Month: October 2011

Frank Schaeffer’s Fundamentalist Fakery

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From the article: “Schaeffer’s Orthodox history might be inconvenient to him today because based on the Church’s teachings — sanctity of life, sexuality, marriage, a hyper-patriarchal priesthood — it looks a lot like the dimwitted “Taliban” Christians and “fundamentalists” that Schaeffer spends so much time denouncing of late. Then again, you can hardly go around advertising the fact that you spent years proselytizing on behalf of traditional morality if, today, you want to maximize your page views on HuffPo and get MSNBC producers to call you back.”

Source: Acton Institute | John Couretas

Frank Schaeffer: Bachmann, Palin, Perry Use Religion Like Snake Oil Salesmen (2011)

Remaining Orthodox in a Secular World : A Sermon by Frank Schaeffer (2002)

Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), has a story on FrontPageMag.com about Frank Schaeffer’s call for the Occupy Wall Street protesters to go after Evangelical Christians. Schaeffer is the son of evangelical theologian Francis Schaeffer (1912-1984). Tooley:

A blogger for The Huffington Post, young Schaeffer is now faulting religious conservatives for facilitating Wall Street greed. He’s imploring the Wall Street Occupiers to “protest the root source of America’s tilt to the far unregulated corporate right.” For Schaeffer, the next logical step is to demonstrate “outside mega churches, Evangelical publishing houses, [and] religious organizations that lead the ‘moral’ crusades against women and gays and all the rest.”

The article, titled “Wall Street Occupiers Urged to Target Churches,” also describes Schaeffer attacking Roman Catholics as “likewise ‘fundamentalists’ who have ‘delegitimized the US Government and thus undercut its ability to tax, spend and regulate.’ So Catholic bishops, like evangelical mega churches, have also tricked their followers into voting against their ‘own class and self-interest.’” See the top video in this post for a sample of Schaeffer spleen.

In August, New York Times reporter Mark Oppenheimer interviewed Schaeffer about his new book Sex, Mom and God and said that that the author’s “break with conservatism, and with evangelicalism, came in the late 1980s.” But, as Oppenheimer described it in “Son of Evangelical Royalty Turns His Back, and Tells the Tale,” Schaeffer, Oppenheimer wrote:

… had long been skeptical of many of his bedfellows. He found the television pastor Pat Robertson and some of his colleagues to be ‘idiots,’ he told me last week, when we met for coffee in western Massachusetts. Looking back, Mr. Schaeffer says that once he became disillusioned he ‘faked it the whole way.’

Schaeffer might be telling the truth, but remember he’s a self-confessed faker. But one thing’s for sure — Oppenheimer didn’t do his homework.

The second, grainy video at the top of this post, shot in a Greek Orthodox church about six months after the World Trade Center terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, shows Schaeffer in his post-evangelical, pre-HuffPo culture wars mode — more than a decade after his purported “break” from the right. You hear him warning those in the pews about the threat from “the Islamic horde that now pours toward our frontiers” and hear him berating Protestants and Catholics for their soft “feminized” Christianity that won’t stand up to secularism, hedonism and a whole catalog of evils that might have been formulated by, say, Pat Robertson. Schaeffer wants a Christianity that isn’t wishy-washy, therapeutic and “sentimental” but has a “my way or the highway” ethic — a lot like the U.S. Marine Corps. In fact, he has found the alternative to America’s flabby faith: the Orthodox Church.

A tireless book promoter (see also the first five minutes of this longer video), Schaeffer spent a good part of the 1990s and beyond attacking Western Christianity for its many failures and novelties over and against the “pure and clean and perfect” Orthodox Church, into which he was received as a convert. The launching pad for much of this vitriol was his 1995 book, Dancing Alone: The Quest for Orthodox Faith in the Age of False Religions, which combined Orthodox triumphalism and cold-hearted sectarian vituperation and took it to new heights.

My Greek Orthodox parish was instrumental in bringing Schaeffer to Grand Rapids, Mich., in 1995 for a speaking engagement at a local high school that drew more than 1,000 people. The crowd included many curious Protestants who wanted to hear the son of the famous evangelical theologian explain why he had left the fold and converted to Orthodoxy. While in town, Schaeffer was interviewed on Calvin Forum, a public affairs program on the Calvin College educational TV channel. Indeed, the Reformed minister who interviewed him later was received into the Orthodox Church. Listen to Kevin Allen of Ancient Faith Radio interview former moderator of Calvin Forum, Robert Meyering, about the role Schaeffer played in his journey East.

