Month: March 2015

The New Intolerance

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I have an ambivalent relationship with First Things magazine because contributors often seem duty bound to frame discussion within the categories of Roman Catholic cultural apologetics. Catholic social commentators are good at analyzing the social currents, but the cultural categories — the larger narrative in which they frame their analysis — often strikes me as too accommodating to the thinking of the current pope, whoever he may be. It’s more than the obligatory tip of the hat. I think it derives from Roman Catholic piety, the idea that the Pope is the man that God choose to lead Christendom and pious Catholics must measure their words by his.

So I debated a bit about posting this essay. The polarity between mercy and intolerance that Eberstadt constructs doesn’t really work it seems to me, but once you get past it the rest of the essay is quite good.

Source: First Things Magazine

By Mary Eberstadt

In November, Cardinal Walter Kasper gave a speech at the Catholic University of America in which he said, “Mercy has become the theme of [Pope Francis’s] pontificate. . . . With this theme, Pope Francis has addressed countless individuals, both within and without the Church. . . . He has moved them intensely, and pierced their hearts.” The cardinal added, “Who among us does not depend on mercy? On the mercy of God, and of merciful fellow man?”

Those questions move all people of good will, and they also go straight to the core of this essay. Pope Francis and Cardinal Kasper teach that mercy means meeting people where they live. We should take their counsel to heart and apply it to ourselves at the present time, looking at where many Christians in America and Europe and other places live today because they are Christians. We are not speaking here of the believers across the planet who suffer grievous harm for the sake of faith. We’re talking instead about something else: the slow-motion marginalizing and penalizing of believers on the very doorsteps of the churches of North America, Europe, and elsewhere, in societies that are the very historical strongholds of political and religious liberty.

Men and women of faith in these societies are well-off, compared to many others. At the same time, though, their world is unmistakably darker and more punitive than it used to be. Let us show empathy and solidarity with all people who need it. Repeating the cardinal’s watchword, mercy, we hope that moral and political and intellectual leaders of all persuasions hear it too.

For there is no mercy in putting butchers and bakers and candlestick makers in the legal dock for refusing to renounce their religious beliefs—but that’s what the new intolerance does. There is no mercy in stalking and threatening Christian pastors for being Christian pastors, or in casting out social scientists who turn up unwanted facts, or in telling a flight attendant she can’t wear a crucifix, or in persecuting organizations that do charitable work—but the new intolerance does these things, too. There’s no mercy in yelling slurs at anyone who points out that the sexual revolution has been flooding the public square with problems for a long time now and that, in fact, some people out there are drowning—but slurs are the new intolerance’s stock in trade. Above all, there is no mercy in slandering people by saying that religious believers “hate” certain people when in fact they do not; or that they are “phobes” of one stripe or another when in fact they are not. This, too, happens all over public space these days, with practically no pushback from anyone. This, too, is the new intolerance at work.

All these are facts of life for Christians and other believers in the West today. This is where a lot of real people now live, and where they need to be met.

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Read the entire article on the First Things website.

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Orthodox Christian Stewardship: What do Jesus, the Bible, and the Church Fathers Say about Tithing and Giving to God?

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by John G. Panagiotou

“Where your treasure is there will your heart be also.”¹ These words of Jesus have resonated within the hearts of people for two thousand years. What was Jesus talking about? What do Jesus, the Bible, and the Church Fathers have to say about tithing and giving to God?

The Scriptures have no less than 2,350 verses having to do with money and money management. Jesus speaks about money and money management more than any other topic including heaven, hell, salvation etc. The topic is very important for the Christian life.

In an often misquoted verse, St. Paul the Apostle writes, “the love of money is the root of all evil”.² St. Paul teaches that our Lord realizes that we have needs to meet in order to live and to carry out His work. God is, however, a jealous God and demands our full commitment with nothing else taking precedence over His Lordship in our lives. That is why the Apostle Paul warns his first century Greek congregation that the love of money is evil.

