The long 17th century gradually draws to a close...

...Ian Paisley is dead.

"Inclusiveness" works its magic on another denomination.
This time the ELCA:

At its inception in 1988 the ELCA it had about 5.3 million members in 11,133 churches.  Every year but two has marked decline in membership; every year has marked a loss of congregations.  In 2010 and 2011 after the decisions of 2009 in which gay blessings and ordinations were approved, the ELCA lost 710 congregations.  Now two break-off churches—Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ and the North American Lutheran Church—account for about 1100 congregations.  In 2011 the ELCA listed 4,059,785 members and 9,638 congregations.  By 2013 there is little doubt it has fallen below 4,000,000.  From 2003-2011 weekly attendance dropped by 26% across the church.  There is decline in every demographic, every geographic area.

Russell D. Moore is shedding no tears for the loss of the Protestant majority...

...or to be more specific, he thinks that the Protestants lost control of their churches a long time ago.

When working toward our “God and country” badges, my childhood Boy Scout troop was shuttled over to the neighborhood United Methodist church for sessions with the pastor about being good Christians and good citizens. I remember my Southern Baptist sensibilities being shocked when the pastor said, in response to a question, that he didn’t believe in angels or demons. The reigning cultural presence of mainline Protestantism served the same purpose as the “God and country” badge. Give us enough Christianity to fight the communists and save the Republic, they said, but let’s remember not to take it all too seriously.

That culture is over.

Frankly, we should be more concerned about the loss of a Christian majority in the Protestant churches than about the loss of a Protestant majority in the United States. Most of the old-line Protestant denominations are captive to every theological fad that has blown through their divinity schools in the past thirty years-from crypto-Marxist liberation ideologies to sexual identity politics to a neo-pagan vision of God—complete with gender neutralized liturgies. Should we lament the fact that the Riverside Avenue Protestant establishment is now collapsing under the weight of its own bureaucracy?

What we should pay attention to instead may be the fresh wind of orthodox Christianity whistling through the leaves-especially throughout the third world, and in some unlikely places in North America, as well. Sometimes animists, Buddhists, and body-pierced Starbucks employees are more fertile ground for the gospel than the confirmed Episcopalian at the helm of the Rotary Club.

Accordingly, evangelicals will engage the culture much like the apostles did in the first century—not primarily to “baptized” pagans on someone’s church roll, but as those who are hearing something new for the first time. There may be fewer bureaucrats in denominational headquarters, but there might be more authentically Christian churches preaching an authentically Christian gospel.

Historic.

America loses Protestant majority.

NEW YORK- For the first time in its history, the United States does not have a Protestant majority, according to a new study. One reason: The number of Americans with no religious affiliation is on the rise.

The percentage of Protestant adults in the U.S. has reached a low of 48 percent, the first time that Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has reported with certainty that the number has fallen below 50 percent. The drop has long been anticipated and comes at a time when no Protestants are on the U.S. Supreme Court and the Republicans have their first presidential ticket with no Protestant nominees.

Among the reasons for the change are the growth in nondenominational Christians who can no longer be categorized as Protestant, and a spike in the number of American adults who say they have no religion. The Pew study, released Tuesday, found that about 20 percent of Americans say they have no religious affiliation, an increase from 15 percent in the last five years.

This is actually a big deal, because Protestantism carries with it a particular set of cultural values and tropes that have formed what we understand the American identity and American democracy to be. Many of those values and tropes have been incorporated into a general set of "American attitudes," such that it can honestly be said that in America even the Catholics are Protestants, but, nonetheless, the implication is that the core set of values that make America what it is may not be "refreshed" from the original source.

That may be something that we all come to regret at some point.

How do Protestants manage to ignore 1,500 years of history?

They do what Mark Driscoll does in this post where he drains St. Patrick of any residual Catholicism and makes him sound like your typical 21st Century mega-church pastor, i.e,. like Mark Driscoll.

Driscoll writes:

Saint Patrick is technically not a saint, as he was never canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. Additionally, Patrick was not actually Irish. Rather, he was an Englishman and a Roman citizen, who spoke Latin and a bit of Welsh.

Nonsense. St. Patrick is "technically" a saint and he was "technically" canonized inasmuch as he is on the Roman calendar of feast days, which is what it means to be "canonized."

Driscoll might be confusing the modern system for centralized determinations of canonization with the fact that in the Fifth Century determinations about holiness were decided more locally. If so, he needs to make that explicit, rather than appealing to the anti-Catholic phobia of his readership with half-truth.

Driscoll also writes:

Upon returning home, Patrick enrolled in seminary and was eventually commissioned as a pastor. Some years later, God spoke to Patrick in a dream, commanding him to return to Ireland to preach the gospel and plant churches for the pagans who lived there.

Right, "commissioned as a pastor."

Or more accurately, "ordained as a priest" by a Catholic bishop.

Driscoll writes:

The Roman Catholic Church had given up on converting such “barbarians,” who were deemed beyond hope.

Nonsense and hypocrisy.

Unlike Protestantism, which until the mid-nineteenth century universally held that the "Great Commission" did not pertain to the post-apostolic age (See e.g., McGrath's, Christianity's Dangerous Idea), Catholicism has always held that the church had an obligation to preach to the ends of the Earth.

Also, Patrick was sent into Ireland to become the first bishop with the support and at the orders of his Catholic superiors, and he was not the first Catholic missionary to Ireland:

Patrick was not necessarily the first missionary to Ireland. His main ambition was to become Ireland's first Bishop, but his monastic superiors did not believe he was adequately qualified for the position and passed him over in favor of Palladius. Palladius' mission lasted only a short time due to the fierce opposition of a Wicklow chieftain and abandoned the sacred enterprise after about a year.

