The opponents of liberalism will win, but they will not convince; they will conquer, but they will not convert

 

Rick Steves and his new bishop girlfriend are emblematic of what's gone wrong with Tim Walz' Lutheran denomination and with politics in the Pacific Northwest

 Rick is a board member on the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

NORML, get it?

He identifies with liberalism and progressivism.

His Wikipedia entry says he divorced his wife in 2010 and is a fan of liberation theology lol, a 1971 invention of the recently deceased Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Peruvian Catholic Theologian.

LINO. Lutheran in name only.

The word radical occurs only in the title of this essay about J. D. Vance

 I was expecting a juicy exposé of 2019 Catholic convert J. D. Vance's radicalism in Paul Elie's "J. D. Vance's Radical Religion" for The New Yorker, here, but all you get is disappointment and dark insinuation.

If you are hoping to find out if Vance fasts for Lent, makes pilgrimage to Our Lady of Guadalupe, or goes to daily Latin Mass, you won't.

It's mostly an essay specializing in ideological assumptions and guilt by association, written from the sneering point of view of the illiberal ethos which can't believe there is still a religion in America which is thoroughly pro-life in its commitment to the unborn and the elderly, and committed to the sanctity of marriage between men and women.

For example, Paul Elie insinuates that Vance is a "conservative Catholic" just like Supreme Court justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, but never tells us exactly how. Therefore we should be afraid of a coming "top-down ordering of society . . . enshrined through regime change" if Vance advances to the executive branch and cooperates with this Supreme Court cabal.

We're not told what kind of Catholics are justices Roberts and Gorsuch, either, not to mention Sotomayor, or how the other four form a conspiracy against the American nation.

For Paul Elie, what it seems to come down to is that Vance is too buddy buddy with people like Patrick Deneen, whom he asserts to be anti-democratic without evidence:

In 2023, Vance took part in a discussion at the Catholic University of America with the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen, an advocate of “post-liberalism,” which, he explains in his books “Why Liberalism Failed” and “Regime Change,” is the view that liberalism has become an “invasive progressive tyranny” and so must be replaced by “a conservatism that conserves.” Vance greeted Deneen with a bear hug; during the discussion, Politico reported, Vance “identified himself as a member of the ‘postliberal right’ and said that he views his role in Congress as ‘explicitly anti-regime.’ ” ...

For Deneen, post-liberalism involves elevating “leaders who are part of the elite but see themselves as ‘class traitors’ ready to act as ‘stewards and caretakers of the common good’ ”—and to enact their views on abortion, marriage and divorce, euthanasia, the free exercise of religion, and other issues without the constraints of legal precedent or the democratic process. Evidently, Vance fits the bill. After learning of Trump’s choice of running mate, Deneen, in a statement, called Vance “a man of deep personal faith and integrity, a devoted family man, a generous friend, and a genuine patriot.”

I'm not a fan of the Catholic integralists, nor of the broad influence of Catholicism at the expense of the nation's historic conservative Protestant character either, but I'm not particularly afraid of them, just as I am not afraid of the Christian nationalists.

Mostly they are amusingly grandiose.

These groups represent a reaction to illiberalism, which is what this is really all about. The radicals are the so-called liberals who like to read Paul Elie and subscribe to The New Yorker, who want to suppress speech and suppress religion and its influence and suppress everything about this country's past. This country is about freedom, and freedom is really messy, which is why ideologues of the left and right have so, so much to say against it. 

Freedom really ticks them off.

I'm thoroughly confident that these idealists can blather on all they want and that the American people are still not going to submit to their religious tests for citizenship on the one hand, let alone to their pope on the other. 

The country is just too damn LGBT for that.

 

    

 

Christianity Today Magazine was founded to counter the liberalism of The Christian Century, but now it's become its self-loathing mirror image

The Korean American who wrote this story and fancies herself a person of color spends ZERO time, ZIP, ZILCH, NADA, contemplating the endemic racism of her home country against actual people of color, nor how the supposedly racist West's American heirs numbering over 36,000 bled and died so her home country could be free from communist tyranny, including about 3,400 African Americans.

Instead of fixing what's wrong with her own country she's here telling us what's wrong with ours, and Christianity Today wants you to know it.

Bunch of pompous ingrates.

