Is intellectual freedom hostile to Catholic orthodoxy? Somebody on the left thinks so!
- Catholic man of the left Daniel Nichols writes: Your economic individualism and embrace of that misogynist punk Roissy are hostile to Catholic orthodoxy. Nice try. If I can't learn from economic individualists and manosphere writers, by that "logic" I can't learn anything from ancient Greek philosophers, Marxist criticism of social problems, or comedies written by Jews. You don't have to buy the ideology to get the benefit. (A wingman is not necessarily a Pope.) Discernment, discrimination, an adult's good judgment. The church is not a micromanaging cult. It teaches the goals (flourishing, charity) but leaves many of the means to the laity's judgment. (Which is what the church including Vatican II means by the freedom/autonomy of the laity and lay apostolates, not laity giving Communion; we're sacerdotalists, not clericalists, and of course the laity are the church's main force in the world, as businessmen, statesmen, husbands, fathers, wives, mothers, etc.) It doesn't say the end justifies the means, but most of the means aren't sins. We can work with kings, dictators, or republics. I've written that liberty is a means, not an end. The answer to the presenting issue with the SSPX, by the way, which is not the old Mass (my Mass) or Latin as popularly reported. Also: "do your own thing" means "every man for himself," which means "just die already." The gospel according to Catholic orthodoxy. So no hostility here; just a classical liberality, open-mindedness, interestingly, different from usually traditionalist Catholic integralism (distributism, third-wayism), not a heresy, but a different school of thought within the church from mine. (We have those: we're not a monolith.)
- What is ACROD? Asks Dale Crakes regarding this (Father has drunk the Kool-Aid). In short, our own churchmen hurt the church.
- Can I just say I am sick of people stating that the Church is dying, or that we need to do this or that for it to continue! (And, yes, that is on the right and on the left!) The Church is God's and like God she will continue for ever. She may not look like she did yesterday but she will continue for ever. Why? Because Jesus said so! The church won't disappear from the earth (Jesus' promise to Peter and at the end of Matthew's gospel) but it has died in many places. The New Testament churches are mostly Mohammed's stomping grounds now. As is happening in Iraq. Modernism can do that in a Western country.
- The case for Anglicanism not being an offshoot of Calvinism. Classic high church: a pretty argument that they stripped away papal accretions and returned to the Bible and the church fathers. The trouble is, once you get rid of the church (infallibility), to serve the state (yes, that means you too, Orthodoxy) or for any other reason, in theory anything goes: the Episcopalians.
- What to say if the girl calls you gay. A quick lesson from Roissy in alpha snark for repartee.
- George Takei: funny guy and grown man. “Fans get “offended” from time to time by my posts,” he wrote. “There's hardly is a day where something I put up doesn't engender controversy. Concerned fans, worried the sky may fall, ask me to ‘take it down.’” “So I'm also going to ask them also to take it down - a notch, please.” No malice: I didn't know that wheelchair users have varying levels of mobility.
- "So what do you do?" I craft customer-driven content to boost your business, creating Web identities for all kinds of small to midsize companies. I have written more than 1,500 commercial sites for clients across the United States and for one overseas client (Belgium). I come from nearly 18 years in newspapers, where I wrote entertaining feature stories, from human interest (from pet psychics to one-legged marathon runners) to theater reviews to covering local schools. Also, my copy-editing skills were an asset to the newsroom.
- Picture: Abby and Brittany Hensel: the movie. If these lovely, unusual girls got the Hollywood biopic treatment.
- From Bob Wallace:
- "Don't hit me; I'm a girl."
- The late Elliot Rodger was a monster. I know partly what had produced him: feelings of humiliation, which is almost always followed by revenge. Hubris followed by Nemesis. It's been noticed for thousands of years. It's not like I figured it out on my own. Then I also found out he never played, and that's associated with murder, too. Such people get no pleasure out of life. So if you really want to screw up someone, humiliate them and take all the fun and pleasure out of their lives. Elliot never showed any signs of normalcy until a grown man got some girls to tickle him. Play is also associated with creativity, with advancing culture, with discovering, with inventing. Actually, play is those things. Men are overwhelmingly the ones who do the inventing, discovering creating. So, the more boys are prevented from playing (which requires trust and security), the more they are humiliated and made to feel guilty, the less creating and discovering is going to happen, and the more hostility they're going to show. And the more civilization goes backward. It's already pretty degraded as it is. As he explains elsewhere, monsters are simply examples of things gone wrong.
