Georgian Chronicle--(1) The place that sits on my heart

     Visitors to this site well know my enthusiasm for all things Georgian--not the Southern state, but the the small republic nestled on the south slopes of the Caucasus Mountains of Eurasia.  In my meager postings during the last sixth months or so, at least five or six concern Georgia.

     An initial 2006 visit was something of a fluke--tacked-on to a more extensive exploration of Turkey.  I returned in 2007 for a closer look around.  After that, I felt I should see other countries, though Georgia was never far from my imaginings.  For the last three years, business and financial concerns, coupled with an assortment of medical problems have kept me on these shores.  I am feeling better these days, and the wolf has now backed away from the door, his attention directed elsewhere, it seems.  That meant, of course, that it was time to return to Georgia.  The fact that my only child now lives in the country cinched the matter.

     I have also come to an important truth about travel. For many, traveling seems little more than a game, in which one checks-off as many destinations as possible. In a week at a Tbilisi hostel, my son was thrown together with a number of rootless (mostly European) travelers. From his perspective, their journeys appeared unfocused, a mere tagging of obscure destinations--two to three days in Tbilisi, so it must be time to move on to Uzbekistan, etc.

     I suggest, however, that travel reveals the places that stir our souls--or as a Georgian would say, that sits on your heart.  Once found, we should return there again and again, as often as possible. I fully appreciate the fact that discovering your touchstone on the other side of the world is a decidedly modern luxury (and perhaps a temporary one at that.) I do have other such locales a bit closer to home. But as health and finances permit, I will be returning to Georgia whenever possible.

     I have just spent eleven days in Georgia, still a bit overwhelmed by it all. I travelled with John Graham's annual "Monastery Tour," as I did in 2007. The group topped out at sixteen--six from New York City, six from New Jersey, a North Carolinian, one from Michigan, one from Illinois, and an outlier from Texas (me.) We formed a diverse but congenial group, ranging in age from four years old to the mid-70s, consisting of academics, successful entrepreneurs, small business-people, craftsmen and artisans--as well as two of the best-behaved children I have ever encountered.  Eight of us were Orthodox, the others Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and the non-croyant.  The group proved to be an intrepid lot, up for anything and everything, with nary a complaint to be heard.

     John is an outstanding guide, completely at home in his Georgian skin as he is his American, and wisely choosing Shergil Pirtskhelani and Soso Kopaleishvili to assist him on the tour.  All three are accomplished vocalists, musicians and musicologists, key players in the renaissance of traditional Georgian folk singing and chant. 

     Georgia's history is often tragic and desperate, sometimes grand and glorious, and occasionally rambunctious and fractious.  Georgians themselves are perhaps the most generous people on earth.  The thing that Georgia and Georgians are not, however, is dull.  I find them endlessly fascinating.  Over the following days and weeks I hope to submit a number of topical posts, in no particular order of importance.  I hope you enjoy these ruminations on Georgia.

[I will add that it will be a great pleasure to write for those who at least know where the country is located.  I must live in one of the most parochial and geographically illiterate regions of the U.S.  When I answer the question put to me of where I have been, the typical response is "Where's that?"  The easy answer is to reference the Black Sea, but then that would presuppose that they knew where they Black Sea is located, which they do not.  Some are vaguely aware of the demonstrations in Istanbul and the mass protests in Egypt, and usually ask "Weren't you afraid to be over there?"  I kid you not.  Apparently, over there is all the same.  I was enlightened to hear from one person, however, that Georgia started off as a penal colony.  Yes.  When you cannot distinguish between an ancient Eurasian kingdom on the Black Sea and the establishment of the British North American colony of Georgia in 1734, then perhaps all hope is indeed lost.]

 

A Forgotten American Hero

The more I learn, the more I realize how little I really know about American history.  Why had I never heard of this man--Richard F. Pettigrew (1848-1926)?  Truth be told, he was outspoken and radical for his times, and the role he played on the national stage is largely forgotten.

Pettigrew was a lawyer and land surveyor, two professions which dovetail nicely into real estate promotion and development.  He figured prominently in the growth of Sioux City, South Dakota.  As a young man, he involved himself in local Republican politics and upon statehood became South Dakota's first senator in Washington. 

Pettigrew soon soured on the crony capitalism he discovered in the nation's capital.  He bolted the Republican Party over the currency issue at the 1896 Convention.  He opposed McKinley on foreign policy, seeing in our pursuit of war with Spain the birth of an American Empire.  Pettigrew was still technically a Republican senator when he voted against the illegal annexation of Hawaii in 1898--the only one of his party to do so.  The GOP was glad to be rid of him when his term ended in 1900.  Pettigrew aligned himself with the Populists, then the Democrats (though he never trusted Woodrow Wilson,) and ultimately the Socialists. 

The defining moment of his career, however, came in 1917.   He opposed our entry into the First World War, seeing it as capitalist manipulation bent on enriching the wealthy elites.  He urged all young men to evade the draft.  Woodrow Wilson's adminstration brought a felony indictment against him for violating the Espionage Act of 1917.  Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs was already serving a ten-year prison sentence under the same charge.  Pettigrew was not without resources, however, and enlisted Clarence Darrow to lead his defense.  The charges against him were eventually dropped.

Jeff Taylor over at the Front Porch Republic (here) describes Wilson's Espionage Act as the "bad gift that keeps on giving...enshrining the principle that speech is free except when  the government deems it unhelpful."  (He also noted that Woodrow Wilson was our worst President ever.  I would qualify that judgment only slighty, for he is certainly among the bottom three.) 

In 1922, Pettigrew published Imperial Washington, with the inside blurb written by Lenin himself.  At his death in 1926, Pettigrew willed his home to the City of Sioux Falls for use as a museum, with the stipulation that the framed copy of his federal indictment must be prominently displayed next to his framed copy of the Declaration of Independence.

My NFIB Moment

My company has been a member of the NFIB—the National Federation of Independent Business—for 57 years.  My dad signed on back in 1956.  I never paid them much attention, but kept the membership up primarily because it had become something of a tradition.  For decades, the sales representative would call on us once a year—to give an update on their lobbying, and more importantly to try and coax a few more dollars out of us for our renewal.  The same woman called on us for close to twenty years.  She was a strange and eccentric sort, and her visits almost made the membership worthwhile.  But of course, that personal connection had to give way to an annual spiel from a phone bank in God knows where.  We substantially reduced our contribution beginning in 2009, but managed to hang on as members. 

For the most part, NFIB maintained a bi-partisan stance during those years.  In recent times, however, I detected more of an edge in their phone solicitations.  For example, I suppose they just assumed that all “bidnessmen” would be opposed to health care reform.  And then last October, the NFIB sent out pre-election special edition of the magazine they publish from time to time.  Any hint of bi-partisanship was out the window.  The slick publication might just as well been printed at the RNC or Romney Campaign headquarters.  They also included a special Texas insert, listing their recommendations for races here.  Our state representative had been defeated in the May primary.  This guy--a proud birther--was so extreme that he had begun to embarrass the powers that be in our district.  And mind you, we are the district that sends Louie Gohmert to Congress.  You might say we have a high threshold for embarrassment.  Anyway, his young challenger, just as extreme but a bit more nuanced in the proclamation of it, took his place on the November ballot.  The clueless NFIB listed the ousted representative as their recommendation, and gave him a 100% approval rating. 