All that we have is on loan from God. It is all gift. What we do with our time, talent, and treasures will have to be given account of on the last day. This was the great sin of disobedience by Adam in the Garden of Eden. He abused his gift of stewardship. King Solomon who was the richest and wisest man of all time, expressed his feeling of the emptiness of materialism apart from God when he said, “vanity of vanities, it is all a bubble that bursts”.

In the book of Genesis, the mysterious paradigmatic priest of priests Melchizedek appears to perform one task alone: to collect the tithe from Abraham and to thus confer a blessing upon him on behalf of the Lord.³ This clearly shows that Abraham in his righteousness before God gave of his first fruits (his best fruits) unto the Lord and in turn was blessed. This is precisely what God is calling us to do. We as believers are each called upon to give sacrificially of our best resources first and God will take care of the rest as He did with Father Abraham.

As individuals, when we become burdened with a mindset of materialism (i.e. non-stewardship focused giving) we become slaves to our wealth instead of our wealth becoming our servants for the promotion of God’s Kingdom. This clearly is not the way that God intended it to be. Inevitably, we squanderer the gifts of our resources. Then a multitude of other problems emerge namely the bondage of debt. For truly, as the Preacher teaches in Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, “the borrower is a slave to the lender”.⁴

All of these principles not only apply to the individual Christian, but to the life of a congregation as well. Jesus is clear in the New Testament when He says that He would build and grow the Church and that the task at hand for believers is to make disciples who are followers of Jesus amongst the nations. That is what the core culture of a parish and diocese should be all about. That is what the ultimate focus of any and all monetary collections should be about. As the late great Russian theologian Georges Florovsky would write on the matter:

The primary task of the historical Church is the proclamation of another world “to come.” The Church bears witness to the New Life, disclosed and revealed in Christ Jesus, the Lord and Saviour. This it does both by word and deed. The true proclamation of the Gospel would be precisely the practice of this New Life: to show faith by deeds (cf. Matt. 5:16). The Church is more than a company of preachers, or a teaching society, or a missionary board. It has not only to invite people, but also to introduce them into this New Life, to which it bears witness.

It is a missionary body indeed, and its mission field is the whole world. But the aim of its missionary activity is not merely to convey to people certain convictions or ideas, not even to impose on then a definite discipline or a rule of life, but first of all to introduce them into the New Reality, to convert them, to bring them through their faith and repentance to Christ Himself, that they should be born anew in Him and into Him by water and the Spirit. Thus the ministry of the Word is completed in the ministry of the Sacraments.⁵

If you want to know the spiritual state and strength of a church, just look at its stewardship report. Invariably, it tells it all because what people do with their money speaks volumes. We make disciples by giving people Jesus through preaching, teaching, the sacramental life, the liturgical life and outreach ministries. It is to this end that our giving should be focused. If the ekklesia will do its job, Jesus has promised to be faithful and do His. Sacrificial giving for the Christian is not an option, but a joyful obligation. St. John Chrysostom in the 4th century speaks of this joyful obligation in his book On Wealth and Poverty
when he writes that the Christian owns nothing because God owns everything.⁶

The ecclesial ministry in its essence is not about buildings, budgets, and bodies. The model that we ought to follow is that the Church should be viewed first and foremost as the family of God, not just as another corporation or business. When that happens, the Bible tells us that inevitably God’s presence and blessing can be seen manifest in the local eucharistic community because its focus is on Jesus the Author of our salvation. It is then when we see the fullness of the Faith express itself, not only in the transformation of the elements into the Body and Blood of Christ, but when the celebrant and those worshipers present are transfigured into the Body of Christ as well.

With these things in mind, proper Christian stewardship for individuals and congregations should include the following four principles: 1) the glorification of God should be the focus; 2) giving should be sacrificial; 3) giving should be of the best of the first fruits of one’s resources; and 4) debt has no place in this paradigm.

