LOL Evangelical feminist wymyn throw a fit, think Connubial Christ talk is misogynist, Reformed parachurch group The Gospel Coalition retreats in fear

How dare you objectify me and call me a fertile field!

In the wake of growing controversy, evangelical Reformed parachurch group The Gospel Coalition (TGC) has retracted an article that used explicit sexual language as a metaphor for salvation. However, some say the retraction does not address underlying issues of concern. ... “They do know, right, that the idea of women as a fertile field to be planted with male sperm is not only misogynist but inaccurate? Don’t they????” tweeted author and Baylor University Professor Beth Allison Barr.

More. 

 

Rod Dreher ably defends Josh Butler from an historical point of view here.

Such discussions inevitably ignore the development of ideas within the New Testament itself.

Rod Dreher on the naive progressivism of Joseph Ratzinger, the now deceased Pope Benedict XVI

 Here: 

In other words, his progressivism consisted of wanting to make Catholic orthodoxy comprehensible to the modern world -- not in wanting to overturn those orthodoxies! The book goes on to talk about his shock in the years immediately following the Council to see how people within the Church used "the spirit of Vatican II" as a pretext to dismantle Catholicism. Ratzinger, a good-hearted soul who expected the best from others, had been terribly naive. 

It wasn't just Ratzinger, however.

The same phenomenon occurred in Protestantism, and in politics.

President Ronald Reagan, for example, had campaigned in the 1970s on libertarian economic orthodoxies, in particular on cutting ordinary income tax rates because he believed people were better judges of what to do with their money than was government. He won in landslides.

But as Ratzinger never anticipated how nefarious forces in the church would use their freedom to indulge sinful human nature, Reagan never anticipated how rich people and corporations would use their tax savings windfalls to invest abroad instead of in the United States, shipping millions of formerly good middle class jobs abroad to cheaper labor markets, hollowing out the country and growing thereby even more fabulously rich in the process.

Underestimating sinful human nature has been the story of our times.

 

 

 

 

Former Milwaukee Catholic Archbishop Rembert Weakland (1977-2002), a prime architect of the national cover-up of sex abuse by priests, has died at 95

 Rembert Weakland was a bad man, and not just because he spent $450,000 of the faithful's tithes (which he paid back later) to pay off a male theology student with whom he had had an affair. Weakland, a lion of liberal American Catholics, came out as gay in 2009. ...

Weakland was Milwaukee's archbishop for a very long time, during most of the child sex abuse allegations against priests. The local church had to pay $30 million to settle the cases, eventually seeking bankruptcy protection. ...

For those who engaged in these cover-ups, the most important thing of all was the clergy, not the children who were molested, and their family members. That is the real legacy of Rembert Weakland, a godfather of the lavender mafia.  

Nobody knows this beat like Rod Dreher, here.

The entire story about the native graves in Canada is made up

The Meaning of the Native Graves:

It is very important to note that the entire story is made up. First, we have always known that many children died in the residential schools, which were active through the 19th and 20th centuries. Child mortality was relatively high during that period to begin with; Indian mortality overall was astronomically high; and the Church-run schools for native children were systemically underfunded by the government, resulting in subpar facilities and inadequate medical care. Second, the sites almost certainly include the graves of Christian adults from the neighboring communities, as Chief Cadmus Delorme of the Cowessess First Nation admitted with respect to the Marieval Indian Residential School, where an estimated 751 burials were detected by radar last month. The “mass graves” of public hysteria are, in fact, the ordered and intentional burial sites of people we always knew were dead, and who died of more or less natural causes. In more literate times, we might have called that a cemetery. 

A US Supreme Court of Judas Iscariots: All Catholics and Jews, not a Protestant among them, stick it to a Southern Baptist

Conservative SCOTUS Betrays Barronelle :

Rod Dreher:

. . . Where were you, John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett? These two, by the way, also were among the majority that refused to hear the Gavin Grimm case, handing a big victory to transgender bathroom-invaders. [UPDATE: Bret Kavanaugh also left Stutzman in the lurch.] . . .   

