I think you’ve struck at the heart of the matter. The church seems to have always struggled with actually being Christ like. I grew up in the united reformed church, became a Christian at university and went to any number of Protestant based churches and, still, 30 years on, my head is spinning because they all pick holes in each other……catholicism was a big no no in many of the more evangelical churches. I mean……where is the true church?
One of my charismatic friends is now seriously worried as I lean towards Catholicism and orthodoxy….so I asked if she felt all Christians ….pre reformation…..1500 or so years worth…..would be doomed for not having the “correct” beliefs. She replied that she never thought about anything pre reformation.
The true church must lie with those who have surrendered to ‘ the kingdom of God’ and let it have free reign in their hearts and they could be catholic, orthodox, Anglican etc but, how much easier and, frankly, how much more welcoming it would be if that ‘kingdom’ was a whole, united body at peace with itself…..
Thanks for your observations shared here. Having seen Karen off to church this morning, and tended to the dog, and the dishes, I’ve motored the vintage old Triumph back across the Big River to home, am considering a second cup of coffee with some toast and bacon; Ralph Vaughn Williams’ “Lark Ascending” is on the turntable. The weather’s a soft mix of Midwestern Spring showers and sunlight here, and has me in a reflective state - your share and Paul’s history of the bloody tumult of ‘church’ in 15th C England having sparked that little flame. You and I are of not dissimilar church background, it seems. I’ve been a member of the American post-Revolution Anglican Communion for nearly forty years now (having been raised protestant Presbyterian, been married once as Roman Catholic), and am most recently what my RC friends would self-describe as ‘lapsed’ Episcopalian. The church community of which I was most recently an active member, including a Warden of the Vestry, Treasurer, and most delightfully (even to those in hearing range), 3rd chair tenor in a very capable ‘high church’ choir; that church community is seeing (and largely tut-tutting if not outright blaming) the effects of social shift in attitudes towards small ‘c’ church, and more inexorably, regional demographic shrinkage. Trinity’s dominating situation above the river valley here, its Gothic architectural heft, and parish history no longer carry either the day or the congregation size necessary to sustain itself. It’s only the millions in endowed fund balances that allow it to keep the weather out of the buildings, the lights on and wages paid. And that’s not unusual for churches here in the States, the ones trying to find the ‘middle ground’ and not caught up in the current quest for power that’s all the rage.
To my point, reflective of yours, perhaps: there’s nothing catches the attention of those who measure such things as declining bank balances and empty pews, and in our case, seek out someone or some thing to blame. I admit, and acknowledge to being swept away by the moments of high church Episcopal services, and being unable to complete the closing verses of the post-communion hymn, being pulled toward a thin place in the veil, my failing tenor failing entirely. I’m experiencing some of the same in the closing moments of “Lark Ascending” just now.
I no longer attend services at all. ‘High Church’ Anglican / Episcopal worship will always be the high point of worship for me. The undoing? For me? The insistence of those stalwart regulars (who have also been the heavy hitters in financial support) in the proper performance of high church worship, and the appearance of a grand cathedral-like space, as opposed to living the Gospel, much less hearing it in present (or even past) context. Trinity is just up the hill from the site of the collapsed SRO / hotel in the downtown, whose residents lost everything last year, some their lives, and the public library upon whose steps the growing number of un-housed gather for ‘community’ and relative safety. It is the world in which we all are.
I can’t un-see the difference. Paul’s fine recounting of the ups- and downs- of the Tudors here cracked open the door to the story this morning. Your thoughts and experiences were a catalyst for me, so thank you. I am reminded of the comment of an old monastic, who was asked by someone expecting an entirely different sort of answer, “Well, Brother, what do you believe?”. And instead of a rigorous theological treatise and justification of their ‘religion’, the monk thought for just a moment, and then quietly just sang a Sunday school hymn: “… Jesus loves me, this I know, for the bible tells me so…”. For me, it was deafening.
I continue on my own quiet, deepening wandering of a pilgrimage. You, and Paul were like wise folks encountered on my path this morning. So, again, thanks.
I enjoyed reading your reply……sounds like you are having a lovely day. I do like Vaughan Williams. I had to study him once for a music exam and he seemed to have been a very nice chap. He used to go round the English countryside collecting ancient folk songs so they were not forgotten. Nice man as well as a genius composer.
I too do not currently attend any services., although I have tried a little Anglican Church that does seem to make Christ the centre of the service. Your church sounds quite familiar to the church I grew up in……there was several families who ran it in the way they saw fit and alas it closed a few years ago. I once suggested a weekly prayer meeting to pray for the future of the church but it did not go down well which, considering the bible tells us to pray continuously, was not good. So many churches have just died over here for similar reasons. it’s sad.
Hope you enjoy the rest of your day and thanks again for your kind response.
I'd come to Vaughan Williams late in life, and although I'd had a pretty good public education in the halcyon post- WW II days of funding for public schools, our music class was once a week, and tended toward American composers of the 19th century. I think you were fortunate to have gotten a rounding out in music.
Anyway, church: During the transition period following the old Dean of Trinity's retirement, there was some concentrated effort to introduce the congregation to regular silent contemplative prayer, but the group intending to protect 'the way we never were' not only did not join in, but cast shade upon the notion in a whispering campaign in the background. It is sad.
FYI, I found Paul Kingsnorth through reading Kentucky-born farmer - writer Wendell Berry, who I cannot recommend highly enough. A friend stuck a copy of his novel of the Port William Membership, "Hannah Coulter", into my hands five years ago, which story reflects much of the change in rural life, and American life, and the life I came of age in, growing up in a small town in northern Illinois. Karen and I read it aloud at days' end for about a month, and I can still pull up a couple of passages that take my breath away. Berry writes knowledgeably of community, self-sufficiency, agriculture and The Machine as well, and up until the last decade, was still farming with mules. And Berry, and Paul sort of brought me to the RC priest Ivan Illich (see his "Tools for Conviviality"), who pitched his collar into the corner rather than conform to the expectations of comporting with the very things that Berry, and Paul K, and now me find to be just awful about modernity.
Illich wrote, years ago, and some senior clergy and leadership I know, are all seeing and saying the same thing about 'church': as not so subtly said by the Bishop of the Diocese of Minnesota to a group last year, "Jesus is coming back, but the 1950's aren't". There's something else coming, and I'm willing to look for that, too.
I so appreciated hearing back from you, and trust your Sunday was as a Sabbath might be. Be well.
I have not long come across him. My husband is a pipe smoker and he watches a You Tube channel called The Pipe Cottage, headed by Alan Harrelson, a recent convert to Catholicism. He talks a lot about Wendell Berry and the agrarian life. I think Alan Harrelson lives in Kentucky and he is certainly living the rural life. Really interesting…..I’ve watched an interview with Wendell Berry and loved what he had to say. I must get one of his books.
I will also look up Ivan Illich.
It was Mothers Day over here in England yesterday so I had my 2 sons around which was lovely……so a good Sunday for me.
Many thanks Tim …..I’ve greatly enjoyed reading your replies
I know a church deacon who maintains that Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis could not exist without a God.
BTW, have you ever heard the Kronos Quartet's Spem in Alium? The melody was also written by Tallis.
Tallis was an artist who was able to bridge the Catholic-Protestant divide. Another was Matthias Grünewald, who painted the famous Isenheim Altarpiece that became the inspiration for Paul Hindemith's symphony Mathis der Maler.
