Christianity abolishes itself

The old priest admonished us to "throw away" the idea of God as judge. "It's garbage!" Jesus died on the cross to show us God's love not to reconcile us to God, because God never stopped loving us. God is nothing but love and mercy.

It's odd. The old priest is traditional in his piety. He says Mass prayerfully (even if he's a little loose with the words sometimes). It is obvious that he loves the Church.

But none of that stuff makes any sense if God's love and mercy negate, entirely, God's judgment. If the message of the Gospel is fundamentally "God loves you, you're OK, and everything is awesome!", why sacrifice? Why be converted? Why, indeed, should Christ die?

I know, I know. We should be good and worship God out of love, in response to his love. That should be enough. But how is sacrifice a meaningful display of love, how is the cross a meaningful display of love if it doesn't conquer our sin or accomplish our reconciliation with God?

I'm not talking about particular soteriological theories, here. I'm saying that if we get rid of the language of sin and judgment and atonement and sacrifice, then the Christian story is completely deprived of meaning. OK, the message is that God loves me. Great, but why should I care? If those things don't mean anything to me (and, in fact, they have become foreign concepts to our culture), God's love is an answer to a problem I've never had.

Indeed, it is as if Christ came not to deliver us from sin, but to deliver us from Christianity. Now that that mission has been accomplished, the good news has become, at best, superfluous, and, at worst, incomprehensible.

Possible and impossible

Today it is impossible for kids to abstain from sex or people to stay married to each other.

This despite the fact that, in very recent history, this society did expect these things and people more or less did live up to these expectations.

But today ... impossible. And you are a crazy person if you say that it's possible.

What is possible, today, though, is equality between sexes, races, sexual orientations, etc., etc.

This despite the fact that this has never happened anywhere at any time in history.

But today ... totally possible. And you are an evil person if you say it's not. In fact, it's wreckers like you that keep it from happening. Once you and you're ilk are out the way ... perfect equality.

Universalism and the demise of Western Civilization

The November 20 Radio Derb has a couple of interesting reflections on the demise of Western Civilization. Derb contrasts the anger he felt over the attacks of 9/11 with his relatively emotionless response to the Paris attacks and suggests that, in Elizabeth Kuebler-Ross's stages of grief, he has moved from anger to acceptance with regard to the end of our civilization.

If we couldn't muster the clarity of mind to comprehend properly the menace that Muslims pose to our society after 9/11 and the attacks that have followed, we never will. All we can come up with are idiotic invade the world/invite the world solutions that are based on false universalism: if the Muslim world just had good democratic governments, if we just would quit offending them by supporting Israel/imposing Christianity/supporting tyrants/stealing their oil/etc./etc., then they would be stop hating us and become good modern, western citizens, separating Church and state, contributing to the GDP, etc.

Liberal universalism is like a kind of mental illness that has anosognosia as a symptom--it frames our experience in a way that we are unable to see it. We think the only solution can be more universalism, more multiculturalism, putting our perspective in perspective, understanding the other, etc. We can't see that this universalism is false. And, as long as it isn't shared by the other, it doesn't matter how much we think we understand him. We never will, unless we see that our universalism is as inescapably peculiar as his fundamentalism: that it is not truly universal, but is the peculiar characteristic of our people. It can only exist among those who share in its premises, and not everyone does. Those outside it are threats to it. And if we fail to recognize that, we open ourselves to be destroyed by them.

This is why universalism is a heresy. Christianity is universalistic in the limited sense that anyone can join the club. You don't have to belong to a certain tribe, speak a particular language. To some extent, it is even culturally pluralistic. But, to belong, you have to join the club and there are certain, minimal rules, that are not culturally dependent.

The heresy of universalism says that everyone is already a member of the club, whether they want to belong or not, whether they follow the rules or not. Liberal modernity is essentially an extension this Christian heresy. It started out by reducing the minimum to eliminate the specifics of Christian creed, then it moved to eliminate the specifics of Christian morality, now it eliminates all requirements. It literally thinks that it encompasses everyone. But this is a delusion.

This heresy is being disproven by events. Universalism is, in fact, a weird peculiarity of Europeans--especially northwestern Europeans (cf. JayMan). No one else believes it--they probably don't even think that we believe it, and so they are quite happy to exploit our blinding insanity to destroy our civilization. While we try to understand them--i.e. figure out how, despite their protestations, they are actually just the same as us--they are hard at work figuring out how to exploit and even destroy us.

If we say that victims deserve help and laws to protect them, they will claim to be victims. If we say that the non-Christians suffer from bias, they will yell "discrimination." If we say we must atone for our historical wrongs, they amp up their complaints about them. If we say that equality demands it, they will call for equality. But they are just exploiting our language--a peculiar feature of our culture--to grab what they want. They have no interest in preserving our universalistic culture. They are interested in preservation of themselves and their people. They are not interested in equality--not for us, anyway. If they were in power, they would not reciprocate.