Comments

Achilles Rienzi:

This so wrong—another stab in the back. I am angered by it. If this wasn’t a stab in the back, then what was it?

This is why people hate establishment Republicans and conservatives. Roberts has sided with the liberals in every split decision since Kennedy retired.

I honestly don’t know how this collection of Judas Iscariots sleep at night. It takes a certain type to backstab like this then sleep like a baby. They are where they are because of people who support religious liberty, then they turn around and stab us in the back.

Only a mass movement led by credible anti-conservative far right leaders will solve our problems. A far right solution but one that is not conservative is the only solution.

Honorable exceptions like Thomas and Alito aside, no group has done more to impose and solidify leftist policies than Republican-appointed SCOTUS judges.

Ralph C. Wood of Baylor tries to enlist St. Paul in his nincompoopery

Here:

It is safe to say that, prior to Descartes, human reason seated itself either in the natural order or else in divine revelation. In the medieval tradition, reason brought these two thought-originating sources into harmony. Thus were mind, soul, and body regarded as having an inseparable relation: they were wondrously intertwined. So also, in this bi-millennial way of construing the world, was the created order seen as having multiple causes—first and final, no less than efficient and material causes. This meant that creation was not a thing that stood over against us, but as the realm in which we participate—living and moving and having our being there, as both ancient Stoics and St. Paul insisted. The physical creation was understood as God’s great book of metaphors and analogies for grasping his will for the world.

So, in the creation we live and move and have our being, huh? Firm grasp of the obvious there Ralph, except that's not at all what Paul said.

The language only vaguely familiar to Wood comes from Paul's Areopagus Speech in The Book of Acts, but Wood has it turned completely around. Paul insists that we live and move and have our being "in him", in the transcendent Creator God, not in creation, whether God's or our own:

God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; . . . For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring. Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device. -- Acts 17:24, 28f.

Far from being a great book "for grasping God's will", the world is a woefully deficient book in desperate need of an editor (as is Wood):

For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him. For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent? as it is written, How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things! -- Romans 10:12ff.

Whatever may be said of Descartes as a dividing line between the modern and the pre-modern, he has nothing on Paul, or Jesus, neither of whom imagined the long future which unfolded and we call Christendom. They were apocalyptic thinkers for whom the end of the world and final judgment were nigh. The separation between us and them is far deeper than anything wrought by Descartes, real or imagined. 

On the hypocrisy of Rod Dreher's friend, The New York Times' David Brooks

Seen here in the comments section:

The reason people loathe Brooks so much, and it’s a good reason, is his rank hypocrisy. He talks about values, yet most of his work has no research base and is easily skewered. After years of lecturing people about their immoral ways, he dumps his wife of 34 years and marries his research assistant. After forcing his first wife to convert to Judaism and change her name, he married his second wife without the requirement and is now saying she has made him rethink his “superficial” ideas about Christianity.

So you can absolutely bank on the fact that David Brooks has done everything he can with his considerable power to give his kids every advantage. But now, the putz is going to lecture his readers on the poor people.

He lies. He’s a hypocrite. He’s a moralizing vacuous jerk.

But hey, he’s your friend, so go ahead and defend him.

Lament of the Day: Rod Dreher calls Homer's Odyssey a "novel"

Here, also not realizing the epic poem was sung:

[Bob Dylan:]

Specific books that have stuck with me ever since I read them way back in grammar school – I want to tell you about three of them: Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey.

[Rod Dreher:]

He goes on to discuss those three novels, and how they affected his understanding of the world, and in turn, his music. One of the greatest popular musicians of the 20th century, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, got his start in what we now call classical education — one that gives the student “a way of looking at life, an understanding of human nature, and a standard to measure things by.”

Here’s part of his description of The Odyssey. He makes it sound like a folk song. He makes it sound like real life . . ..