 

 

Finally, some really good reporting on how American Puritanism became a feature of the political left

 . . . according to Rothman . . . there is “a popular mythology that long ago outlived its usefulness,” he said in a direct Twitter message to Tablet, which “postulates that the vestiges of prudish American puritanism are exclusive to the political right.” Instead, he said, “with the policing and enforcement of moral frameworks again becoming a feature of the left, America’s vestigial puritanism is assuming a form that is far more historically familiar.” ...

“Today,” Rothman said in his message to Tablet, “as the left gravitates away from liberalism and toward progressivism, they are assuming many of progressivism’s conceits—chief among them, a messianic utopianism that views everything, even life’s most banal pleasures, through the prism of political activism.”

More.

Neocon speech writer for George W. Bush, Evangelical Michael Gerson is very angry with his brothers for not being angry, too

Trump should fill Christians with rage. How come he doesn’t?

The Trump movement is

inconsistent with Christianity by any orthodox measure. Yet the discontent, prejudices and delusions of religious conservatives helped swell the populist wave that lapped up on the steps of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. During that assault, Christian banners mixed with the iconography of white supremacy, in a manner that should have choked Christian participants with rage. But it didn’t.    

Is that disqualifying?

Like many of his fellow Christians, Gerson rejects the historical Jesus as eschatological prophet of the end of the world and instead believes in an unfolding, immanentized eschaton which realizes the universal rule of God through the church:

In the present age, [Jesus] insisted, the Kingdom of God would not be the product of Jewish nationalism. It would not arrive through militancy and violence, tactics that would contribute only to a cycle of suffering. Instead, God’s kingdom would grow silently, soul by soul, “among you” and “within you,” across every barrier of nation or race — in acts of justice, peacemaking, love, inclusion, meekness, humility and gentleness.       

Gerson's Trump critique is useful to the political objectives of Washington Post liberalism, but that liberalism all the same knows that his version of Christianity is nothing but a paper tiger, having co-opted its values long ago.

Maybe down deep Gerson knows this also.

He is a life-long sufferer of mental illness:

 

Adventures in Catholic cognitive dissonance: Sainted Pope J2P2 in 2001 gave the red hat to McCarrick, now charged with sex crimes from the '70s

Ex-Cardinal McCarrick charged with sexually assaulting teen

 

Two things are true here.

 

Pope John Paul II indeed made mistakes in these matters. He "covered up" predatory homosexuality in the Roman Catholic Church, and he elevated monsters like McCarrick.

 

Pope Francis, who defrocked McCarrick in 2019, is also out to sully the reputation of the traditionalism and conservatism J2P2 resurrected in the church in response to the liberalism of Vatican II, which Francis supports, most recently shown by his re-imposition of restrictions on the Latin Mass. 

 

The biggest problem for Catholics in our time has been the clash between the sexual revolution and the asceticism required of clergy, which, however, has been a problem since it became required over a thousand years ago.

 

Tradition which ignores the font of it is worthless, and ultimately destructive. The church needs priests who make love to women instead of who fake love with little boys.

 

Do we not have the right to the company of a believing wife, like the other apostles and the Lord's brothers and Cephas?

  

-- I Corinthians 9:5

On the American Protestant origins of liberalism as freedom from Catholicism and the authority of the pope

From a very useful essay by James M. Patterson, "The Dogmatic Rivalry at the Heart of America":

These Protestant outbursts coalesced into a prominent mid-nineteenth century faction called “Nativists,” who found a home in the Whig Party. Nativists tended to come from the artisan classes who were negatively affected by the arrival of Irish working in factories whose cheaper products displaced artisanal work and, hence, added to the animus for the Irish as minions of “popish plots.” In his recent book Liberal Suppression, [Philip] Hamburger charts how Nativists began to use the term “liberal” during this period to refer not merely to a kind of political gregariousness [among rival Protestants] but to an independent from “foreign influence.” To be “liberal,” then was the opposite of being Catholic. Because Americans loved liberty, they had to be Protestant, since Protestants rejected the impositions of foreign princes in favor of native liberty of conscience. Hence, Nativists identified themselves as the “American Party” and their political program as “Americanism.”

The early Nativists were animated by their Protestant enthusiasm, but over time, they moved from religious convictions to political ones. ... Indeed, one of the most shocking conclusions of Hamburger’s work is the direct link between the ideology of the KKK and today’s “humanist” associations. ...