It was Germanus who commended Patrick to Pope Celestine. It was only shortly before his death that Celestine gave this mission to Patrick and on that occasion bestowed on him many relics and other spiritual gifts, and gave him the name "Patercius" or "Patricius". Patrick, returning from Rome, received the tidings of the death of Palladius, and traveled to the nearby city of Turin where he received episcopal consecration at the hands of its great bishop, St. Maximus. He quickly hastened to Auxerre to make preparations for the Irish mission.

Driscoll concludes:

Patrick gave his life to the people who had enslaved him, until he died at 77 years of age. He had seen untold thousands of people convert, as between 30-40 of the 150 tribes had become substantially Christian. He trained 1000 pastors, planted 700 churches, and was the first noted person in history to take a strong public stand against slavery.

"Trained pastors" and "planted churches."

Well, I guess Driscoll has to speak in the vernacular of his readership, who might become disturbed if they read "ordained priests" and "established Catholic churches."

The serious point is that this is the technique that permits modern, historically ignorant people to retroject their own assumptions and culture back into the past. This is the technique that permits "bible Christians" to look back to First Century Judeah and see nothing more surprising than what they would expect to see in their Clovis mega-church.

But the past is a different country. The past should be different, it ought to be unsettling, and uncomfortable, and jarring. It ought to make us look at our own time from a different perspective. Just as we learn, and thereby grow, by being exposed to the customs of different countries, we ought to learn, and thereby grow, by being exposed to the customs of different times.

Shorter conclusion: A large portion of the Christian past was Catholic - deal with it.

Via Mark Shea.

Parchment and Pen rolls out a favorite topic for Protestants...

...are Catholics saved?

You have to admire the humility of these people.

Actually, not so much, since it amounts to nothing more than a kind of Pharasaic gossip about other people, i.e., God is so lucky to have them, unlike those other people with their wrong "gospel."

My experience could be wrong, but I don't ever see Catholics spend time "tut tutting" about whether Protestants are saved. Catholics will certainly argue for Catholic doctrine against Protestant doctrines, but somehow Catholics don't appoint themselves judges of the salvation of Protestants as a class.

That probably has something to do with the Catholic notion that God makes those decisions and humans don't get a vote in the matter.

That Methodist drive for inclusiveness is beginning to pay-off.

UMC in United States still shrinking

UMC membership and average worship attendance in the United States continue to drop, according to the latest figures released by the denomination’s General Council on Finance and Administration.

GCFA said membership dipped 1.4 percent in 2010, having declined 1.2 percent in 2009. Average worship attendance was down by 2.3 percent in 2010, compared to a drop of 1.9 percent the year before.

In 2010, only 54 percent of churches reported receiving any members by profession of faith or faith restored.

Amazon Review...

...Christian Smith's "How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps."


I would be very appreciative if you would go here and give me a helpful vote.

A insightful examination of how the way that we look at the world can make a profound difference in what we see.

December 20, 2011

Christian Smith is a sociologist who recently converted from Evangelical Protestantism to Catholicism. This book is principally an account of the causes, phases and processes he went through in making that move.

Because Smith is a sociologist, he organizes his book around the idea of a "paradigm shift" as adumbrated by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. To that end, Smith starts out with a discussion of the worldview that subsists in Evangelical Christianity, then he recounts the many minor, inexplicable discontinuities that he regularly encountered in Evangelical Christianity, then he builds up to the major problems for which he could not find an answer in Evangelical Christianity, and finally he pointed to the paradigm shift which allowed him to see the world through Catholic eyes.

I am a life-long Catholic, and I found it fascinating to hear many of the things I had observed - or seen but couldn't explain - through Smith's Protestant perspective. In this way, Smith's book is a work of ecumenism - bridging a gap that may be more cultural and epistemological than it is theological. I know that I have had many knock-down, drag-out debates that were never resolved; after reading Smith, I realize that because the problem is cultural, it can't be resolved simply by appealing to commonly accepted texts.

For example, I've noticed the following whenever I get told that Catholics won't get to Heaven because of their "misunderstanding" about "justification":

"18. Note your dissatisfaction with the heavily cognitive, often rationalist, nature of much of Protestantism. There is no denying it: Protestantism is a religion of the head. What matters most are holding the right beliefs. And right beliefs are things that reside between one's ears. Having the right cognitions is the essence of Protestantism. So is possessing, professing, and defending the right words. And those words come from and enter into the head as well. True, evangelicalism includes strains of pietism, charismatic tendencies, revivalist emotion, and a love of practical activism that can help counter-balance the heavily cognitive leanings of Protestantism. But in the end, as you well know, what is ultimately important is having the right beliefs, the right ideas, the right words (even if that is in some ways contradicted among the laity by a simultaneous cultural emphasis on the subjectivistic opinions and feelings of individuals when interpreting the Bible, as discussed below in point 25)."

Smith, Christian (2011-06-09). How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (p. 49). Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

In fact, I recently asked one Evangelical interlocutor if he thought that God gave a test on theology to determine who gets admitted into Heaven.

The flip side is this:

"For most of Christian history, the material and spiritual world was much more enchanted, thicker with spiritual meaning, and full of greater mystery than modern evangelicalism knows. Modernity suffers a "mystery deficit"--an inability to even conceive of unknowns and realities beyond those accessible to rational understanding. Indeed, that mystery deficit is central to the corrosions of secularization. Evangelicalism participates in that mystery deficit."

