GR: Friday, May 14, 2021

An Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical take on the challenges of our times. And 200 years of good news.

It’s Biology, Stupid
I’m stealing a line from the 1992 presidential election (“It’s the economy, stupid”)—not questioning GR readers’ intelligence! But I couldn’t resist playing with the line. You’ll understand after you read Father Stephen Freeman’s reflection “This Is My Body.” For me, it was bursting with insights about the nature of our existence and what that tells us about so much swirling around us today. The Orthodox views of the atonement and the Eucharist are woven tightly into his argument, but I would think many Christians from other traditions will resonate with it.  

As “civilized” people, however, we seem to have a drive towards an imaginary, disembodied existence. In our contemporary setting of the internet-webbed world, this drive is all the stronger. Jesus as “idea” is all the more tempting…. Technology has allowed us to “manage” the necessity of biology in a manner in which it largely becomes an inconvenience in comparison to the unfettered imaginary existence of the mind. We say of the passions that run through our brains, “This is my true self, my freedom, my undeniable truth,” while we suppress our biological reality with baths of chemicals and surgeries, which, like the costumes we assume, seek to hide and obscure the naked truth of our being.

To this, God says, “This is my Body,” pressing the broken, bleeding, biology of His crucified Incarnation into our mouths. “Take, eat … drink this….” Almost immediately we seek to transmute His tasty flesh into an idea, as though He had said, “Take, think….”

It’s Tradition, Stupid.
Sorry, I couldn’t resist. (So much for my daily petition, “… lead me not into temptation….”). Daniel J. Mahoney’s thorough and engaging review of Sohrab Ahmari’s new book, The Unbroken Thread, is, according to Mahoney, “a most welcome invitation to take both wisdom and tradition seriously again, to see in tradition an indispensable vehicle for conveying and sustaining wisdom about the things that truly matter.”

Its purpose is to remind them [the next generation] of the need to cultivate the precious gift that is the human soul.

That task demands openness to “the fundamental dilemmas of what it means to be fully human,” and an accompanying willingness to respond to the call of sacrifice and self-restraint, even to the requirements of authentic heroism and sanctity so nobly represented by … St. Maximilian Kolbe. Instead of the false allure of unlimited “progress,” which “can’t fulfill our soul yearnings or satisfy our urge to put ourselves right with the sacred,” Ahmari recommends a dialectical return to the “wisdom of tradition” through a thoughtful and engaging challenge to the unexamined dogmas at the heart of radically progressivist or modernist thought.

With C.S. Lewis (whose prose and fictional writings Ahmari explores with insight and gusto), Ahmari rejects the “chronological snobbery” that dismisses “good ideas from the past merely because they were from the past.”

On the Other Hand!
To show my eclectic nature, or maybe my confusion, here’s an essay that questions the value of enduring Christian institutions and traditions. David French at The Dispatch, repeatedly offers wise takes on things Christian and especially evangelical in a way that is accessible to evangelical readers. French knows and speaks the lingo, and he doesn’t flirt with Orthodoxy, Tradition, or Catholicism, to drive home his points (guilty as charged). He’s thoroughly grounded in the Bible and the evangelical ethos. The latest example: “How American Christendom Weakens American Christianity: An age of scandals reveals how institutions of the faith can fundamentally oppose the faith.”

The question is simply this: Is American Christendom increasingly incompatible with American Christianity?

The root of the question comes from Soren Kierkegaard’s Attack on Christendom, a series of searing essays aimed directly at the established Danish church, a church that was deeply entangled with the Danish state. In Kierkegaard’s formulation, “Christendom” refers both to the legal institutions of the church and to the culture those institutions create. 

Think of the distinctions roughly like this—Christianity is the faith, Christians are believers in the faith, and Christendom is the collective culture and institutions (universities, ministries) of the faith.

This contrasts sharply with how the Orthodox and Catholics think about the faith. They refuse to separate the institution from the faith, precisely because of biology and the traditions that institutions pass on. But here’s where I am: I love the Orthodox and Catholic way of seeing things, but I also love Kierkegaard! I hope you weren’t looking for a consistent philosophy in this newsletter….

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I’ll be interested to hear from GR readers:  Which of these three analyses seems most cogent to you? I recognize that each is responding to a different problem, and your answer will depend partly on which problem concerns you most deeply. Then again, each employs arguments that are grounded in an Orthodox, Catholic, or evangelical ethos respectively. What is your take on such things?

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The Sky May Be Rising
I’ve been banging the drum for more balanced news, meaning more stories that don’t sound like the sky is falling … again.  Here is a short video, “Beautiful Numbers,” that does a splendid job of putting our current anxieties in historical context.  It’s amazing how far we’ve come in a few hundred years.

Grace and peace,

Mark Galli

markgalli.com