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  • The Nature of Sin

    From the Dominican Walter Farrell, as quoted in Donald Connolly’s Renewing Your Faith:

    The catechism defines sin as a thought, word, deed or omission against the law of God.” But the word “omission” is a little unfortunate. It has the air of the accidental about it, like forgetting to take medicine or absent-mindedly going out without an umbrella. Actually, sin is impossible without some positive act back along the road from which that sin has come. Sins do not just happen, they are willed; they are not accidents that stain our souls as ink might stain a table-cloth; we must deliberately throw the stain at our souls. For sins are human acts, acts for which a man is responsible, which proceed under his control and to an end which he has freely chosen. Otherwise his acts, no matter how evil they may be in themselves, are not sins. So somewhere behind a sin of omission, either by way of cause, or occasion, or impediment, we must be responsible for the omission: which means that somewhere we must have willed it, whether directly or indirectly.

    Yet in another sense, sins are indeed accidents. The commission of sin puts us in the position of the little boy who wants to eat green apples, but does not want the inevitable stomach-ache that goes with eating them. Nevertheless, he eats the apples. The stomach-ache is an accident so far as his will is concerned , certainly his mouth does not water in anticipation of a stomach-ache; yet in another sense he is quite willing to accept the stomach-ache as the price to be paid for eating green apples. No man wants to be a sinner, wants to turn his back upon God , wants to give up all chance for happiness and condemn himself to eternal misery. But if all that is inevitably connected with what is desired here and now, the sinner is willing to pay that price for his sin. We never quite grow up; and there is no more convincing evidence of our constant immaturity than the childish reversal of values involved in sin.

    Stepping into the world of sin is like stepping into a dark tropical forest, nurtured to unbelievable growth by a sun of desire which kills healthy plants. The variety of sin rivals the variety of tropical growth, in fact surpasses it; for the variety of sin is limited only by the possibilities of a will whose limit is the infinite. It is of no use to look to that will for a distinction of the various kinds of sin; an examination of the motives of sin, meaning by motives the causes which produce sin, can tell us only that this act was or was not human, that it was or was not sin. From a terrible fear of humiliation, or from a wildly passionate love, can come the same sin of lying or murder; from the one motive of anger can come sins as widely different as blasphemy, theft and murder.

    The reason for this is that sin, like every other human act, is a motion to a goal. In the world below man, we can easily determine the nature of a motion by looking either at the goal or at the active power that produced the motion; for the powers beneath man run along a determined track that leads always to the same goal. But the powers of man have no set channel along which they must necessarily flow. So, for the determination of any human act, virtuous or vicious, we must look to the goal towards which it is going, to the object of the act. to the thing desired that first set in motion that activity of a human being. In other words, the specific character of any sin, as the specific character of any virtue, its very essence, is to be judged by the object to which it is directed.

    This concept, which is rooted in St. Thomas Aquinas and is certainly evident in Dante, was one that drew me to Roman Catholicism in the first place.  It solved many problems that the Episcopal Church I grew up in either could or would not address.  And it has protected me from the Scylla and Charbdis of both the unreasonable sentence of Reformed theology or the sloppy theodicy of modern Pentecost.

  • Venite, American Version

    A very nice, a capella, solo rendition of the Venite, done in Anglican Chant (1940 Hymnal #609) is here:

    I discuss the difference between the “American” and “English” version here.  The 1928 Book of Common Prayer (where the Venite can be found on p. 9) is here.

  • Two Funerals and an Amazing Grace

    After attending yet another funeral in the morning yesterday, I came home and hunched over my kitchen counter, absorbed in leftover scalloped potatoes, to be transported by the soaring music, the elegant hats, and the heartbreaking social distancing of a very different kind of burial, that of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. A handful of…

    Two Funerals and an Amazing Grace

  • Those Dangerous Latin Masses

    You’d think that there is a better use of time, but…

    What’s happened to the next generation, you ask? Well, to Fr. Reese’s sorrow, they’re off attending the Traditional Latin Mass, just as if Vatican II never happened. Or if not all of them, enough to cause Fr. Reese to beg the Vatican: do something! “The church needs to be clear that it wants the unreformed liturgy to disappear and will only allow it out of pastoral kindness to older people who do not understand the need for change,” he writes. “Children and young people should not be allowed to attend such Masses.”

