I agree!

Could you explain to me how this is not proof-texting? Nothing against private property-I own a house- but if we use scripture to support private property what is to stop one from using it to support communism or some form of socialism? Can we not assume that the words of Christ are always talking about a deeper, spiritual level which is ultimately about our salvation? I know that it might be stated, there are or can be multiple layers to interpretation, but it still seems like proof-texting. One of the reasons that I appreciate Orthodoxy is because it generally avoids using scripture to make social or political commentary and sticks to the matters of the heart while telling the story of our salvation.

“How and why did the popular conception of poetry shift from ritual recitation and communal performance to the unstoppable pouring forth of the individual inspired heart? How was it that the history of Christian worship seemingly stopped on a time – that an evolving millennium-and-a-half liturgical tradition suddenly witnesses a principled defense of the effusions of free prayer that lives on in today’s televangelism and megachurches?”

From the article:

English Protestants attacked the ceremonies of the Catholic Church and the remnants of ceremony in Prayer Book liturgies because they thought these ceremonies lacked biblical support but also because they believed that set liturgical forms were, in themselves, inimical to religious sincerity. This had the effect of detaching believers from communal actions. Medieval Christians were participants in rituals; after the Reformation, Christians began to see themselves as detached individual selves, desperately ginning up religious passion.
For many Protestants, sacramental rites could not accurately represent or effectively communicate the grace of God. Faced with this “crisis of representation,” Christians looked inward to find a place of communion with God. Not just any experience would do, however. . . . What Bunyan is looking for, after all, is clear and distinct proof that he is truly saved, that his individual religious experience is genuine. . . . (Lori) Branch sees this as a sign of profound self-alienation.

Later, discussing Wordsworth (using a perspective I have never heard before, but it is compelling):

The problem of human agency is a central point in Branch’s treatment of Wordsworth. The problem arises directly from the ideology of spontaneity, for which valuable human action must be an autonomous expression of the individual. If he has been influenced in any way, the sincerity of his action is vitiated. Yet we know that we are subject to all sorts of influences that we don’t control. Is there a way to account for the freedom of human action while also acknowledging the reality, and the legitimacy of those influences? . . . Wordsworth’s answer tuns back to the original concerns of Branch’s book, for he finds in liturgy a form of double agency, in which human acts are free yet not autonomous. Liturgy also is the site for the formation of moral agents. The repetitive acts of daily ritual and the ritualized prayers of the Church cultivate love. In the repetitive acts of daily rituals, moral beliefs are, Wordsworth claims, shaped as beliefs. Wordsworth’s turn to liturgy is not, as many have suggested, a retreat into a safe zone of privacy. Rather, Wordsworth comes to see spiritual practice as the basis for a constructive politics, the ground for resistance to the solvents of commercialized culture.

Later yet, an intriguing quote from the book:

What was lost in the Reformation crisis of representation and its rejection of the vast, varied communal Christian ritual life: faith in the possibility of communing with God through the action of a community rather than the isolated self.”

Her findings seem to strongly support both the quotes from Vigen Guroian and Father’s thesis above.

At the risk of theological sloppiness, one could say that Christ is not just God incarnate but also THE Sacrament of God. A sacramental approach to life and the world follows Him in His ministry, healing the rift between matter and meaning. As the various elements of the world rebelled against monarchical Catholicism – or even expressed the fragmentation that began in the garden – they threw out the baby with the bathwater. (Passion will blind you that way.) So many of the -isms that have arisen have undone what God united – have de-sacramentalized the world – resulting in one defective reaction after another. The recovery of sacramental living and sacramental life, more fully realized in the lives of the saints, shows the way to the healing of our cultural wounds.

Amen, as well, to note 83. The ironic man presumes and depends upon a sober world. In a mad world, his emptiness and impotence is transparent, offering no food to a hungry culture and no help to a dying society.

Forgive the long quote that follows, but the whole is required to make the point I think:

MORE THAN MORAL FORMATION IS NEEDED
Lots of ethics may look Christian and use Christian categories, but when the liturgical context is missing and the eschatological dimension is forgotten a variety of transmutations occur. For example, since the Enlightenment, advancing processes of secularization have opend ways of entrance for secula ethics–Kantian, Lockean, Millsian, Hegelian, or Marxist–into the bloodstream of Christian life. The deterioration of Christian worship and disciplines of prayer deprives the Church of tools of discernment and creativity to build ethics from within the ecclesial body itself, and so there has been wholesale borrowing from these secular ethics.