Dreher also seems blissfully unaware that after Paul's Damascus Road conversion he eventually disappeared for about 10 years, no doubt reassessing his new found faith in Christ against his native tradition in Pharisaism:

Isn’t this what all serious religious pilgrims and truth seekers do? After their epiphany, they submit to tradition — not just the more recent tradition, but big-T Tradition. 

Rod Dreher gets a DNA test but gets completely distracted from the fact that his family "turned" German

Here:

I’m 99.3 percent European. About 67 percent of that ancestry is Anglo-Irish, with 9 percent “French and German” (they can’t yet distinguish between French and German ancestry, so my ancestors came from that region; it’s got to be German, because the first Dreher to come to the US came from Germany; Dreher is a German name meaning “turner”), and 4 percent Scandinavian. The rest is “broadly Northwestern European”. But here’s the surprising part: 0.6 percent of my ancestry — the thin red slice — is West African. The genetics timeline indicates that five to eight generations ago (the test can’t be more specific), I had an ancestor who was 100 percent West African. That ancestor was likely born between 1700 and 1820.

Well, isn't that instructive?

So far in life Rod Dreher has "turned" personally from Methodism, to Roman Catholicism, to Orthodoxy of some sort or other. How long will it take for him to understand how in keeping this is with his own name, his own character?

Obviously his family got this name "Dreher" because it turned from what it was to German, and the family accepted it. Now Rod Dreher is turning still, which is why he submitted his DNA for analysis in the first place (there's some innate doubt there), only to find out he's got a little "black" in him somewhere along the way, which turns him some more . . . from the main point.

The money on the test was obviously well spent.

Rod Dreher says Dennis Prager calls NeverTrumpers "prissy" and "self-involved", and takes it personally

Prager also makes the shopworn “Georgetown cocktail party” criticisms, accusing Never-Trumpers of being too prissy and self-involved to embrace Trump . . ..

But Prager never says that, here. Which tells you a lot about Rod Dreher.

In fact, Prager doesn't name names, but Dreher calls Prager's arguments "farcical" and "delusional" in addition to being "shopworn", here.

Take that, you big nasty man!

On top of feeling a little unmanned by the big Jewish conservative, Dreher never mentions one of those arguments, that NeverTrumpers have "a utopian streak".

Which isn't surprising because that's a main recurring theme in the criticisms of Dreher's Benedict Option.

So, why aren't anti-Trump conservatives jumping for joy?

I have come to believe that many conservatives possess what I once thought was a left-wing monopoly — a utopian streak. Trump is too far from their ideal leader to be able to support him.

Best not to address it while you're otherwise busy misrepresenting your enemy.

The anti-Protestant lunatics get to spread their hate at Rod Dreher's blog

Seen here in the comments section from Roman Catholic partisans:

Luther, in effect, by concocting a doctrine that he said was THE essence of the faith, swept away all church history . . ..

And this:

. . . God was killed by Martin Luther. What we are now witnessing is the final product of that deicide.

Meanwhile Muslims are mass-murdering Coptic Christians in Egypt in coordinated attacks on Palm Sunday.

But the enemy for Catholics is Lutherans. And anti-migrant populists.

Last time I checked it was Protestant America that saved Rome's sorry ass.

Rod Dreher isn't orthodox about prayer anymore than anyone else is

Instead of praying in secret according to the teaching of Jesus, Rod Dreher broadcasts the news about his praying, makes a show of his praying even before it happens, and uses his praying almost like a weapon, a cudgel, with which to threaten, nay promise, confrontation with the enemy, solidarity with the like-minded, and "witness" generally against the godless West, as if there were no godless East. But if the witness is contrary to the basic soul of the faith, what good is it?

Dreher fancies himself a refugee from the religious right, but what follows below just proves once again that you can take the man out of the politicized religion, but you can't take the politicizing out of the religious man. The reason, of course, is that man is a political animal by nature, as Aristotle taught us long ago, and Paul accepted and taught in his peculiarly Christian way.

