Benedict in Erfurt: Is That An Objective Genitive, or a Subjective?

Seen here:

 “It was the error of the Reformation that for the most part we could only see what divided us.”

Why wasn't it, why isn't it, the error of the Papacy? As if division were the most mortal of sins. "For there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you" (1 Cor.11:19).

Ask you, what provocation I have had?

The strong antipathy of good to bad.

When truth, or virtue, an affront endures,

Th' affront is mine, my friend,

and should be yours.

-- Alexander Pope


(I love quoting Pope to the Pope).

Kentucky Baptist Association Boots Queers in August, Calvinists in October

There's hope for the world yet.

Story here:

Frank Page, head of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee, recently identified the growing influence of Calvinism -- also called Reformed Theology or the Doctrines of Grace -- as one of the biggest challenges facing the nation’s second-largest faith group.

According to a 2007 study by LifeWay Research, about one in 10 Southern Baptist pastors considered themselves to be five-point Calvinists. Among recent seminary graduates the rate nearly tripled, to 29 percent. Page, a former SBC president elected as the Executive Committee’s CEO last year, said he hears often from churches struggling with the divide between Calvinist and non-Calvinist -- also known as Arminian -– theology.

Debating Mormonism Isn't Remotely Close To Imposing A Religious Test For Public Office

Unless you happen to believe that discussion of religion is speech without protection from the First Amendment.

The question isn't "Can Mitt Romney be president?", because he was born here and is at least 35 years of age. He meets the constitution's test.

But politics imposes a different kind of test than asking "Can he?"

The political question is "Should he be president?"

Some people won't vote for Mitt Romney because he's a flip-flopper on some important issues. Some won't vote for him because he supported TARP. Others won't vote for him because he's a Mormon. Still others won't because of RomneyCare in Massachusetts.

But probably the largest group which won't be voting for Romney will be Democrats, simply because Romney is a Republican. But you won't hear the media's C-students bemoaning that as a stupid reason not to vote for someone.

Ken Connor attempts to clarify the matter here:

"[T]he question remains, 'Are Mormons Christian?' Since Mormons assert that they are, isn't this a fair subject of public debate? Since religious truth claims have eternal consequences, isn't it in the public interest to examine the merits of those claims? The election of a Mormon president will likely do more than any other single event to mainstream Mormonism into American life, with all of the consequences attendant thereto. That being the case, why should the claims of that religion be any more immune from scrutiny than those of any other religion?

"America will be a poorer country when we reach the point where discussions about religion and our eternal destiny can no longer be part of the public dialogue."

Timothy Dalrymple Is A Hypocrite and Terribly Confused

Timothy Dalrymple takes a break from baby care to say he wants it both ways over the characterization of Mormonism as a cult, hurling the term himself at the evangelical followers of Gov. Rick Perry who use it of Mitt Romney's religion, here.

Dalrymple thinks because the term conjures up notions of Koolaid drinkers in the jungle in the popular imagination that Perry's followers shouldn't use it about Mormons:

"[T]he American people associate 'cult' with poisoned Koolaid and the Branch Davidians and Charles Manson.  The implication is that Mitt Romney is a cult member, and we all know cultists are unstable, weird, irrational and subject to control."

Then why speak of "the cult of Rick Perry"?

And why allow the term's meaning to be dictated by common parlance after insisting that words have meanings and people cannot define the truth for themselves?

But my favorite part is this:

Mormons uphold the personal, family and social values I hold dear. ... Mormons have stood fast on abortion and the definition of marriage.

Oh sure. That's why Utah alone still tolerates about 40,000 polygamists, with still more in other western states. Mormons insist those polygamists aren't Mormon, having disavowed polygamy in 1904. Funny then that Mormons get so upset when Christians insist Mormonism isn't Christian.

Utah has a culture of polygamy because of Mormonism. America has a culture of monogamy because of Christianity. What we worship determines who we are and what we are like.

Christianity is a sect of Judaism rejected by the parent. Mormonism is a sect of Christianity rejected by the parent. Good parents know how to say No to their wayward children.

But that no longer seems important to people like Timothy Dalrymple.

Good luck with those diapers, Tim.

Like Evangelicals, Roman Catholics and Methodists Have Problems With Mormonism

As reported here:

For Christians, calling yourself a Christian while not believing that God has always existed as the triune Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is as inconceivable.

This is not simply a conservative evangelical Christian view. Methodists have said "the LDS Church is not a part of the historic, apostolic tradition of the Christian faith." Even Roman Catholics (hardly conservative Protestants) don't recognize LDS baptism.

The problem is that, in America, everybody's an expert: If you say you are xyz, you are xyz. Even though you most definitely, unequivocally, are not xyz.

Russell Kirk once said that Christianity wasn't a failure, it's just that it has never really been tried. Quite the condemnation, that, on Paul, Augustine and Luther among others, when you think about it. Or on Thomas Aquinas.

I'll go him one better, though, since fools rush in where angels fear to tread: Jesus had no disciples in his lifetime, and he's never had any since. He just hasn't been around to correct the record which states otherwise.

At most one might venture to say that Jesus has had imitators who took themselves almost as seriously as he took himself.

But apart from that opinionated air, it is probably more useful for the issue at hand to accept at face value the early observation that "Christian" was in truth an epithet applied by outsiders. It was not originally a term of self-description:

"And in Antioch the disciples were for the first time called Christians" (Acts 11:26).