My co-workers had a big laugh about my ranting over this.  I fired off an email to NFIB, but received no response.  So, I bided my time.  I knew that the NFIB would be making their phone solicitation sometime in the early summer.  That call came yesterday.  I cut the solicitor off in mid-spiel and told her I would not be renewing after 57 years.  I then told why, thanked her and hung up.

I know this is just a silly thing.  But I’m glad to be free of the NFIB, and in so doing striking a small blow for the old republic.

Orthodoxy Ten Years On

Rila Monastery, Bulgaria

       This month marks the tenth anniversary of my first exposure to the Orthodox faith.  A decade seems to be an appropriate milestone, I think, to reflect and take stock of any decision that has so altered the course of one’s life and relationships.  In the very early days of this blog, I felt a compulsion to talk about it all--and did do so to a limited degree.  Fortunately, this typical convert impulse usually fades with time.  In time, most who stick with Orthodoxy grow out of this need to incessantly talk about what they came out of and how--or at least that is the case with me and our mission parish.     Just shut up about yourself already and go to Vespers.  Beyond that, conversion stories often fall into a disappointing pattern, characterized by narcissism, banality, triumphalism, self-justification, etc.   And they are seldom as convincing or quite as applicable to everyone else as the writer imagines them to be.
       Now for the proverbial “That said,” as I attempt to tip-toe around the very thing I just argued should not be done.  I intend no Journey to Orthodoxy © story, for mine is a messy tale that would only serve as a cautionary note for anyone considering a similar decision.  I do propose, however, to revisit my initial exposure to Orthodoxy--the thing that attracted me to the Faith in the first place--those first impressions retained from a few days visit to Bulgaria in 2003.  And to the best of my ability, I also intend to place my spiritual perception--or lack thereof--in context.  What was it in my own background that rendered me so receptive to what was laid-out before me, while my traveling companion remained unaffected?  And so, if a conversion story is to be told, it should not be of my becoming Orthodoxy, but rather my joining myself to a distinctive Protestant sect at age twenty-three, which indeed set the stage for my receptivity to the older faith some twenty-five years later.

I do not pretend to have attained a high degree of self-awareness.  No doubt I present as false a face to the world as most anyone else.   But to see our own selves as God does is the very task set before us.  The natural inclination is for one to somewhat mentally rewrite the narrative of their life to better fit their contemporary circumstances.  And so, in this particular matter, I wonder if I had constructed a back story to justify my present situation.  Perhaps there is a little of that around the edges, but I think the truth of the basic narrative holds.  This is not just a subjective call on my part, for I actually took notes at the time.  Reviewing my 2003 journal for the first time in years, I found that my notes did indeed confirm my remembrance.  The main difference is that I previously focused on one particular experience, instead of a series of impressions spread out over three or four days.  I find that I am now better equipped to make sense of it all, but the back story is little changed.  My hope is that these observations have some value beyond the narcissistic replaying of this particular clip of my life. 
 

                                                                           THE WAY I WAS THEN

        Stories of American tourists venturing into eastern Europe and discovering Orthodoxy are a dime a dozen.  In that sense, my experience is typical.  But many of these narratives involve some sort of religious quest or “journey,” or at least a heightened attentiveness to spiritual matters.  Such was not the case with me.  I was disinclined to leave my church, and certainly was not in search of any Eastern religious exotica.   I went to Bulgaria with the only the most superficial notion of Orthodoxy, and certainly without any thought that it might appeal to me. 

I was raised nothing much at all:  my mother was the most nominal of nominal Baptists, and my father was a lapsed member of the Church of Christ.  We did not say Grace over our meals and we did not discuss religion in any manner at all, other than the gratuitous berating of religious hypocrites, who were always conveniently close at hand (a sister-in-law and a son-in-law provided endless examples.) 

My mother was not religious on any level, and had no faith heritage to pass down to the next generation.  Southerners will realize how thin a purely superficial Southern Baptist background can be.  I remember a family dinner when I was introducing my somewhat sheltered Church of Christ fiance to my family.  The table was spread with vegetables from our garden and beef from our pastures.  My father—sensitive to my wife’s background—asked my mother, “L*****, don’t you think someone needs to give thanks?”  My mother shot back, “Why?  We raised every bit of it ourselves.”  That was my mother—if she thought it, she said it, and thought it needed saying.  My mother did have a Bible.  It was safely preserved in the box it came in, behind the right headboard of her bed.  As a young child, I remember going in there when she was away from the house.  I would carefully remove the Bible from its box and look at each of the pictures.  If my mother was ever baptized, it was never mentioned.

A Church of Christ preacher baptized my teen aged father in the Lampasas River.  This was his mother's family faith, a seemingly odd fit for such a joyous, happy woman.  My granddad--a true gentleman--loved to argue religion, but studiously avoided accompanying his wife and children to the Campbellite gatherings.  
 I remember accompanying my parents to church a few times in my very early youth.  My dad would sit in the pew with his head down, his hands clasped with his index fingers forming a V.  He clearly would rather have been in the pasture.  But it was my father who was--and remains--my great example of how one should treat others.

I cannot ever remember a time when I did not believe.  Doubt has never been my problem (I have plenty of others.)  I have always believed in God, absolutely.  And after a certain age, I never tried to convince myself that I was somehow okay without faith. 
My dad had an office downtown, and many days I would hang out there and run errands until the first one of my parents went home.   The LDS church had a storefront outreach on the courthouse square.  I would walk slowly by and look at their exhibits in the window, but I never got up enough courage to go inside.  I picked up a free Book of Mormon at the Hemisfair in 1968.  I read it through as a thirteen year-old, but laid it down,  decidedly unconvinced.  A clunky adventure yarn does not a faith make.  I knew it was bunk, just as a few years later I instinctively knew that the Young Life craze of my high school peers was not the real deal either, or at least not for me. 
When I was maybe twelve or thirteen, I remember telling my dad that I wanted to be a member of a church.  He and I would talk on our way out to the farm to check on the cattle.  This was our everyday routine, after he came home from work.  He generally wanted to talk about cattle and I wanted to talk about anything but.  But we did have good conversations that would have been impossible if my mother or brother were included.  I remember that he told me that I could be any religion I wanted, except Catholic.  (Anti-papism was drilled-in early in the South, even in moderate souls such as my dad.)  He may have made some vague commitment to seeing that I was able to attend church, but I do not remember it.   But lest I be too critical of my dad, this simply would not have been anything he would have known how to do, exactly. 

My parents did send me to church with my much older sister and her husband, who were apparently trying to save me from being a heathen.  We went to their Baptist church.  My remembrances are of gluing cotton balls on the outline of a lamb in Vacation Bible School and later being taught against cults like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Church of Christ (really) in Sunday School.  A well-meaning but sanctimonious old biddy scared me away from there when I was about thirteen or fourteen.  Years later--while off in college--I received a letter from my mother, regretting the fact that they had never taken me to church (it was the 70s and my hair was approaching shoulder-length.)   To my mother, church was something I should have been "taken to."  The idea that it would have any relevance beyond the hour or so in the pew was a foreign concept to her.  But I will say that my mother mellowed considerably in her last years of illness, and it is those memories I retain.  
And so, partially to appease her and partially to ease my own conscience, I tried out the University Baptist Church down Guadalupe Avenue.  Once was enough.  They had posters up advertising an upcoming service featuring Willie Nelson as speaker, depicted Jesus-like, in a white gown.  I did not know anything much at all, but I knew that a church that had Willie Nelson delivering a sermon was not one to be taken seriously.  (I actually like Willie Nelson, but in context.)  After graduation, I returned to my hometown, and my sister’s husband promptly insisted I visit their Baptist church, as they were having a special series on the “End Times” and prophecy.  I did so, and all those bad memories came flooding back.  At that point in my life, I had no idea what I would become, but I knew beyond a doubt that I would never, ever be a Southern Baptist.