If the true faith of Jesus were practised anywhere, however, you would be hard-pressed to know much about it, by definition. What is "the widespread practice of the faith" when we are to pray in secret, give in secret, fast in secret? The public face of the church is not known by these things. The true orthodox are invisible in these matters or they are not orthodox. When they pray, you do not know it. They pray like David to be hidden, not revealed:

Keep me as the apple of the eye, hide me under the shadow of thy wings, From the wicked that oppress me, from my deadly enemies, who compass me about.

 

-- Psalm 17:8f.

Here is Dreher, featured this day at Real Clear Religion:

As most readers know, I am an Orthodox Christian. My deep concern over the relationship between Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church is not that the ROC will exercise undue influence over the Russian state, but that the ROC will become Russian nationalism at prayer. I am extremely sympathetic to the ROC critique of the West, and see things like the opening of the new Russian Orthodox cathedral in Paris to be a blessing. On my next trip to Paris, after I make my pilgrimage to pray before the relics of St. Genevieve, the city’s patron, I will make a visit to this Russian cathedral, pray there, and give thanks to God for its witness in that magnificent Christian (or once-Christian) city. It is my prayer — really, it is — that the Russian cathedral will in some real sense bring believing Eastern and Western Christians closer together, and strengthen our common witness against the post-Christian West — such that one day, Europe may return to the widespread practice of the faith. 

Sometimes I wonder if Rod Dreher thinks more highly of himself than he ought to think.

Rod Dreher imagining he's Karl Barth

Karl Barth imagining what's for dinner

The ever superior Rod Dreher dismisses the hopes of Christians who support and pray for the new president in faith

Here:

Some people are already asking me what this means for the Benedict Option. Answer: nothing different. I’ve said all along that politics can’t fix what ails us. I believe that the erosion of our religious liberties will probably cease for the time being under Trump (and for that, thanks be to God), but the deep currents in society and culture are towards atomization and the abandonment of religious belief and tradition. There are a lot of conservative Christians who have faith that Trump can turn this around. They hope in vain. They forget that we are not to put our trust in princes. This would be true even if the princes were good, which is not the case here.

Russell Moore embraces the immanentized eschatology of Martin Luther King Jr., Harry Jaffa and Abraham Lincoln

Quoted here:

[I]magine a 1960s civil rights movement led not by Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, but by Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright. King did not simply speak to the passions of his followers but to the consciences of his detractors and to the consciences of those on the sidelines, overhearing it all. Behind that was a coherent set of ideas, grounded in the Bible and the Declaration of Independence.

Give that man the Duranty Award: Rod "Benedict Option" Dreher is so insular he can't find his own ass with both hands let alone the unfree world in 2016

Guess he never heard of China, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela for starters, then there's all the Muslim tyrannies, and then the tens of millions of aborted in Europe and the United States who never made the light of day because we think we're so free.

What's the unfree world in 2016? One in five people in the world still live under communism . . . at a minimum.

Apparently Rod Dreher is enjoying too much grilled octopus in Manhattan these days to be awake to the rest of the world.

Outed for being secretly uncollegial, Yale University Professor of Philosophy publicly erupts with hatred for much more distinguished Oxford Christian colleague

Reminds me of the outburst directed at yours truly's happy disposish by another philosopher on the day after Ronald Reagan's reelection in 1984. I guess it comes with the territory, but what idiot expects us to believe he believes anything will stay private on Facebook? Maybe Yale should recheck his credentials.

Jason Stanley, the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy, 344 College St, New Haven, CT 06511-6629, 203-432-1689, jason.stanley@yale.edu, whose public Facebook attack on University of Oxford Emeritus Professor of Philosophy Richard Swinburne is quoted here:

"'F*ck those assholes' ... wildly understates my actual sentiments towards homophobic religious proponents of evil like Richard Swinburne, who use their status as professional philosophers to oppress others with less power. I am SO SORRY for using such mild language. I am posting this on 'public' so that there will be no need for anyone to violate any religious code of ethics and take pictures of private FB pages to share my views about such matters."

Rod Dreher's false choice, where his utopian devil is in the detail "truly"

Here:

"I would rather live in a truly Christian culture that was dominated by (say) Latino Christians than live in a secular culture dominated by whites."