It is no coincidence that the three critics of liberalism considered here are Catholic. Both because of crises in the Catholic Church and because of the rapid social change of the past two decades, Catholic intellectuals have had to improvise an explanation and have found it to be liberalism. It is not so much wrong as incomplete, but it does explain how American Catholics and Protestants have diverged in their evaluation of liberalism. In the recent dustup between Sohrab Ahmari and David French, one saw this tension reach the surface. The Catholic Ahmari, in keeping with the American Catholic tradition, held liberalism in contempt for its failure to defend the common good, but for the Protestant French, liberalism was instrumental to forming a coalition for religious freedom against the external authority of the secular state. French seems not to understand that for much of American history, Protestants used the same argument against Catholics.

Lockean liberalism is in the final analysis a creature of Christianity as universal but benign religion, without which it stands to reason it will not survive

The wonder is that Locke seemed blissfully unaware, or unconcerned, that Islam was not benign and was therefore incompatible with political liberalism because it was a political religion which spread by the sword, not by the dictates of conscience.

The Need for a Revival of Lockean Liberalism:

A manuscript titled “Reasons for Tolerating Papists Equally with Others,” written in Locke’s hand in 1667 or 1668, has just been published for the first time, in The Historical Journal of Cambridge University Press. The document challenges the conventional view that Locke shared the anti-Catholicism of his fellow Protestants. Instead, it offers a glimpse into the radical quality of his political liberalism, which so influenced the First Amendment and the American Founding. “If all subjects should be equally countenanced, & imployed by the Prince,” he wrote, “the Papist[s] have an equall title.” ...

In his first major treatise supporting religious liberty, An Essay Concerning Toleration (1667), Locke constructs an argument, a defense of the rights of conscience, that he will build upon for the rest of his life. He argues that magistrates have no right interfering in religious beliefs that pose no obvious threat to the social order: “In speculations & religious worship every man hath a perfect uncontrolled liberty, which he may freely use without or contrary to the magistrate’s command.” The challenge of accommodating different religious traditions, including Roman Catholicism, is front and center. “If I observe the Friday with the Mahumetan, or the Saturday with the Jew, or the Sunday with the Christian, . . . whether I worship God in the various & pompous ceremonies of the papists, or in the plainer way of the Calvinists,” he wrote, “I see no thing in any of these, if they be done sincerely & out of conscience, that can of itself make me, either the worse subject to my prince, or worse neighbor to my fellow subject.” ...

What Locke found intolerable was not Catholic theology per se but rather the agents of political subversion operating under the guise of religious obedience. As he put it in the newly discovered manuscript: “It is not the difference of their opinion in religion, or of their ceremonys in worship; but their dangerous & factious tenets in reference to the state . . . that exclude them from the benefit of toleration.” On this point, Locke could be as tough on Protestants as he was on Catholics. ...

Political philosopher Greg Forster insightfully observes that Locke “towers over the history of liberalism precisely because virtually everything he wrote was directed at coping with the problem that gave birth to liberalism — religious violence and moral discord.” ...

America’s experiment in human liberty and equality is profoundly Lockean. It is also, in some important respects, deeply Christian. Locke believed that the gospel message of divine mercy — intended for all — implied political liberalism. The founder of Christianity, he wrote, “opened the kingdom of heaven to all equally, who believed in him, without any the least distinction of nation, blood, profession, or religion.”

It would be hard to conceive of a better doctrine on which to build a more just and humane society. A revival of Lockean liberalism would do much to tame the hatreds now afflicting the soul of the West.

A Catholic joins Pope Francis in misunderstanding "ideology" as single issue voting

One Paul Moses, here in Commonweal:

[Bishop Murphy] thus subordinated many other concerns of Catholic social teaching—and signaled to Catholic voters in the two suburban counties on Long Island to do the same. (Murphy was not available for comment in a phone call to his residence.) It was no small matter, given that Catholics are a majority within the diocese’s borders, that polling shows nearly nine in ten of them say religion is “very important” in their lives, and that many are the sort of moderate suburban voters who swing close elections in New York state.

In his apostolic exhortation Rejoice and be glad, Pope Francis warns against elevating any single social issue, including abortion, above all others. He includes this in a passage that assails two “ideologies striking at the heart of the Gospel.” The first is seen in those who elevate the quest for social justice over faith, over openness to grace. The second is found in those who see social engagement as “superficial, worldly, secular, materialist, communist or populist,” he wrote. “Or they relativize it, as if there are other more important matters, or the only thing that counts is one particular ethical issue or cause that they themselves defend.”