At about that same time, a distant cousin on my mother’s side stopped by my house and invited me to attend a “gospel meeting” at her Church of Christ.  Her grandmother later called to do the same thing.  All I knew about the Church of Christ were the gentle jibes I heard at home (my great-grandmother had a way of saying THE Church.  And then there were my feuding great-aunts in central Texas.   The youngest son of one became a Baptist boy-preacher at age fifteen, shocking the other sister’s staunchly Church of Christ family.  The two stopped speaking.)  But I went to the “gospel meeting” anyway.  The straight-forward, logical preaching appealed to me, I thought offering a stark contrast to the emotionalism of the Baptist service.  I was clearly interested, but was embarrassed to pursue it in my small town.  A Church of Christ in the nearby city ran a telephone ministry, where people could dial in and listen to any number of short discourses on various subjects.  And so, I studied through this method, and eventually garnered enough courage to call the preacher and request baptism.  I was twenty-three.

In looking back now, I have to admit that there was some part of me that was attracted to the Church of Christ simply because it was the church of my father’s family (at least his maternal side.)  In fact, through this line I became the 7^th generation in his family to be so.  This is just one of a series of conscious decisions on my part to self-identify with the sane side of my family.  I know my dad was pleased when he found out what I had done.

For many people, the Churches of Christ are just another entrée in the broad smorgasbord of American evangelical Protestantism.  Those readers who hail from Texas or Tennessee know differently, however.  Like the Mormons, they are Restorationists and retain a unique self-perception.  Churches of Christ believe in a pristine First-Century-New-Testament-Christianity that quickly apostatized after the death of the Apostle John.  They neither identify with the Reformation nor believe they are connected with that movement in any way.  The Reformers were moving in the right direction, mind you, but according to Churches of Christ did not go nearly far enough. 
Their particular history began in early 19^th century frontier America during the religious ferment of the Second Great Awakening.  Alexander Campbell (and others) urged a return to New Testament simplicity, arguing that a sincere student of the Bible could know what God required by reading the “blueprint” of Scripture.  One simply had to free their minds of all preconceived religious prejudices and look at the Scriptures objectively and rationally.  Campbell believed he had done that very thing, and  he and his followers concluded that they were the first to ever really and truly do that, hence the “restored” church.  Other religionists who looked at Scripture and arrived at different conclusions were dismissed as insincere, still holding to the “traditions of men.”  These early Restorers were eager to debate this point with others, though their self-serving and circular reasoning was a bit like arguing with Calvinists about predestination.

These "New Testament Christians" proudly claim to be neither Protestant nor Catholic, but simply “the church.”  In fact, they are perhaps the most Protestant of any group, taking sola scriptura to all new levels.  A few beliefs and practices set the Church of Christ apart from their religious neighbors, to-wit:

1.        There is one body and denominationalism is a sin.  The “restored” Church of Christ is that one church.  They often use the phrase, the “Lord’s church,” meaning them alone.   (I never used it.) 
2.      The Lord’s Supper is to be taken every Sunday, though only as a memorial.
3.      Baptism is to be of believers, by immersion, and for the remission of sins.
4.      Each congregation is completely autonomous, ruled by a plurality of elders.
5.      Musical instruments in worship are forbidden (though this is changing.)
6.    Worship consists of five items:  Preaching, Praying, Singing, taking the Lord's Supper and Giving.
7.     A hermeneutic based on CENI (command, example and necessary inference.)  There are other differences, to be sure, but these were the main points.
Churches of Christ hold to a radical bibliolatry.  Scripture is very much a blueprint by which to reconstruct the church whenever necessary.  Old-timers compared Scripture to the game of baseball.  If the sport died out, and centuries later a baseball manual was discovered, then the game could be “restored.”  They posited that Scripture should be viewed in the same manner.  In Orthodoxy, whenever one sees the phrase “the word” in Scripture, it is Jesus Christ that comes to mind.  In the Church of Christ, the default position is the words on the page of the Bible itself.  A minority believed that the Holy Spirit has no role beyond the words of Scripture themselves.
 

I was attracted to the vision of the church's founders—one body, no denominationalism.  I did not comprehend that, while admirable, they were starting from the wrong place.  I also believed strongly in their position on baptism for the remission of sins.  I never really bought into many other aspects of the Church of Christ, however.  (After becoming Orthodox, I had a chance to visit with a former preacher of ours.  As he put it, I was “never a good fit.”)  For example, I always rejected that the Church of Christ constituted the entirety of the Kingdom.   (In fairness, that extreme position has sluffed-away, outside of a hard-core group of what I call the knot-headed congregations.  Most members of the Church of Christ freely admit that there could be others outside their number among the elect.  During my time in the church, the consensus seemed to be that some Baptists would make the cut.  I never heard anyone expand this thinking to include Methodists, however.)  In all my years in the Church of Christ, as Sunday School teacher, deacon and finally elder, I watched my language closely and never “talked the talk.”  I thought the vision was worth fighting for.  Attitudes were slow to change, but I thought it a fight worth making.  I was in it for the long haul. 

Two areas, however, continued  to frustrate me.  These days I can truly call myself a historian—I have the degree, I teach the classes, etc.  But historical research has always been my passion.  I studied our particular religious history in great detail.  Where I now have a wall of Orthodox books, I once had a wall of Church of Christ volumes.  I still have the complete works of Alexander Campbell, Barton W. Stone and Walter Scott (the evangelist, not the Scottish novelist.)  I knew our history inside and out.  I wrote my master’s thesis on the “Stoneite” wing of the Church of Christ in Texas, 1824-1865.   But outside of an occasional professor at our Texas, Tennessee or Alabama colleges, there was absolutely no interest in our history—or really anyone else’s for that matter.  I gave talks on the subject from time to time, and my congregation was polite, but uninterested.  The attitude bordered on active disinterest.  The reason is not hard to fathom.  The Bible is the “blueprint” and the Church of Christ is the “restored” church built on that plan.  This rendered history and the normal historical forces to be irrelevant, as at any time an individual could open their Bible and “restore” the church, regardless of their historical perspective (provided of course, they concluded as Campbell and his successors.)  I always knew this to be inane.  Writing these words makes this belief sound almost childish, but that was indeed the attitude.  History was unnecessary to the church.   I always knew better.
Churches of Christ imagines a 1st-Century church much along their own lines:  small autonomous congregations, each ruled by a plurality of elders, under the guidance of Scripture.  They hold that soon after 100 AD, the church started to apostatize in a big way--bishops, sacramental view of the Supper, infant baptism, etc.  Churches of Christ do not hold that the church began to go astray with the decrees of Constantine.  Rather, they believe that the rot had set long before, the Byzantine emperor's actions only confirmed what was already in place.   This is a pleasant enough story, but no more based in reality or real history than the fantasy of the Nephites and Lamanites created by their contemporary Restorationists.