What is Orthodoxy? According to Schaeffer, “it is the church that has maintained the worship, the sacrament, the truth, in its only pure form that can be found in the world today.” Problem is, in his current incarnation as scourge of the Religious Right, Schaeffer doesn’t say much about the Orthodox Church and his many years of (faking it again?) traveling the country as a Neo-Byzantine circuit rider. You see no evidence on his personal web page of any of those rants against the Catholic and Protestant enemies of Orthodoxy, nor access to a digital version of his tabloid Christian Activist newspaper that was frequently the vehicle for these attacks.

In Dancing Alone, Schaeffer decried the “Protestant debacle [embodied in the ecumenical movement] which has resulted in the disintegration of Western civilization, the acceptance of abortion on demand, the ordination of women, homosexuals and lesbians, the apostasy and heresy inherent in ‘liberal’ Protestant theology.” This was years after he “broke” with the conservatives and Religious Right? Here’s the contents page for the book on Regina Orthodox Press, the publishing house Schaeffer founded and which continues to sell titles like From Baptist to Byzantium and The Virtue of War.

Schaeffer’s Orthodox history might be inconvenient to him today because based on the Church’s teachings — sanctity of life, sexuality, marriage, a hyper-patriarchal priesthood — it looks a lot like the dimwitted “Taliban” Christians and “fundamentalists” that Schaeffer spends so much time denouncing of late. Then again, you can hardly go around advertising the fact that you spent years proselytizing on behalf of traditional morality if, today, you want to maximize your page views on HuffPo and get MSNBC producers to call you back.

IRD covered a speech Schaeffer recently gave in which he cited the Orthodox tradition’s reverence for “holy mysteries” as grounds for rejecting “the frozen being of belief.” But the mysteries of the faith in Orthodox teaching (indeed, the Christian faith rests on profound mysteries) do not provide grounds for a faith that changes, as he puts it, “like the weather.” He should go back and re-read his history of the Ecumenical Councils if he thinks that “anything goes” is how the Church does theology.

Years ago, it was obvious to some Orthodox Christians that Schaeffer had anger management issues. In a 1995 review of Dancing Alone, the scholar and essayist Vigen Gurioan said the book “oozes with the same moralism, instrumentalism and pragmatism that have contributed to the secularization and loss of catholic Christian consciousness that he condemns.”

Schaeffer, Guroian wrote, is at heart an individualist who has taken it upon himself to single handedly interpret the Truth and right all wrongs:

Schaeffer seems to have become Orthodox because the rest of America has gone wrong, and Orthodoxy is the best religious remedy for cultural crisis and moral malaise. At work here is not the catholic mind of the church but the romantic self that takes upon itself the task of reconstructing and arbitrating theological truth. Schaeffer intones “Holy Tradition” repeatedly when he passes judgment on the falsehood in others and claims truth for his own statements (“Holy Tradition says…”). But at center stage as arbiter and mediator of this so-called Holy Tradition is the “I.”

Schaeffer is still arbitrating the truth, but now from the left. Fair enough. That’s his choice. Although, inciting mobs to attack churches and publishing houses does sound a tad intolerant.

But the New York Times claim that the years of “faking it” among Christian traditionalists ended in 1985, doesn’t hold water. Actually, his right wing, sectarian hate speech phase extended deep into the 1990s and 2000s, albeit masquerading in the rich brocades of Orthodox triumphalism. You wonder: Because Frank Schaeffer is such a good faker, could he still be faking it today? Is he a double agent in the culture wars, secretly going among the liberals at HuffPo and MSNBC until the time is ripe to once again expose the evildoers with new books and fresh tirades? We’ll have to stay tuned.

With the Rise of Militant Secularism, Rome and Moscow Make Common Cause

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Met. Kyrill (before becoming Patriarch) and Pope Benedict

The Acton Institute just published my essay.

Source: Acton Institute | Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse

The European religious press is abuzz over recent developments in Orthodox – Catholic relations that indicate both Churches are moving closer together. The diplomatic centerpiece of the activity would be a meeting of Pope Benedict and Patriarch Kyrill of the Russian Orthodox Church that was first proposed by Pope John Paul II but never realized. Some look to a meeting in 2013 which would mark the 1,700th anniversary of the signing of the Edict of Milan when Constantine lifted the persecution of Christians. It would be the first visit between the Pope of Rome and Patriarch of Moscow in history.

A few short years ago a visit between Pope and Patriarch seemed impossible because of lingering problems between the two Churches as they reasserted territorial claims and began the revival of the faith in post-Soviet Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere. The relationship grew tense at times and while far from resolved, a spirit of deepening cooperation has nevertheless emerged. Both Benedict and Kyrill share the conviction that European culture must rediscover its Christian roots to turn back the secularism that threatens moral collapse.