If you would incorporate these four principles of economics into your lives and the life of your congregation, the Lord has promised to do mighty, mighty works in your life and in the lives of all around you. A proper understanding of stewardship is not a luxury in our private life as a Christian and in our collective life as the Ekklesia. For us to be be truly “called out from the world” as the word ekklesia connotes, is to take up the mantle and responsibility of stewardship and all that it entails.

ENDNOTES

¹ Matthew 6:21
² 1st Timothy 6:10
³ Genesis 14:18-20
⁴ Proverbs 22:7
⁵ Florovsky, Georges, “The Church: Her Nature and Task” appeared in volume 1 of the Universal Church in God’s Design (S.C.M. Press, 1948).
⁶ Chrysostom, Saint John, On Wealth and Poverty [trans.] (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984).

John G. Panagiotou is a graduate of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary and Wheeling Jesuit University. He can be reached at johnpan777@gmail.com

Rod Dreher: The New Battle Lines

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Rod Dreher wrote recently on the American Conservative (The New Battle Lines) that the next step in the domination of culture by progressive elites will be to punish anyone who does not affirm homosexuality. I agree with him. The battle against gay marriage is lost. In fact, the moral inversion of Christian culture is largely complete (gay rights represents it final phase) and orthodox Christians (those who hold to the authority of the Christian moral tradition) have been relegated to a sociological minority. We have become the strangers in a strange land.

Dreher’s article approaches the question from a political angle and argues that the last bastion of any orthodox defense is the preservation of a conscience clause to protect those who disagree with the morality of the dominant culture. It’s compelling but not one that I think will be successful in the end. A conscience clause draws from either religious sensibility or a more developed sense of natural law. One doesn’t contradict the other of course, but in the former progressive ideology is fundamentally a moral reordering of society (inversion) that is necessarily intolerant of any competing truth claims, and the latter is usurped by a law governed by instinct and appetite — man is defined by what he feels.

I’ve argued for a while that gay rights will create the legal ground for the persecution of Christianity. It’s here. Also here is the warning Christ gave over two millennia although contextualized for our time: “They will put you out of the synagogues. Yes, the time comes that whoever kills you will think that he is offering service to God” (John 16:2).

The New Battle Lines

Source: The American Conservative

By Rod Dreher

This just in on behalf of the Pacific School of Religion, a major liberal Protestant seminary:

BERKELEY, Calif., March 11, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — On April 16-17, the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry (CLGS) at Pacific School of Religion will host a symposium addressing the ways in which the concept of “religious liberty” is being used to justify and further discriminatory actions, such as denying service to same sex couples or limiting the reproductive health care benefits for employees. “Religious liberty should emphasize our freedoms — the right to worship, to self-expression — and should never be used as an excuse for discrimination against any group of people,” states Dr. Bernard Schlager, executive director of CLGS and Dean of Pacific School of Religion.

The focus of the symposium will be to articulate a theologically-based and positive definition of religious liberty that explains why religious liberty should not be used as a license to discriminate. The symposium will also consider how the concept of religious liberty can be used to further religious pluralism in the United States.

This is the next step in the fight. It never was going to be enough for progressives to get gay marriage and discrimination against LGBTs outlawed except for within religious organizations. Now the push from progressive elites will be to tear down the wall protecting religious liberty to punish the wrongthinkers. If you don’t think this is coming, you are a fool. The Law of Merited Impossibility is vindicated more and more each day.

Time to lawyer up with the Becket Fund and other religious liberty legal organizations. This is where the battle is now.

On the political front, Maggie Gallagher surveys recent LGBT-related threats to religious liberty, and says:

This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but it points to where I think the greatest threats lie: closing down educational and work opportunities to traditionalists who dare to speak. If the GOP would like to leave a legacy that makes a difference, I would argue for generous anti-discrimination protections for those who favor or oppose gay marriage (unless they work for an organization whose substantial purpose is to favor or oppose gay marriage).

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Read the entire article on The American Conservative website.

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