There's never been a truly Christian culture, and never will be. This is a straw man argument.

In which case the choice of where to live is much less important and much less fraught than this Manichaean choice between Light and Darkness.

But Rod Dreher likes fraught.

Rod Dreher: The bad news is Donald Trump is religious and social conservatives' only choice in this election

From Rod Dreher, here:

[Trump] has said publicly that he will make protecting religious liberty a priority. Does he mean it? I have no idea, and you don’t either. He is no religious conservative. But he is a populist who doesn’t care what the donor class thinks, because he is not indebted to them. It is reasonable to think that religious liberty stands a better chance with Trump in the White House than any other Republican. Mind you, that’s the soft bigotry of low expectations, but that just goes to show you how weak the position of us religious and social conservatives has become within the Republican Party. ...

For people in our socioeconomic demographic, greater immigration meant more and better restaurants, and better lawn and garden care.

Our kids weren’t having their schools overrun by children who couldn’t speak the language; they went to private school, or to public schools in parts of town immigrants couldn’t afford. 

We weren’t having the hospitals we used overrun by illegal immigrants needing care; we didn’t have to use the public hospital.

Our neighborhoods weren’t changing in front of our eyes. And so on.

The immigration issue was a chance for us to show our compassion — sometimes our explicitly Christian compassion — without it costing us anything tangible. The kind of white people my class looked down on and thought of as racist rabble were the kind of white people who had to bear a lot of the brunt of our politics and what we called compassion. ... [T]hey are not wrong to judge that many in our class looks [sic] down on them, and doesn’t [sic] share their interests. The kinds of social things they might like to conserve don’t really matter to people of my class. We can’t see it, we never could see it, and some of us are still bound and determined not to see it, until they make us see it.

So Rod Dreher's had another crisis: How many is that now?

The Methodist turned Catholic turned Eastern Orthodox lost a sibling and turned . . . to a therapist, at the age of 46 or so, and after all that.

Christianity does attract a certain sort of person. Its founders were peculiar too. Who knows. Maybe you have to be quite nuts to found a religion.

I suspect this isn't the last time we'll hear that Rod Dreher has had another crisis, but I do hope it is. 

The story is here.

Rod Dreher, Sanctimonious Scold, Turns His War For Seriousness on Herman Cain

Recently it was people in the church whom Dreher labeled unserious because they adopted a realistic view of the visible church where moral failure occurs. In Dreher's view, such people couldn't possibly appreciate how that might turn someone into an unbeliever.

Dreher has moved on to politicians like Herman Cain, whom he labels an unserious amateur, because he sang at the National Press Club, here:

When Herman Cain sang at the National Press Club the other day, I thought it was absurd. There he goes again, the clown. ... You wouldn’t trust an amateur to spay your cat or to give you sound investment advice for your 401(K) — yet there are millions of Republians who think an avuncular amateur like Herman Cain would do a great job as president of the United States, or at least a better job than Jon Huntsman, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, or anybody else on offer who has actually worked in politics. I’m not thrilled with these choices either, but come on, what is wrong with us?

Dreher is entitled to his opinion.

And mine is that under that dismissal of Cain lurks a disdainful view of Cain's Baptist religion, which isn't as elite as Dreher's Eastern Orthodoxy but which Cain wears far more effortlessly, cheerfully and convincingly than what most religious people put on.

If you want to believe that people who believe what Cain believes couldn't possibly be deep thinkers about anything, go right ahead. But to my way of thinking, I don't want a president constantly having an existential crisis about his faith like Dreher seems to have on a regular basis. He's gone from Methodist to Catholic to Eastern Orthodox to who knows what next.

Herman Cain knows where he wants to take the country, and his moral compass to get us there is set. If you don't want a population which exercises more self-restraint, self-control, savings, investment and personal responsibility for its own success, by all means, avoid Herman Cain. 

But if you want more of the same old same old handwringing about insoluble problems, any of the others will do.

(updated from November 2011)