Jews in particular understood believers in Jesus like Paul to be members of a sect of Judaism, a cult if you will, which was not officially recognized, in a way similar to how Christians today do not recognize Mormonism, which borrows from Christianity quite freely and builds something new on it.

Interestingly enough, the self-designation which Paul mentions in referring to this fact is follower of "The Way":

"But this I admit to you, that according to the Way, which they call a sect, I worship the God of our fathers, believing everything laid down by the law or written in the prophets" (Acts 24:14).

That self-description goes back directly to the teaching of Jesus:

"Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide [is] the gate, and broad [is] the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait [is] the gate, and narrow [is] the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it" (Matthew 7:13f.).

For Paul, those belonging to "the few" became an increasingly larger number beyond just the lost sheep of the house of Israel:


"Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into [any] city of the Samaritans enter ye not: But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel" (Matthew 10:5f).

But there Paul did go, and the rest, as they say, is history. Which I think goes a little way toward explaining religious innovation in our own time, Mormon innovation included.

William McGurn Must Be A Shill For The Homosexual Lobby

To William McGurn for The Wall Street Journal, Christian evangelical objections to the heretical theology of Mitt Romney's Mormonism are equivalent to incidents of homosexual intimidation and violence against Mormonism, except McGurn never mentions the words "homosexual" or "gay" when referencing these attacks, all of which were committed against Mormons by queers, and queer lovers, not Christians, here:

[F]ar more alarming for Mormons are the attacks on Mormon property and Mormon livelihoods just three years ago that registered barely a peep among the same media now so obsessed with Mr. Jeffress. These attacks happened during the 2008 campaign in California over Proposition 8, a state referendum to ban same-sex marriage. When opponents of the measure found that Mormons had contributed heavily to its passage, ugly attacks followed.

LDS temples in Los Angeles and Salt Lake City received envelopes filled with white powder, provoking an anthrax scare. A Book of Mormon was burned outside an LDS chapel in Denver. Other Mormon chapels were vandalized.

Individuals fared even worse. The head of the Los Angeles Film Festival was forced to resign after his contribution was made public. Ditto for a fellow Mormon who ran the California Musical Theater. A former gold medalist who served as U.S. chef de mission for the 2012 Olympic Games in London likewise stepped down. A 67-year-old woman who had donated just $100 stopped working at the restaurant her mother owned to spare it further protest.

If William McGurn had any integrity, he'd admit that Republicans are giving Mormon candidates more than a fair hearing, while Christians welcome Mormon support against the real enemies of America, like homosexuals, but stake their claim against Mormon candidates on the political issues and especially on their propensity to flip-flop on them, which looks like a feature of their religion, as was the case historically both with respect to polygamy and to the status of black people.

What leaves readers wondering is why William McGurn works so hard to hide the homosexuals' attacks on Mormonism, and conflate those attacks with the First Amendment speech of evangelical Christians and Republicans.

We notice there is no Mormon running for president in the Democrat Party. But there might be a Muslim secular humanist.

Rod Dreher is Really Full of It

Rod Dreher gets all uppity, here, searching as he does the innermost thoughts and secrets of the human heart:

So many times I’ve heard Catholics and Orthodox both, when talking about the scandals within these churches, quickly dismissing the deep and complex evils embedded within the lives of the two churches by making some easy reference to the wheat and the tares, or complaining that the media doesn’t see all the good things the church does, etc. That sort of thing. And it’s true! But these are statements that the people who make them typically haven’t earned the right to make, because they have never seriously looked at and thought about the kinds of things that exist within these churches (and all churches) that would lead someone to lose faith. Tom Breen has done that. That he could not only hold on to his faith, but actually find his faith by so doing, is a testament to the man’s character, and to the grace of God.

Nice riff on the human will cooperating with the spirit of God there Rod. I'd be more impressed by an involuntary conversion like that of Saul of Tarsus, which no one in any denomination seems very interested in talking about.

And just why isn't it a testament to their character who lose faith? Perhaps because for you that's impossible a priori? Because for you it is in principle impossible for the faithless to look seriously and think seriously and reach the conclusion not to believe?

Isn't the point of both experiences that human character is not absolute and not eternal and completely contingent, and something of a mystery to us? Isn't the point that it's not a conclusion?

Like it or not, "The soul that sinneth, it shall die" (Ezekiel 18), you and me, and everyone else, serious or not.

The Devil's Dictionary Turns 100

Stefany Anne Golberg for The Smart Set here attempts to rescue Ambrose Bierce from the clutches of "an animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be."

I rather think she does:

There’s a connection between the Devil and the word that goes back to the original Greek diábolos, which means “slanderer” or “accuser.” Bierce knew all too well the demons that lurk in our language. He wrote that the cynic sees things as they are, but also wrote that they ought to be otherwise. This is another way of saying that the cynical writer’s role is to bring the message of goodness. For only a writer who had known evil could channel virtue from the arms of the Devil and bring it back to humans. Bierce attacked goodness precisely because he believed in it, not because he didn’t. He attacked faith because he had lost it. It’s notable that a definition for God is missing from The Devil’s Dictionary. It’s as if Bierce was saying, anyone who wants to know about God should read the Bible, but anyone who wants to know humanity should read this.