Smith, Christian (2011-06-09). How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (p. 36). Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

And:

"The University of Chicago theologian, David Tracy, provides a language for this Protestant-Catholic difference in thought and imagination in his book, The Analogical Imagination. We might think of the general Protestant mentality as mapping onto what he calls a "dialectical" mentality, versus the more Catholic "analogical" tendency which he contrasts.16 The Catholic priest and sociologist Andrew Greeley writes similarly about "the Catholic Imagination" in his 2001 book by the same title, in which he emphasizes the Catholic instinct for seeing the mysterious in the plain, the sacred in the material, the holy lurking just below the surface of the ordinary. In the kind of analogical imagination toward which you need to now shift, everything is not simply what it is, only and literally that, and nothing else. Rather, our understanding comes from seeing how some things are like other things, how certain symbols point to other realities, how differences and similarities can work together to create coherent, harmonized understandings of reality.

Catholics, therefore, are much friendlier to what (for Protestants) seem like contradictions, to both/and understandings, metaphorical images, symbolic representations, and non-literal readings and interpretations. In some sense, Catholicism is more confident than Protestantism in its understanding of its apprehension, definition, security, and coherence of Christian truth--it has, after all, been working with the same basic approach for two millennia, and it enjoys the Church Magisterium to guard the deposit of faith.17 So Catholicism tends to feel more relaxed and at ease with differences, tensions, metaphors, and ambiguities in its thought and imagination. This is, again, a very different way of thinking, which takes a paradigm shift to acquire. So keep working on and praying about that."

Smith, Christian (2011-06-09). How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (p. 104). Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

All of this is tied into this gem of an insight:

"Protestantism itself was a crucial force setting modernity into motion. The birth of Protestantism marks the onset of the early modern period in history. And Protestantism in all of its forms has grown up entirely within the developing modern world. There is no such thing as pre-modern Protestantism. Protestantism has no authentically Protestant references, resources, or formations that predate modernity.

Now, start to suspect that a Christian church tradition that is of modernity will eventually be consumed by modernity and postmodernity. The signs of that are already evident, for those who have the eyes to see them. Begin to wrap your mind around the idea that if the Christian church is to survive modernity it very likely needs to have spiritual, intellectual, theological roots that predate modernity. To be of modernity is to be captive to modernity, not just its ways of life but its basic presuppositions and instinctive outlooks. By this I mean things like autonomous individualism, Enlightenment skepticism, distrust of tradition, moral relativism, consumerist materialism, knee-jerk hostility toward authority, the market's colonization of non-economic spheres of life (such as church), and the domination of mass media, advertising, scientism, and rationalism.

In contrast to Protestantism's position, Catholicism goes back to the very beginning with deep roots in the ancient world. That provides references and resources that enable modern Christians to potentially transcend modernity and so perhaps to resist its corrosive effects."

Smith, Christian (2011-06-09). How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (pp. 67-68). Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

By the way, the idea that modernity and Protestantism are twin births from a common cultural moment is not unique to Smith; Alister Mcgrath makes a similar point, albeit in a more upbeat way in Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution--A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First.

Finally, since I have often noticed the tendency of Evangelicals to overuse the word "just" - which I assume is Koine Greek for "We beseech thee, O Lord" - I found this observation worth a chuckle:

"Those around you and maybe you yourself pray with a lot of particular, but by now so-familiar-that-they-usually-go-unnoticed, phrases, such as, "Father God," "we would lift up," "I just have a heart for," "as unto the Lord," "knit our hearts together," "we are convicted," "if it be your will," "pray a `hedge' around," and "in Jesus' name." About 10-20 percent of the words used in the informal prayers of more than a few of the people around you consist of the one word "just"--as in, "Lord, we just ask that you just give us the eyes just to see you, Lord." Your community believes in praying authentic, spontaneous, personal prayers--not rote, ritualistic, formal, dusty, traditional prayers. It once occurred to you, however, that most people's spontaneous, personal prayers sound an awful lot alike. They actually seem to follow standard formats. You yourself wish you could be a better pray-er--and might have some books on your shelf about improving your prayer life--but you usually fall back into your old habits and familiar prayer wordings."

Smith, Christian (2011-06-09). How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (pp. 21-22). Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Smith's book will undoubtedly offend sincere Protestants, and to that extent it is performing a "prophetic" function of having people face their shibboleths. It performs the same function for Catholics. Recently, I found myself quoting this bit to a fellow Catholic:

"Do not become Catholic because you think it will give you certainty. Some evangelicals find Catholicism attractive because they think it offers them certainty about Christian beliefs. Previously, they thought an inerrant Bible alone provided certainty. Then they began to see the real problems with that approach, some of which we have noted above. What then to do? Looking to Rome, some decide that the Catholic Church Magisterium provides the epistemic certitude that conservative Protestantism taught them to desire. Catholicism appeals to such people in these cases because it seems to provide that absolute certainty.1

Don't do that. Don't think that way. Establishing certainty is a distinctively modern secular project, not a Christian one. It was Descartes, empiricism, scientism, and the logical positivists who taught us to prioritize and search after an indubitable and universal foundation of certainty in human knowledge (which only fairly recently we have realized actually does not exist). Christ, by contrast, calls us to drop what we want and expect, to believe, and to learn the truth from and follow him. So, do not become Catholic in order to replace a misguided theory about the Bible with a misguided expectation about the Church Magisterium. The main attraction of both of those, of course, is to make people feel more secure about what they think they know. But managing feelings of (in)security is not what Christian faith is about. So don't replace an old foundationalist Protestantism with a new (falsely) foundationalist Catholicism.2"

Smith, Christian (2011-06-09). How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (pp. 151-152). Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Amen to that.