Single issue voting is hardly the same thing as "ideology". That is quite simply a terrible simplification of ideology.

What marks out ideological thinking from mere single issue voting is the overarching, undergirding character of an ideology's flight from reality, indeed, its denial of reality, over against those who accept the features of reality which happen to be the impediments to the ideology's realization.

In the case of abortion, the denial of reality is all on the side of its advocates, not its opponents. Its advocates say that the unborn child isn't a child, merely a fetus. And therefore when one terminates a pregnancy one isn't committing murder. To which the opponents reply, If it isn't really alive why do you have to kill it? The hoops one must jump through to deny the evidence plainly in view are self-evident. It's the abortion advocates who are the ideologues, not the advocates for life.

The case is similar with illegal immigration, the real subject of Paul Moses' advocacy. The ideologues deny the reality and legitimacy of nation states, their borders and the rule of law, and redefine the transgressors of same as "migrants" or "strangers" instead of what they really are, "illegals".

One suspects that this attack on single issue voting as ideology is not just another example of the penchant for projection characteristic of human nature when caught in a fault, but of contemporary liberalism generally. Frustrated with an ever intractable reality, the representatives of reality must be marginalized, maligned and disarmed if the liberal agenda is to have any hope of advancement.

Catholics used to be smarter than to fall for this sort of thing.    

An alt-right Jesus, but for Jews only: The rest of us are dogs, whites included

Contra Connor Grubaugh, assistant editor of First Things, here:

Christianity in its original and most animating form is fundamentally incompatible with the Faustian ethic and race-based mythos of the alt-right, just as it is incompatible with the equivocations of liberalism. Orthodoxy is its own mythos—a true one.

These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them, saying, 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.

I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel. ... It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs.

-- Matthew 15:24, 26

The vignette in Acts 10 and 11 proves that the earliest church had assumed on the basis of this original message of Jesus that repentance unto life had not been granted "also to the Gentiles" (Acts 11:18).

Moreover Jesus himself had criticized the missionary zeal of the Pharisees in the outside world:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.

-- Matthew 23:15

Rather than speak of the impossibility of "alt-right Christianity", it seems more like an absolute necessity, however much that makes the faith an anachronism which has precious little to say to our time. The original message of Jesus is thoroughly "race-based", for Jews only.

Or is all this "scripture" to be relegated to the junk heap of history as nothing more than the evil work of Paul's opponents, the Circumcision, tampering with the Word of God?

Isn't "postliberal theology" oxymoronic?

Think about it.

The post-liberals rejected the preeminent role played by reason in the formulation of the modernist interpretation of Christianity, which in its turn had really been a rejection of the pre-modern rationalism of the church in favor of the so-called modern type. 

The post-liberals granted that there was an internal logic to these two interpretations, something liberal theology had been loathe to grant, but rejected the existence of a superintending logic over them all, to which they bare witness.

When one goes this route, one is separating the "logy" from the "theo" in theo-logy and jettisoning it. As a consequence, one can't really speak of a postliberal theology. In rejecting logos one is really rejecting speech and argument itself. One is left with a God about whom nothing can be said.

Had postliberalism been true to itself, however, it never would have come to exist in the first place because it would have understood this imperative to shut up.

The thing post-liberalism claimed was true of others they never quite applied to themselves, namely that the limitations of language and culture made their own truth claims impossible. In seeking to relativize the dogma of others, their own movement became a dogma, but not one successful enough that you can actually look one up in the Yellow Pages under "post-modernist churches" and attend a Sunday, or preferably some other day, service.

What post-liberalism actually does is attract certain personalities from the pre-modern or the modern camps who are susceptible of rejecting reason, Americans caught up in radical individualism being noteworthy examples. This mission field has been white unto harvest, riddled as it is with self-imposed isolation and separation from "community". Some of them doubtless call themselves "nones", and their creed, if they have one, is "Here's to the truth as perceived by you!".

The topic is recently and usefully discussed here at The Blog of Veith.

Creeping liberalism in Southern Baptist Convention accompanied by declining membership

Back to back stories at Real Clear Religion today report on a membership decline in the SBC in 2016 coincidental with the introduction last fall of a new gender-inclusive translation of the Bible:

Southern Baptists Embrace Gender-Inclusive Language in the Bible:  America's largest Protestant denomination has produced a revised translation that incorporates many features it had long condemned

Hundreds of New Churches Not Enough to Satisfy Southern Baptists:  Baptisms are at a 70-year low, while Sunday worshipers are at a 20-year low

The second headline avoids telling the truth up front: Membership is down 1 million since the 2003 peak, and 78,000 in 2016, according to the story, with total giving down 1% in the last year.