I'm sure I've listened to "Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tallis", and will look for it in my collection of found LPs. Thank you for the reminder. I also have his Symphony No. 3, "Pastoral", which absolutely breaks my heart, start to finish. I will seek out Kronos' "Spem in Allum", which strikes a chord of familiarity for me. I appreciate these seekers of bridges, of third ways, of reaching across divides, and using our hearts and minds to live better, kinder and more gently with one another. I'll check the encyclopedia for the Isenheim altarpiece. Thanks very much for sharing this.
I like pieces like this that give me the headlines of history that I should already know but don't. Our tour of English Christianity makes perfect Sunday morning reading, but lest I get too comfortable with the gentle beauty of it all, this piece reminds me that we're never far from the demands of the cross.
A thought, not my own, as to why Christianity as well as other major religions have become watered down over the centuries. All major religions were founded by a spiritually advanced figure. As time goes on, the original force of that figure inevitably weakens its grip on humanity's imagination. Its no accident that every thousand years or so a Buddha, a Prophet, a Christ comes among humanity. If you can begin to see this pattern, you begin to see how it the cycle of religious revival occurs.
And, I might suggest, if you are right, perhaps mankind is going to someday finally be shed of these superstitions we call "religion", and accept our material reality.
We're experiencing a much larger gap between Buddhas, Prophets, and Christs (all of which came WITHIN the span of less than 1000 years, not spaced out by 1000).
Maybe when Clark observed “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, he was incidentally predicting the end of religion in a technological age.
So far. But the hope folks seem to put in better future outcomes for the rationalist/materialist/Marxist is that eventually everyone will see the Emperor's New Clothes that is religion, and no war or killing will be necessary to move on toward enlightenment. Eventually what resides in the domain of the falsifiable will be regarded as truth, and no superstition will be strong enough to hold enlightenment back.
And so far, as we watch the diminution of religion over the centuries, and its almost lightning fast retreat in the past few decades, it's hard to not see reason in their hope. American Christianity is crumbling without a shot being fired.
And the growth vs diminution of religion is tracking just exactly as the rationalist/materialist would predict it. That is: Religion is growing in the under-educated third world, and disappearing in the first world (we religious first-worlders delude ourselves with a misunderstanding that this game of musical chairs in which one or the other denomination sees a huge growth (today it is the Orthodox Church, in my youth it was something called "Evangelicalism") shows a revival and the growth of Christianity. But it's not growth. It's migration.
So, the first world Christianity -- supposing as it has for two centuries now that it cannot compete in the world of rational thought, is trying to revive a belief in the magic that the third world is thriving on. It is the intuitive gamble that the promise of more magic -- with the caveat that it forever remain a capricious magic that reveals itself by it's own erratic will, and we are forever the ones at fault for not being able to access it at will -- will defeat rational thought.
We are putting all our eggs in faith-as-epistemology basket.
Elsewhere here I have said that there are conflicting influences in our inheritance from Rome, Greece and Judea (not to mention Germany ?). In France, and probably elsewhere, people who consider themselves to be sophisticated, EDUCATED, and.. rational look down their nose at religious faith, considering that it is for gullible children/poor, stupid people who refuse to grow up and become adult. This is a way of considering faith to be only for the gullible and the childish, the stupid ? and not for the enlightened realists.
Ironically enough, this BELIEF SYSTEM is based on a misunderstanding of what the sophisticated ? Greeks themselves believed, and a desire to ape them. But we have a lot of prejudices about what our ancestors believed, and they are not ready to go away soon.
It is worthwhile meditating the fact that many people in France, good Christians, consider that it is wrong to talk about their religious beliefs in the public space. Religion is reserved for the private sphere, and talking about it in the public sphere generates a lot of tension. This would sit better with me if I did not think now that France's "laïc" republic is a religious structure in disguise, which banishes the expression of other religions from the public sphere out of intolerance.
Maybe one of the biggest problems here is the idea that religious organisations could actually be trying to CONVERT/convince people ? and that is anathema in France, where we are all supposed to be what we choose to be, individually, without being influenced by anyone else in our choices. Being "free" means escaping ANY influence whatsoever. Basically, being an atom in a vacuum. Sigh.
Rationalism, materialism, and Marxism are all pseudo-religions (that is, they are religions with non-supernatural deities). I think you are kidding yourself regarding 'progress.'
Interesting. There are two ways you could look at this. There's the mainstream cultural story in the West: religion is dying because it's nonsense and materialism is triumphing because it's true. Or there's another story: the rationalist, left-brained, literate West has confused wisdom with knowledge and is unable to see much of the truth of reality, and that limited worldview is killing it.
We will find out which is true very soon, I suspect.
I've just read a very fine book on this very subject -- Peter Harrison's "Some New World." He makes no predictions but does an excellent job of telling how we got here.
More deeply, you point your finger on the essential cause of the long decline of Christianity in Europe, a scandal that instantly resurfaces to this day in conversations about Christianity: “the historical Christian tendency to burn other Christians alive.”
There’s no reason at all to be flippant about it, it’s a world-historical tragedy.
And that was only partially religious nature-- more so at the onset when Ferdinand II tried to force the Bohemians back into the Catholic fold, less so by the end when it had become yet another fight in the long running feud between France and the Habsburgs (both Catholic) using Germany as their field of contention.
Very true. My point is, the Thirty Years War was far more religious than the later Christian-on-Christian violence that came after. We have to assess all the motives to come up with an accurate understanding of the degree of the religious component.
Thank you. It was a ten year labor of love for me. I had to drop it for a few reasons, one being that the Big Tech companies did everything to subvert it. I would have had to spend a couple of thousand dollars a year to stop them, and I didn't have the money. I still keep it up and running from about $6 a month. I don't have the UPS box anymore.
But "historical" is a key word there. How many wars of religion have we had lately? We've had horrendous wars with staggering death tolls, but they weren't over religion. Why should we be haunted by the Sack of Magdeburg or the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre at this late date when Auschwitz and Hiroshima lie at the far boundary of living memory still?
I don't think Jon was dismissing the relevance. Reducing it perhaps in the light of later secular events. Also, I think he missed your original point, which is that the stain of aggressive Christian religious warfare will last until the Second Coming (I write 'aggressive' because the Crusades and similar wars were mostly defensive in origin, despite whatever they later became).
When I was (briefly) at Oxford my American(Protestant) tutor took me an American(then Catholic) student to see that memorial. I suppose the tit-for-tat still goes on so to speak haha.
I have a friend who is an unlikely synthesis of cultures. He is a Jew who has always lived in New York City....and he loves and plays bluegrass music (actually, if you know much about bluegrass music, you already know that though NYC might seem an unlikely hotbed of bluegrass music and culture, nevertheless, it is. And as to the unlikelhood of a Jew being a big fan of the genre, you'd also know that that's not unusual. It might be a bit of a "tell" though, that a Jew from NYC would use the word "genre" to define bluegrass music. *heh*).
Anyway, that friend, knowing my profession to some sort of Christianity, once asked me (also a bluegrass fan) why so many old (bluegrass) gospel songs talk about hypocrisy -- and in particular, the devil being its model and progenitor.
My answer was thematically the same as "The Burning Season" post to which we are commenting. That is: Christianity is perhaps the primary reason people don't believe in Christianity.
Christianity also happens to be the primary reason many people do believe in Christianity, for better or worse. No man is an island. The church offers community to comfort a battered world, and consensus to bolster belief in the unseen. We don't have to be alone in what the world tells us is a ridiculous belief in an invisible friend.
But that belief by consensus is a shaky proposition.
For more than 20 years I participated in an internet forum (remember those?). It began as a chat group over a common interest in guitar music, but after 20 years we moved on from discussing strings, tonewoods, songwriting, and music, and ended up discussing everything under the sun -- usually in a friendly manner (we did, after all, start meeting each other in real life -- traveling hundreds of miles to gather together every year). But there were quite often fractious arguments.