Intellectualism is not always what it is cracked up to be, and I certainly do not consider myself to be an intellectual.  That said, I did tire of checking my brain at the foyer on Sunday.  Normal religious terminology was frowned upon if it was not found in Scripture.  I never heard the words “theology” (other than in derision) or “Trinity” used.  We were unaware of the Nicene Creed (other than we were against all creeds.)  We had no notion of how and when the New Testament came together, not realizing the tremendous gap in time and space between the death of the last apostle and the leather-bound King James Bible.  The worst aspect about this and other things is that there was no curiosity to learn—again, one of those “history things.”  A young preacher, fresh out of our most knot-headed preacher college in Tennessee, once taught the Young Adult Sunday School class that whenever wine was mentioned in the Bible, it was clearly unfermented since Jesus would not drink alcohol, and that if we ever took a drink it would be like the frog continually jumping half the distance to the wall.  Just as the frog would never actually get there, we would never truly be completely sober again. 

Even though I had great reservations on some issues, and resisted their cramped, narrow world view,  I was loyal to the Church of Christ, still believing in the vision.  I thought all the denominations were flawed, and believed our shortcomings were less egregious than others.  I never remotely considered Catholicism.  In short, I had decided that the Church of Christ was the best possible take on things. 

One thing I learned from my historical research was that what the Church of Christ was preaching and teaching in the late 2oth-century actually took shape in the 1920s, 30s and 40s.  This church bore scant resemblance to the church of the 1830s, 40s, and 50s.  And it was to that earlier church that I felt most attached.  

American Churches of Christ peaked at about 1.2 million in 1980.  That overall number has roughly held, with well over 25% in Texas alone.  Most of the rest can be found in Tennessee, Oklahoma and northern Alabama.  There are more members abroad (Nigeria, Ghana, India, etc.) than there are in this country, primarily due to the very successful World Bible School.  Congregations differ wildly.  Many large urban churches are only culturally Church of Christ.  Many young adherents are hard-pressed to explain why they do the things the way they do, other than that is just what Church of Christ people do.  In recent years, some preachers discovered Grace, and many Church of Christ sermons can be easily interchanged with those of any Evangelical whatever church (case in point:  while accompany my wife to a Church of Christ in Chattanooga, we were subjected to a clown riding a bicycle down the aisle to the stage where a skit ensued, advertising their upcoming VBS.)    Other--usually rural--congregations still hold to the “old paths” (of the 1920s.)  The local congregation here is actually doing quite well, after getting rid of me and a few other trouble-makers.   
       But back to the point I have been trying to make:  In 2003, I was an active leader in the Churches of Christ, hoping for constructive change and growth, but determined to work within the system, so to speak.  One other development affected my thinking quite a bit, contributing to a growing sense of disquietude.  This was the attacks of September 11, 2001.  To some degree, I was swept up in the tide of emotionalism much like everyone else.  But what gnawed at me was the understanding that--as reprehensible as it was--the attackers of that day truly believed in something.  I began to question what it was we truly believed in.  And then I looked at my church.  We had never been tested.   Despite success in some parts of the world, we could never quite shake our Southernness, our rural roots, and yes, our unacknowledged but all too obvious Protestantism.  Our congregation supported a mission in western Ukraine.  They tried to replicate exactly the way we did things here—the order of worship, Sunday School, Bible camp, etc.  Even from the other side of the globe, it seemed unnatural to me.  Global issues were forcing their way into our smug, comfortable lives.  Simply put, the cramped world-view of the Church of Christ seemed peculiarly ill-equipped to confront them.

My favorite aunt is a Jehovah’s Witness.  Her children have said that whoever had knocked on their door that day would have gotten her, whether they were the JWs, the Mormons, or the Hari Khrisnas.  I was certainly not in that extreme condition, but perhaps I was primed for something.  I do know that if I had remained in the states, I would have never made any move away from the Church of Christ.    On the other hand, I wonder if I would have been attracted to Orthodoxy if I had not been a member of the Churches of Christ.  That, in 3,600 words or so, is the best way I can describe my spiritual state on June 9, 2003.

 

                                                             WHAT I SAW:     SOFIA 

In June 2000, in a Paris metro station stairwell, my wife made a Scarlett O'Hara-ish pronouncement.  If it did not actually contain the preface of "As God is my witness," it certainly carried that much force.  She declared to the world that she "would never go overseas again."  And she hasn't.  I stewed for three years before launching off by myself, or with friends.   My buddy Bill and I opted for Bulgaria--cheap, a bit gritty, and exotic enough to provide ample stories for our friends at the coffee shop.   I knew Bulgaria to be traditionally Orthodox, but my understanding went no further than that.  As always, I researched extensively before our departure.  We would base ourselves  in Sofia and Veliko Turnovo, with excursions out into the countryside.  Five hundred years of severe Ottoman domination precluded development of the castles and palaces that dot other parts of Europe.  What Bulgaria does have, however, is monasteries--destroyed and re-built time and again over the centuries.  Unless you are going to the Black Sea beaches, monastery hopping is what one does in Bulgaria.  And so, that was our plan. 

,

The Aleksandr Nevsky Cathedral, the great landmark of Sofia, was completed in 1912, a gift from the Russian people.    We walked up the front steps of the church, past the beggar woman, and into the cavernous interior.  At first glance, the church appeared dark and gloomy, empty and lit by candles here and there.  As Bill and I positioned ourselves besides one of the enormous columns, I gradually began to realize these initial impressions were misleading.  Our eyes eventually adjusted to the dim lighting.  Almost magically, images began to appear on all the walls, columns and ceilings--indeed, the whole panoply of Heaven and Earth was laid out before me.  Nor was the church empty.  The size of the sanctuary was such that it would take several hundreds of people to make a noticeable crowd.  The church sits in the middle of a traffic circle in the very heart of the city, the noises of which sometimes break the silence inside. 
A steady stream of people entered and exited the sanctuary, as Bill and I stood by our column and observed.  I had never seen anything quite like this before.  I did not know that there were actually places that people went to pray.  A church was strictly utilitarian in my thinking--nothing special about it otherwise.  These Sofians, either going to work or to market, first stopped at a kiosk where they apparently purchased candles.  They would then light them and place in scattered candle stands, and later cross themselves and kiss one of the framed icons.  They might stop at several, or perhaps just one, and then they were on their way again.  If this was worship, it was different than any I had ever witnessed. 
I then began to notice one young man, twenty-something and dressed in jeans, standing almost at attention before a framed icon wreathed with flowers, located near the altar.  He was thin, not from working out and eating right as would be the case with Americans, but probably rather from not having enough to eat.  After he had stood there some time, the young man started crossing himself--slow, deliberate sweeps with his hand and then touching the floor.  He did this three times, stood a moment longer, bent down and kissed the icon and then walked off.  I eased up towards the front of the church and observed that he had been before an icon of the Virgin Mary.  I have contemplated this image for ten years.  Instinctively, I realized that I had witnessed something completely new--real, observable reverence. 
This was not a concept that found much practical traction in Churches of Christ--a nice-enough concept, to be sure, but with little relevance to actual worship.  Our demeanor, whether before church, between Sunday School and church, or after the service, could be characterized by chattiness, boisterousness, with perhaps a bit of Southern hoo-rawing.  This attitude characterized most every Church of Christ of my experience.  Our songs were usually either sickly-sweet sentimental--Love Lifted Me" or I'm in the Gloryland Way, or Farther Along, or Give Me the Bible, etc., or praise-worship silly--Days of Elijah (In fairness, there were a few that were of noble sentiment and theologically sound--Up from the Grave He Arose comes to mind.)  During the prayer before the Lord's Supper, we were supposed to be somber and think intently on the Cross, but if everyone else was like me then their mind was wandering 15 seconds after the prayer ended.  The preacher would often tell a few jokes or humorous anecdotes as the congregation settled-in to the twenty minutes of sermonizing.  But never in all this did I ever experience real reverence.  I just didn't.  I had a lot yet to learn and unlearn, but the Bulgarian youth that morning opened my eyes to a new understanding of what worship was all about.