Both men draw from a common moral history: Benedict witnessed the barbarism of Nazi Germany and Kyrill the decades long communist campaign to destroy all religious faith. It informs the central precept in their public ministry that all social policy be predicated on the recognition that every person has inherent dignity and rights bestowed by God, and that the philosophical materialism that grounds modern secularism will subsume the individual into either ideology or the state just as Nazism and Communism did. If Europe continues its secular drift, it is in danger of repeating the barbarism of the last century or of yielding to Islam.

The deepening relationship does not portend a union between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Roman Catholics are more optimistic about unity because they are less aware of the historical animus that exists between Catholics and Orthodox. Nevertheless, while the increasing cooperation shows the gravity of the threat posed by secularism, it also indicates that the sensitive historical exigencies can be addressed in appropriate ways and times and will not derail the more pressing mission.

The cooperation has also caused the Churches to examine assumptions of their own that may prove beneficial in the long run. The meaning of papal supremacy tops the list.

On the Orthodox side the claims to a universal jurisdictional supremacy of the Patriarch of Rome have been rejected since (indeed, was a cause of) the Great Schism of 1054 (see here and here). That said, the Orthodox see the Pope of Rome as the rightful Patriarch of the Church of Rome and could afford him a primacy of honor in a joint council but not jurisdiction.

On the other side, the Orthodox do not have a Magisterium, a centralized Church structure that speaks for all the Orthodox in the world. This has led to some fractious internal wrangling throughout the centuries although doctrine and teaching has remained remarkably consistent.

It will come as no surprise for anyone to know that the Orthodox have difficulties with some of the claims made by the Catholic Church concerning the precise responsibilities and the nature of the authority associated with the Bishop of Rome. The Catholic Church has long recognized this as a basic difference between the Orthodox and Catholic worlds. The rise of militant secularism, however, and the cultural challenges this creates for Orthodox and Catholic Christians alike, have focused everyone’s minds on how they can cooperate to address these issues of ethics and culture.

Protestants have a stake in the outcome as well particularly as attitudes have softened towards Rome due in large part to Pope John Paul II’s exemplary leadership during the collapse of communism in the last century. Protestant ecclesiology has no real place for priest or pope which makes the nature of discussions between them and the Catholics or Orthodox entirely different. Nevertheless, as the soul denying ramifications of secularism become more evident, an increasing number look to the Catholic and Orthodox Churches for leadership.

The most visible ambassador for the Orthodox Church is Oxford-educated Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev of Volokomansk who runs the Department of External Church Relations of the Russian Orthodox Church. Observers report that a deep respect and even genuine fondness exists between Hilarion and Benedict which has contributed to the recent thaw.

Both of them note with alarm the increasing attacks on the Christian faith in Europe and on Christians themselves in other parts of the world, a development they term “Christophobia.” Hilarion brought these points forward several years back when he first challenged the European Union for omitting any mention of the Christian roots of European civilization in the EU Constitution. That earned him considerable worldwide notice and he has become increasingly outspoken towards any attempts to silence the Christian testimony or dim the historical memory of Christendom.

From the Orthodox side it is clear that the leadership that deals with the concrete issues that affect the decline of the Christian West is emerging from Moscow. One reason is the sheer size of the renewed Russian Orthodox Church. The deeper reason however, is that the Russians have direct experience with the suffering and death that ensues when the light of the Christian faith is vanquished from culture.

Decades before the fall of Communism was even a conceptual possibility for most people, Pope John Paul II prophesied that the regeneration of Europe would come from Russia. At the time many people thought it was the misguided ramblings of a misguided man. It is looking like he knew more than his critics. We are fortunate to have these two leaders, Benedict and Kyrill, to help guide us through the coming difficulties.

Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse is an Orthodox priest in the Antiochian Archdiocese of North and South America. He is president of the American Orthodox Institute and serves on the board of the Institute for Religion and Democracy. He writes frequently on social and cultural issues on his blog and elsewhere.

Rod Dreher: It’s Time Bishops Man Up

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Rod Dreher

Earlier this year, there was a battle-royal raging among the elites of my church, the Orthodox Church in America, over the leadership style of Metropolitan Jonah, the primate. A number of the bishops on the Synod were plotting against him, along with some key and vocal activists associated with the OCA old guard.

I involved myself in the defense of Jonah, blogging under a pseudonym to prevent the chance that that controversy could bring negative publicity to my then-employer. I and the other bloggers were outed after a bishop accessed (probably illegally) the e-mail account of a friend and former pastor, and spent two months reading all the man’s private e-mails, including correspondence from me.