In those sometimes heated discussions, if I (or 1 or 2 others whose Christian beliefs were similar to mine -- that is, adhering to Christianity's beliefs in the redemption narrative that is our heritage from the beginning of time, and climaxing in the death, burial, and in particular, the resurrection) ever expressed an opinion based on my Christianity, the most vehement objections came from the majority of Christians who have unwillingly had to tolerate my backwards, unenlightened version of THEIR religion.
The argument was proprietary in nature.
I (we) embarrassed the other Christians in front of their non-Christian peers by suggesting that Christianity accepted the supernatural (and, again, the resurrection in particular) as real, historical fact. It was embarrassing for them to suppose that their peers might lump them in with me and my benighted beliefs. They wanted their peers to understand clearly that their Christianity was not offensive. Not socially and not morally. They wanted their peers to understand that their Christianity was non-judgemental. They wanted to explain their enlightened version of Christianity -- a Christianity that understands Christianity as mythology, and as a moral code put forth by a human teacher and a moral example named Jesus who was martyred 2000 years ago because he told people to be good and people don't like being told to be good.
And even the hint that Christianity might contain elements that could cause one to conclude any degree of exclusivity was beyond the pale.
Essentially, those of us who called ourselves "Christian", but who believed in redemption, resurrection, virgin birth, miracles ... we were an embarrassment to those more enlightened Christians who wanted their friends to know that they weren't as stupid, under-educated, backwards as I am.
On the one hand, I sympathize with the other Christian's plight. I at least felt the same compulsion to make clear the distinction between the (in this case) two separate Christianities to the non-believers on the forum. Oh, for my part it wasn't because I was embarrassed by the other Christianity's beliefs, or the fear that I would be deemed "ridiculous" if the non-believers on the forum associated me with them. My compulsion was more driven by wanting to get to the bottom of -- to the underlying, fundamental truth behind the differing views. I wasn't (I don't believe) trying to defend myself when disagreements arose. I was trying to defend truth.
In those discussions I absolutely avoided saying that the other Christians were wrong. I merely stated what I believed in contrast, and backed it up with Christian history and orthodox theology.
As long as we continue to believe that the principle mission of Jesus incarnation was as an example for moral living...
The devil's hypocrite shoes are going to stomp all over us.
We were never called to believe in Christianity; We are called to believe in Jesus the Messiah.
Christianity too easily becomes an organization committed to structure, and structures. God reminds us that He does not dwell in buildings made by hands.
"We were never called to believe in Christianity; We are called to believe in Jesus the Messiah."
That's a little true and a little untrue.
It's true that we were never called to believe in Christianity -- certainly not by the name "Christianity". "Christianity" didn't exist at the time we were called by Jesus to follow him.
We were, however, called to follow whatever it is that you want to call the redemption narrative that began in the beginning with the Word who was with God and the Word that was God....that same beginning in which God created the world.
More to the point, it is an uncomfortable reality for someone like me to admit -- a guy who has more trouble with church than I do with believing in Jesus the Messiah -- but the truth is that it's pretty hard to come away from the New Testament with the belief that we are called to believe in Jesus absent the church.
So, what I read in your "We were never called to believe in Christianity; We are called to believe in Jesus the Messiah" is an unfortunate substitution of "Christianity" for "the Church" and dismissing what we are called to believe in.
The church is SO often wrong. But it is what we are *stuck* with. We WERE called to believe *in* (as part of) the Church.
No argument here. My intent was to emphasize Christ over the institution. My folks ran a hospital for believers who had been beat up by the institution in it's various forms. Too often the response is to abandon the Body and that we are told to never do. As poor a representation as it may be, it is us, and it is how God has chosen to meet with us in the power of his Spirit.
I am another Bluegrass fan. It is complex and requires a mastering of rhythm and harmony both vocally and instrumentally. One of my dad's brothers was a Bluegrass singer and guitarists who played studio backup with Bill Monroe on some of his albums. Christianity is one of the major themes recurring in Bluegrass music.
Christ's teachings embraced both unity and division. He claimed to embody truth, "I am the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me." While he taught love for God and each other, both other Christians and their enemies, he also proclaimed, "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person's enemies will be those of his own household." Matthew 10:34-36.
And Paul, who founded many Churches around the Mediterranean, called out against heresiac beliefs and behaviors within those Churches. He was not above calling those in error sons of Satan. Neither was Jesus. While all men are sons of God, all have sinned and come short. It would be nice if we could just all get along, but we can't. In Glory we will be at peace with each other, but only having been publicly judged by Christ and having witness the judgement of all others. We will not only be changed, but we will have seen both ourselves and each other as we were in this life. Only then will we be humble and know that with what judgment we we judged others we were rightly judged.
I listened to the song. A good song, well done, artistic.
My grandmother would have approved, but she was a strong, very stubborn Protestant widow, verging on paranoical in her... mistrust and condemnation of her fellow man (particularly man...), and her granddaughter keeps walking in the direction of "La Grande Romaine", in search of a place to hide ? Yep.
My grandmother had lots to say about hypocrisy too, but it definitely did not make her (or her fellow man) happy either...
A very important meditation. "They will know you are my disciples by your love" for each other.
Had I been God, I would have used Luther to reform Rome as Luther intended. God didn't, He allowed a fracture to separate Truth from religion. Religion will always end in bloodshed, as you rightly note. Would that we sought Truth with as much vigor as we seek to build great edifices.
A challenging topic and Scripture often suggests that is too simplistic a formulation. I would agree that none of us have ever done anything we didn't want to do. I would also suggest that we have no idea what ultimately shapes our will; and yet we are entirely liable for it.
I attended a talk on Guadalupe recently. It was pointed out that while Europe was hemorrhaging Catholics from the Reformation and all the strife that you write about today. 9 million Mezoamericans converted (without the sword at their necks) because they read the signs in that apparition and amazing image. Fascinating to look into ....
I’d be really curious where I could learn more about this! Is there a book I can read? Or YouTube video available that you know of? My ancestors (the Sami) experienced a revival and converted with relief and enthusiasm - without the sword.
There are so many books and You tube accounts...lots of scientific study too. I think you'll find lots of information with a little research. I would be challenged to mention one over another.
It is an intriguing counter-factual, and I always love them. You may be right. A long reign and an English husband might have swung things back. Many of the ordinary people did support her. At least until she married a Spaniard ...
Our Jewish forbears did not go to war or kill each other but still disagreed, even in the first century before the time of Jesus https://mjcs.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/YK-Day-Sermon-Hillel-and-Shammai.pdf. The idea that we all have to believe the same thing.. where did it come from? And to kill people who don’t believe the same? What’s that about?
"The idea that we all have to believe the same thing.. where did it come from?"
The insecurity we are left to when our God is invisible. The insecurity we feel as we need to place our trust in a God who is not obvious.
And the perceived consequences are so dire (eternal) that the insecurity is always on red alert.
We can insulate ourselves from the insecurity by building communities of consensus. That helps.
But every alternative point of view -- especially those that strike at the foundations of belief -- threatens that insularity. And that is especially so if:
1. a competing community grows larger and more dominant (especially if it successfully subsumes the institutions that guard our tenets).
2. it is one of the superstars of our particular community that changes his mind. We don't mind if one or two ignorant folk move on. We put that on them. But if a superstar upon whose shoulders we placed a degree of our certainty on changes HIS mind? ...that one rips a huge hole in our comforting insularity.
As a member of several religious communities through time.. we seldom talk about theological differences. There's probably a spectrum of belief within each community about theological topics let alone currently divisive issues in some churches like gay marriage or Latin Mass.