This is an insightful book, and it is insightful because it was written by somebody who did the hardwork of honestly thinking about the issues. As such, I highly recommend it.

Amazon Review...

So, you're saying that everything in the Emerald City of Oz is green because of these glasses?

A review of Christian Smith's The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture.

This is the second volume in my personal search to get some purchase on the idea of "private interpretation." After a surprising experience on an internet Christian apologist forum where I was roundly condemned for asserting that reading St. Augustine's "On the Trinity" might be useful for thinking about Christian doctrines - because, after all, as my modern interlocutors explained, they had more information than was available to St. Augustine and had at least as much access to the Holy Spirit - I decided to look at this idea of "private interpretation" in order to learn and understand what led these people with an obvious commitment to the intellect to ridicule the idea that they might be wrong and St. Augustine might be right with respect to the interpretation of the Bible.

I started with Alister McGrath's Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution--A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First. McGrath promised that his thesis would be that "private interpretation" was the dangerous idea behind Christianity. I was therefore expecting a discussion of private interpretation and some analysis about how it worked in practice. While I read a lot of heart-warming slogans about the "right of every Christian to read scripture for himself," I also so a lot of instances where various Protestant denominations did everything they could to channel their adherents' reading of scripture into what the denomination considered proper and orthodox. What was strange to me was that McGrath did not discuss, or even seem to notice, the disconnect between his slogans and the actual practice demonstrated in history.

Christian Smith's The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture offers an explanation for that disconnect, and, it seems, the explanation is sociological and not intellectual, which is why McGrath and others don't seem to see disconnect. They get up close to the point where theory starts to transition into practice, and, then, the explanation slides off to more theory.

Smith's target is limited to what he calls "biblicism." "Biblicism" is defined by Smith as "biblicism" I mean a theory about the Bible that emphasizes together its exclusive authority, infallibility, perspicuity, self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability." This is the view that informs most, or much, of modern American evangelicalism, and explains how Christian bookstores like Bereans can have stacks of books promising the "Biblical approach" to weight-loss, dating, business management, raising children, etc. It is also the reason that many Evangelicals talk about connecting a verse of the Bible to a problem they are facing as if the Bible were a guidebook to modern life written in language accessible to everyone.

Smith points out that this approach misconstrues the Bible. The bible was never intended to be a guidebook to living life. Rather it is a collection of books about God, and for Christians, about Christ. Treating the Bible as a guidebook to life deforms the Bible, according to Smith, by shifting the perspective of readers who employ that approach away from Christ to work-a-day trivia of life. Likewise, treating the Bible as if it were always written in plain and accessible language causes further deformations in that the Bible is not always written in plain and accessible language, which results in "biblicists" having to delude themselves through a variety of tools, approaches and tropes into denying something that is plainly true. Smith writes:

"In order not to let these problematic texts endanger their formal theory of the Bible, biblicists tend to respond in three ways. The first is simply to ignore the problematic texts, essentially pretending that they do not exist. The second is to "interpret" the problematic texts as if they say things that they do not in fact say. The third is to develop elaborate contortions of highly unlikely scenarios and explanations--of the sort to which nobody would ever resort in any other part of life--which seem to rescue the texts from the problems."

A result of this approach is a kind of cognitive dissonance where "biblicists" on one level know that there is a problem with what Smith calls "pervasive interpretive pluralism" as part of which "biblicists" know that there are divisions on major issues in practice, but deny that such divisions exist in theory, except, of course, when they don't, as suggested by the recent ejection of Michael Licona from the North American Mission Board because of his "private interpretation" that the apparent resurrection of the dead mentioned in Matthew 27 was a symbolic "illocution" or "perlocution."

Smith offers a solid analysis of the flaws in the "biblicist" project. Smith argues that the Bible was not intended to speak to our mundane lives. Rather it points to the transcendent God. By ignoring that the Bible is about Christ, Evangelicals have moved away from their christocentric commitment. Further, by insisting that the Bible is clear, plain guidebook, Evangelicals have minimized the reality that God is mysterious.

Smith's solution is tentatively sketched, at best. His solution constitutes a call for Evangelicals to return to their christocentric commitment, and to read the Bible as if it were about Christ, rather than about finding the best way to play the stock market or find happiness or have a good dating relationship. In doing this, Evangelicals will have to re-learn how to live with uncertainty. We may not know, now, soon or ever, whether the saints of Matthew 27 really were raised from the dead, or if that event was meant as a symbolic prefiguring of Christ's role as the "first fruit" before the general resurrection. Or in the case of my experience with the Christian apologists, we may not learn definitely whether the epiphanies described in Genesis were Christophanies, or, as St. Augustine tentatively suggested in "On the Trinity," they were, in fact, angelic visitations.

Smith also advocates a willingness on the part of Evangelicals to distinguish between dogma, doctrine and opinions. One effect of the "biblicist" project, according to Smith has been a tendency to make all theological issues carry the same weight. In my interney discussion on the Augustine's opinion that the theophanies of Genesis were actually "opinions," I soon discovered that no one seemed to understand the concept that I was presenting Augustine's opinion as an opinion, notwithstanding the fact that I made that point repeatedly. I see now from Smith's book that this is simply a feature of the "biblicist" mindset.