The first story might in part explain why:

The CSB [Christian Standard Bible] translates the term adelphoi, a Greek word for “brother” in a gender-neutral form 106 times, often adding “sister.” “Brotherly love” is translated “love as brothers and sisters.” The gender-neutralizing pattern is also present in its translation of the Old Testament. ...

In the CSB, there are hundreds of verses that fall within the “gender-neutral” category condemned in Southern Baptists’ own resolutions. Together, they provide an illustrative survey of the kinds of quietly progressive changes that have been inserted into this conservative denomination’s Bible translation. 

That breeze you're catchin' is W. A. Criswell, spinning in his grave.

"The least of these my brethren" remains misunderstood divorced from the meaning of discipleship in its apocalyptic milieu

The misunderstanding was recently on vivid display here, where conservative and liberal interpreters feud over the meaning of Matthew 25:40 for the contemporary social situation of wealth and poverty.

And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Unfortunately the text has little meaning for the contemporary social situation, except perhaps to teach those who think that they are Jesus' followers that they are not, and those who are self-satisfied humanitarians that they are dull.

The significance of "my brethren" is much more than what its conservative interpreters say it is. The phrase locates it in apocalyptic time, to the activity of The Twelve before the end of the world. It cannot refer to future generations, as if it were some timeless instruction for right living which liberalism for example can pride itself on by making it the law of the land. Jesus does not at all imagine such a future. He does not even imagine our existence. Instead Jesus imagines a future cut short by judgment and the arrival of the kingdom of God. It is the narrowest of time horizons constrained by the expectation of an imminent end of the world.

Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. ... Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels (Matthew 25:34, 41).

The activity of The Twelve is what is expected of disciples who have paid the cost to escape the apocalyptic sentence of death: Leaving all and following their Master, selling what they have and giving to the poor, embarking on an itinerant life preaching a similar repentance, traveling without visible means of support and relying on God to provide, and so on. This is all of a piece with the teaching on discipleship and the instructions to missionaries elsewhere, summarizing and presupposing it.

"Salvation" comes to a house that provides these itinerants their food, drink, clothing, shelter, palliative care for illness in the event, and companionship if and when imprisoned for posing a threat to the powers about to be overthrown by the inbreaking of God's reign. Such acts constitute their own repentance and solidarity with the "Christian" message.

Needless to say, this is a vision which has almost nothing to do with the Pauline Gospel per se, but amazingly survived in the written record anyway despite its failure to materialize.

It does live on in Paul, however, in another form, in "the collection for the saints". Paul's pledge "to remember the poor" is specifically defined by that, and not by a dull humanitarianism. Paul's collection for the saints in Jerusalem, in fact, is the second great animating feature of his missionary journeys but is still little remarked let alone appreciated in your average church today. As for the dull humanitarianism, we have to wait until the 19th Century and Liberal Christianity before we really get the groundwork laid for that contemporary misreading of the ancient sources referred to above. It was against this that Schweitzer's critique based on apocalyptic was launched at the beginning of the 20th Century.

We talk about that critique a lot here.

Opposition to Russell Moore among Southern Baptists is reaching a crescendo

For a summary of important essays by Southern Baptists who oppose Moore's liberalism, see here.

Like much else, Islam got "irja" from Pauline Christianity

From a recent discussion, here, about how ISIS seeks to immanentize the eschaton:

'Unless you have some knowledge of medieval Islamic theology you probably have no idea what irja means. The word translates literally as “postponing.” It was a theological principle put forward by some Muslim scholars during the very first century of Islam. At the time, the Muslim world was going through a major civil war, as proto-Sunnis and proto-Shiites fought for power, and a third group called Khawarij (dissenters) were excommunicating and slaughtering both sides. In the face of this bloody chaos, the proponents of irja said that the burning question of who is a true Muslim should be “postponed” until the afterlife. Even a Muslim who abandoned all religious practice and committed many sins, they reasoned, could not be denounced as an “apostate.” Faith was a matter of the heart, something only God — not other human beings — could evaluate.

