Ochlophobist on Evangelical Influence
The Ochlophobist is a convert to Orthodoxy. He isn’t hesitant to criticize the Americanization of Orthodoxy. Here he addresses it with Catholicism, using as his foil Fr. Jay Scott Newman’s piece on Evangelical Catholicism. A brief tease:
The religious psychology behind the “personal relationship with the Lord Jesus” is among the most interesting religious phenomena in modernity. The notion of the “personal relationship with the Lord Jesus” asserts an unmediated personal relationship between the believer and Jesus, but as we have seen this relationship is in fact mediated via a host of rituals and ritual language. Yet, like the Quaker whose Quaker meetings follow a near exact routine 99.8% of the time, we have a religious psychology here which fervently expresses an intention to deny the role of any ritual in mediating the relationship between the believer and Jesus (in the case of Evangelical Catholicism and Byzantine Rite Evangelicalism the stress is put on the ritual only rightly existing for those who have this Evangelical approach to the faith, as we will see below, and the inference that the ritual cannot be approached rightly unless the ‘heart work’ is done first — there is some truth to this, of course; God save us from things that have some truth). In classic evangelicalism this anti-ritual intent is indeed ritually expressed, such as the mention, frequent and routine, in services of how one cannot be saved via rituals, and a whole sub-lingo of anti-ritualism, the repetitive use of which in religious services is itself ritualistic. In those cases where Evangelicalism has been imported into Catholicism or Orthodoxy there is not an overt anti-ritualism, but there remains either a soft assertion or a clear enough inference that the unmediated “Gospel” oriented “personal relationship with the Lord Jesus” soteriologically precedes the role of ritual acts in mediating God to man. Beyond the anti-ritual aspects of this religious psychology, there is the positive assertion and/or intuition that to engage in these deemed non-ritual ritual acts of the “personal relationship with the Lord Jesus” is to actually engage directly with the Lord Jesus. Oftentimes this is sad yet humourous. So often when you listen to the prayers of a person who has a “personal relationship with the Lord Jesus” you find that the content of those prayers consists mostly of assertions to (reminders to) Jesus of Who He is, which, of course, inevitably mimics the conceptualization of Jesus that the believer (and usually his community of believers) wants Jesus to be, and this form of prayer essentially serves to convince the believer that he or she has a “personal relationship with the Lord Jesus” by means of the mental and emotional construction of a Jesus whom the believer “relates” to by way of those acts which construct said Jesus. Does this sound circular? It is.
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A perceptive take on Evangelicalism.
Of course there is nothing wrong with “a personal relationship with Jesus,” and in some sense a personal response to Jesus and a personal decision to follow him is the foundation of being what we call a Christian. But as with the notion of being “born again,” this notion of having a personal relationship with Jesus can be elevated to a theological principle that crowds out, distorts, and/or ignores a lot of what it has meant to be a Christian since just about day one–a lot of the Gospel and Tradition with the big “T.”
I’ve read a few things here and there about the anti-ritual character of evangelicalism and especially so many of the independent, and often large, conngregations springing up these days. It is a new movement in Christianity, apparently.
I remember a few years ago going for the first time to my parents’ Wesleyan church (they raised me a mainline Methodist). Having been a Catholic for a few years at that point, I was surprised by the nature of the service: There was hardly any form to it: It was a lot of music and some prayer and preaching by the pastor and an altar call. The whole point seemed to be to stir people up emotionally, to give them an experience.
I have to say, what the young preacher preached seemed to me–every time I visited there–to be nothing but the Gospel: a lot of basic stuff about following Christ–repentance, forgiveness, service to others, and so on. So that was encouraging, and really edifying, and made me feel all ecumenical, but as a Catholic I still felt something was missing–the Eucharist, to begin with, and liturgy in general.
I think I have a notion of what is lost when the Sunday Eucharist is dispense with, but I wonder what Ochlophobist and others think is lost when liturgy is lost. And are we moderns tending to lose it by some sort of influence of modernity?