As a non-evangelical, the most important thing I picked up from Smith seems to be that I shouldn't expect discusions with most Evangelicals with a "biblicist" state of mind about "private interpretation," or whether a given opinion might be held but may be wrong, to bear much fruit. It seems that what separates Evangelicals (with a "biblicist" state of mind) from non-Evangelicals is not intellectual. That which separates us is more an act of the will by which the two groups adhere to what they see as "the good." It also explains why my quest for an explanation of how the theory of private interpretation works in practice may never bear fruit. There is quite simply "no there there."

Father Barron on McGrath's "Christianity's Dangerous Idea."

The most important doctrine of Protestantism is "private interpretation"...

...except when it's not.

Alister McGrath wrote a massive tome on "Christianity's Dangerous Idea," which apparently was supposed to be "private interpretation," as part of which every believer had the right to their own understanding of the Bible, and which, according to McGrath, paved the way for democracy, tolerance, progress, science, indoor plumbing and free pizza delivery, i.e., in a word, to the modern world.  The problem with McGrath's grandiloquent theory, in my opinion, is that you can't actually spot it in practice when you look at actual history. What actual history looks like is that each Protestant church/denomination/pastor has its own magisterial authority and is as quick to excommunicate and suppress divergent interpretations as they Protestants to allege against Catholicism, up to and including killing those who disagree with the interpretation preferred by the given Protestant church/denomination/pastor (although, admittedly, not so much in the last 300 years more or less.)

One of the reason why I find the Protestant idea - slogan, really - of "private interpretation" to be so problematic are things like this:

A fiery debate has erupted over a leading Southern Baptist apologist's questioning of Matthew 27. The question: whether Matthew's reference to many saints rising from their graves after Jesus' resurrection might not be literal history.


The theological war of words, spurred by high-profile open letters and retorts on the Internet, has raised questions about the meaning of biblical inerrancy. It has also led to the departure of Michael Licona as apologetics coordinator for the North American Mission Board (NAMB).

At issue is a passage of Licona's 700-page The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach, published in 2010 by InterVarsity Press.

"Based on my reading of the Greco-Roman, Jewish, and biblical literature, I proposed that the raised saints are best interpreted as Matthew's use of an apocalyptic symbol communicating that the Son of God had just died," said Licona, former research professor of New Testament at Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina. Licona voluntarily resigned from the seminary on October 4 after the print version of this article went to press.

In a series of open letters posted online, Norman Geisler, distinguished professor of apologetics at Veritas Evangelical Seminary in Murrieta, California, objected to Licona's characterizing the passage as a "strange little text." Geisler accused Licona of denying the full inerrancy of Scripture. He also called for Licona to recant his interpretation, labeling it "unorthodox, non-evangelical, and a dangerous precedent for the rest of evangelicalism."

In a 2,800-word blog post, Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, praised Licona's book as "virtually unprecedented in terms of evangelical scholarship" and "nothing less than a masterful defense of the historicity of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead."

Yet Mohler devoted most of the post to criticizing what he called Licona's "shocking and disastrous argument" concerning the bodily resurrection of the saints.

Licona replied to Geisler that additional research has led him to re-examine his position. "At present I am just as inclined to understand the narrative … as a report of a factual (i.e., literal) event as I am to view it as an apocalyptic symbol," Licona wrote.

In the wake of the controversy, a number of leading evangelical scholars came to Licona's defense—some publicly, others privately.

"I know a good number of evangelical seminary professors who have privately expressed support for Mike Licona but cannot do so publicly for fear of punitive measures," said Paul Copan, an apologist and president of the Evangelical Philosophical Society.

And this is a good point, and the reason why the claim to submtting to the "bible alone" is a great slogan, but makes no sense in practice:

Daniel B. Wallace, New Testament professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, said he disagrees with Licona's interpretation but considers the issue hermeneutical, not a challenge to biblical inerrancy.


"If we view our own interpretation to be just as inerrant as the Scriptures," he said, "this could ironically elevate tradition and erode biblical authority."

Wallace is both right and wrong. To say that someone, anyone, is wrong in their interpretation of the Bible is to say that your interpretation is right, and, therefore, your interpretation is necessarily the correct interpretation of the Bible and, as such, your interpretation is inerrant and, dare we say it, infallible.  But Wallace is wrong if he thinks that he can ever separate a text from interpretation.  Apart from a trivial claim that they exist as physical structures, texts do not exist except to the extent that they interact with a mind. The purpose of a text is to interact with the mind. If a text is not interacting with a mind, then it is no more a text than a rock is a text.  That means that texts are texts only insofar as they are interpreted.

So, just as "words are not crystals with fixed, invariant meaning; words are the living skin of thought," texts are the living skin of thought, and, therefore, getting the interpretation right is getting the text right. Moreover since we interpret in light of a tradition, getting the interpretative tradition right is important.

Saying that all interpretations equally right in order to avoid elevating tradition means that saying that a text is "inerrant" and "sufficient" is absolutely meaningless. Inerrant how? Sufficient in what way? "Inerrancy," "sufficiency" and "perspicuity" may be great slogans, but in practice if there is no interpretative tradition that is sufficiently trustworthy to make the inerrancy, sufficiency and perspicuity of the text known, they are meaningless words.

According to Christian Smith in "Making the Bible Impossible," Evangelicals find themselves in a state of cognitive dissonance between theory and practice.

n.b. - the actual quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes is -

"A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used."

Amazon Review

The French Wars of Religion, 1562-1629 (New Approaches to European History) by Mack P. Holt.

Mack P. Holt's "The French Wars of Religion" brings clarity and order to a historical narrative that can all too easily collapse into confusion. After all, when the penultimate act of the narrative is something known as "The War of the Three Henries," the prospect of losing a reader in the details is a constant threat.


