Rod Dreher's don't-be-Left Behind Benedict Option™ & church to go

Recently, Rod Dreher picked a fight with Pastor Dan Phillips of Copperfield Bible Church in Houston, then, because he is Rod Dreher, ran away and blocked him on Twitter:

Over the weekend, I got into a brief Twitter exchange with a pastor of a nondenominational “Bible church” (as if all churches aren’t Bible churches) in Texas who said that I am not a Christian, because Orthodox and Catholics are not Christian. I pointed out to him that Christianity did not begin with the Reformation, but then decided to block the guy on Twitter, because the last thing I wanted to do was get into an exchange with a guy like that.

The offense seems to have been the tweet I've highlighted among these remaining:

Jon Swerens says:

May 25, 2015 at 2:16 pm

 

All of the tweets that I could find:

@DennyBurk @roddreher Don’t know Dreher besides that he’s a name. Christian, or Roman Catholic, or something else? http://twitter.com/BibChr/status/602223403253149696

@BibChr @DennyBurk Christian “or” Roman Catholic? I used to be a Catholic, and was at that time also a Christian. Still am a Christian. http://twitter.com/roddreher/status/602242438187520000

@roddreher @DennyBurk Yes, “or.” It is impossible to affirm what the Bible teaches and what Roman Catholicism officially teaches. http://twitter.com/BibChr/status/602282578083643392

@BibChr @DennyBurk This doubtless comes as a shock to you, but Christianity didn’t start with the Reformation. http://twitter.com/roddreher/status/602242769336143873

@roddreher @DennyBurk That’s interesting. I don’t know you, so I ask, rather than assume. You seem to know my level of education. How? http://twitter.com/BibChr/status/602282998474539008

Yes, “doubtless,” for disagreement equals ignorance.

[NFR: I was being snarky. Dang literalists. Note the "Christian or Roman Catholic or something else" -- as if by "something else," I couldn't possibly be a Christian. -- RD]


[NFR.2: Anyway, thank you for digging up the tweet thread. I couldn't find it, but I'm very bad at Twitter. -- RD]

After congratulating himself for his beliefs of the moment after Methodism, agnosticism, and Catholicism

 An hour later, I was standing in our Orthodox vespers service, thinking about that guy and smiling. There we were, praying in a church that can trace itself in an unbroken line back to the apostles

and following a critique of Phillips dimensionally beyond anything contained in Phillips' actual tweet above, the theological disagreement between Phillips and Dreher sets Dreher up to raise this ominous a priori eschatological question:

Well, anyway, I have no interest in engaging in theological disputation here, and won’t. What prompts this post is my curiosity about this question: Does laying hold to a position so extreme and so ungrounded in history leave people like Mr. Bible Church vulnerable in other ways to the forces of modernity, which deny the authority of the past? That is, does the nature of their conservatism leave Christian fundamentalists particularly vulnerable to the cultural forces that are tearing Christianity apart in the West

But it seems that it's not just fundies like Phillips who are vulnerable to the "cultural forces that are tearing Christianity apart" foreseen by Prophet Dreher. Just about everyone else is, too: conservatives, Protestants, even Catholics:

This reminds me of firebrand political conservatives who seem to think conservatism began with Ronald Reagan, and that before his appearance among us, there was a vast void between the age of the Founding Fathers, and Reagan’s coming. Their historical ignorance denies them deeper philosophical resources that they could rightly draw on to defend their position against contemporary challenges. All true conservatives — as opposed to ideologues — lay hold to continuity with the past, and the democracy of the dead.

Christians who refuse, even denigrate, the Church’s deep theological roots in history, strike me as holding a conservatism that is a hard outer shell. What happens when the experience of living in modernity, with its valorization of radical autonomy, erodes or pierces the armor? With their creedless, non-denominational, make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach to Christianity, they are sitting ducks. They deny themselves the wisdom and profundity of tradition, which would give them deep roots. Ironically, their approach to ecclesiology is itself part of modernity, the very thing they oppose so fiercely. Christian fundamentalism, especially in its nondenominational variety, is parasitic on older, more ancient forms of Christianity, in ways that its adherents don’t appreciate.

It’s like political conservatives who don’t grasp that conservatism is a far broader and deeper thing than Reaganism and post-Reaganism. Given Reagan’s celebration of the free market, they don’t know what to say when questions are raised about the market’s role in undermining traditions that conservatism has historically stood for upholding. So they double down on dogmatism and ideology, which, as time goes on, persuades or attracts fewer and fewer people.

This is going to happen to fundamentalist Christianity, I think. It is an unstable thing, and far more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of time than its believers think. We can all look at liberal Protestantism and liberal Catholicism, and see how they are withering. Fundamentalism looks strong by contrast. I think this is deceptive.

And yet, it must be conceded that all that tradition, and all that doctrinal depth and comprehensiveness, is not producing Catholics who believe in what their own church teaches,

When all these other institutions and structures ultimately crumble and fall, as Prophet Dreher has foreseen they must, this tacitly leaves one Last Church Standing with roots deep enough and a - what? appropriately not-hard outer shell - to ultimately withstand and weather  the "cultural forces that are tearing Christianity apart in the West". Which church could that be?