Thank you for the sermon on Hillel and Shammai, and the story beneath it. I'll be sharing that with the little pax Christi community with whom I meet to discuss the present plight of "The Other" here in our larger community. It strikes me here, that that troublemaker from Nazareth confronted the same irresolvable 'my way or the highway' debate between the Jewish autocracy in Jerusalem who wanted to make a deal with the Roman authorities (who were the sole owners of state-sanctioned violence), and this sandal-clad prophet, so that they could retain their 'position'. Jesus would rather go to an unseemly execution than make that deal. And I find myself asking (of myself), "Where is the point in our awfulness toward 'The Other' of the moment, for which I can no longer just shrug, and walk away? Where is the hill on which I'm willing to die for The Other?
Today I learned Nietzsche said one thing in his life that's straightforwardly true by me. I don't know if I appreciate that, given the broad inapplicability and contrary controversialism of his thought, but I suppose I have to thank you for the knowledge just the same. I think the validity of his proposition is uncontroversially obvious in that, given let us say the same uncomfortable sort of exit, I think it's considerably easier for me to see your martyrdom than you mine.
All I require is that you do it for the sake of the idea that one life anywhere is worth saving, simply for the hope that the world is better for their presence than their absence. Going out for any reason that even roughly maps to that qualifies as martyrdom by me, and a prayer pleasing to any god worth worshiping besides. I think most people have a lot more rules than that in the matter. I don't say they should consider otherwise, but I think I would feel myself to live in a crueler world if I considered more the same.
What would be the use? It seems a cruel enough world already without people making it more so through accident and malice. I think that's a lot easier for a lot of folks to see in 2025 than it was in 2024. Given the causes I'm not going to say I'm glad of that, quite, but I have found it not the least of consolations.
Thinking about this now, it seems to me that it is understandable that perhaps the most convincing conversion (outside of Orthodoxy, of which I can say nothing) to the Christian faith is a conversion to Roman Catholicism.
When I look at the expression "Roman" "Catholicism", I see two words, two major historical and civilisational references, and influences : Rome, the church of Rome, yes, but the church OF ROME, which was a major empire with a major influence on Europe that perdures to this day, and the word "Catholic", which is Greek and a lot harder to pinpoint : "kat'holon", and "katholou" which are two Greek words going back to different tendences in Greek philosophy which I am not competent to talk about, but which refer to different perspectives on the universal. So "Roman Catholic" combines Greece and Rome(like what you can hear in the Latin mass), and our inheritance from Greece and Rome. And... we are very ambivalent about our inheritance from Greece and Rome, and have been so for a long time, if for no other reason than the fact that Jesus came from a community that had very conflictual relations with Greece and Rome, at least for as long as the Jews (and the Christians later...) were not... converted... to Hellenism, becoming assimilated into Hellenistic culture. (Everything ends up succumbing to Greece in the long run in the Western world.)
...
From what I can see of Jesus's story, and particularly in the accounts of his passion, Judas's betrayal was already an indication of a schism in the attitudes of his disciples about what his mission should be as Messiah to the Jewish people. That schism is still with us, still alive, and in a sense, it still divides Christianity.
Jesus was not a milksop figure either. Much has been done in recent years to make him appear politically correct ?/nice, but he was not politically correct at all. When he entered the Temple and turned out the merchants, telling people to go home and pray to God in the privacy of their rooms, he was a revolutionary, and that act did a lot to get him killed. And he was angry. He was often angry. I can relate to that.
As someone who was born in southern California in the 1950's, to a Protestant woman, I can testify that Protestant bigotry about Catholicism was alive and kicking then and now, too. While Roman Catholicism has a great debt to Greece and Rome, the Protestant sects during the Reformation were largely a return to Judaism, and the domination of the spoken, written word over the... pictures. Why do we pit one against the other ? Why do we pit heart against mind ? Will we ever get past it ? Maybe not. The turmoil that Paul talks about in England was also very present in France, where Louis XIV managed to revoke the Edict of Nantes that had put an end to the religious wars, and actively prepared the French Revolution during his reign.
For the martyrs... they convert. They certainly converted many people to Christianism under the early Roman emperors. Particularly when they are courageous, and set beautiful examples. People WHO SACRIFICE THEMSELVES WILLINGLY AND GRACEFULLY, (Jesus, to save his disciples ? for the truth ? in order to obey, and do God's will ?) will always force admiration and inspire others. That is their reward, and who would I be to begrudge them that ? WHO... can say anything against that kind of behavior ? It is the behavior of an aristocrat, a king, in any case, a man who by sacrificing himself became the king of a new people.
While the violence perpetrated by Orthodox Christians towards other believers was significantly less than what occurred among Catholics and Protestants, they still committed grave atrocities against other non-Christians, like what happened with the Pogroms in the late 1800s and early 1900s in Russia and Ukraine by Orthodox Christians against the local Jewish populations. This kind of egregious behavior has nothing of Christ within it, and it is extremely heartbreaking that it was committed in His Holy Name. My husband's Jewish family emigrated to the United States from the Minsk Belarus area to flee these persecutions. By some miracle, my husband was able to transcend this sordid, abhorrent history and embrace the Orthodox Christian Faith because he understood that, ultimately, none of the hate crimes committed against his ancestors had anything whatsoever to do with the teachings of Christ.
The Orthodox severely persecuted the "Monophysites" in the Eastern Roman Empire, to the degree that the latter initially welcomed the Muslim Arab conquerors as liberated.
The Russian Orthodox also persecuted the Old Believers.
In many places (notably Egypt) the Monophysites were a large majority, so persecution was not feasible. And where it was a thing, it took the form of discriminatory laws and seizure of property (still bad of course) not massacres and autos da fe.
No argument on the Old Believers-- though I will note this happened when Russia had begun westernizing. Apart from a capital law against "Judaizing" Russia originally had no laws against heresy- it was something picked from the West. Ivan the Terrible, for example, expressed admiration for the Spanish Inquisition.
I appreciate how you mention schisms amongst atheists religions too. I’ve been reading up on soviet history. Many people were massacred because they were accused of thinking incorrect thoughts. It’s not a religion problem; it’s a human problem.
Or..it IS a religion problem, and atheists just have their own religions with other idols. IMO all humans are religious one way or another, excepting perhaps some very rare individuals.
I think it's a problem with ideology. When anything become an ideological commitment - otherwise known as idol-worship, I suppose - whether it is 'religious' or 'secular' people will kill and die over it. It's essentially tribalism.
Very informative. I enjoyed reading this piece.
I think you’ve struck at the heart of the matter. The church seems to have always struggled with actually being Christ like. I grew up in the united reformed church, became a Christian at university and went to any number of Protestant based churches and, still, 30 years on, my head is spinning because they all pick holes in each other……catholicism was a big no no in many of the more evangelical churches. I mean……where is the true church?
One of my charismatic friends is now seriously worried as I lean towards Catholicism and orthodoxy….so I asked if she felt all Christians ….pre reformation…..1500 or so years worth…..would be doomed for not having the “correct” beliefs. She replied that she never thought about anything pre reformation.
The true church must lie with those who have surrendered to ‘ the kingdom of God’ and let it have free reign in their hearts and they could be catholic, orthodox, Anglican etc but, how much easier and, frankly, how much more welcoming it would be if that ‘kingdom’ was a whole, united body at peace with itself…..
