazard that Francis Collins has assumed in getting to the place in life he has. That moral hazard in this case isn’t driven by his theology (such as it is) but by politics and the corrupt, money-driven system that we have. That system has been on display throughout the entire COVID mess. It’s worth noting that the original “Benedict Option” came out not because the late Roman Empire was anti-Christian but because it was corrupt and brutal, as I discussed in my piece The Tough Lesson of Augustine’s “Dear Marcellinus”.
    • Our moneyed, left-wing elites are obsessed by suppressing conspiracy theories. But if there’s one thing I’ve found out, it’s that, if you don’t want a problem solved, turn it over to conspiracy theorists. Their MO is to “expose” a conspiracy, beat it to death in social media of how bad it is, and then have no plan of action to fix the problem. Conspiracy theorists work under the unsaid assumption (if they said it, everyone else would walk away) that, if you identify the conspiracy, you’ve solved the problem. That’s true whether there’s a real conspiracy out there or not.
    • It’s interesting that the two major countries where distrust of government is most reflected in the COVID vaccination rate are the U.S. and Russia. Evidently the “Fifty-Year Wound” of the Cold War runs in both directions! The difference is that, while Russia is used to distrust in government as a way of life, we haven’t gotten to that point. Yet.
    • Is there any good reason why we’re funding research in China? They’re not a poor country any more, they can fund their own research. The Soviets did just fine without our money, as my incessant posts on Chet Aero Marine will attest. If they’re worried about the Chinese “going places” in the research without our knowledge, rest assured they can figure out a way of doing things out of sight.
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  • Beginning of the Persecutions of the Child Jesus

    These elevations concern Jesus’ escape into Egypt from Herod’s clutches, the massacre of the Innocents, and his return to Galilee. In the process …

    Beginning of the Persecutions of the Child Jesus
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  • Reaching the Turning Point

    I’ve done many posts on this site over the years. If I look back, say ten years ago, many of those deal with the same issues that we fight over today. Our media on both sides of the political divide are, as my mother used to say, like geese: they get up in a new world every morning. Whether geese actually do this is hard to say. The geese, obviously tired of being trashed by my mother, invaded her yard when she moved to Chattanooga from South Florida for good in the late 1980’s, but their guilt was unestablished.

    I’ve always felt that, given the incompetent way this country has been run, sooner or later something would give and things would start to go downhill in a recognisable way. I’ve been criticised for the low opinion I have for the people that own and operate this place. Aren’t they successful, say my critics. Shouldn’t you emulate them, they say. My retort is that my critics are sycophants, which only makes them angrier.

    It seems to me that the United States has been successful in spite of the people at the top, not because of them. The main goal of those at the top is to stay there, and the easiest way to do that is to run a class-stratified society where people “know their place,” those who don’t control the vast majority of the wealth, and dissent be stifled so that those who do the work keep doing it in the same energetic, American way they’ve always done it (well, most of them) oblivious to their own exploitation.

    Those of us who have some Scots-Irish in them know that there’s a way out of this treadmill. It’s called “laying out,” that time-honoured practice of reverting to our instinctive laziness when there’s work to be done. Avoiding this moment has been our elites’ juggling act for the last thirty years. One the one hand they hate that Americans are aspirational and that they think they can move up: if they succeed, they could possibly displace the current elite, which the latter finds very distasteful. On the other hand they need Americans to go on working as they have in an open-shop environment where their constraints on what they can do with the labour are minimal. They need the latter in order to float the enormous debt incurred by our government and to purchase the goods and services they would like to sell us.

    I think we have reached the critical moment where the juggling act has come to a halt.

    It’s called the “Great Resignation,” and it’s partly due to COVID, but also partly due to the fact that Americans find their bosses to be things described by words that don’t appear on this blog. People are finding out that they can do without the income their multiple jobs paid to them, that they were underpaid for many of them, and that the family work was really as valuable as the “right-wing nutjobs” told them. The exodus from explicitly paid work is accelerated by the government forcing people out of their jobs by vaccine mandates. To do this in the middle of a general labour shortage might seem to be good public health policy but the effect on the economy and the performance of the system is still adverse.

    When we compound all of this by the woes small businesses are experiencing and the loss of business formation and economic growth spurred by that formation, we have an economy that can neither generate the tax revenues nor finance the inevitable growth in the dole (in all of its forms) that will result from the decrease in work. We also have an economy that doesn’t quite work the way it used to, with the supply chain shortages that we are experiencing these days. That’s been an advantage up to now of these United States; losing that even partially is a major setback.

    These reasons are why I think we have reached the turning point downward in the trajectory of our nation. Some seek moral reasons but a country which is in reality an economic arrangement will turn down for economic reasons. The downturn has moral reasons behind it but it will manifest itself in economic distress. We are in for a rough ride; fasten your seat belts.

  • Further Thoughts on the Elizabethan Settlement

    Being a bishop and a parish clergyman, I basically do not have that much time for systematic research, so many of the things that I find out come to me accidentally. For example, earlier this week I was looking for something on the Württemberg Confession and Google produced an article entitled “Lutheran Influences on the…

    Further Thoughts on the Elizabethan Settlement

    It’s worth noting that one Catholic who have the settlement a reserved “thumbs up” was Bossuet, which he expressed in Variations of the Protestant Churches.

  • Denmark Embraces Secular Blasphemy

    That’s what it looks like:

    ‘I think we will have that in the next two months, and then I hope the infection will start to subside and we get our normal lives back,’ she said on Monday.

    Before the start of the last semester I wrote a piece entitled  Teaching Secular Blasphemy, where I pointed out that no process in this material world was without risk.  That assumption is implicit in this Dane’s view of the situation.  The Omicron virus is milder but more transmissible than its predecessors and her idea is that its spread will increase the herd immunity of the population, thus changing pandemic to endemic.  It’s a strategy not without risk but IMHO it’s a risk worth taking.

    That’s completely opposite of what our secular elites are telling us here.  Based on the American “perfect life” concept, they are telling us that it will never end until everyone is both multiply vaccinated and does all of the rules (acquired immunity having little meaning,) but that it can be completely conquered.  Neither of these is true because our provisions are not perfect, thus the complete eradication is a mirage.

    The impossiblity of complete eradication is beginning to percolate in our discourse, but that doesn’t stop people and institutions from imposing draconian measures in the hope that it is true.  It’s reminiscent in a way of the Soviet concept that they had conquered nature and thus could do what they wanted to do, which resulted in many environmental disasters (the Aral Sea is the most spectacular of these.)  And the Soviets were better focused on society being productive than many in places of power here.

    I’m not optimistic that reality will become the norm again in our policy, but we can always hope…

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