“For Presbyterians of all others to discount the perpetual danger from Romanism is thoroughly thoughtless and rash. We believe that the Christianity left by the apostles to the primitive church was essentially what we now call Presbyterian and Protestant. Prelacy and popery speedily began to work in the bosom of that community and steadily wrought its corruption and almost its total extirpation. Why should not the same cause tend to work the same result again? Are we truer or wiser Presbyterians than those trained by the apostles? Have the enemies of truth become less skillful and dangerous by gaining the experience of centuries? The popish system of ritual and doctrine was a gradual growth, which, modifying true Christianity, first perverted and then extinguished it. Its destructive power has resulted from this: that it has not been the invention of any one cunning and hostile mind, but a gradual growth, modified by hundreds or thousands of its cultivators, who were the most acute, learned, selfish, and anti-Christian spirits of their generations, perpetually retouched and adapted to every weakness and every attribute of depraved human nature, until it became the most skillful and pernicious system of error which the world has ever known. As it has adjusted itself to every superstition, every sense of guilt, every foible and craving of the depraved human heart, so it has travestied with consummate skill every active principle of the Gospel. It is doubtless the ne plus ultra of religious delusion, the final and highest result of perverted human faculty guided by the sagacity of the great enemy.”
Robert L Dabney
The attractions of Popery
Could it be that one reason people are moving to Rome and EO is because what they are envisioned as doing is pursuing a continuity with a storied past? Could the move away from Protestantism be due to the fact that such a move is the new counter-culture move? Protestantism is seen as irrelevant because it represents all that is shallow, disposable, and unworthy about our current moment.
People want gravitas again and the smells and bells of Rome and EO give them that.
Now, of course, we few Protestants who never took up the worship as a bad rock concert or the sermons as 10 minute self help talks or who never viewed the congregation as a Brothel from which ambitious ministers might have their pick have always known Rome and EO is all promise with no fulfillment and so we know there will be no fulfillment for those traipsing to Rome and EO.
But, in our hearts of hearts we understand that the flight to Rome or EO by the hoi polloi is likely not going to be any worse for their souls and lives then the rancid miasma they are fleeing from. Despite that being so we have a need to be responsible and warn people off of Rome and EO as being dangers to their souls. This needs to be said repeatedly as we now have platformed Protestants out there (Joel Webbon comes to mind) who are suggesting that Rome is a better poison than the poison of the Cultural Marxists. Poison is poison and we cannot make peace with any poison that will kill us dead.
I have no doubt that many in the confederation of Rome or EO share values with biblical Christians that many in the Evangelical/Reformed/R2K world do not share given how degenerate the Evangelical/Reformed/R2K world has become but those shared values do not translate into a shared faith, religion, or God.
Beware Rome … Beware EO.
The technological environment forms an occult substratum for all cultural, religious, and intellectual trends.
There is a reason the Reformation was contemporaneous with the print revolution. Literacy itself — especially the hyper-literacy of a print-dominated society — fosters a culture of private thought and independent judgment.
Non-literate or semi-literate cultures are prone to mysticism and locked in tradition. The private self is submerged in communal identity.
Appearances to the contrary, Western man no longer inhabits the world of letters. That world has been replaced by the resonant hum of electronic media, recreating something analogous to the traditional, tribal mindset. You sense it everywhere — this yearning for community and continuity. We long to escape the private prison of our own minds, to be taken up in something greater.
Sadly, the Reformed and Evangelical churches absorbed the utilitarian attitudes of the 19th century and are still saddled with that baggage. As such they are ill-suited to the emerging sensibilities of a post-literate world.
This is a factor in the movement of young men to join the Eastern church. It is not rooted so much in formal theology as it is in the dialectical tension between the utilitarian ethic that builds technology and the pseudo-mystical noosphere generated by said technology.
It is this same tension that is tearing apart the psyche of Western civilization.
EXCELLENT ADAM
Thank you for leaving that comment!
See
Marshal McLuhan — The Medium is the Massage
Neil Postmen — Amusing Ourselves To Death
Neil Postmen – Technopoly
Jacques Ellul — Propaganda
Roger Whittaker — Why Johnny Can’t Think
Documentary
The Century of the Self
On the basis of T.S. Eliot’s highest encomium, I’ve been reading Dante’s Divine Comedy in its entirety. I confess that there’s much of it that goes over my head with classical allusions that weren’t a part of my modern education. (Eliot warned that those without a knowledge of Greek and Latin would be missing a lot).
Still, I came across these very striking lines that are all the more so in light of the fact they were written about 200 years before the Reformation while also describing quite well most of the Protestant churches of today:
Dante, ‘Paradiso’, Canto XXIX (Longfellow translation)
Christ did not to his first disciples say,
‘Go forth, and to the world preach idle tales,’
But unto them a true foundation gave;
And this so loudly sounded from their lips,
That, in the warfare to enkindle Faith,
They made of the Evangel shields and lances.
Now men go forth with jests and drolleries
To preach, and if but well the people laugh,
The hood puffs out, and nothing more is asked.
But in the cowl there nestles such a bird,
That, if the common people were to see it,
They would perceive what pardons they confide in,
For which so great on earth has grown the folly,
That, without proof of any testimony,
To each indulgence they would flock together.