    It’s worth noting that one of the restrictions the Chinese Communist Party puts on Christian churches is that children and young people is prohibit them from going to church.

    I think it’s sad that supposedly “tolerant” and “liberal” people think this way, but as we all know it’s common.  This is especially true in Roman Catholicism where no one gets to vote for their pastor, or bishop, or much of anything past Susan of the Parish Council.  So there’s no danger that these terrified people will take over the church and cast the Novus Ordo Missae into the Outer Void.

    A large part of the problem here–as is the case with most things in American Catholicism–is the parish system.  Catholic parishes are in theory like public schools, with zones and enforced non-competition between them.  Occasionally a Byzantine Rite or Anglican Ordinariate parish (like a magnet school) will emerge, but they’re outliers in the general scheme of things.  Although some of this goes back to the way the Church in this country was organised, much of it comes from the same wellspring of the public schools: the desire for uniformity and non-competition amongst parishes, which makes it easier for those who lord over them to manage things.  The result is mediocrity, and the Church has the parishioner bleed to show it.

    Roman Catholicism is large enough to handle the diversity that would result from some parishes being TLM.  (The Charismatic Renewal wouldn’t have needed covenant communities if this option had been available.)  But real diversity, in the Church and elsewhere, is hard to find these days.

  • Cancelling William Fulbright

    They’ve come for another one:

    Comments to the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville about the legacy of former U.S. Sen. J. William Fulbright included a few threats to halt donations if his statue is taken down and his name is removed from UA’s arts and sciences college.

    But many wrote in to say that UA should distance itself from Fulbright given his legislative record supporting segregation and opposing civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s.

    In many ways this is amazing, since generally Fulbright has been lionised by the American left for his opposition to the Vietnam War, something that many civil rights leaders at the time (including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) shared.  But the left has allowed CRT to induce a form of amnesia for stuff like this.

    As some of my readers know, my mother was from Arkansas, so politicians from that state are more than a passing interest.  Personally I don’t care what the University of Arkansas does with this.  Fulbright was one of those people who was educated far past his ability to properly absorb it, and that’s something he shared with many Southern liberals.

  • What We Were Really Trying to Accomplish in Men’s Ministries

    As sort of a follow-up to my last post, I’d like to defend something else that’s under attack these days: men’s ministries.  I actually worked in this field during my time with Church of God Lay Ministries, from when I started in 1996 until the department was abolished in 2010.  So I can speak with some authority on the subject.  When the department ended, I created a legacy web site from the site we had, so you and everyone else can see what was going on.

    So what were we trying to accomplish?  The best way to start is to reproduce our own introduction to the topic and ourselves, from this page:

    Sunday after Sunday, pastors and ministers in the Church of God go up to their pulpits and frequently preach to a congregation of mostly…women and children (assuming there’s no children’s church.) This is so common that we take it for granted. It is not something that is restricted to our denomination; it is the rule in many evangelical churches. Beyond the doors of the church—on the golf course, at the football game or bowling alley, or in the backyard—men absent themselves from the house of God. Today in the U.S. men represent the fastest growing portion of the population to abandon meaningful belief in God. They frequently embrace secularism, a “religion” in its own right whose growth threatens both the eternities of those who embrace it and the ability of everyone else to freely live for Christ. Why is this? One reason is that there is no organization in many local churches for men to find fellowship, to learn who God is and how they might live for Him, and how they might then serve Him in a meaningful way. By “organization” we don’t mean a quasi-governmental structure as has been common in churches. Our goal is to facilitate ministry teams, men bonded together in love for Jesus and each other, discipled in the essentials of Christianity, instructed to interact with people around them in a Christian way, and sent forth in service to the lost and hurting world around them. LifeBuilders Men’s Ministries—and the Church of God Men’s Fellowship that preceded it—have been ministering to men before such organizations as Promise Keepers and the National Coalition of Men’s Ministries. We have a long-standing alliance with both. But our world is changing, and we must change with it even as we serve “the Maker of the Lights in the heavens, who is himself never subject to change or to eclipse.” (James 1:17b) Men’s ministries must become more relational if it is to be meaningful both to men newly saved or for those who have walked with the Lord for many years.