What struck me about Holt's narrative was how "Shakespearian" the events of the French Wars of Religion were, with one generation seeking revenge for an atrocity of a previous generation, only to reap the whirlwind of their own atrocities in a later age. Thus, in the 1563, Francis, Duke of Guise, was assassinated during the siege of Orleans. The Guise suspected Admiral de Coligny of masterminding the assassination and pursued a vendetta against de Coligny, culminating in a botched assassination attempt in Paris in 1572. Because this failure threatened to touch of another round of civil war, the Guise involved themselves in a treacherous and cowardly "decapitation strike" against the Protestant Huguenot leaders in Paris, which included pulling Coligny out of bed and murdering him. This was the match to a powder keg of religious tribalism in Paris and twelve Catholic controlled communities with sizeable Huguenot minorities, known to history as the St. Bartholomew's Massacres. By the time that the massacres ended, there were 3,000 Huguenot dead in Paris and 2,000 in the provinces. The Guise were to get repaid in kind in December of 1588, when King Henry III invited the leader of the Guise, the latest Duke Henry (one of the "Three Henries") and his uncle, a Cardinal of the Catholic Church, to his chambers, where King Henry III without "telegraphing his punch" had Duke Henry ambushed and murdered by his guard, and the Cardinal imprisoned. Two days later, Henry III had the Cardinal murdered, the bodies of the Duke and the Cardinal hacked to bits and burned and scattered to the winds, whereupon the Henry III went off to Christmas Mass. Henry III was repaid in his turn in August of 1589 when a Jacobin monk named Jacque Clement assassinated Henry III, and, thereby, extinguished the Valois line and promoted the last of the Henries - Henry Bourbon, the Huguenot King of Navarre and the successor of Henry III - to the throne, as well as establishing the Bourbon dynasty, which would last in France until the 19th Century - after an interruption on account of the French Revolution - and would be re-established in Spain in the 20th Century.

Shakespearian, indeed, as well as a fruitful source for contemplating the irony of history. If it wasn't history, it would make an exciting story. Also, when I consider the twists of fate caused by ill-time deaths - three of the four Valois sons would ascend to the throne and die relatively young during this period - as well as the breaking and remaking of alliances, and the fact that there were 8 separate wars, which were punctuated by peace treaties determined by who was doing better at the time that hostilities were ended, the history reminded me of the English War of the Roses.

As a Catholic, I appreciated the even-handedness of Holt's account. Histories of the religious conflicts of the Reformation era are typically written by Protestants, who find it too easy to portray the Protestant cause as the forces of historical progress against superstition and oppression. Holt's account is even-handed so that it is possible to see that there was a cycle of actions and reactions by people who found themselves in a situation where they felt provoked by their understanding of what it meant to be a community. Holt's thesis is that religion was defined by community, more than by beliefs, and that for both sides, it wasn't clear how to define people who were not part of one's own community. Notwithstanding Protestant apologists for whom the Huguenots were just liberty seeking folks who wanted to be left alone, this was clearly a problem for both sides. Although Holt simply mentions it in passing, several of the negotiated peace treaties called for the Protestants to permit the re-institution of Catholic religious practices in the cities and towns they held. It would seem that both sides had similar attitudes toward non-conforming religious practices.

I was also fascinated by the constant theme of the sacral nature of the French monarchy, which required the monarch to defend the Catholic faith as part of a vow made upon his coronation. Thus, when on the Day of the Placards, Protestants published and posted blasphemies against the Eucharist throughout France, it was inevitable that the King would react. Similarly, when Henry IV abjured Protestantism in order to assume the throne, he too saw it as part of his core mission to bring the Protestants back into the Catholic Church because of the sacral nature of the monarchy.

I was surprised by Holt's sympathetic depiction of Henry IV. I had believed that Henry IV had said something like "Paris is worth a mass" in reference to his decision to abjure Protestantism. I had viewed that decision as a cynical political ploy. Holt's interpretation is that Henry IV had proven his religious sincerity too often for us to assume that he was a religous cynic. In addition, Henry's subsequent conduct in trying to encourage nobles to return to Catholicism is positive evidence of his sincerity. In any event, Henry IV comes across as the most admirable person to emerge from this conflict.

Holt describes the Machievellian intrigues of the eight wars of religion, as well as the effect that the wars had on the peasantry. Holt spends a chapter describing the desultory ending of the religious wars as Henry IV's son, Louis XIII and his chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, finally brought the Protestants "state within a state" to an end in the 1620s. The Huguenots would continue to co-exist with the Catholics until the 1680s, when in a final bit of historical irony, Louis XIV, the grandson of Henry IV, the great champion of the Protestant cause, would revoke the Henry's Edict of Nantes and exile Huguenots from France.

In sum, Holt's account is a well-written and very interesting account of a fascinating period.

How's that policy of promoting inclusiveness working out for you?

Episcopal Church announces that its membership level is the lowest in 70 years.

New statistics from the Episcopal Church show the group's loss of more than 200,000 members and 300 parishes between 2006 and 2010, bringing membership to its lowest since the 1930s.


In an Oct. 22 blog entry, commentator David Virtue noted that if the U.S. branch of the Anglican Communion continues to lose active members at the present rate, then “in 26 years there will no longer be anyone attending an Episcopal church.”

Virtue made his prediction based on figures showing five years of consistent decline in average Sunday worship attendance, as well as total membership and number of parishes, in the Episcopal Church.

The official “Episcopal Domestic Fast Facts Trends 2006-2010” document showed a 16 percent decline in members since 2000.