- Wall Street Journal editorial board member Jason Riley criticized the impending arrival of Attorney General Eric Holder in Ferguson, Missouri on Tuesday, saying Holder was there as part of President Barack Obama’s efforts to play “race-healer-in-chief.” “These looters and rioters do not need to hear from the attorney general that criticism of Obama is race-based,” Riley told host Bret Bauer. “What they need to hear from this Black man in this position — the nation’s leading law enforcement official — is that they need to stay out of trouble with the law. They need to pull up their pants and finish school and take care of their kids. That is the message they need to hear.” Of course he can get away with saying that because he's black.
- Rich families that lost it all. The Vanderbilts may still be in the Social Register but there's no more trust fund. Pictured: A&P heir Huntington Hartford and some cutie.
Catholic integralism is the true seamless garment.
Concerning "the case for Anglicanism not being an offshoot of Calvinism," as propounded here:
ReplyDeletehttp://anglican-anastomosis.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-torpedo.html
the linked article suffers from at least two errors, the second of which goes far to undermine its whole thesis. The first error comes here:
"That having been said, Article XVI torpedoes a straight-up Augustinian-Reformed theological framework for the Anglican. Any admission that one can lose one’s salvation for any reason once one is elect (and knows it, another feature of Lutheranism is the matter of assurance) breaks the whole Reformed paradigm."
I do not know how classical Lutherans reconcile "assurance" with the fact that "one can lose one's salvation" even "once one is elect" (although it may be that there is an understanding of "assurance" that does not involve a psychological conviction about one's eternal destiny - not that I can readily imagine such a chimaera), but it is without any doubt the case that Lutherans believe that a "faithful Christian" can "lose his salvation" as a result of subsequent unrepented sin, or falling into unbelief.
The second, exemplified here:
"Article XVI, 'Of Sin after Baptism,' says that a man who has received the Holy Ghost and fallen into sin may rise again: 'After we have received the Holy Ghost, we may depart from grace given, and fall into sin, and by the grace of God we may arise again, and amend our lives.' This article contradicts the Calvinist teaching on Irresistible Grace and the Perseverance of the Saints. Calvinism would say that should we fall into sin after we have received the Holy Ghost we 'will arise again,' rather than 'may arise again;' and denies that Christians 'may depart from grace given.' In fact, 'In 1572 the Puritans addressed certain admonitions to Parliament complaining of the inadequacy of the Articles and their dangerous speaking about falling from grace' (A Theological Introduction to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, E. J. Bicknell, D.D., 1935, p. 21)
If the Articles are Calvinist, then why such strong and consistent opposition for so long? If Anglicanism is really 'Calvinist,' then why have Calvinists opposed not only the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, but its Liturgy and Episcopal Church Order as well? And, if Anglicanism is really Calvinist, then why did the Puritans completely replace the Articles, Prayer book and Episcopal Order of the Church as soon as they had the opportunity after the Great Rebellion and the crime of regicide? The answer is that the Articles of Religion were written to guide the Church of England through the controversies of the Reformation and back to the Faith and practice of the primitive Church; and that the Anglican Church is not a Protestant denomination but a branch of the Catholic Church, unhappily divided from the wider Church by accidents of history"
(cont'd)
(cont'd)
ReplyDeleteis both simplisitic and, in some of its claims, mistaken. First, and above all else, it conflates and confuses "Reformed" with "Calvinist." One could be "Reformed" without being "Calvinist" (e.g., in the degree of emphasis put on predestination and election, and, among Calvinists after Calvin, on the necessity of the elect being aware and confident of their elect status; in the emphasis on Church Polity and small-p "presbyterianism" and opposition to an episcopal polity; and on attitudes towards the 39 Articles), although all Calvinists were, of course, Reformed (Calvin, like his mentor Bucer, recall, desired to occupy a middle position between Wittenberg and Zurich - but while Bucer crossed his fingers and made a deal with Wittenberg, Calvin did the same with Zurich*). Most English Elizabethan Protestant divines (both generally Reformed and specifically Calvinist) thought that the 39 Articles (although perhaps containing some infelicities) were fine so far as they went - but that they didn't go far enough; most of them also thought, initially, although clearly with misgivings (cf. Jewel's letters to his Zurich chums, and the attempt of the bishops, including Parker, at the 1562 Convocation to get rid of vestments, organs and kneeling for communion) that the BCP services were acceptable, at least as an initial step towards something better; and none of them had any problem with an episcopal polity, so long as it did not make any "exclusivist" claims for itself. But from the point of view of many of them, what they got with the passage of time was not "something better," but "something worse:" a rigorous insistence on the most objectionable and barely-tolerable, as they saw it, features of the BCP; the development of a theory of jure divino episcopacy which seemed totally unProtestant (although, ironically, it arose in reaction to post-Calvin "Calvinist" ideas about jure divino presbyterianism, in England and in Geneva) and, after 1603, a hermeneutic of the 39 Articles that qualified or even denied any privileged "Reformed reading" of them, a view "canonized" in the "Royal Declaration" of 1630. This being so, the question:
"why did the Puritans completely replace the Articles, Prayer book and Episcopal Order of the Church as soon as they had the opportunity"
has a simpler and more economical answer than the one provided: the BCP, the episcopal polity, and the Articles had shown themselves to be inadequate to achieve the goals which most English Protestants, and indeed, many or most of the framers of the Articles, imagined to be their purpose: making England and the English a Protestant Reformed realm and people, and now that an opportunity had at last arisen to achieve "something better," it should be taken advantage of.