    To that I’d like to make some comments and explanation:

    1. Our Executive Director, Leonard Albert, is first and foremost a trainer of lay people for soul winning.  The LifeBuilders Men’s Ministries was deeply affected by that.  Our desire was for men to share the good news both in what they said and the way they lived.
    2. The Church of God, unlike some other churches, does not have a socio-economically privileged demographic.  Our men’s interests ran along those lines and we tailored our activity recommendations to that reality.  We had to promote the idea that men should read books.  We are also a multi-ethnic church; our men come from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds, something that made working for the Department a real joy.
    3. On the other hand, neither Leonard Albert nor I were into the “he-man” ethic that some find so off-putting with men’s ministries.  When Wild at Heart was released, he was unenthusiastic about it, it took some time before we included it in our book store.  As I mentioned in the last post, the society we live in was militarised by World War II and the Cold War, but we never really pushed that nor pushed for men’s ministries to be organised in that fashion.
    4. In our last years we shifted our emphasis to a more discipleship/relational model for men’s ministries.  This was not only a more Biblical way to do it; it was also driven by the realisation that the “pre-discipleship” the culture may have given in the past was fading away.  To be honest a discipleship model was a hard sell in some places, but we partnered with Patrick Morley and Man in the Mirror Ministries in order to promote it.
    5. We never got pushback from the women of our church about men’s ministries.  To encourage men to be saved and responsible husbands and fathers resonated positively with many women.  The big pushback–and this included our entire agenda–came from some of our pastors, who were content with the model described at the start of the piece above.  They felt the presence of strong men in their congregation was a power challenge to them, so they resisted it.

    More about how our idea of men’s ministries worked is here.  The Department came to an end in the wake of the church’s budgetary crisis caused by the cutback in remissions from local churches.  Today the legacy website is most frequently visited by Hispanics from all parts of the hemisphere, so men’s ministries is anything but a “white supremacy” project, at least in a Pentecostal context.

    I was blessed to be able to be a part of such a ministry and also to explain and defend what we did.

  • The Episcopal Snobs and the John Wayne Evangelicals

    There’s never a dull moment these days, and to shut off the possibility of one occurring we now have the food fight around Kristin Kobes du Mez’ Jesus and John Wayne.  The most recent volley has been around the illustrious Anglican Anne Carlson Kennedy’s review of same, with the usual suspects saying the usual things.  For du Mez and those of her idea Kennedy poses a special threat since she is a) a woman and b) an Anglican.  The first is obvious; the second will take some explanation.

    I started out life as an Episcopalian.  In the Episcopal world we had the classic Episcopal Snob, which I have commented on before.  Such people believed and were convinced that the religion they had was superior to that which those around them practiced, especially those dreadful, hollering, money-grubbing fundamentalists.  A corollary to that belief was that those who gave up their antecedent religion and adopted the colonies’ best substitute for the religion our former dread sovereigns fashioned for us were likewise invested with the same superiority.  It’s not a very Biblical appeal for a church but it worked, and worked very well for the years immediately after World War II.

    Such transitions were rougher than they looked.  Shortly after I was inducted in the Acolyte Order of St. Peter, my mother and I were in the narthex after a proper 1928 BCP service. I was wearing the cross keys of St. Peter, similar to those on the Vatican flag.  Our rector, Hunsdon Cary, pointed at each of the keys in succession and said, “This key is for Episcopalian and this one is for Baptist.”  I’m sure that my mother–only confirmed a couple of years earlier–was thrilled at being outed in this way.

    On the other side of the lake (and later the tracks) were those impecunious fundies, with their lack of either liturgy or trust funds, believers’ baptism and Bill Clinton’s Eucharistic Theology.  They’re the target of du Mez’s book.  Militarized by World War II (weren’t we all really?) and facing the onslaught of the sexual revolution, they adopted a response that angers people like her.  The old fashioned Episcopal snobs could have predicted this.  But they were unprepared for the onslaught of modern and post-modern theology that took over their church.