                                                    WHAT I SAW:       RILA

 

Iconostasis at Rila Monastery

 

This part of my story has been told twice before, here and here.  So I may run through it a little quicker than I would otherwise.  As mentioned earlier, I  have tended to highlight my experiece here in Rila, whereas my impressions were actually formed over several days.   That said, what happened to me at Rila was pivotal.  In my own mind at least, I have divided my life at this point; what went before and what has come afterwards. 

Briefly put, Rila is the top attraction in the country, known as the "Jerusalem of Bulgaria."  The church itself is a jewel, nestled within a three-storied walled compound--half fortress--deep within the Rila Mountains.  We arrived at an opportune time, apparently between waves of pilgrims and tourists.  The compound was relatively quiet and empty, unlike the later two times I visited.  Before we entered the church, Bill and I inspected the exonarthex (porch to us at the time), unlike anything either of us had ever seen before.  Every inch--the walls and ceilings--were covered in bright, vivid iconography.  My favorite scenes were the Rich Man and Lazarus, the Archangel Michael, the Last Judgment (with Pharisees being pulled into the abyss) and a strange scene depicting black demons dancing in the air.   But in time, we ventured inside where new wonders awaited us. 

I was unprepared for what greeted me there.  Unlike the dark, sooty walls of Aleksandr Nevsky, Rila is awash in color.  I grew dizzy trying to follow the iconography upward, as it seemed to soar to heaven itself.  The immense, intricately carved iconostasis is--in a word--breathtaking, perhaps the best representation of the renown Bulgarian woodworking art.   Candles flickered everywhere.   My tourist-mode fell to the wayside, as I simply stood there barely within the sanctuary of the church.  I took a half-step forward and stopped again, as my senses were overwhelmed by what I was experiencing.  I was not simply moved by beauty, for I have seen many beautiful things, including churches.  I moved forward slowly, again by half-steps, a bit confused by the feelings I was experiencing.  A very good word--awesome--has been ruined in the popular American usage.  And yet, that was exactly my reaction--awe.  
I began to realize that I was standing in a truly Holy place.  Founded by St. John of Rila, the monastery has always been at the heart of the Bulgarian people, destroyed time and again by the Turks, only to be promptly rebuilt.  The floors of the church had quite literally been washed in the blood of the martyrs.  I was standing where prayers of the faithful had been offered up for over a thousand years.  I was in the presence of simple Holiness.   The idea of any "holy place" was anathema to my  church.  This particular intellectual construct of ours, however, was based upon something in which we had no experience.  This was the real thing. 
After some time, Bill and I stepped back onto the exo-narthex.  He commented favorably about the beauty of the quaint iconography, but was otherwise unaffected.  As I walked down the steps, I instinctively knew that--for myself at least--something else had happened, though I did not yet know what. 

 

                              WHAT I SAW:     PLAKOVO 

Outside of Rila, we visited all the other monasteries from our base at the Hotel Gurko in Veliko Turnovo, the historic capital of the second Bulgarian Empire.  A great number lie within driving distance, but we had time for four:  Dragalevtsi, Kilifarevo, Plakovo and Troyan.  Of this number, it was Plakovo, perhaps the least outwardly impressive, that provided the most memorable experience.  Bill considered our time at Plakovo was his most memorable experience in Bulgaria.  

Church of St. Prophet Iliya (Elijah), Plakovo Monastery

Plakovo is a bit hard to find and seemingly forgotten, out in the countryside at the end of a poorly-marked back road.  They probably receive few visitors.  The setting, however, is idyllic.  A small church sits in a meadow, with a two-storied ell-shaped building to the southwest.  The west end of this latter structure is anchored by an impressive bell-tower.  Plakovo, like Rila, was a touchstone in the long history of resistance against Ottoman oppression.  In later research, I learned that there is a secret tunnel into the woods, both out of the church and the kitchen.  The monastery's long history has been one of destruction and rebuilding.  A framed picture hanging on the porch of the building revealed that the church had once been surrounded by a two-storied walled compound, of which the present structure was merely the southwest corner.  The loss is not to be blamed on the Turks, however, but on a 1949 fire.

There were two monks in residence (if there were others, we did not see them.)  One was a lanky, younger man, thirtyish, his long hair gathered into a loose ponytail.  The other was an older man, heavily-bearded, and short, stocky and shirtless.  (The fact that he was so dressed has since caused me to conclude that he may have been simply a caretaker rather than a monastic.  But perhaps his dress had more to do with the specific work they were doing at the time.)  The two men were in the meadow between the church and other building, gathering freshly-cut hay onto large bedsheets, and then pulling it into the barn.  We had become accustomed to such sights in Bulgaria.  During Communism, individual farms gave way to massive collectivized operations.  There were only 900 farms in the entire country under Communism.  The rusting ruins of these endeavours--and the deserted towns that supported them--dot the countryside.  Meanwhile, agriculture had to begin anew, and from scratch.  All across the country, we witnessed small plots being farmed and harvested in the age old methods, without benefit of machinery.  The older man put on his shirt and greeted us, while the young monk continued with the gathering of the hay.

My friend Bill is an ever-vigilant student of languages and had picked up a Bulgarian-English dictionary in Sofia.  He tried a few words with the man, but without much success.   Bill could, however, speak Serbo-Croatian and he claimed that there was considerable overlap between that language and Bulgarian.  So, to the limited extent that we were able to make ourselves understood to one another, it was through Bill's knowledge of Croatian.  The man obviously surmised that we were there to see the church, and so he motioned for us to follow him.  

There was no outside iconography, other than one of St. Prophet Elijah over the doorway.  The church was much smaller than the ones we had visited heretofore, and the interior was modest as well.  Anything containing Bulgarian woodworking is impressive, and the iconostasis did not disappoint in this regard, though much less imposing than Rila and what we would later see at Troyan.  Lovely carved "standing-chairs" (my terminology) lined the walls.  Christ Pantocrator was in the dome, of course, but the rest of the walls were whitewashed.  A number of icon stands dotted the small sanctuary and framed icons hung on the walls.  One in particular drew my attention.  In all my subsequent Orthodox travels, I have only seen this in Bulgaria.  The image is similar to the  Christ Not Made by Hands icon.  The difference is that Christ's eyes are closed, and somewhat eerily, the icon has all the appearances of an actual photograph.  I wish I knew more about it, but like I say, I have seen it in no other country.  I left a few levas in the collection box, and we returned outside.

