Friday, December 20, 2013

Say no to bunker Christianity

Erika Rudzis on

Why Bunker-Christianity isn’t an option

Shorter: you can try to hide where God won't let your pants be pulled down, or you can be a Christian, but you can't do both.

This post flows like a gentle, inexorable stream from source to delta, so you should without question RTWT.

5 comments:

  1. It is a nice piece indeed, Keith.

    It is also exactly what Pope Francis is saying in Evangelii Gaudium. It is also what JPII said many times, for example in in which he quotes St. Paul ("Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel"). And taken to extremes, it is what JPII said is a defining error of Buddhism, because it teaches that salvation comes from removing oneself from the world.

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  2. Keith, it's been a long-standing criticism of the crunchy project, from their revulsion of the suburbs to their toying with the so-called "Benedict option."

    Erika's arguments from specifically Catholic teaching about laymen and society are, in my view, redundant and secondary to the clear teachings of Scripture that she also mentions: let your light shine before men.

    Christ's commands in the Sermon on the Mount, to be both salt and light, are warnings against the two great temptations of compromise and retreat.

    As I wrote seven years ago, "We must be in the world but not of the world if we are to be effective conduits of God's love to the world."

    So far as I know, Dreher has never addressed this obvious criticism, and if he hasn't, it's a shame.

    It's also a shame that the myth is still floating about, that Dreher changed churches because of the Scandal.

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  3. Bubba: "Dreher has never addressed this obvious criticism"

    As I have pointed out elsewhere, I think the reason for this is simple. RD's meanderings about the "Benedict Option" were never coherent or sincere to begin with. It has all been just another shtick in his long running carnival show. One thing is sure: RD doesn't really believe in such a thing, at least not to the point of actually pursuing it. It is forever "optional."

    The BO had nothing there of substance to begin with and therefore, nothing was ever there to address.

    I think that Jonah Goldberg's original takedown of the whole crunchy project was pretty devastating.

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  4. It's obvious why we don't like Rod, and why he doesn't like us: we take his writings far more seriously than he does, and he takes himself far more seriously than we do.

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    1. He takes himself so seriously that he was certain that all his readers would want to see that he got kirschwasser and Calvados for Christmas. Better pack a couple of cases of those when you go BO.

      Further on the narcissism front, he also let all his readers know, in another post, that he would have posted the Office Depot "Elf Yourself" video in which his face appears, if he only knew how.

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