    I’ve lived long enough and been in enough places and churches to have been on both sides of this divide.  I’ll also mention that I actually worked in men’s ministries for a long time.  Frankly our society was better off when such divides didn’t have much to do with each other; we see the results of when they spend all their time in a state of virtual war.  But I think I can make a reasoned estimate of which of these sides has the better merit.

    There’s no doubt that, especially when conflict comes, one would wish that Evangelicals wouldn’t have considered the Sermon on the Mount a practical dead letter.  And it would be nice if they didn’t consider centuries of church history as a void waiting for them to show up.  But on balance the Evangelicals have the better case for being Biblical and having a viable path to eternal life than their counterparts to the left, including current-day Episcopal snobs.  A comparison of core beliefs will show this, but I’m going to concentrate on my favourite topic relating to this: the economic disparity between those of du Mez’ idea and her Evangelical opponents.

    Evangelicals (and especially Pentecostals) are in the greater scheme of things an underclass.  That may shock some people but it’s true, not only in comparison to, say, the Episcopalians but also our very secular elites.  Donald Trump’s years didn’t change that, but you’d never know it from the endless howling you hear about him and his supporters.  And no one is more loathe to admit it than the Evangelicals themselves.  But when it comes to to helping others in need, Evangelicals are more sacrificial in their willingness to give of themselves and their substance than their liberal counterparts.  When I was a kid at Bethesda we had “mite boxes” but I’ve seen more “widow’s mite” moments as a Pentecostal than I ever saw as an Episcopalian.

    Evangelicals’ biggest problem is their endless attempt to get out of the economic basement and move into the seat of power they think they’re entitled to.  That, I think, motivated them in part to support Donald Trump (his opponents’ obsession with adopting non-Christian and anti-Christian policies also fuelled that.)  It drives a great deal of what they do, even when they’re on shaky Biblical ground, such as the recent conflict I’ve gotten involved with about working in heaven.  It hasn’t always been this way, but it is now.

    But that leads us to the Anglican part: getting blowback from an Anglican woman is a real slap in the face for left-leaning evangelicals who aspire to move up into the Anglican world.  Even Rachel Held Evans figured that out: she became an Episcopalian.  The ACNA, stupidly I think, facilitated this movement with things like the Diocese of the Churches for the Sake of Others. (If that’s not pretentious, I’m not sure what is.)   To move up and then face opposition from people like Anne Kennedy is hard to take.

    But that’s the difference between lay people and clergy.  Clergy–especially left-leaning clergy–expect the church they’re in to change to their idea.  Lay people only get to leave and go somewhere else, and that’s not always easy. People like du Mez would be better off if they spent as much time building the church they want people to be a part of rather than nitpicking the one that’s there, but these days that’s too much to ask.

    ,

  • Those Infernal Internal Passports

    At the left is a passport cover, one of those things designed to protect your passport, especially if your home is really a pied à terre and you travel a great deal.  But look carefully: it’s from the old Soviet Union, complete with their national seal embossed on the cover, and “Pasport” at the bottom.

    The Soviet Union had not only external passports (for those few who got to leave the country) but internal ones as well.  It was necessary to produce this passport for inspection upon request of the police.  As noted in Pipko and Pucciarelli (1985):

    “The passport is a biographical capsulization of its bearer in booklet form. It contains a recent photograph of the bearer. It states, inter alia, his name, place and date of birth, nationality (based upon the nationality parents), information concerning his marital status and the id of his children, a record of his military service, his place of work, notations concerning his failure to make court-ordered alimony payments, if applicable, and, most importantly, a propiska.”

    The last is the most important: this stamp and its annotations showed permission to the bearer to live in their specific dwelling place.  The internal passport’s most important function was not to limit the journey or the destination but to define (and control) the starting place!  I should note that the Soviets were obsessed with the passport concept: even pieces of equipment had their own passports, I have a few of these myself.

    Today we’re debating the use of “vaccine passports” to restrict people from going certain places and doing certain things based upon whether they have been vaccinated or not.  The biggest problem with this is that, once we start with a passport based on vaccination status, we then proceed to something more comprehensive like the Soviets had.  Our problem is that we have a political and bureaucratic class which is no longer content to regulate and facilitate the society’s prosperity but to control it.