* Calvin's "mediating position" was largely "swallowed up" into generic Reformed Christianity; "Bucerianism" has, IMO, acted as a cuckoo in the Lutheran nest ever since 1536 - as, for example, when I see those Lutherans whom I respect arguing that "Liturgy is not adiaphora," arguing, in a Missouri-Synod context, against replacing the "traditional Lutheran reformed Catholic rite" with holyrollerdom, I sympathize - but then think of the Lutheran churches of SW Germany which did indeed wholly abandon the Western Catholic liturgical tradition, and replace it by forms of worship similar to those of Zurich and the Swiss. Since 1555, if not earlier, no "classical Lutherans" have, to my knowledge denied the "orthodox Lutheran status" of these churches because of the nature of their worship services (before their turning liberal, I mean).
Furthermore, this paragraph:
ReplyDelete"Article XVI, 'Of Sin after Baptism,' says that a man who has received the Holy Ghost and fallen into sin may rise again: 'After we have received the Holy Ghost, we may depart from grace given, and fall into sin, and by the grace of God we may arise again, and amend our lives.' This article contradicts the Calvinist teaching on Irresistible Grace and the Perseverance of the Saints. Calvinism would say that should we fall into sin after we have received the Holy Ghost we 'will arise again,' rather than "may arise again;" and denies that Christians 'may depart from grace given.' In fact, 'In 1572 the Puritans addressed certain admonitions to Parliament complaining of the inadequacy of the Articles and their dangerous speaking about falling from grace' (A Theological Introduction to the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, E. J. Bicknell, D.D., 1935, p. 21) ..."
with its making heavy weather over "will" and "may," seems to ignore (or be ignorant) of the fact that Calvin believed that individuals among the reprobate (the non-elect, the massa damnata) might well "receive the Holy Ghost" enabling them for a time to lead righteous and, if Christians by outward profession, godly lives, and yet "not unto salvation" - in which context Article XVI's use of "may" rather than "will" (concerning "a man," not stipulated to be amongst "the elect") makes perfect Reformed, and even Calvinist, sense.
One more comment (lest I be censured for neglecting the author's strongest argument) on this:
ReplyDelete"How should the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion be interpreted? The Church gives us an authoritative answer to this question. In 1571, the same year that the Articles were adopted by Convocation, Canon 5, "On Preachers," was also adopted. Canon 5 says, "But especially shall they see to it that they teach nothing in the way of a sermon which they would have religiously held and believed by the people save what is agreeable to the teaching of the Old and New Testament and what the Catholic Fathers and ancient bishops and doctors have collected from this selfsame doctrine." This canon is clearly grounded in the Commonitorium of St. Vincent of Lerins."
This is a very interesting canon. One may point out, though, that it was never ratified by the Queen, and so its legal/canonical standing is disputable, or even doubtful. Still, in arguably subordinating the interpretation of the 39 Articles to a sort of "Patristic consensus" it is unique among Reformation-era confessions of faith. (I do not accept the author's argument, in the subsequent paragraph of his post, that "The Thirty-nine Articles are not, and were never intended to be, a Confession of Faith like the Continental Protestant Confessions. The Anglican Church is a creedal Church, not a confessional denomination," which seems to be a post-Laudian and post-Restoration retrospective rationalization.) It was easy to make such a statement in 1571, since both the Lutherans and the Reformed alike believed that their peculiar and characteristic doctrines were "agreeable to the teaching of the Old and New Testament and what the Catholic Fathers and ancient bishops and doctors have collected from this selfsame doctrine." We know better now, of course - and the Reformers themselves (Luther as well as the principal Reformed Reformers) would (and in some cases did) reject the views of any Church Father, group of Church Fathers, or consensus of Church Fathers that stood in opposition to Sola Scriptura, Sola Fide, or, among the "Calvinist Reformed" their views on predestination/election, church polity, and the sacraments. But whatever its canonical standing or original significance, the canon was to prove useful in that "invention of Anglicanism" which was the unique achievement of Richard Hooker, on the one hand, and the friends and followers of Lancelot Andrewes, on the other.