By this Saint Anthony his pig doth fatten,
And many others, who are worse than pigs,
Paying in money without mark of coinage.
But since we have digressed abundantly,
Turn back thine eyes forthwith to the right path,
So that the way be shortened with the time.
How apropos!
Thanks Ron!
The historical tradition claims that the Russians originally converted to Eastern Orthodoxy because they were so impressed by the “smells and bells” they saw in the gorgeous churches of Constantinople. This denomination relies heavily on outward aesthetic appeal.
I get the desire for aesthetic appeal and I am not an iconoclast. However, to far is to far.
Thank you Viisaus
One thing the EOs do NOT excel in is systematic theology. Before the Vatican II, it was common for RC polemicists to make belittling comments about what a disorganized jumble the EO theology was, both in theory and practice – like here:
https://archive.org/details/orthodoxeasternc00fort/page/108/mode/2up
“As always happens to people who have not gone far into the matter, they rather inclined to the opposite of St. Augustine’s system, to loose and kindly principles which, if driven out of their vagueness, would become semi-Pelagian. St. John Chrysostom is an example of this. He did not intend to formally discuss the matter, he had never heard of Pelagianism, and was concerned to defend free will against Manichaeism. He does in many places maintain the need of grace for every good deed,2 but he also, inconsistently, in other places uses such expressions as ”We must first choose what is right, and then God will do his part,”3 expressions that would be inconceivable in Augustine. This want of definiteness about Grace and Predestination has always been a note of the Eastern Church. Long after the schism, in 1575, when the Tübingen Protestants sent an exposition of their belief to Jeremias II of Constantinople (1572-1579), the Patriarch in his answer to their Calvinism teaches pure semi-Pelagianism.4″
https://archive.org/details/orthodoxeasternc00fort/page/420/mode/2up
“All the Greek-speaking Orthodox rebaptize any convert who comes to them from the Latins or Protestants. But the Church of Russia has officially declared that she has no such doubt and that she will not do so.6 Of course, if our baptism is not valid we can have no valid Sacraments, our Orders, Penance, and Eucharist are alike vain. So it would hardly seem worth while making so much fuss about our form of Consecration. Only in this point again one has to notice the vagueness and inconsistency of their ideas. All through their theology one is struck by an indefiniteness and a want of method that would be inconceivable to Catholic theologians.”
https://archive.org/details/orthodoxeasternc00fort/page/422/mode/2up
“The Orthodox believe that the grace of holy orders, like that of confirmation, may be entirely lost through heresy or schism. This fact, besides our doubtful baptism, would make our orders invalid. And there are cases in which they have reordained not only Latin priests, but even Uniates who had received holy orders according to exactly the same form as the Orthodox.5 But the Russians have declared that they recognize our orders as well as our baptism, and that they will neither rebaptize nor ordain Latins.6 Nor do any of the Orthodox really straightforwardly say that all our orders are invalid. It would be rather too wild a statement, and in this point, once more, they have not quite the courage of their convictions. They do not seriously make this charge against us in their controversy1—it would be a very much more serious one than the Filioque, Azyme bread, or celibacy, and, as far as my experience goes, the average Orthodox theologian, if directly asked about it, hesitates, is obviously embarrassed,2 and eagerly turns the conversation on to our creed-tampering habits. He will talk about that without end. Really in the questions of our baptism and holy orders they do not know what they believe. They often repeat both Sacraments to Latin converts, apparently chiefly as a mark of general scorn for Popery; sometimes they do not do so, and they shirk a plain statement about it. Once more, it is quite useless to look for consistent dogmatic theology among them.”
The strict and disciplined theology that both pre-modern RCs and classical Protestants had is alien to the vague and mystical EO mind. They may simply find it too “rationalistic” for their taste.
Generally speaking, Protestant apologists should learn how to “divide and conquer” the RCs and the EOs, by learning their arguments against each other, and use them against them both. For example, they should use the EOs to deflate the RC pretensions of having had harmonious universal empire of faith before the Prods showed up – how big part of Christendom never recognized the bishop of Rome as its spiritual autocrat or the “Vicar of Christ.” And as for the EOs, one of their common-place arguments against Protestantism is that if their view of church history would be true, that would mean that “the gates of Hell have triumphed against the church”, if there had really been such a massive apostasy in the Middle Ages. Well, if they take the serious view (like hardcore EOs should be expected to do) and consider papalism to be a heresy, that would mean that the great majority of Christendom DID fall away in medieval times, even by their own standards.
Here is an example of EO polemic against Western forms of Christianity – when you think about it, it makes perfect sense for EOs to conclude that there must have been already something deeply wrong about the RC civilization for such a downfall as the Reformation to happen “under their watch,” so to speak – Fyodor Dostoevsky also thought so:
http://orthodoxinfo.com/inquirers/papism.aspx
“Essentially, Protestantism is nothing other than a generally applied papism. For in Protestantism, the fundamental principle of papism is brought to life by each man individually. After the example of the infallible man in Rome, each Protestant is a cloned infallible man, because he pretends to personal infallibility in matters of faith. It can be said: Protestantism is a vulgarized papism, only stripped of mystery (i.e., sacramentality), authority and power.”