    I’m not sure I really have the sword to cut this Gordian knot, but it will be interesting to see if whatever universal ID they eventually come up with will be useful when it is time to vote.

    Reference:

    Pipko, S., & Pucciarelli, A. (1985). The Soviet Internal Passport System. The International Lawyer, 19(3), 915-919. Retrieved April 2, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40705651

  • The Catholic Church and the Dung Beetles

    One of my Twitter followers referred me to this series of posts (Part I, Part II and Part III, and now he’s added a piece about the Trads) by one Larry Chapp, one time seminarian and academic.  (He uses the dung beetle analogy in the first post.)  A thorough response would be as long as his original series.  (I’ve addressed the issue of the Trads elsewhere.) The podcast video brought out many points that were hard to find in the long narrative, but it too takes a while to digest.

    I’ve spent a lot of time on Roman Catholicism on this site, for two reasons,  The first is that its place in Christianity is important whether you think that place is deserved or not.  The second is that my years as a Roman Catholic were the central drama in my walk with God on this earth; here is where it all was transformed.

    Chapp’s opening narrative about the bishops brings back to mind something that happened to me while an undergraduate at Texas A&M.  After my second year, I left dorm life behind for good and moved into a trailer with a friend of mine from “Newman/Answer” circles.  Early on we got into a discussion about the Church and its leadership.  Growing up Episcopalian acclimated me to less than stellar clergy leadership.  But he would have none of it, and basically forced me to read this from Ezekiel:

    Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel, prophesy, and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD unto the shepherds; Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the flocks? Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you with the wool, ye kill them that are fed: but ye feed not the flock. The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was broken, neither have ye brought again that which was driven away, neither have ye sought that which was lost; but with force and with cruelty have ye ruled them. And they were scattered, because there is no shepherd: and they became meat to all the beasts of the field, when they were scattered. My sheep wandered through all the mountains, and upon every high hill: yea, my flock was scattered upon all the face of the earth, and none did search or seek after them. Therefore, ye shepherds, hear the word of the LORD; As I live, saith the Lord GOD, surely because my flock became a prey, and my flock became meat to every beast of the field, because there was no shepherd, neither did my shepherds search for my flock, but the shepherds fed themselves, and fed not my flock; Therefore, O ye shepherds, hear the word of the LORD; Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against the shepherds; and I will require my flock at their hand, and cause them to cease from feeding the flock; neither shall the shepherds feed themselves any more; for I will deliver my flock from their mouth, that they may not be meat for them. (Ezekiel 34:2-10 KJV)

    That was in 1975.

    Chapp clears up a major reason for this problem: the episcopal appointments under Paul VI left a lot to be desired of.  Those appointments, and the whole leftward drift of the American church after Vatican II, left the church vulnerable to sub-Christian influences, a situation that I’ve discussed elsewhere.

    My friend’s and my subsequent course as Roman Catholics was an exercise in navigating this swamp while at the same time maintaining a high level of Christian life that we knew God expected of us.  In the short run it wasn’t a problem, but after we left College Station things got interesting–too interesting.

    We tried very hard to stay in the Church, I think he more than me.  But it wasn’t easy.  In his case he ended up in a Catholic Charismatic covenant community, one ultimately split by a Marian devotion controversy.  He even married a Roman Catholic in a Catholic ceremony (the last time I was a lector.)  But in the end he gave up and left.

    Neither my first parish nor my years at A&M really prepared me for the miserable state of American Catholic parish life.  I tried and rejected the covenant community.  I moved to Tennessee and got involved in a Catholic Charismatic prayer group, which also split over the Marian devotion issue.  The church didn’t like Charismatics and ultimately wore down the group, not only for doctrinal issues but because it wasn’t really respectable in this community, and the Catholic Church around here craved respectability.  So I ended up leaving as well.  That wasn’t my original plan–and it wasn’t my friend’s either–but I really feel that the Church didn’t leave us with much choice, its ostensible representations notwithstanding.