The denomination has lost an average of 25,798 Sunday worshipers each year since 2006, bringing the total of U.S. Episcopal worshipers on a given Sunday to 657,831 in 2010. Overall, the Sunday attendance rate in Episcopal communities has declined by 23 percent since 2000.

With a total membership of 1,951,907 in 2010, the Episcopal Church has reached its lowest rate of membership since the 1930s. According to the Association of Religion Data Archives, the mainline Protestant denomination last reported having less than 2 million members in 1939.

Episcopalianism peaked numerically in 1959 with more than 3.4 million members. Since 1968, however, it has lost over one third of its membership.

That is an absolute decline.  The relative decline is absolutely staggering in the face of the quadrupling of the United States population during the Twentieth Century.

But, of course, according to the lady who runs the Episcopal Church in the United States, the decline is a design feature of Episcopalianism.  According to the Rt. Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori :

Episcopalians tend to be better-educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than some other denominations. Roman Catholics and Mormons both have theological reasons for producing lots of children… . We encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion.

So, in post-modern parlace, "be fruitful and multiply" means joining the voluntary human extinction movement.

If you too want to see your church become extinct, by all means ordain women and make homosexuality a lifestyle option for your clergy.

In 2012, let's shut the Protestants out of government.

2012 Decoded talks about a Mormon- Catholic ticket:

A Mormon-Catholic Ticket Would be Groundbreaking and Typically American


When Elena Kagan was sworn in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court in 2010, it was an historic event: For the first time in American history, there was no Protestant member of the nation's' highest court.

Could 2012 be a presidential ticket of a major party without a protestant?

Were Mitt Romney to be the Republican presidential nominee and were he to choose a Catholic running mate--say, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. or New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie--that would seem to be such an event. Of course, the Obama-Biden ticket was historically WASP-free, an African-American attendee of the United Church of Christ--until the Jeremiah Wright controversy church--and a Roman Catholic.

 Right now, the Supreme Court is 7-2 Catholic/Jewish, the Speaker of the House is Catholic, the Senate Majority leader is Mormon, the Veep is Catholic - a bad Catholic, but nonetheless still in the Catholic column - and the President is...well, who knows what he is.

This saying something deeply significant about Protestant culture, but I'm not sure what exactly it is.

66 or 73?

What text? Whose tradition?

Francis Beckwith on the canon:

This led to two other tensions. First, in defense of the Protestant Old Testament canon, I argued, as noted above, that although some of the Church’s leading theologians and several regional councils accepted what is known today as the Catholic canon, others disagreed and embraced what is known today as the Protestant canon. It soon became clear to me that this did not help my case, since by employing this argumentative strategy, I conceded the central point of Catholicism: the Church is logically prior to the Scriptures. That is, if the Church, until the Council of Florence’s ecumenical declaration in 1441, can live with a certain degree of ambiguity about the content of the Old Testament canon, that means that sola scriptura was never a fundamental principle of authentic Christianity.


After all, if Scripture alone applies to the Bible as a whole, then we cannot know to which particular collection of books this principle applies until the Bible’s content is settled. Thus, to concede an officially unsettled canon for Christianity’s first fifteen centuries seems to make the Catholic argument that sola scriptura was a sixteenth-century invention and, therefore, not an essential Christian doctrine.

Second, because the list of canonical books is itself not found in Scripture – as one can find the Ten Commandments or the names of Christ’s apostles – any such list, whether Protestant or Catholic, would be an item of extra-biblical theological knowledge. Take, for example, a portion of the revised and expanded Evangelical Theological Society statement of faith suggested (and eventually rejected by the membership) by two ETS members following my return to the Catholic Church. It states that, “this written word of God consists of the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments and is the supreme authority in all matters of belief and behavior.”

But the belief that the Bible consists only of sixty-six books is not a claim of Scripture, since one cannot find the list in it, but a claim about Scripture as a whole. That is, the whole has a property – i.e., “consisting of sixty-six books,” – that is not found in any of the parts. In other words, if the sixty-six books are the supreme authority on matters of belief, and the number of books is a belief, and one cannot find that belief in any of the books, then the belief that Scripture consists of sixty-six particular books is an extra-biblical belief, an item of theological knowledge that is prima facie non-biblical.

For the Catholic, this is not a problem, since the Bible is the book of the Church, and thus there is an organic unity between the fixing of the canon and the development of doctrine and Christian practice.

If only the Catholic Church ordained women priests, if only it would become more tolerant of homosexuality, then it could reach out to everyone and enjoy the same spirit-filled growth ....

... as the Episcopal Church.

THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH: Latest Statistics Show Continued Denominational Decline


TEC will be out of business in 26 years figures reveal

2010 attendance figures for the Episcopal Church reveal a denomination in steep decline.


Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) in 2009 was 682,963. In 2010, ASA was 657,831, a decrease of 25,132.

The 10-year change in attendance has seen a decrease of 23%.

57% of all churches have lost more than 10% of their attendees in the last 5 years.

Median attendance per church has gone from 72 in 2006 to 65 in 2010, pushing many more churches below the threshold of the required number of attendees to support running a parish and to pay clergy.

54% of churches had fewer people attending in 2010 vs. 2009. Annual attendance declines are accelerating across the board.

The decline was 3% in 2006, 2008, and 2009. It was 5% in 2007 and is now back at 4% for 2010. This points to a widespread decline across the whole church.

The decline cannot be blamed on a few churches/dioceses leaving the denomination.