Regaring what O. says about telling God what he is like in our prayers, I think we Catholics do that too (check out some of the Mass prayers), and it doesn’t bother me all that much. It seems to me at least a part of prayer as ritual is expressing ourselves about our beliefs as a community. But maybe this point does not really contradict O’s point.
I have just read Ochtophlobist’s rant, which maybe I should have done before making the comment above, and then I looked up “tendentious” in the dictionary and found his pciture next to the definition.
Overall the piece leaves the impression of trying as hard as it can to be be as anti-Protestant as possible and as anti-Rome as possible (the ardent Orthodox convert speaks), which it accomplishes by condemning Evangelicalism and showing how Evangelical Catholicism is more or less the same thing.
I would not question O.’s faith and sincerity, but to me he is overly harsh and hyperbolic in his arguments, especially when he tars Fr. Newman with the brush of Calvinism and consumerism.
No, this is not perceptive. That little bit of Feuerbach can just as easily be turned on the language and liturgy of the E.O. or R.C. That is, the ancient liturgies are just projections of the God they (the authors and the followers) “want” to exist.
Furthermore, the motive behind “a personal relationship with Jesus” is not directly anti-ritual — that’s only incidental — rather, the motive is anti “nominal” Christianity. Evangelical faith is thus conceived as a personal crisis and resolution through an affective appropriation of Christ’s sacrifice. Agree or disagree, the polemics against “ritual” have their basis in this vision of the local church as a regenerate community of believers. This community, of course, has its own rituals (patterns of normative behavior), but the anti-ritual polemic was never about “ritual” per se.
He was an Evangelical and a PK, so it wouldn’t be entirely shocking to find he lacks a desire to “find the good” in Evangelicalism. I don’t see how the American Catholic Church can be described as anything other than materialistic. I’m probably sympathetic to the piece because I came back to Catholicism after having found the personal gospel (Just me and Jesus) to not be reflected in scriptures.
Mr. Davis – he addresses nominalism elsewhere in the piece.
MZ,
I do think it is important to “find the good” in Evangelicalism, so I’m glad you use the phrase. Too often in the polemical spirit, as we act and speak as if we are fighting for the Party of God against the Party of Darkness, we do the opposite–looking for the bad to add force to our arguments. I remember what St. Paul wrote: No one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit.
Also we have the precedent of Vatican II. One motive behind Pope John’s convening of the council was precisely to “find the good” in the modern world, including other religions, that the Church could relate to and speak to. And the world, to some degree, responded to this move. A friendly spirit of cooperation and understanding can work. Does polarization and proud opposition ever work, really? Luther said, Here I stand, I can do no other,” and I guess he ultimately helped the Church change in some good ways, but at what price?
Of course, all this is easy for me to say when I myself don’t happen to be in the mood to pick a fight.
Maybe you could expand on the idea that the American Catholic Church is “materialistic.”
M.Z., I totally agree with your statement on materialism and the US catholic church. I believe that the US CC is an extension of the materialism and its reliance on ritualistic structure beginning with the Hierarchy. The grandiosity of ritual expressed to the world betrays the humility and mystery of the Last Supper.
Do current structures that project Catholicism to the world depict a faith based on humility and love or do these structures portray a reliance on the past in which the intellectual elite attempted to create an illusion of humility and false piety while creating a materialistic theology which promoted the rise of intellectualism and reason as the foundation of our faith?
Does our current system promote dying to self or conformity to the past?
I don’t see the issue as structural. I am resigned to there being an elite in this country (and in fact in all countries.) It is much better that that elite contain some clergy than be wholly without. I’m no more offended by a grand bishop’s mansion than I am by the governor’s mansion. Monuments are reflective of what a society values.