March 30, '25. Sunday
Dear Rachael,
Thanks for your observations shared here. Having seen Karen off to church this morning, and tended to the dog, and the dishes, I’ve motored the vintage old Triumph back across the Big River to home, am considering a second cup of coffee with some toast and bacon; Ralph Vaughn Williams’ “Lark Ascending” is on the turntable. The weather’s a soft mix of Midwestern Spring showers and sunlight here, and has me in a reflective state - your share and Paul’s history of the bloody tumult of ‘church’ in 15th C England having sparked that little flame. You and I are of not dissimilar church background, it seems. I’ve been a member of the American post-Revolution Anglican Communion for nearly forty years now (having been raised protestant Presbyterian, been married once as Roman Catholic), and am most recently what my RC friends would self-describe as ‘lapsed’ Episcopalian. The church community of which I was most recently an active member, including a Warden of the Vestry, Treasurer, and most delightfully (even to those in hearing range), 3rd chair tenor in a very capable ‘high church’ choir; that church community is seeing (and largely tut-tutting if not outright blaming) the effects of social shift in attitudes towards small ‘c’ church, and more inexorably, regional demographic shrinkage. Trinity’s dominating situation above the river valley here, its Gothic architectural heft, and parish history no longer carry either the day or the congregation size necessary to sustain itself. It’s only the millions in endowed fund balances that allow it to keep the weather out of the buildings, the lights on and wages paid. And that’s not unusual for churches here in the States, the ones trying to find the ‘middle ground’ and not caught up in the current quest for power that’s all the rage.
To my point, reflective of yours, perhaps: there’s nothing catches the attention of those who measure such things as declining bank balances and empty pews, and in our case, seek out someone or some thing to blame. I admit, and acknowledge to being swept away by the moments of high church Episcopal services, and being unable to complete the closing verses of the post-communion hymn, being pulled toward a thin place in the veil, my failing tenor failing entirely. I’m experiencing some of the same in the closing moments of “Lark Ascending” just now.
I no longer attend services at all. ‘High Church’ Anglican / Episcopal worship will always be the high point of worship for me. The undoing? For me? The insistence of those stalwart regulars (who have also been the heavy hitters in financial support) in the proper performance of high church worship, and the appearance of a grand cathedral-like space, as opposed to living the Gospel, much less hearing it in present (or even past) context. Trinity is just up the hill from the site of the collapsed SRO / hotel in the downtown, whose residents lost everything last year, some their lives, and the public library upon whose steps the growing number of un-housed gather for ‘community’ and relative safety. It is the world in which we all are.
I can’t un-see the difference. Paul’s fine recounting of the ups- and downs- of the Tudors here cracked open the door to the story this morning. Your thoughts and experiences were a catalyst for me, so thank you. I am reminded of the comment of an old monastic, who was asked by someone expecting an entirely different sort of answer, “Well, Brother, what do you believe?”. And instead of a rigorous theological treatise and justification of their ‘religion’, the monk thought for just a moment, and then quietly just sang a Sunday school hymn: “… Jesus loves me, this I know, for the bible tells me so…”. For me, it was deafening.
I continue on my own quiet, deepening wandering of a pilgrimage. You, and Paul were like wise folks encountered on my path this morning. So, again, thanks.
Thank you Tim
I enjoyed reading your reply……sounds like you are having a lovely day. I do like Vaughan Williams. I had to study him once for a music exam and he seemed to have been a very nice chap. He used to go round the English countryside collecting ancient folk songs so they were not forgotten. Nice man as well as a genius composer.
I too do not currently attend any services., although I have tried a little Anglican Church that does seem to make Christ the centre of the service. Your church sounds quite familiar to the church I grew up in……there was several families who ran it in the way they saw fit and alas it closed a few years ago. I once suggested a weekly prayer meeting to pray for the future of the church but it did not go down well which, considering the bible tells us to pray continuously, was not good. So many churches have just died over here for similar reasons. it’s sad.
Hope you enjoy the rest of your day and thanks again for your kind response.
You're welcome, Rachael.
I'd come to Vaughan Williams late in life, and although I'd had a pretty good public education in the halcyon post- WW II days of funding for public schools, our music class was once a week, and tended toward American composers of the 19th century. I think you were fortunate to have gotten a rounding out in music.
Anyway, church: During the transition period following the old Dean of Trinity's retirement, there was some concentrated effort to introduce the congregation to regular silent contemplative prayer, but the group intending to protect 'the way we never were' not only did not join in, but cast shade upon the notion in a whispering campaign in the background. It is sad.
FYI, I found Paul Kingsnorth through reading Kentucky-born farmer - writer Wendell Berry, who I cannot recommend highly enough. A friend stuck a copy of his novel of the Port William Membership, "Hannah Coulter", into my hands five years ago, which story reflects much of the change in rural life, and American life, and the life I came of age in, growing up in a small town in northern Illinois. Karen and I read it aloud at days' end for about a month, and I can still pull up a couple of passages that take my breath away. Berry writes knowledgeably of community, self-sufficiency, agriculture and The Machine as well, and up until the last decade, was still farming with mules. And Berry, and Paul sort of brought me to the RC priest Ivan Illich (see his "Tools for Conviviality"), who pitched his collar into the corner rather than conform to the expectations of comporting with the very things that Berry, and Paul K, and now me find to be just awful about modernity.
Illich wrote, years ago, and some senior clergy and leadership I know, are all seeing and saying the same thing about 'church': as not so subtly said by the Bishop of the Diocese of Minnesota to a group last year, "Jesus is coming back, but the 1950's aren't". There's something else coming, and I'm willing to look for that, too.
I so appreciated hearing back from you, and trust your Sunday was as a Sabbath might be. Be well.
Ah Wendell Berry!
I have not long come across him. My husband is a pipe smoker and he watches a You Tube channel called The Pipe Cottage, headed by Alan Harrelson, a recent convert to Catholicism. He talks a lot about Wendell Berry and the agrarian life. I think Alan Harrelson lives in Kentucky and he is certainly living the rural life. Really interesting…..I’ve watched an interview with Wendell Berry and loved what he had to say. I must get one of his books.
I will also look up Ivan Illich.
It was Mothers Day over here in England yesterday so I had my 2 sons around which was lovely……so a good Sunday for me.
Many thanks Tim …..I’ve greatly enjoyed reading your replies
God Bless
I
I know a church deacon who maintains that Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis could not exist without a God.
BTW, have you ever heard the Kronos Quartet's Spem in Alium? The melody was also written by Tallis.
Tallis was an artist who was able to bridge the Catholic-Protestant divide. Another was Matthias Grünewald, who painted the famous Isenheim Altarpiece that became the inspiration for Paul Hindemith's symphony Mathis der Maler.
I'm sure I've listened to "Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tallis", and will look for it in my collection of found LPs. Thank you for the reminder. I also have his Symphony No. 3, "Pastoral", which absolutely breaks my heart, start to finish. I will seek out Kronos' "Spem in Allum", which strikes a chord of familiarity for me. I appreciate these seekers of bridges, of third ways, of reaching across divides, and using our hearts and minds to live better, kinder and more gently with one another. I'll check the encyclopedia for the Isenheim altarpiece. Thanks very much for sharing this.
I like pieces like this that give me the headlines of history that I should already know but don't. Our tour of English Christianity makes perfect Sunday morning reading, but lest I get too comfortable with the gentle beauty of it all, this piece reminds me that we're never far from the demands of the cross.
I have a particular admiration - even love - of Ambrose of Milan, a bishop who denounced heresies and opposed violence against heretics.
A friend of mine is a descendent of one of Queen Jane's sisters (and of the American Revolutionary War general Nathaniel Greene as well).
A thought, not my own, as to why Christianity as well as other major religions have become watered down over the centuries. All major religions were founded by a spiritually advanced figure. As time goes on, the original force of that figure inevitably weakens its grip on humanity's imagination. Its no accident that every thousand years or so a Buddha, a Prophet, a Christ comes among humanity. If you can begin to see this pattern, you begin to see how it the cycle of religious revival occurs.