The man motioned for us to follow him to either his quarters, or the kitchen, in the south ell of the building.  As the Bulgarian was talking to us, Bill pretended to understand what he meant, but it become clear that he was offering us what hospitality he could.  We sat down at a table on the covered porch outside one of the rooms.  Soon our friend emerged with cups of coffee and cigarettes.  I do not remember if we smoked or not, though neither of us was averse to doing so (I have always held to the pleasant fiction that any smoking done overseas does not count, and generally that was my first purchase upon arriving anywhere.)  The coffee turned out to strong, but absolutely cold.  We smiled and thanked him profusely.  He went back into the room and came back with several framed pictures and newspaper clippings to share with us.  They all depicted the monastery in better days, before the Nazis, before the Communists, before the fire.     Although I cannot guess the occasion, one picture showed a large number (several dozen at least) of monks lined-up in front of the west wall of the then-complete compound, beneath the bell tower.  We both found it to be interesting.

But for the most part, Bill and I sat in the cool of the porch, sipped our cold coffee and returned smiles with our host.  Looking back now, the man did have hay on the ground that needed to be moved into the barn.  The more important thing to him, however, was to show hospitality to his guests.  I think we left another contribution on the table, thanked our host and started back towards the rental car.  Simple and genuine hospitality leaves a lasting impression.          

 

                                         WHAT I SAW:       TROYAN

Two options presented themselves to us as we contemplated our return to Sofia.  We could just return west down the highway we drove in on, or we could drive south, taking a twisting pass through the mountains which eventually intersected with a highway in the Valley of the Roses.  You do not have to know much about me to guess which route we took.  There are two passes through the mountain, the Troyan Pass and the Shipka Pass.  This time we chose the former (I drove the Shipka Pass on a later trip.)  The town of Troyan is also the site of the the third largest monastery in Bulgaria after Rila and Bachkovo.  Troyan Monastery is a popular destination for pilgrims and tourists.  The area outside of the large compound is primarily devoted to supplying food, souvenirs and trinkets to the visitors.  Once you wade past that, however, Troyan is a gem.  The church and the monastic buildings are built in the Bulgarian Renaissance style.  The outside of the church contains iconography and frescoes, though not to the degree of Rila Monastery.  And the church contains a miraculous icon, that of "the Three-Handed Holy Virgin."

Bill and I walked up the cobblestoned courtyard from the car park to the church.  Up ahead, we could see an old Bulgarian peasant woman making her way towards the church.  Her slow steps seemed painful, and she was bent with age.  The old grandmother may have been walking since early morning to make it there by that time.  The thought crossed my mind of the tumultuous times her life had witnessed.  We soon drew even with her and passed on towards the church.  Bill and I spent some time on the exo-narthex, observing the iconography, and then entered into what we discovered to be a fairly crowded sanctuary.  The iconostasis was impressive, even after having seen that of Rila, as were the icons.  We looked around a bit and generally started working our way to the back of the church.  I then noticed that the old peasant lady had finally made it into the church.  She was talking quietly to a youngish priest, who was bent down, holding her hands.  The old woman was looking up at him and I could not help but notice that she positively beamed with delight.   Stripped of the noisome pilgrims and tourists, there was at its heart a real community of Christians here, where the pastoral needs of the faithful were truly addressed.  The comparison is unfair, I know, but I never remembered anyone ever beaming with delight at any of our preachers, or our elders for that matter (and I can say this, for I was one.)  In short, I saw evidence of a type of relationship that existed on a plane heretofore unknown to me.


                                                          CONCLUSION

I returned home to my life and routine.  And while I did not forget these experiences, I was not yet launched off onto any new path.  The trigger for that would come in a couple of months.  And when it did, I had the context of my experience in Bulgarian Orthodoxy, characterized by reverence, holiness, hospitality and community.
Recently, I stumbled across an online survey for ex-members of the Churches of Christ.  The pollsters were analyzing the reasons why this fellowship is failing to keep their own.  (And in fairness, I have no doubt that there is a similar survey somewhere that addresses the former Orthodox.)  Just for kicks, I took the survey.  I remember one question in particular.  The pollster asked what would induce me to return to the Churches of Christ.  The question took me aback, and I realized that I was probably coming from a much different perspective than the average disgruntled ex-CoCer.  I concluded then that the poll was pointless and the pollsters did not grasp the real problem.  They were searching for ways to tweak or reform the church, to make it less objectionable to the dissatisfied.  But they did not consider that the basic premise itself was misguided.  For the Church of Christ did not do sola scriptura wrong.  If anything, they carried it to at least one of its logical conclusions.  I do not recall exactly how I answered the question, but I believe I said something about the Pearl of Great Price. 
 

 

 

The Unintended Reformation by Brad S. Gregory

I have recently finished The Unintended Reformation by Brad S. Gregory.  Without doubt, this is one of the most consequential books I've read in some time.  Gregory is a professor of history at Notre Dame, so it should come as no surprise that he approaches the subject from a Catholic angle.  Many readers--used to the Reformation being portrayed as a decidedly good thing--may find this disconcerting.  Those of a conservative political bent or of a liberal theology will find plenty to offend them as well.  I believe that this will become a seminal work, a revisionist history that (hopefully) pushes the conversation in new directions.

 The promotion for the volume notes that it is as much about the present as it is the past.  Indeed, Gregory finds the roots of our contemporary hyperpluralistic, consumerist, and religiously disenchanted society in the Reformation itself, not just the Enlightenment.  Instinctively, I already knew this, even back in my Protestant days, long before I became Orthodox.  Viewing the West as it stands now from six different perspectives, Gregory methodically and substantially connects all the dots.  His theories do not explain everything, but they explain quite a lot.  Without further commentary on my part, I will post some of his noteworthy passages, below:

 

INTRODUCTION

 

The underlying problem is that most people seek--and through relentless advertising are encouraged to pursue--ever greater material affluence and comfort, despite the fact that the average American income, for example, rose eightfold in real terms during the twentieth century.  Westerners now live in societies without an acquisitive ceiling:  a distinctly consumerist (rather than merely industrial) economic ethos depends precisely on persuading people to discard as quickly as possible what they were no less insistently urged to purchase, so that another acquisitive cycle might begin.

 

If "rights" and "persons" no less than "morality" are mere constructs without empirical grounding in the findings of science, and only science can legitimately tell us anything true about reality, then such constructs can be deconstructed and dismissed in the pursuit of alternatives.

 

Reformation leaders thought the root problem was doctrinal, and in seeking to fix it by turning to the Bible they unintentionally introduced multiple sorts of unwanted disagreement.  This constituted a new set of problems, different from the first.  What was true Christianity and how was it known?  Doctrinal controversy was literally endless, and religio-political conflicts...were destructive and inconclusive.

 

What sort of public life or common culture is possible in societies whose members share ever fewer substantive beliefs, norms, and values save for a nearly universal embrace of consumerist acquisitiveness?

 

 

CHAPTER ONE:  EXCLUDING GOD 

 

This chapter traces the historical trajectory whereby the assumptions about God, nature, and science that dominate contemporary intellectual life have come to be taken with such uncritical matter-of-factness.  they are widely regarded as ideologically neutral,, obvious truths rather than seen for what they are:  ideologically loaded, contestable truth claims based on unverifiable beliefs.

 

...this anti sacramental view of science and religion, if the universe as a whole were a closed system of natural causes, there would be no place for God either causally or conceptually.  God would simply be superfluous, because there would be neither a place nor any evidence for him.  But a genuinely transcendent god, if real, is not spatial at all.  So such a God, if real, no more needs room to act than he needs room to exist.  Both presuppositions--the assimilation o God to the natural world and the mutual exclusivity of natural causes and divine presence--are implicitly part of modern science as it is conceived and practiced, although bot have long ceased to be active concerns among practicing scientists qua scientists.  Bot indeed repudiate central claims of Christianity....