As far as the US specifically goes, there are a number of issues. First, many, many parishes have moved toward explicitly charging for religious instruction and the sacraments. When an institution abandons the young, it is difficult to see it as anything but materialistic. The Church is becoming the yuppie couple doting over their puppy. (One could get into parish schools, but I want to offer more nuance there than I will be able to do in this paragraph.) Second, the servicing of the Hispanic population in the states is scandalous, and people don’t seem to care. A parish will gladly donate tens of thousands to ministries in India for the untouchables but will get provincial when it comes to serving the Hispanics in their midst. And finally, there are just the little things. If your parking lot has twice as much square feet as your church, you are serving the wealthy. Yes, the church needs to be where the people are, but in suburbia we are speaking of a people that has intentionally separated itself from society. I’m not sure why the rest of us are made to suffer for their lifestyle choice. Well, actually I am sure, and it has to do with money.
As for me being a disenchanted former Evangelical – a fair enough assumption. We have all met persons who converted more in a sense of converting from than converting to. I think those who have been long-time readers of my blog would defend me here. When I write of my religious upbringing, I almost always write much more that is positive than negative – particularly with regard to the rural Appalachian Baptist culture of my youth, which was an odd mix of Mainlineish Protestantism, fundamentalism, with some holiness mixed in. I went to an Evangelical Bible College, but that, frankly, was almost as foreign to my Baptist upbringing as Orthodoxy is to Evangelicalism. Most of the criticism I make of what has become contemporary Evangelicalism is the same sort you will hear from certain persons within Evangelicalism, or near to it, such as Ken Myers of Mars Hill Audio or perhaps more so the folks at the Nicotine Theological Journal. My father is a communist turned ordained (now long retired) American Baptist pastor whose favorite theologians are Barth, Bonheoffer, and Multmann (with a healthy dose of Kierkegaard in there as well), and he, with my mother, a feminist-dispensationalist who reads Left Behind novels and believes in the rapture but also fiercely defends the ordination of women, etc and will vote for the Democrat until the day she dies, decided to return to the land of my mother’s Appalachian kinfolk in order to do the liberal Evangelical chic working with the poor bit, and there I spent my childhood until age 17. I went on high school missions trips with a Nazarene buddy of mine, and instead of going to Eastern College like I was supposed to in order to study with my father’s friend Ron Sider, I went to a tiny missions training Bible college. My father only let me go because an anthropologist there (who I would later learn was at odds with the school on a host of issues) was a former student of Eugene Nida’s and definitely of the Sojourners reading set within Evangelicalism. I grew up on a critique of popular Evangelicalism, I miraculously was able to affirm that disposition while at a very happy clappy Evangelical Bible college because of that particular prof who remains a mentor to me, and thus I could argue that my current arguments against Evangelicalism are not a disenchantment of my youth, but an instance of still being enchanted. I think that contemporary Evangelical forms and the consumerism and perverse psychology behind them are usually destructive to the human soul (there are anomalies, to be sure). I think that their introduction into American Catholicism and Orthodoxy is most unfortunate. I suppose one might, with some accuracy, assert that I am bringing my old axes into Orthodoxy with me and grinding them anew. Fair enough. But I have known too many cradle Catholics and Orthodox who agree with me to think that if such is the case it renders my arguments to be prejudiced to the point of being untrue.
As for my argument being Feuerbach-lite, I respond ti a similar accusation in the thread. What is not divinely created in the life of the Church is a human construct, sometimes benign, sometimes not. A difference here is that the Catholic or Orthodox admits that his or her ritual is ritual, and the Evangelical does not. Evangelicals think that they have avoided religion and have instead a direct non-religious (in the formal sense) encounter with God. I hold this to be absurd. Evangelicals have rites, rituals, codifications, etc., just as Catholicism and Orthodoxy do. Different Evangelical subgroups stress different rituals, and there is more diversity and malleability of rite than one sees in traditional Catholicism and Orthodoxy, but the ritual functions nonetheless as all religious rituals do. Human beings are incapable of encountering the sacred without ritual. The Evangelical denial of this reflects a horrid theological anthropology, and, say, like Sola Scriptura, is not merely a false notion, but an assertion of something that does not exist – there is no human act of seeking God without ritual, just as there is never an act of Scripture acting or conveying its own authority as there is always a prior authority at work, etc.
Oh, and the suggestion that I am anti-Catholic is nonsense.