And, I might suggest, if you are right, perhaps mankind is going to someday finally be shed of these superstitions we call "religion", and accept our material reality.
We're experiencing a much larger gap between Buddhas, Prophets, and Christs (all of which came WITHIN the span of less than 1000 years, not spaced out by 1000).
Maybe when Clark observed “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, he was incidentally predicting the end of religion in a technological age.
People have tried many times to "shed [...] these superstitions we call 'religion.'" Those ended as poorly as the internecine wars in Christianity.
So far. But the hope folks seem to put in better future outcomes for the rationalist/materialist/Marxist is that eventually everyone will see the Emperor's New Clothes that is religion, and no war or killing will be necessary to move on toward enlightenment. Eventually what resides in the domain of the falsifiable will be regarded as truth, and no superstition will be strong enough to hold enlightenment back.
And so far, as we watch the diminution of religion over the centuries, and its almost lightning fast retreat in the past few decades, it's hard to not see reason in their hope. American Christianity is crumbling without a shot being fired.
And the growth vs diminution of religion is tracking just exactly as the rationalist/materialist would predict it. That is: Religion is growing in the under-educated third world, and disappearing in the first world (we religious first-worlders delude ourselves with a misunderstanding that this game of musical chairs in which one or the other denomination sees a huge growth (today it is the Orthodox Church, in my youth it was something called "Evangelicalism") shows a revival and the growth of Christianity. But it's not growth. It's migration.
So, the first world Christianity -- supposing as it has for two centuries now that it cannot compete in the world of rational thought, is trying to revive a belief in the magic that the third world is thriving on. It is the intuitive gamble that the promise of more magic -- with the caveat that it forever remain a capricious magic that reveals itself by it's own erratic will, and we are forever the ones at fault for not being able to access it at will -- will defeat rational thought.
We are putting all our eggs in faith-as-epistemology basket.
Elsewhere here I have said that there are conflicting influences in our inheritance from Rome, Greece and Judea (not to mention Germany ?). In France, and probably elsewhere, people who consider themselves to be sophisticated, EDUCATED, and.. rational look down their nose at religious faith, considering that it is for gullible children/poor, stupid people who refuse to grow up and become adult. This is a way of considering faith to be only for the gullible and the childish, the stupid ? and not for the enlightened realists.
Ironically enough, this BELIEF SYSTEM is based on a misunderstanding of what the sophisticated ? Greeks themselves believed, and a desire to ape them. But we have a lot of prejudices about what our ancestors believed, and they are not ready to go away soon.
It is worthwhile meditating the fact that many people in France, good Christians, consider that it is wrong to talk about their religious beliefs in the public space. Religion is reserved for the private sphere, and talking about it in the public sphere generates a lot of tension. This would sit better with me if I did not think now that France's "laïc" republic is a religious structure in disguise, which banishes the expression of other religions from the public sphere out of intolerance.
Maybe one of the biggest problems here is the idea that religious organisations could actually be trying to CONVERT/convince people ? and that is anathema in France, where we are all supposed to be what we choose to be, individually, without being influenced by anyone else in our choices. Being "free" means escaping ANY influence whatsoever. Basically, being an atom in a vacuum. Sigh.
You are missing the point, my dude.
Rationalism, materialism, and Marxism are all pseudo-religions (that is, they are religions with non-supernatural deities). I think you are kidding yourself regarding 'progress.'
Interesting. There are two ways you could look at this. There's the mainstream cultural story in the West: religion is dying because it's nonsense and materialism is triumphing because it's true. Or there's another story: the rationalist, left-brained, literate West has confused wisdom with knowledge and is unable to see much of the truth of reality, and that limited worldview is killing it.
We will find out which is true very soon, I suspect.
I've just read a very fine book on this very subject -- Peter Harrison's "Some New World." He makes no predictions but does an excellent job of telling how we got here.
287 year, not 400 year, gap.
More deeply, you point your finger on the essential cause of the long decline of Christianity in Europe, a scandal that instantly resurfaces to this day in conversations about Christianity: “the historical Christian tendency to burn other Christians alive.”
There’s no reason at all to be flippant about it, it’s a world-historical tragedy.
Yes, probably close to 100 million Christians have died as martyrs since 33 AD. Perhaps as many as a third were at the hands of other Christians.
https://todaysmartyrs.org/index.php/timeline/
What a horrible statistic! Thank you for sharing it.
The biggest chunk of martyrdom by Christians was the Thirty Years War.
And that was only partially religious nature-- more so at the onset when Ferdinand II tried to force the Bohemians back into the Catholic fold, less so by the end when it had become yet another fight in the long running feud between France and the Habsburgs (both Catholic) using Germany as their field of contention.
Very true. My point is, the Thirty Years War was far more religious than the later Christian-on-Christian violence that came after. We have to assess all the motives to come up with an accurate understanding of the degree of the religious component.
Cavanaugh's 'The Myth of Religious Violence' is vital reading on this subject.
Yes, mostly Germans.
Blimey. That's a useful site, thanks.
Thank you. It was a ten year labor of love for me. I had to drop it for a few reasons, one being that the Big Tech companies did everything to subvert it. I would have had to spend a couple of thousand dollars a year to stop them, and I didn't have the money. I still keep it up and running from about $6 a month. I don't have the UPS box anymore.
How did you like Voyage to Alpha Centauri?
But "historical" is a key word there. How many wars of religion have we had lately? We've had horrendous wars with staggering death tolls, but they weren't over religion. Why should we be haunted by the Sack of Magdeburg or the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre at this late date when Auschwitz and Hiroshima lie at the far boundary of living memory still?
Strange logic to dismiss the relevance of events that are centuries-old when the events that founded Christianity are millennia-old.
I don't think Jon was dismissing the relevance. Reducing it perhaps in the light of later secular events. Also, I think he missed your original point, which is that the stain of aggressive Christian religious warfare will last until the Second Coming (I write 'aggressive' because the Crusades and similar wars were mostly defensive in origin, despite whatever they later became).
When I was (briefly) at Oxford my American(Protestant) tutor took me an American(then Catholic) student to see that memorial. I suppose the tit-for-tat still goes on so to speak haha.
Oh, the devil he wears hypocrite shoes
Now, the devil he wears hypocrite shoes
The devil he wears hypocrite shoes
If you don't watch out he'll stomp 'em on you
https://youtu.be/YdUw6h11rnE?si=vG7-JBQExTbrNaHm
I have a friend who is an unlikely synthesis of cultures. He is a Jew who has always lived in New York City....and he loves and plays bluegrass music (actually, if you know much about bluegrass music, you already know that though NYC might seem an unlikely hotbed of bluegrass music and culture, nevertheless, it is. And as to the unlikelhood of a Jew being a big fan of the genre, you'd also know that that's not unusual. It might be a bit of a "tell" though, that a Jew from NYC would use the word "genre" to define bluegrass music. *heh*).
Anyway, that friend, knowing my profession to some sort of Christianity, once asked me (also a bluegrass fan) why so many old (bluegrass) gospel songs talk about hypocrisy -- and in particular, the devil being its model and progenitor.
My answer was thematically the same as "The Burning Season" post to which we are commenting. That is: Christianity is perhaps the primary reason people don't believe in Christianity.
Christianity also happens to be the primary reason many people do believe in Christianity, for better or worse. No man is an island. The church offers community to comfort a battered world, and consensus to bolster belief in the unseen. We don't have to be alone in what the world tells us is a ridiculous belief in an invisible friend.
But that belief by consensus is a shaky proposition.