The gospel of lawsuits doesn't seem to be winning any converts and is slowly hemorrhaging viable dioceses. Active homosexual laity, priests and two bishops have failed to draw in anticipated crowds.

Inerrancy - What about those saints in Matthew 27?

Apologianick at Deeper Waters is tracking the ongoing debate between Mike Licona and Norm Geisler on whether the resurrection of the saints mentioned in Matthew 27 was an allegorical vibration from apocalyptic literature or whether it was really and truly something that happened. Licona holds to the former position and Geisler holds to the latter.  (Nick is invested in the issue because Licona is his wife's father.)

Here is a further post on the issue, which includes a letter signed by various bible scholars who opine that Licona's position does not conflict with the doctrine of "biblical inerrancy," which, if that's true, makes literalism and fundamentalism a whole lot less literal than it has previously been.

Baptizing in the name of the Source and the Servant and the Guide.

Huh?

There seems to be some ecumenical document between the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and various Reformed Christian denominations, including the United Church of Christ.  The document notes that the Catholic Church will not recognize baptismal formulas which are not the Trinitarian formula found in Matthew 28:19 - 20, i.e., "the Father, Son and Holy Spirit."

But dealing with Protestants is like herding cats, even - strangely - when it comes to adhering to "biblical" language.  According to UCC pastor Chuck Currie:

I do not use the traditional language of "Father, Son and the Holy Spirit" during baptism as I try to refrain from using gender specific language for God in most cases. You can download the basic outlines of the baptism liturgy that I use here to see what language I do incorporate.


Actions taken by the General Synod of the United Church of Christ speak to but not for the local church. Therefore, as a minister in the UCC I am not bound by any agreement made regarding baptism and may (and will) continue to use the language that I currently do. Inclusive language is important in theology and a important trait of many UCC congregations and our denomination as a whole. None of this is to say that I am opposed to the agreement. Ecumenical agreements are important and when and where Christians can find unity it is important to foster those relationships.

Currie's preferred baptismal formula is to baptize in the name of the "Source, Servant and Guide."

*Yuck*

How many things are theologically wrong with that formulation?

1.  It denies the integral relationships which make up the Trinity.  Is a servant necessarily begotten?  Is a servant begotten by a source?  What's the relationship of a "guide" to a servant or a source, or vice versa?

These aren't abstract questions.  They go directly to the heart of orthodox Christianity.  Deny the relationship between the persons of the Trinity - such that the Father begets the Son and Son is begotten by the Father and the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (or through the Son, if you swing in the Eastern Orthodox direction), and you've got polytheism, not Trinitarianism.

2.  It denies the equality of the persons of the Trinity.  Orthodox Christianity affirms that each person of the Trinity is equal to each other.  While the notion of "Father" and "Son" gestures at an inequality, such inequality is not logically inherent in the two terms.  "Servant", on the other hand, cannot logically be anything other unequal to the Father (and maybe the Spirit.)

Do that and you have moved in the direction of an Arianism that posits that the Son is a lesser being.

3.  It gestures at Modalism.  Father, Son and Spirit are mutually exclusive, but Source, Servant and Guide are not.  What happens to the concept of "person" when the divine persons are reduced to a job description.

4.  It's not biblical.  Matthew 28:19 - 20 affirms that Christ instructed that disciples followers be baptized as follows:

18. Then Jesus approached and said to them, "All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me.


19 Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit,

20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.

It seems like a poor trade just to be politically correct.

In America, even the Catholics are Protestants.

If only the New Atheists were as honest as the Catholic Archbishop of Denver.

For their own purposes, a traditional New Atheist trope is to deny that the America was founded by Christians as a Christian nation.  They go so far as to cite to the obscure "Treaty of Tripoli" where some diplomats diplomatically pointed out that the American government was not framed as an explicitly Christian nation, and, so, had no dispute with Muslims on religions grounds.

But that doesn't deny that the nation was "born Christian" - or, more precisely, Protestant - or that the government didn't grow out of the roots of a particular Protestant ecclesiological practice that involved decentralized, federalized authority.

This is indisputable as Archbishop Chaput recognized in  a recent talk:

“The American model of religious liberty is rooted in the thought-world and idea-architecture of the Christian humanist tradition,” he said. “Whatever it becomes in the future, America was born Protestant.” The archbishop added that he was

not saying that our Protestant heritage is uniformly good. Some of the results clearly are good: America’s culture of personal opportunity; respect for the individual; a tradition of religious liberty and freedom of speech; and a reverence for the law. Other effects of Reformation theology have been less happy: radical individualism; revivalist politics; a Calvinist hunger for material success as proof of salvation; an ugly nativist and anti-Catholic streak; a tendency toward intellectual shallowness and disinterest in matters of creed; and a nearly religious, and sometimes dangerous, sense of national destiny and redemptive mission.

“The global situation is made worse by the inaction of our own national leadership in promoting to the world one of America's greatest qualities: religious freedom,” he said later in his address. “This is regrettable because we urgently need an honest discussion on the relationship between Islam and the assumptions of the modern democratic state. In diplomacy and in interreligious dialogue we need to encourage an Islamic public theology that is both faithful to Muslim traditions and also open to liberal norms. Shari'a law is not a solution. Christians living under shari'a uniformly experience it as offensive, discriminatory and a grave violation of their human dignity.”

Concerning the continuing decline of mainline Protestantism in America.

There are no Protestants on the Supreme Court, and there are no mainline Protestants running for the GOP nomination.

That could change, but it is certainly evidence of two things: (a) mainline Protestantism has become essentially a liberal project and (b) mainline Protestantism no longer carries the essential cultural influence it once did.

The two are probably related.