    The fact that we were both involved in the Charismatic Renewal was part of the problem.  With the accession of Pope John Paul II in 1978 a house cleaning was initiated.  Unfortunately that included much of the Charismatic Renewal, which was ecumenical in nature.  Covenant prayer groups and communities ended up either getting offers they couldn’t refuse, going “underground” or going away.  (I still am not sure how the People of Praise managed to dodge the bullet, but they did.)

    This illustrates something else that Chapp brings up: the tone deafness of the current Occupant of the See of St. Peter about the needs of the American church.  To some extent all of the Occupants have this problem.  I’m sure that the ecumenical, free-form Charismatics here got under John Paul II’s skin (I have reason to believe they did in Poland, too.)  But during the Anglican Revolt days of the late 1990’s and 2000’s, the Charismatics furnished some of the heft the “reasserters” needed in that effort (although the Reformed and Anglo-Catholic types are loathe to admit it.)  Their Catholic counterparts would have been very helpful in the current struggle.

    But now we are back to the future: the American Catholic church, with the help of the Vatican, is drifting back into a classic “go along to get along” stance with our culture.  As Chapp notes, they don’t really believe much of what they supposedly teach.  And that’s a sad commentary.  But there’s more to it than that.

    Chapp brings up something that you don’t hear much about: ultramontanism.  Ever since the Restoration in France, the Church has been an ultramontane institution, i.e., one governed by the fiat of Rome.  In one sense that should improve the accountability of the lower ranks, but their lack of accountability to their flocks (a ditching of a hallmark of Vatican II) only makes them “little Caesars” in their parishes and (especially) dioceses, with cover from above.  They can build their own empires and cushion their own positions with impunity, if they can survive storms such as the molestation scandals.

    Sooner or later, however, the leadership of the Church will experience this prophetic passage of Bossuet, given about a century before the French Revolution:

    Let us listen to our law in the person of Jesus Christ, as long as we are priests of the Lord. If it was said to Levi, on account of his sacred ministry: You are my holy man, to whom I have given perfection and doctrine; and for that, he must say to his father and to his mother: I do not know you; and to his brethren: I do not know who you are, and he has no children but those of God. If it is thus, I say, about the law of Levi and the Mosaic priesthood, how pure, how detached from flesh and blood must be the Christian priesthood, with Jesus Christ as author and Melchizedek as model? No, we must know of no other task, no other function, nor have any other interest than that of God, teaching his law and his judgments, and continually offering him perfumes to appease him. If we keep this law of our holy ministry, one would not see the invasion of the rights and authority of the priesthood, which are those of Jesus Christ. God would become our avenger, and the prayer of Moses would have its effect: Lord, help your ministers, uphold their strength, protect the work of their hands; hit the fleeing backs of their enemies, and those who hate them may never rise again. But because, more carnal than the children of the age, we only think of making ourselves fat, of living at our ease, of making successors for ourselves, of establishing a name and a house, then everyone sets upon us, and the honor of the priesthood is trampled underfoot. (Elevations on the Mysteries, XIII, 6)

  • I’m Featured in the New Humanist About Working in Heaven

    It’s the topic that never seems to go away (sorry!) My first post on this topic was in 2012, but just a few weeks ago I wrote this in response–and amplification–to an article which featured my first post in, of all places, MEL Magazine (a secular publication for men.)

    Now Ralph Jones has written a piece for the New Humanist which once again examines this question. And once again my pieces and also an email interview we did are featured.

    There are two questions which bother me about this whole issue, at least the way I’ve been involved with it.

    The first is this: why are secular publications seemingly more interested in this topic than Christians are? I think the answer is that churches and ministers, thinking that people are more interested in the immediate benefits of following Jesus Christ in this life than the reward on the other side, have emphasised the former at the expense of the latter. The interest in this topic by secular publications such as these challenge this assumption.

    This isn’t the first time that a topic of interest has had secular people call out those who profess and call themselves Christians; it happened in 2007-8 when Brendan O’Neill called out Rowan Williams on environmentalism, which I documented in my piece Messing in Our Own Box.

    The second is this: am I the only Christian to actively oppose the idea of working in heaven? Or are there other closeted saints who read the Scriptures the same way that I do who are afraid to voice their opinion? That, by definition, is a form of cancel culture.

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