For more than 20 years I participated in an internet forum (remember those?). It began as a chat group over a common interest in guitar music, but after 20 years we moved on from discussing strings, tonewoods, songwriting, and music, and ended up discussing everything under the sun -- usually in a friendly manner (we did, after all, start meeting each other in real life -- traveling hundreds of miles to gather together every year). But there were quite often fractious arguments.
In those sometimes heated discussions, if I (or 1 or 2 others whose Christian beliefs were similar to mine -- that is, adhering to Christianity's beliefs in the redemption narrative that is our heritage from the beginning of time, and climaxing in the death, burial, and in particular, the resurrection) ever expressed an opinion based on my Christianity, the most vehement objections came from the majority of Christians who have unwillingly had to tolerate my backwards, unenlightened version of THEIR religion.
The argument was proprietary in nature.
I (we) embarrassed the other Christians in front of their non-Christian peers by suggesting that Christianity accepted the supernatural (and, again, the resurrection in particular) as real, historical fact. It was embarrassing for them to suppose that their peers might lump them in with me and my benighted beliefs. They wanted their peers to understand clearly that their Christianity was not offensive. Not socially and not morally. They wanted their peers to understand that their Christianity was non-judgemental. They wanted to explain their enlightened version of Christianity -- a Christianity that understands Christianity as mythology, and as a moral code put forth by a human teacher and a moral example named Jesus who was martyred 2000 years ago because he told people to be good and people don't like being told to be good.
And even the hint that Christianity might contain elements that could cause one to conclude any degree of exclusivity was beyond the pale.
Essentially, those of us who called ourselves "Christian", but who believed in redemption, resurrection, virgin birth, miracles ... we were an embarrassment to those more enlightened Christians who wanted their friends to know that they weren't as stupid, under-educated, backwards as I am.
On the one hand, I sympathize with the other Christian's plight. I at least felt the same compulsion to make clear the distinction between the (in this case) two separate Christianities to the non-believers on the forum. Oh, for my part it wasn't because I was embarrassed by the other Christianity's beliefs, or the fear that I would be deemed "ridiculous" if the non-believers on the forum associated me with them. My compulsion was more driven by wanting to get to the bottom of -- to the underlying, fundamental truth behind the differing views. I wasn't (I don't believe) trying to defend myself when disagreements arose. I was trying to defend truth.
In those discussions I absolutely avoided saying that the other Christians were wrong. I merely stated what I believed in contrast, and backed it up with Christian history and orthodox theology.
As long as we continue to believe that the principle mission of Jesus incarnation was as an example for moral living...
The devil's hypocrite shoes are going to stomp all over us.
We were never called to believe in Christianity; We are called to believe in Jesus the Messiah.
Christianity too easily becomes an organization committed to structure, and structures. God reminds us that He does not dwell in buildings made by hands.
Spot on.
"We were never called to believe in Christianity; We are called to believe in Jesus the Messiah."
That's a little true and a little untrue.
It's true that we were never called to believe in Christianity -- certainly not by the name "Christianity". "Christianity" didn't exist at the time we were called by Jesus to follow him.
We were, however, called to follow whatever it is that you want to call the redemption narrative that began in the beginning with the Word who was with God and the Word that was God....that same beginning in which God created the world.
More to the point, it is an uncomfortable reality for someone like me to admit -- a guy who has more trouble with church than I do with believing in Jesus the Messiah -- but the truth is that it's pretty hard to come away from the New Testament with the belief that we are called to believe in Jesus absent the church.
So, what I read in your "We were never called to believe in Christianity; We are called to believe in Jesus the Messiah" is an unfortunate substitution of "Christianity" for "the Church" and dismissing what we are called to believe in.
The church is SO often wrong. But it is what we are *stuck* with. We WERE called to believe *in* (as part of) the Church.
No argument here. My intent was to emphasize Christ over the institution. My folks ran a hospital for believers who had been beat up by the institution in it's various forms. Too often the response is to abandon the Body and that we are told to never do. As poor a representation as it may be, it is us, and it is how God has chosen to meet with us in the power of his Spirit.
I am another Bluegrass fan. It is complex and requires a mastering of rhythm and harmony both vocally and instrumentally. One of my dad's brothers was a Bluegrass singer and guitarists who played studio backup with Bill Monroe on some of his albums. Christianity is one of the major themes recurring in Bluegrass music.
Christ's teachings embraced both unity and division. He claimed to embody truth, "I am the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me." While he taught love for God and each other, both other Christians and their enemies, he also proclaimed, "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person's enemies will be those of his own household." Matthew 10:34-36.
And Paul, who founded many Churches around the Mediterranean, called out against heresiac beliefs and behaviors within those Churches. He was not above calling those in error sons of Satan. Neither was Jesus. While all men are sons of God, all have sinned and come short. It would be nice if we could just all get along, but we can't. In Glory we will be at peace with each other, but only having been publicly judged by Christ and having witness the judgement of all others. We will not only be changed, but we will have seen both ourselves and each other as we were in this life. Only then will we be humble and know that with what judgment we we judged others we were rightly judged.
What a great reply. Good thinking 99
I listened to the song. A good song, well done, artistic.
My grandmother would have approved, but she was a strong, very stubborn Protestant widow, verging on paranoical in her... mistrust and condemnation of her fellow man (particularly man...), and her granddaughter keeps walking in the direction of "La Grande Romaine", in search of a place to hide ? Yep.
My grandmother had lots to say about hypocrisy too, but it definitely did not make her (or her fellow man) happy either...
Wow.
This experience you describe, brings me back to decades of what it was like for me in my social circles at UBC and in Vancouver more broadly.
I shudder.
Glad to be on the edges, in the bush now.
Haven't remembered those feelings for a long time.
May God bless the seeds he planted, in the manner you maintained.
Respect;
-mb
(let me add: I love the song! thanks for this)
A very important meditation. "They will know you are my disciples by your love" for each other.
Had I been God, I would have used Luther to reform Rome as Luther intended. God didn't, He allowed a fracture to separate Truth from religion. Religion will always end in bloodshed, as you rightly note. Would that we sought Truth with as much vigor as we seek to build great edifices.
God is not a puppetmaster. Luther proceeded by his choices, using the freedom God gave him. And God never directly abridges that freedom.
A challenging topic and Scripture often suggests that is too simplistic a formulation. I would agree that none of us have ever done anything we didn't want to do. I would also suggest that we have no idea what ultimately shapes our will; and yet we are entirely liable for it.
I attended a talk on Guadalupe recently. It was pointed out that while Europe was hemorrhaging Catholics from the Reformation and all the strife that you write about today. 9 million Mezoamericans converted (without the sword at their necks) because they read the signs in that apparition and amazing image. Fascinating to look into ....
I’d be really curious where I could learn more about this! Is there a book I can read? Or YouTube video available that you know of? My ancestors (the Sami) experienced a revival and converted with relief and enthusiasm - without the sword.
Hi Alissa,
There are so many books and You tube accounts...lots of scientific study too. I think you'll find lots of information with a little research. I would be challenged to mention one over another.
Re: Mary’s counter-revolution, though, was doomed to fail.
Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps if she had married an Englishman and if her health had not failed and if she had been able to bear an heir...
I don't think the twenty years or so between Henry's break with Rome and Mary's ascesion had turned the country irrevocably toward Protestantism.
Re: Elizabeth went on burning heretics - Catholic ones this time
I think she had them tortured and hanged. Burnings were "unEnglish" and Mary made them even more loathsome.
It is an intriguing counter-factual, and I always love them. You may be right. A long reign and an English husband might have swung things back. Many of the ordinary people did support her. At least until she married a Spaniard ...