The fallout from all that made me decide that I need to stay the hell away from anything to do with bishops, because there is nothing but trouble there for me. I never should have gotten involved, because it was all, in the end, pointless. I say that not to “re-litigate” that whole controversy, but only as way of background to what I’m about to say.

During all this, some of Jonah’s enemies within the OCA made accusations that he was going soft on priests guilty of sexual misconduct, and violating the OCA’s own policies in this regard.

From my point of view, much of the evidence for these charges was cherry-picked and spun; it seemed pretty clear to me that people who hated Jonah for other reasons were trying to manufacture a case to get rid of him. That said, there were some instances in which Jonah’s leniency on sexually aberrant clerics was, in my view, indefensible.

One that was public involved the enfeebled Archbishop Dmitri’s decision, under duress, to return to the altar a gay deacon in Miami who had abandoned his post and gone to California to “marry” another man. The deacon returned and took up residence with his old housemate, a retired Orthodox bishop, and asked to be reinstated.

Jonah, as the Diocese of the South’s locum tenens, did not change Dmitri’s decision.

I told my wife Julie that as much as I cared for Jonah and wanted to defend him, I was troubled by seeing in him the same old patterns of clericalist softballing of sexually incontinent priests that she and I had seen among the Catholic bishops, and that ultimately destroyed our ability to believe as Catholics. Again, there was nothing remotely along the lines of the Catholic abuse scandal at issue, but I was seeing evidence that, however unfair the accusations against him from his enemies were, the Metropolitan was failing to take this kind of clerical corruption seriously enough.

Julie hit the ceiling. And when she came down, she woke up the next morning, put on her shoes, walked to the train, and didn’t stop until she reached the Metropolitan’s house in Washington, DC.

She delivered to him some very stern words — in love, of course, but without fear or restraint.

In short, she told the patriarch that he had better wake up and realize that his duty is not to coddle priests who can’t keep their pants up, but rather his duty is to protect the whole church. She told him that she and a bunch of other moms she knows are working their butts off to raise faithful Orthodox children, and when they see that bishops are so spineless as to go the extra mile to be considerate of the needs and wants of errant priests, it is an egregious insult to the laity.

She ended by telling him, through tears, that the faithful need our bishops to be morally straight, and strong, and trustworthy, and they had better bloody well man up.

Julie arrived home after midnight, emotionally exhausted. I don’t know that I’ve ever been prouder of her. She said the Metropolitan received her words kindly. I noticed that days later, he ordered that prodigal Miami deacon to be removed from ministry.

Nothing happened, though, because by then Jonah had no direct authority over him (this because of Orthodox ecclesiology), and the bishop who did, Nikon of Boston, apparently had no interest. The deacon is still on staff at the Miami OCA cathedral.

I don’t expect the bishops to man up. I quit expecting anything of bishops.

Source: Real Clear Religion

But you know, here’s what I wish bishops — Orthodox, Catholic, and otherwise — would get through their thick mitres.

Many of us parents are trying to raise children to be faithful to our churches in a secular, pluralistic age. As these children grow up, they will be able to entertain the thoughts of believing in other churches, in other faiths, or in no faith at all. If we’re serious about our Orthodoxy, or Catholicism, or Anglicanism, what have you, we will want our children to stay loyal to the faith. There are so many forces pushing and pulling them away from it. We’re living with it daily, and doing our best to build our kids (and ourselves) up in the faith: to know what we believe, and to be joyful in it.

We need to be able to look to our church leadership with trust and respect. We don’t have a right to expect every bishop or priest to be a saint; we do have a right to expect them all to have basic integrity. And God knows we have a right to expect that if a clergyman has committed serious sins that compromise his ability to serve as a spiritual father, that the bishop will find something else for that man to do.

Everybody who is repentant can be forgiven, thank God — but that doesn’t mean that every forgiven sinner has a right to serve as a priest or deacon.

When our kids get old enough to start questioning their faith, as most of them naturally will do, what will they think when they see bishops like Finn of Kansas City, who covered for a priest who possessed child pornography? What will they think when they see all kinds of lesser but still significant failures by church leadership?

We will tell them that the failures of men do not obviate the truth of Church teaching, and we will tell them that the Church is made of fallen men, and we will tell them that they too are sinners. And we will hope that that will work. But we will know too that they are part of a generation that feels no loyalty to a particular church or tradition.

Maybe the groundwork we will have laid in their childhood will stand them in good stead once they start to question everything they were taught. We have to hope so. What we could use, though, is strength, integrity, and consistency in the priesthood.

The bottom line: We should be able to tell our kids that Bishop N. and Father J. are reasons for them to remain in the Church, not to leave it.