 

However human reason is construed or understood, it cannot fathom what is by definition unfathomable, and so despite traditional Christian theology's pervasive and variegated use of reason it can never finally grasp directly that with which it is chiefly concerned.

 

This is Scotus's univocal conception of being--"univocal" because it is predicated in conceptually equivalent terms of everything that exists, including God....and...would prove to be the first step toward the eventual domestication of God's transcendence...

 

The Reformation chiefly matters for the emergence of modern science in quite another way:  the intractable doctrinal disagreements among Protestants and especially between Catholics and Protestants...had the unintended effect of sidelining explicitly Christian claims about God in relationship to the natural world.  This left only empirical observation and philosophical speculation as supra-confessional means of investigating and theorizing that relationship.

 

...the denial that Jesus could be really present in the Eucharist...is a logical corollary of metaphysical univocity.  A "spiritual" presence that is contrasted with  a real presence presupposes an either-or dichotomy between a crypto-spatial God and the natural world that precludes divine immanence in its desire to preserve divine transcendence....it is precisely and God's radical otherness as non spatial that makes his presence in and through creation possible, just as it had made the incarnation possible....The denial of the possibility of Christ's real presence in the Eucharist, by contrast, ironically implies that the "spiritual" presence of god is itself being conceived in spatial or quasi-spatial terms...

 

But what if the anti-Roman exclusion of divine immanence that presupposed metaphysical univocity were to be combined with Occam's razor and a conception of the natural world as an explanatory adequate system of self-contained, efficient causes?  Then there would be neither a place for the active, ever-present, biblical God of Christianity, nor a reason to refer to him except perhaps as as an extraordinarily remote, first efficient cause.  This would mean, of course, that the god under consideration would no longer be the biblical God.  It would be the God of deism....In this way, the Protestant denial of sacramentality as it was understood in the Roman church contributed unintentionally and indirectly to post-enlightenment disenchantment.

 

Empirical investigation of the natural world had not falsified any theological claims.  Rather, incompatible Catholic and Protestant views about the meaning of god's actions created an intellectually sterile impasse because of the objections they inevitably provoked from theological opponents, and the intractable doctrinal controversies they constantly reinforced.  What was left as a mean for understanding the natural world?  Only reason--understood and exercised in ways that did not depend on any contested Christian doctrines.

 

But for most innovative eighteenth-century thinkers...the principal remaining significant question about God was whether he was an initial, remote, efficient cause of the universe's deterministic mechanism, or simply a superstitious invention of unenlightened, primitive peoples ignorant of the truth about dynamic, eternal matter....His domestication now complete or nearly so among such thinkers, God was in both cases conceived as though he were spatial and temporal.

 

 

CHAPTER TWO:  RELATIVIZING DOCTRINES

 

A rejection of the church's authority and many of its teachings is precisely what happened in the Reformation.  All Protestant reformers came to believe that the established church was no longer the church established by Jesus.  So they spurned many truth claims of the faith as embodied in the Roman church....The Reformation's upshot was rather that Roman Catholicism, even at its best, was a perverted form of Christianity even if all its members had been self-consciously following all the Roman church's teachings and had been enacting all its permitted practices.  Institutional abuses and immorality were seen as symptomatic signs of a flawed foundation, namely false and dangerous doctrines--that is, mistaken truth claims.

 

It is thus misleading to say that "Protestantism itself splintered into rival denominations, or 'confessions,'" as if there ever was some point in the early Reformation when anti-Roman Christians had agreed among themselves about wha3t scripture said and God taught.  There wasn't.

 

Commitment to the authority of scripture led neither obviously nor necessarily to justification by faith alone or to salvation through grace alone as the cornerstone doctrines of Christianity.  Radical Protestants made abundantly clear that the Bible did not "interpret itself" in this way, whatever protagonists claimed to the contrary.  Unfettered and unconstrained, the Reformation simply yielded the full, historically manifest range of truth claims made about what the Bible said....From the very outset of the Reformation, the shared commitment to sola scriptura entailed a hermeneutical heterogeneity that proved doctrinally contentious, socially divisive, and sometimes...politically subversive.

 

The assertion that scripture alone was a self-sufficient basis for Christian faith and life...produced not even rough agreement, but an open-ended welter of competing and incompatible interpretations of Luther's "one certain rule"....Scholars...have overlooked the significance of the principle of sola scriptura for contemporary hyperpluralism.  Unless radical and magisterial Protestants are studied together, historically and comparatively, this significance cannot be seen.  

 

 

CHAPTER THREE:  CONTROLLING THE CHURCHES

 

Christian morality was irreducibly communal and social.  According to the Gospels, Jesus did not tell his listeners to believe whatever they wished to believe as individuals, or to follow him only in their private thoughts and interior sentiments but not in concrete, public, shared human life.  On sacrifice, forgiveness, compassion, service, and generosity simply was Christianity.  It was the Gospel concretized and enacted.  It was not something called "religion" distinguished from the rest of life, but rather all of life lived in certain way.

 

His [Luther's] experience of justification by faith alone convinced him that the dialectic between Law and Gospel as he understood it comprised the cornerstone for correctly understanding God's word.  It followed that the Roman church' teachings were mistaken wherever they contradicted his reading of the Bible, linked to his transformative experience of God's gratuitously given grace....all other Christians did likewise who not only denounced the sinful shortcomings of the Roman church...but in addition rejected its authority based on their respective interpretations of the Bible.  This meant rejecting in various ways many inherited Christian truth claims--often not in accord with Luther...but in an open-ended plethora of rival views about "the better interpretation."

 

In large measure it was Augustine's vision, still--but now in the context of a divided Christendom whose magisterial Protestant and Catholic antagonists each claimed Augustine.

 

...the ideological scaffolding and political framework beneath the energetic, mostly Protestant churches and effervescent evangelization in the United States between the ratification of the Constitution and the Civil War was religion of the individual, by the individual, and for the individual...."of all the countries in the world, America is the one in which the precepts of Descartes are least studied and best followed."

 

The prescriptive content of the country's foundational political documents was so thin and abstract as to be virtually nonexistent:  "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," but nothing about how to live, how to exercise one's liberty, or in what happiness consists....It was their legally protected freedom, if they so chose, to live for their own enjoyments and pleasures and the acquisition of material things, to pursue the fulfillment of their desires while ignoring whomever they chose to ignore.  It was constitutional.  Each American citizen had a right to it.  Such a life would bear scant resemblance to the teachings of Jesus, who preached the opposite...

 

Millions of Americans seem still to believe the Wilsonian notion that the United States has a divine destiny and providential mission to accomplish in the world, that of "spreading freedom and democracy"...the aim is apparently to force (at least certain strategically selected) others to be free, if necessary through proactive military intervention, even if it means killings tens of thousands of the would-have-been-liberated and unsettling the lives of millions more.

 

 

CHAPTER FOUR:  SUBJECTIVIZING MORALITY

 

...the widespread default in Western societies at large is emotivism, an ethics of subjective, feelings-based, personal preference, which only exacerbates the unresolved and irresolvable disagreements...Everything becomes "political" because once morality has been subjectivized no arguments can succeed, since there is no shared set of assumptions from which they can proceed.