Why, Rod Dreher's own personal current church of choice, Eastern Orthodoxy, of course.

As one of his commenters explains and which Dreher, who constantly adds NFRs to comments he disagrees with, makes no effort to deny or repudiate,

There is no such thing as “small-o Orthodoxy.” None whatsoever. There is the Church, and then there is everything outside it. This does not mean that there are no God-fearing people outside the Church. Far from it! I think of God-fearing people, outside the Church, as contemporary versions of Cornelius the Centurion in the Gospels, whose hearts are in the right place, but who simply haven’t received the whole truth yet.

However, what this does mean, is that a Christian life is not possible outside the Church. Only within the Church is a fully Christian life possible...The New Martyr, Metropolitan Hilarion Troitsky, explains this further in his sermon “Christianity or the Church?”

So, if you're going to take Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ in order to strategically withdraw (as Dreher did from his Twitter fight with Phillips) from the world and cultivate your Christian values offline rather than fighting for them openly in the public square, there's really only one political and religious option within which Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ can be warranted safe and effective for you and your family if taken as directed: Rod Dreher's personal church of choice.

You want to be Saved from the "cultural forces tearing Christianity apart", don't you, particularly your own fragile, shallow-rooted, inferior Christianity or, worse, God-less social conservatism. Don't you?

Then don't risk being Left Behind in the apocalyptic cultural wasteland Prophet Dreher foresees for you.

Run, don't walk, and convert to the one true church guaranteed by Prophet Dreher to deliver a satisfactory Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ today. Operators are standing by.

George Weigel on Bad Ecumenism

Weigel shows how some people like Cd. Kurt Koch are really tied down by the human perspective on what's good for the Church and for true peace in the world. The fall of communism left a mess, but I seem to remember someone saying we shouldn't be afraid of messiness and making messes.

Yet what seems so clear to others is, somehow, not self-evident in the halls of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. In a recent interview with Vatican Radio, the pontifical council’s president, Cardinal Kurt Koch, said that “the changes in 1989 (that is, the collapse of communism in central and eastern Europe) were not advantageous for ecumenical relations” because “the Eastern Catholic churches banned by Stalin re-emerged” from underground—and that made life difficult for Roman ecumenists, given Russian Orthodox phobias about “Uniate churches” like the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Byzantine in liturgy and polity but in full communion with Rome.

What is going on here? No local Church in modern times suffered more for its fidelity to Rome than the Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine—the world’s largest underground religious community between 1946 and 1989. Was Cardinal Koch suggesting that it would have been better for “ecumenical relations” if the communist crack-up in 1989 hadn’t occurred and if the Soviet Union had remained intact? It’s bad enough to be subjected to ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin’s laments about the Soviet crack-up being the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century; it’s even worse when the Catholic Church’s top ecumenical officer expresses what seem, at first blush, to be ominously parallel sentiments.

Bad ecumenism: is that phrase redundant? I'm one of those people that see the whole project of ecumenism in practice as being a big, ivory tower academic ritual. I'm much more interested in personal, hand-to-hand apologetics, even though it gets pugilistic at times. I prefer ecumenism to a supposed search for common ground which, in my experience, is usually a chance for theology grad students who can't write and don't want to commit to the priesthood or religious life to finally use those hours spent in classes and late-night bull sessions spent on the mostly irrelevant subject called comparative religion.

Conversion is about embracing the Truth which sets you free, not about mouthing other peoples' failed rhetoric in grandiose seminar settings and getting a rise out of "coming together". That's best left to the motivational speakers. What Weigel demonstrates in his article is how the fear of offending a group of people leads deep thinkers to lament the effects of fighting and overthrowing what, in the case of the Soviet regime, was truly and completely evil, and was persecuting all Christians viewed as threats (i.e., Catholics).

Holy Russia?

Commenter Judge373 shared an interesting letter with me titled "Appeal by Metropolitan Hilarion on the celebration of the 1,025th anniversary of the Baptism of Rus". I read the whole thing; it's interesting, though has somewhat strange language with regard to Holy Russia. I imagine this is sort of short-hand for the Russian Orthodox Christian tradition, encompassing the corpus of the Russian Orthodox belief and practice through the 1000+ years of it's existence. Judge highlighted some of what he called the stranger statements.

"As sons and daughters of the Russian Orthodox Church, we are all citizens of Holy Russia."

"If we truly wish to spread the Orthodox Faith in America, we must look to our roots and drink of the pure fountain of Sacred Tradition that is Holy Russia."

"Today, America has need not just of Russia, but of 'Holy Russia', for it is only this Russia that represents true spiritual wealth;..."

"Russia is necessary to us and dear to our hearts as a firm bulwark of the true Faith on earth."

What to make of this. It doesn't disturb me too much, although I agree it represents a strange choice of words. Perhaps not a majority, but I would estimate somewhere around half of American Christian leaders, American Catholic clergy included, make an attempt at simple and ecumenical language in their missives, even when it is addressed to their own flock. At any rate, I plan to keep it in my back pocket for the next time a non-Catholic Christian accuses the Catholic Church of jargon overuse.