Too many of us don’t have that now. And we don’t have that in part because you bishops place the perceived needs of yourselves and your priests above the needs of, and your responsibilities to, the whole Church. You too often act like you are the Church, and the rest of us are privileged to have the blessing of your company.

In the Catholic Church, too many bishops act like they’re the district managers of General Motors plants circa 1960, when there was no competition. As Putnam and Campbell reported in “American Grace,” social science research shows that so many American Catholics are leaving the Church that if not for Hispanic immigration, Catholicism in this country would be declining as fast as the Protestant mainline.

In my branch of the Orthodox Church, many of our bishops carry themselves as if they were going to have tea with the Byzantine Emperor after liturgy, when the truth is that the OCA is small and poor, and getting smaller and poorer, and more demoralized. And the Episcopalians — well, that mess hardly needs elaboration.

Look, I know not every bishop is a bad guy. Still, I think it’s safe to say that most — though not all! — of you bishops live in a churchy bubble. You are surrounded by sycophants and people who kowtow to you, and who never want to bring you bad news. The historian Barbara Tuchman, in “The March of Folly,” had this to say about the six Renaissance popes whose stupid misgovernment helped provoke the Protestant Reformation:

Their three outstanding attitudes — obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constituents, primacy of self-aggrandizement, illusion of invulnerable status — are persistent aspects of folly. While in the case of the Renaissance popes, these were bred in and exaggerated by the surrounding culture, all are independent of time and recurrent in governorship.

Nowadays, Your Graces, leaving the faith for another church, or no faith at all, has never been easier for Christians. Wake up. Man up. Can’t you read the signs of the times?

Things are hard now for small-o orthodox Christians and our families, and they’re going to get harder. You are not helping.

Miraculous Myrrh-Streaming Iveron Icon Visits St. George GOC in Ocean City, Maryland on Wednesday, October 19.

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Myrrh-Streaming Iveron Icon of the Mother of God (click to enlarge)

Ocean City, MD — The miraculous Myrrh-Streaming Iveron Icon of the Mother of God will visit the Greek Orthodox Church of St. George on Wednesday, October 19, 2011, at 6:00 p.m. The Church is located at 8805 Coastal Highway, Ocean City, MD. All Orthodox Christians and others are invited to the solemn visitation of the wonder-working icon.

The icon will arrive at the Church, be greeted by the clergy and faithful, and have a Paraklisis (prayer service) sung before it. Upon completion of the service, all present may venerate the icon and be anointed by the holy myrrh that miraculously streams from it. The icon’s home is Holy Theotokos of Iveron Russian Orthodox Church in Honolulu, Hawaii. It will visit many churches and monasteries on the Eastern seaboard for the veneration by the faithful and the consolation of those who are ill or troubled.

“We are blessed to have the Myrrh-Streaming Iveron icon visit St. George,” said Fr. John Stavropoulos, Presiding Priest of the parish. “It is a powerful gift of God to the Church, one associated with personal miracles and healing. We welcome this holy icon into our midst and ask that the Mother of God whose image it bears grant our prayers, bring healing and blessing to our families and to all who join us for this deeply spiritual experience.”

The icon began to stream holy myrrh in July, 2007 in the home of the Reader Nectarios. After extensive examination, in June, 2008, the icon was officially recognized by Archbishop Kyrill of the Russian Orthodox Church, as miraculous and genuine. It is a 7 x 9 inch paper copy, mounted on wood, of an original icon — The Montreal Myrrh-Streaming Iveron Icon of the Holy Theotokos (Mary, the Mother of God). That original icon disappeared and its caretaker, Br. Jose Munoz, was brutally murdered in Athens. The original has not been seen since. This icon was one of two that began to stream myrrh in Hawaii. The other, an icon cross, has since ceased to stream myrrh.

Everyone is invited to the visit of the icon and the prayer service and anointing. As its caretaker Reader Nectarios notes: “ ….one thing is clear: the Holy Mother of God has not forgotten us. She has not abandoned us. She will not abandon us! Through this icon I have hope that there IS a light at the end of the tunnel. God has shown us that he has not forgotten us! That is all that is needed. God is telling us that He is real! Dare we ignore this revelation?”

For additional information, contact Father John Stavropoulos at the St. George Greek Orthodox Church of Ocean City 410-524-0990. Visit the St. George website.

Mark Steyn on Free Speech

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Steyn: “One of the great strengths of common law has been its general antipathy toward group rights because the ultimate minority is the individual. The minute you have collective rights, you require dramatically enhanced state power to mediate the hierarchy of different victim groups.”

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