 

This chapter argues that a transformation from a substantive morality of the good to a formal morality of rights constitutes the central change in Western ethics over the past half millennium...Those who repudiated the Roam church uncoupled the medieval discourse on natural rights from the teleological Christian ethics within which it had been embedded.  That discourse was transformed and the consequential trajectory to a modern ethics of rights established as a result of Christian contesting about the good, the violence of the Reformation era, and the subsequent demands for religious freedom....In society at large, aside from the ever burgeoning dominance of consumerism and capitalism, nothing has replaced Christianity in providing for shared goods.  The result is a de facto reliance on emotivist, individual preference to determine the good as such and a seemingly inexorable trend towards increasing permissiveness necessarily coupled with ever more insistent calls for toleration.

 

Fleeing the scriptural unmasked Whore of Babylon, anti-Roman Christians would have to constitute a moral community afresh, based on the Bible.  Yet no such alternative moral community emerged.  There were only rival moral communities...

 

...all Protestants based their flight on the same foundation:  their interpretation of scripture...Because they read differently, they fled differently.

 

From the outset of the reformation to the present day, the insistence on sola scriptura and its adjuncts has produced and continues to yield an open-ended range of incompatible interpretations of the Bible, with centrifugal social and wide-ranging substantive implications for morality.

 

Indeed, the moralistic character of early modern Catholic and magisterial Protestant regimes...helps to explain why in the early twenty-first century many Christians understand ethics less as the pursuit of holiness linked to human flourishing as part of the imitation of Christ, than in legalistic terms as "following the rules" lest punishment ensue.  It also helps to account for the strength of the dominant secular narrative of Western modernity as an emancipatory drive for ever-greater individual liberation from resented impositions, with religion interpreted primarily as a form of oppressive social control.

 

 ..."we hold these truths to be self-evident:  that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."  Given that there had never been anything self-evident about such claims, however, common they had become by the late eighteenth century, one might admire the strategic moxie that in pressured circumstances sought preemptively to stifle all would-be criticism and debate.  That is what claims of self-evident truths try to do, by offering assertions in place of arguments....the founding documents of the United States enshrined not a substantive ethics of the good but a formal ethics of rights, one that eparted in critical ways from the conception of rights both in medieval Christianity and in magisterial Protestantism during the Reformation era. 

 

Something new was created:  a "private sphere" within which individuals could do as they pleased based on their own beliefs and preferred goods, provided they were publicly obedient.

 

The threat of subversion and fears of heterodoxy in the conflicts between confessionalizing Catholic and magisterial Protestant rulers made obedience the central social virtue of early modern Europe.  And the central social virture of Western modernity, within the institutions of the liberal state, is toleration--as it must be.

 

 

CHAPTER FIVE:       MANUFACTURING THE GOODS LIFE

 

The consumerist cycle of acquire, discard, repeat now makes up the default fabric of Western life in the early twenty-first century, regardless of how one assesses it and whether or not one resists it, because "the conditions under which choices are made are not themselves a matter of choice"....ubiquitous practices of consumerism are more than anything else the cultural glue that holds Western societies together...acquisitiveness unites us....Classic moral critiques of capitalism's exploitative (and often brutally gendered) effects on industrial workers have lost none of their relevance amid the scramble to outsource labor since the 1970s....Only now Western consumers are spared having to see the workers who make their stuff and the factory conditions in which they toil.

 

Democracy is the right to buy anything you want.  Freedom's just another word for lots of things to buy.

 

But neoclassical economists no less than the champions of consumerist self-fashioning are quite wrong in thinking that the practices of never-ending, material acquisitiveness are an unavoidable given of human nature, a cross-cultural and trans historical constant,.  Such a claim naturalizes acquired, contingent human behaviors in order to justify them and to preempt analysis.  Most human cultures have not exhibited such practices, nor have they believed what most modern Westerners believe about material things and their acquisition:  rather, "consumer aspirations have a history."

 

...Protestants unambiguously condemned avarice, acquisitive individualism, an any separation of economic behavior from biblical morality or the common good....Yet, Luther and Reformed Protestants disagreed with their Catholic contemporaries about teleological virtue ethics...One's actions...did not contribute to one's salvation which was entirely and exclusively God's free gift of grace by faith alone....This was a long-term, internal development within Reformed Protestantism in which once-devout, shared busyness would eventually yield to individuals' self-appointed secular business in a disenchanted "public sphere," within which the descendants of Reformation-era Protestants had learned to segregate economic behavior from interior dispositions.

 

Luther's sharp two-kingdom distinctions between faith and politics, the inner man and the outer man, the freedom of a Christian and obedience to secular authorities, were probably more important than a zealous work ethic as an indirect influence on the development of modern capitalism.

 

Conflating prosperity with providence and opting for acquisitiveness as the lesser of two evils until greed was rechristened as benign self-interest, modern Christians have in effect been engaged in a centuries-long attempt to prove Jesus wrong.  "You cannot serve both God and Mammon."  Yes we can.  Or so most participants in world history's most insatiably consumerist society, the United States, continue implicitly to claim through their actions, considering the number of self-identified American Christians in the early twenty-first century who seem bent on acquiring ever more adn better stuff, including those who espouse the "prosperity Gose" within American religious hyperpluralism.

 

The substantive emptiness of the nation's founding documents was possible not only because Americans were strongly shaped by Christian moral assumptions, but also because so many of them had simultaneously departed in practice from the traditional Christian condemnation of avarice.

 

If Christianity is among other things a discipline of selflessness in charitable service to others, then the United States' legally protected ethos of self-regarding acquisitiveness, culturally reinforced at every turn, would seems to be its antithesis.  The latter says "satisfy your own desires"; the former, "you must deny your very self."  But if one thinks religion is about the life of the spirit rather than about the material world; that faith is about what one feels inside rather than what one does with one's body;  that detachment from material things implies an inner attitude rather than actually giving things away; and that one has already "got saved" by one's "personal Lord and Savior" in the self-chosen congregation that makes one feel most comfortable, then one perhaps doesn't see much of a conflict.

 

 

CHAPTER SIX:       SECULARIZING KNOWLEDGE

 

Liberal Protestant theologians and skeptical biblical scholars, having hitched their wagon to post-Kantian philosophy beholden to univocal metaphysical assumptions, found that wagon's payload progressively lightened until it was unclear how Christianity could consist of anything more than post-Schleiermacherian pious sentiments.

 

The interpretation of scripture had been centrally important in Christianity from the time of the church fathers....The Reformation's fundamental claim of sola scriptura upped the ante considerably.  According to those who rejected the Roman church, Christian experiential knowledge and the prospects for eternal salvation now turned directly and entirely o the correct understanding of the Bible....the bible was not sharply contrasted with the "human additions" and mere "traditions of men"....According to Protestants, anyone who looked anywhere else for this knowledge, including the "holy" example of the church's saints, was self-deceived.

 

Charles Hodge:  "the Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science.  It is his storehouse of facts; and his method of ascertaining what the Bible teaches, is the same as that which the natural philosopher adopts to ascertain what nature teaches."  Hodge's insouciant confidence reflected an intellectual complacency about religio-social and historical realities....American Protestant theologians were as little equipped to handle the intellectual challenges of Darwinism, German biblical criticism, and historicism as Aristotelian natural philosophers had been prepared to accommodate Newtonianism in the eighteenth century....of an attempt to determine, as some sort of lowest common denominator, what it was that all Protestants shared in common and then to promote it....It turned out that they shared only their rejection of the authority of the Roman Catholic Church.