'The scholars who put this forward became known as “murjia,” the upholders of irja, or, simply, “postponers.” The theology that they outlined could have been the basis for a tolerant, noncoercive, pluralistic Islam — an Islamic liberalism. Unfortunately, they did not have enough influence on the Muslim world. The school of thought disappeared quickly, only to go down in Sunni orthodoxy’s memory as one of the early “heretical sects.” ...

'In fact, there are hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world who are also engaged in irja, even if they are unfamiliar with the term. Some of them are focused on the Quran, instead of the medieval Shariah, and hold on to the famous Quranic verse that says, “There is no compulsion in religion.”' 

--------------------------------------------------------

Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then every man will receive his commendation from God.

-- 1 Corinthians 4:5

Each one must do as he has made up his mind, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.

-- 2 Corinthians 9:7

Liberal exceptionalism: The post-war liberal West is suddenly suffused with self-doubt, but the rest of us are fine

Steven Erlanger reporting from London in The New York Times here, conflating post-war liberal values with Judeo-Christian ones:

"THE West is suddenly suffused with self-doubt. ... Are Western values, essentially Judeo-Christian ones, truly universal?

"The history of the last decade is a bracing antidote to such easy thinking. The rise of authoritarian capitalism has been a blow to assumptions, made popular by Francis Fukuyama, that liberal democracy has proved to be the most reliable and lasting political system. ... The fight over values is not limited to democracy . . . with radical disagreements over the proper place of women and the rights of homosexuals. In its rejection of Western liberal values of sexual equality and choice, conservative Russia finds common cause with many in Africa and with the religious teachings of Islam, the Vatican, fundamentalist Protestants and Orthodox Jews."

It's as if liberalism were a frightened little child, running to hide behind her mother's skirt after having gone too far with some opponent, maybe the dog. Judeo-Christian values, the last refuge of the liberal scoundrel.

Historically speaking, Judeo-Christian values produced what was a relatively quiescent American republican mercantilism until the dawn of the 20th century, not the worldwide crusade for democracy and unfettered capitalism we have come to see thereafter, but sixty years of lousy public education has a way of making people forget such things.

Amnesia also exists about traditional values, which gave us their easy imprimatur for social relations organized around the family and children, with a long and storied history until recent times. The pipe dream has been egalitarian individualism and its various licenses for perversion, which are still fringe arrangements for most people, even for those who purchased them. Regret is everywhere. Such things are the specialties of liberalism, which does indeed look like it's coming undone, but the truly universal things like religion and the family and the arrangements they inspire continue to suggest themselves by nature to billions.

Only a liberal could fail to see them everywhere, as if they were the exception, not he.

Liberalism remains what's the matter with Kansas: plans to build a really big pile of rocks

A Rob Bell Sympathizer Admits "Spiritual" Experience Can Be Manufactured

"[S]o many Christian teachers oversell, and therefore inevitably underdeliver—or better, put God in the position where he will underdeliver. I suspect that in many cases, they are merely using hyperbole to drive home a point, but I'm convinced that readers and listeners take such exaggerations literally because they desperately want them to be true. ...

"I myself have experienced a healing of severe pain in my leg. I have also almost been "slain in the Spirit" (but got hold of myself just in time!). And as the Spirit leads, I speak in tongues. I have also had ecstatic experiences when the love of God penetrated my whole being.

"And in a life of 60 years, I can count these experiences on one hand. Because I've had such experiences, I understand perfectly the desire to have them all the time, and to imagine that maybe there is a technique, a method, a way to pray, a way to be open and alert—something!—that will allow me to experience this daily. Believe me, I tried that for a while and discovered that, yes, I could manufacture something very similar to a genuine spiritual experience. But it soon became clear that the search for daily wonder was creating a religion of Mark Galli."

-- Mark Galli, here

Yeah, well, what if the "genuine" experiences were in fact manufactured, too? It's the rare, unwilling conversions which interest me, the road-to-Damascus sort which are devoid of "the religion of feeling". Rob Bell's religion of feeling, on the other hand, appeals to an American culture which has finally surrendered to the sentimental in the post-war period because of the triumph of liberalism. And in an important sense Romanticized Christianity from the Great Awakening onward paved the way for that victory, just as it paved the way for socialism and communism in early 20th century Europe. To be converted today is to reject all these forms of Christianity.

"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?"

-- Jeremiah 17:9

"My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever."

-- Psalm 73:26