What has become apparent over the last 15 years is that our disease is terminal. We are incapable of doing what is necessary to fight off the foe. We are not even capable of recognizing our foe. We are fat. We are effeminate. We are weak. We are old. (Derb brought up the "mouse utopia" experiment of John B. Calhoun.)

This doesn't just apply to the Muslims. It applies just as well to the racial grievance mongers within higher education. Like the Muslims, they have little or no interest in sharing in our supposedly universalistic culture. They have no interest in the cultural basis of the institutions we've built--they want the wealth and power that those institutions possess and produce.

They see our "reason" and "free speech" as white male constructs that exist for the benefit of white males. And, they're actually right, to a degree. The open culture of liberal modernity is, in fact, even more of a white male thing than Christianity. But its universalism has degenerated together with liberal Christianity. It has put aside the necessity of conversion. And so it has opened itself to exploitation and destruction by the barbarian who enters the gates and claims the benefits of citizenship, but rejects the duties that once went with it.

I don't know what the solution is. It doesn't seem like it has to necessarily be perpetual war, but surely some realism about whom we let into our countries--who is and who is not likely to assimilate (and have children who will assimilate)--would be the starting point. In any case, a realistic assessment of the real and perhaps irreducible differences between peoples seems like a better basis for peace than the illusion of universalism.

Muslims can have their own countries and live as they please within them--even if this necessitates excluding outsiders who interfere with their way of life. But certainly we ought to enjoy the same rights.

Racists and anti-racists now agree ...

Racists and anti-racists now seem to agree that freedom and reason are peculiar to white males and exist primarily for their benefit. They just disagree on whether that makes them good or bad things.

Science and reform

I stated that conservative Catholics only accept revision of Church teaching when it emerges from within the tradition and higher up in the hierarchy of truths. I think, in practice at least, there is an exception to this: conservative Catholics will accept revision to Church teaching based on clearly demonstrated scientific or historical facts.

For instance, I don't really know that the biblical creation account was ever taught definitively and formally as being literally true, but I'm pretty sure that it was more or less taken for granted that it was so until clear evidence emerged to the contrary. Similarly, with medieval geocentric cosmology. Likewise, I think that at least some of the conclusions of modern critical biblical scholarship (e.g. regarding authorship of the biblical books) are in this category. And, at least in this case, there were preliminary negative responses to these ideas from the Vatican--though nothing ex cathedra. While it's true that that these new facts were able to be assimilated because there was not clear, definitive teaching to the contrary and openings could be found within the tradition, it remains the case that what was assimilated was new information from outside the tradition.

Perhaps, then, what differentiates liberals from conservatives within the Church, to some extent at least, is that certain developments in modern society and thinking that conservatives view as errors to be rejected or resisted are held by liberals to be in this category of clearly demonstrated empirical truths--so the felt needs of the day are new "facts" that traditional teachings have to be weighed against. For example, the difficult situation of civilly divorced and remarried people is a new (or newly recognized) fact that in some way relativizes the authority of the anathemas of Trent. Likewise, modern psychology gives us new facts that force us to adjust traditional understandings of sin and culpability.

Things at this level involve conceptual errors about the meaning of moral truth and too slavish following of modern expert opinion claimed in the name of science and complete servility to the modern political order ... but it can still be seen as a difference in degree rather than in kind from the sort of development that a conservative would view as possible. In other words, not necessarily heresy.

However, many liberals tend to accept modern "facts" that work at a meta level to negate the tradition as a whole: so they also say that the facts of comparative cultural anthropology undermine any attempt to posit a universal, idea of unchanging human nature, making the teaching of universal moral truths impossible in principle; the facts of modern historical research force us to reject the naive idea that the tradition is continuous and binding; and the facts of post-modern Cultural Marxism force us to subject the entire narrative to critique in the name of the oppressed and marginalized.

This, surely, is the synthesis of all heresies.

Own your heresy

Ross Douthat's (in)famous tweet encouraged those who find themselves advocating positions that the Church has consistently rejected to "own" their heresy.

As he has explained, not all liberals are heretics, and not all liberal Catholic ideas are heresy, but a significant element of Catholic liberals seem to think that pretty much everything (aside from the Creed and maybe some clearly infallible core of later councils and papal teaching) is up for grabs. And this is clearly heresy.

While John Paul II and Benedict XVI worked vigorously against this heresy, for whatever reason--most likely fear of making division within the Church worse--they didn't name it as heresy.