Our Jewish forbears did not go to war or kill each other but still disagreed, even in the first century before the time of Jesus https://mjcs.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/YK-Day-Sermon-Hillel-and-Shammai.pdf. The idea that we all have to believe the same thing.. where did it come from? And to kill people who don’t believe the same? What’s that about?
"The idea that we all have to believe the same thing.. where did it come from?"
The insecurity we are left to when our God is invisible. The insecurity we feel as we need to place our trust in a God who is not obvious.
And the perceived consequences are so dire (eternal) that the insecurity is always on red alert.
We can insulate ourselves from the insecurity by building communities of consensus. That helps.
But every alternative point of view -- especially those that strike at the foundations of belief -- threatens that insularity. And that is especially so if:
1. a competing community grows larger and more dominant (especially if it successfully subsumes the institutions that guard our tenets).
2. it is one of the superstars of our particular community that changes his mind. We don't mind if one or two ignorant folk move on. We put that on them. But if a superstar upon whose shoulders we placed a degree of our certainty on changes HIS mind? ...that one rips a huge hole in our comforting insularity.
As a member of several religious communities through time.. we seldom talk about theological differences. There's probably a spectrum of belief within each community about theological topics let alone currently divisive issues in some churches like gay marriage or Latin Mass.
Thank you for the sermon on Hillel and Shammai, and the story beneath it. I'll be sharing that with the little pax Christi community with whom I meet to discuss the present plight of "The Other" here in our larger community. It strikes me here, that that troublemaker from Nazareth confronted the same irresolvable 'my way or the highway' debate between the Jewish autocracy in Jerusalem who wanted to make a deal with the Roman authorities (who were the sole owners of state-sanctioned violence), and this sandal-clad prophet, so that they could retain their 'position'. Jesus would rather go to an unseemly execution than make that deal. And I find myself asking (of myself), "Where is the point in our awfulness toward 'The Other' of the moment, for which I can no longer just shrug, and walk away? Where is the hill on which I'm willing to die for The Other?
Today I learned Nietzsche said one thing in his life that's straightforwardly true by me. I don't know if I appreciate that, given the broad inapplicability and contrary controversialism of his thought, but I suppose I have to thank you for the knowledge just the same. I think the validity of his proposition is uncontroversially obvious in that, given let us say the same uncomfortable sort of exit, I think it's considerably easier for me to see your martyrdom than you mine.
All I require is that you do it for the sake of the idea that one life anywhere is worth saving, simply for the hope that the world is better for their presence than their absence. Going out for any reason that even roughly maps to that qualifies as martyrdom by me, and a prayer pleasing to any god worth worshiping besides. I think most people have a lot more rules than that in the matter. I don't say they should consider otherwise, but I think I would feel myself to live in a crueler world if I considered more the same.
What would be the use? It seems a cruel enough world already without people making it more so through accident and malice. I think that's a lot easier for a lot of folks to see in 2025 than it was in 2024. Given the causes I'm not going to say I'm glad of that, quite, but I have found it not the least of consolations.
Thinking about this now, it seems to me that it is understandable that perhaps the most convincing conversion (outside of Orthodoxy, of which I can say nothing) to the Christian faith is a conversion to Roman Catholicism.
When I look at the expression "Roman" "Catholicism", I see two words, two major historical and civilisational references, and influences : Rome, the church of Rome, yes, but the church OF ROME, which was a major empire with a major influence on Europe that perdures to this day, and the word "Catholic", which is Greek and a lot harder to pinpoint : "kat'holon", and "katholou" which are two Greek words going back to different tendences in Greek philosophy which I am not competent to talk about, but which refer to different perspectives on the universal. So "Roman Catholic" combines Greece and Rome(like what you can hear in the Latin mass), and our inheritance from Greece and Rome. And... we are very ambivalent about our inheritance from Greece and Rome, and have been so for a long time, if for no other reason than the fact that Jesus came from a community that had very conflictual relations with Greece and Rome, at least for as long as the Jews (and the Christians later...) were not... converted... to Hellenism, becoming assimilated into Hellenistic culture. (Everything ends up succumbing to Greece in the long run in the Western world.)
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From what I can see of Jesus's story, and particularly in the accounts of his passion, Judas's betrayal was already an indication of a schism in the attitudes of his disciples about what his mission should be as Messiah to the Jewish people. That schism is still with us, still alive, and in a sense, it still divides Christianity.
Jesus was not a milksop figure either. Much has been done in recent years to make him appear politically correct ?/nice, but he was not politically correct at all. When he entered the Temple and turned out the merchants, telling people to go home and pray to God in the privacy of their rooms, he was a revolutionary, and that act did a lot to get him killed. And he was angry. He was often angry. I can relate to that.
As someone who was born in southern California in the 1950's, to a Protestant woman, I can testify that Protestant bigotry about Catholicism was alive and kicking then and now, too. While Roman Catholicism has a great debt to Greece and Rome, the Protestant sects during the Reformation were largely a return to Judaism, and the domination of the spoken, written word over the... pictures. Why do we pit one against the other ? Why do we pit heart against mind ? Will we ever get past it ? Maybe not. The turmoil that Paul talks about in England was also very present in France, where Louis XIV managed to revoke the Edict of Nantes that had put an end to the religious wars, and actively prepared the French Revolution during his reign.
For the martyrs... they convert. They certainly converted many people to Christianism under the early Roman emperors. Particularly when they are courageous, and set beautiful examples. People WHO SACRIFICE THEMSELVES WILLINGLY AND GRACEFULLY, (Jesus, to save his disciples ? for the truth ? in order to obey, and do God's will ?) will always force admiration and inspire others. That is their reward, and who would I be to begrudge them that ? WHO... can say anything against that kind of behavior ? It is the behavior of an aristocrat, a king, in any case, a man who by sacrificing himself became the king of a new people.
While the violence perpetrated by Orthodox Christians towards other believers was significantly less than what occurred among Catholics and Protestants, they still committed grave atrocities against other non-Christians, like what happened with the Pogroms in the late 1800s and early 1900s in Russia and Ukraine by Orthodox Christians against the local Jewish populations. This kind of egregious behavior has nothing of Christ within it, and it is extremely heartbreaking that it was committed in His Holy Name. My husband's Jewish family emigrated to the United States from the Minsk Belarus area to flee these persecutions. By some miracle, my husband was able to transcend this sordid, abhorrent history and embrace the Orthodox Christian Faith because he understood that, ultimately, none of the hate crimes committed against his ancestors had anything whatsoever to do with the teachings of Christ.
The Orthodox severely persecuted the "Monophysites" in the Eastern Roman Empire, to the degree that the latter initially welcomed the Muslim Arab conquerors as liberated.
The Russian Orthodox also persecuted the Old Believers.
In many places (notably Egypt) the Monophysites were a large majority, so persecution was not feasible. And where it was a thing, it took the form of discriminatory laws and seizure of property (still bad of course) not massacres and autos da fe.
No argument on the Old Believers-- though I will note this happened when Russia had begun westernizing. Apart from a capital law against "Judaizing" Russia originally had no laws against heresy- it was something picked from the West. Ivan the Terrible, for example, expressed admiration for the Spanish Inquisition.
I appreciate how you mention schisms amongst atheists religions too. I’ve been reading up on soviet history. Many people were massacred because they were accused of thinking incorrect thoughts. It’s not a religion problem; it’s a human problem.
Or..it IS a religion problem, and atheists just have their own religions with other idols. IMO all humans are religious one way or another, excepting perhaps some very rare individuals.
I think it's a problem with ideology. When anything become an ideological commitment - otherwise known as idol-worship, I suppose - whether it is 'religious' or 'secular' people will kill and die over it. It's essentially tribalism.