But what heresy is it? Is it just modernism redux? It it even a single heresy? Many of have claimed (plausibly) that "modernism" doesn't really describe an actual heresy or coherent school of thought. And, when you look at the condemnations from Pius IX and Pius X, it does seem to be kind of grab-bag of modern ideas or attempts to modernize the Church.

And, of course, the heresy that goes under the name of liberalism is similar. There's not one identifiable, consistent error or line of reasoning that defines it. It is rather--like modernism--defined by its desire to fully reconcile the Church to the times, and it's pretty much willing to throw any line of reasoning at that project that will stick.

So, in a sense, whatever common thread--however thin--joined together the ideas that got condemned as "modernism" in the nineteenth century, it could be argued that contemporary liberal Catholicism (in its more radical forms, at least), shares that thread, even if its particular claims and ideas aren't identical with those of the nineteenth century modernists.

As both traditionalists and liberals like to point out, at least some of the ideas once condemned as modernism seemed to have been adopted by Vatican II (and, actually, to some extent, before that). Traditionalists point this out to condemn the council and the popes since John XXIII as modernist heretics. Liberals point this out in order to claim that the Church changed her mind about modernism.

There's obviously some truth in this. There was, at least, a moderate appropriation of certain ideas that were once condemned with modernism, such as historical-critical study of the Scriptures, and acceptance of democratic forms of civic government and religious freedom. Likewise, the idea of aggiornamento is an acceptance that the Church--to some degree at least--can and should be reconciled to the modern world.

Still, the official line and intent of the Council and the popes has not been an embrace of modernism, but a kind of moderate and flexible response to modernity that seeks to distinguish what is essential, internal, and unchangeable and from what is non-essential, external, and changeable. An adaptation of approach, but not a wholesale reevaluation of Catholic teaching or practice.

I'm sympathetic to a traditionalist critique that views that approach to be naive and, in some ways, wrongheaded. At least when it comes to actual human beings rather than intellectual abstractions, there is no "mere" external that you can modify without affecting in some way the internal. The reform of the liturgy has, in fact, changed the faith, despite the benign intentions of Paul VI. (I won't speak of whether the intentions of the liturgical reformers were benign.)

Even so, it remains that the Church did not accept the core premise or project of modernism. While the Church did acknowledge that there is a hierarchy of truth--with essential and more certain things at the center and less essential and certain things at the peripheries--it has, to this point, maintained that the standard of truth and reform comes from within that hierarchy--not from the world.

And this, perhaps, is the key distinction between genuine reform and adaptation to the times and heresy of modernism/liberalism. The latter believes that the modern world is to be set up as judge over the faith and not vice versa.

An asymmetrical debate

Watching the debate between Douthat and the liberal theologians has been rather instructive. Conservatives are interested in demonstrating from Church tradition that their position is correct and obligatory. Liberals just don't seem to be interested in engaging this argument. For them, the general facts that the Church has changed in the past and that theology and history are complex are apparently adequate for putting aside just about any argument from tradition. They want a certain result, and if there are specific discontinuities with the tradition, they are happy to let the professional theologians paper over them.

Intelligent and educated conservative Catholics like Douthat are quite aware that the Church has changed, that doctrine has developed, and that history doesn't lend itself to an easy argument for a broad understanding of the infallibility of the Church. For liberals, this historical consciousness has resulted in a kind of demythologizing of the tradition of the Church (or, at least, of all but its very core) and of any arguments made from it. Arguments from tradition were used in the past to claim that the Church never innovates, but simply reiterates what has been handed down, but this can be demonstrated to be false, so these arguments can no longer be made in earnest. At best, they are a form of discourse for governing how the Church changes to meet changing times. But they do not determine the result. The result is determined by the needs of day. For historically aware conservatives (i.e., not "fundamentalists"), though, this demythologization has not occurred (or has not proceeded to the same extent). They still see fundamental continuity in the development of doctrine as a whole and not just in the very core of Church teaching. Thus, they still make arguments from tradition in earnest.

Unlike the liberal, what they seek primarily in such arguments is not the "best" solution as determined by the needs of the day, but the best expression of faithfulness to the tradition. If there is innovation, it needs to be continuous with the tradition and come out of it--a clarification or synthesis that takes better account of the data of tradition. (This is how non-traditionalist conservatives view Vatican II.)

Liberals seem to be content with showing that a proposed innovation meets the felt needs of the day and does not contradict a clearly infallible teaching of the Church. It is not that conservatives view all magisterial statements as infallible, but they put the burden of proof on the innovators and that they regard the tradition as always authoritative, even if not infallible. This means that, if past magisterial statements are to be revised, they should be revised from within the tradition and from higher in the "hierarchy of truths," not just based on the perceived needs of the day.