In a variety of ecclesial locations, the fundamental antinomy of being ‘in the world not of the world’ loses its edge while simultaneously the eschatological horizon of Christian belief is overlaid with a transparenchy of one or another secular ideology. Thus, Protestant fundamentalists claim that the ‘traditional’ middle-class family and its moral values unambiguously reflect or embody the Bible’s teaching. Mainline liberal Protestants often quickly assume a correlation between liberalism’s standards of liberty and equality and the essence of biblical faith. Practicable goals of social amelioration and reform are treated as if they constitute the raison d’etre and telos of Christian morality. Orthodox Christians, who view themselves as entirely traditional but who are deeply imbued with modern notions of nationalism, conflate ethnic idenity with the peoplehood of God and supplant the eschatological hope for the reign of God with secular dreams of nationhood. Meanwhile, Roman Catholic liberationists assert that Marxist theory and analysis are compatible with the redemptive message of Scripture. In this instance, Christian eschatology is flattened as it get read into economic and political processes, while erroneous claims are made that the people of God come into being through revolutionary practices. In all these cases, holiness is no longer represented at the heart of human existence or as being the horizon of human destiny.

Modern claims for the priority of moral formation have lead to similar confusions. It is assumed that all that is needed to ‘make’ good Christians is to devise more and better models of religious education. The free gift of Christ’s own perfect life received in the Eucharist through the action of the Holy Spirit is not believed. Mere Christianity devolves into mere morality and falls short of true repentence and conversion. As I have already suggested, God calls Christiansthrough morality and ethics beyond morality and ethics. He calls them to perfection in the communion of love for one another and with God. Christians are instructed to be (become)
perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect (Matt. 5:48 RSV), striving together to become a single body in Christ, moving ‘from one degree of glory to another’ (2 Cor. 3:18 RSV). Moral formation may improve our lives but it alone does not make us free; a greater formation, a conversion, must also happen. Becoming holy makes us totaly free as we leave behind the wounded body of ethics. “Now the Lord is Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom’ (2 Cor 3:17 RSV)

On a more mundane level, Hayek’s belief in liberty was only possible in the world of Christendom. As was the birth of the scientific method, the rule of law, and the emancipation of women. So I would personally take his distaste for “monotheism” with a grain of salt. Perhaps a lapse in critical thinking on his part?

More likely the conceits of educated men who lived during a time when the Christian narrative was still the ground of culture and thereby offered a stability and certainty despite the hardships that life presented. George Bernard Shaw is another example. It is easy to be skeptic, or a cynic, or even a mocker, when the cultural weight it carried by others and the only consequences are personal.

Apply it to all of society however, and the consequences are catastrophic. We see the loss of the Christian social consensus all around us today. Suddenly the conceits don’t seem so benign, so safe to hold anymore. In fact, we see these men as naive in ways.

True, one has to have the ears to hear in order to have the eyes to see, but in our day the notion that creation has a sacred dimension never escapes this world of private conviction even among most believers. Even Christians see the creation primarily as mechanism, and even though beauty and meaning are perceived as have a source and end outside of the individual, we function in the world as if it does not.

We live in a time where logical positivism and philosophical materialism are exhausted giving rise to environmentalism, animal activism, and all the other movements that (correctly in some ways) assert that the creation is more than a machine, more than an object for consumption. We have witnessed the fall of Freud, Marx, and we will witness the fall of Darwin, by whom the great mysteries of creation were purportedly explained.

But the tendency of these movements is towards the authoritarianism that has its roots in the rebellion against Monarchical Catholicism and expressed today as complete antinomianism, a rebellion against all authority, especially moral authority (how many times have you heard the barbarians of popular culture praised for “breaking taboos”?), that will lead to another kind of slavery.

My point in bringing up Calvin is that I think the crisis is, at bottom, religious. And here Orthodoxy has something to offer — if we get to work. We really do (or at least our Tradition does) understand that what needs to be restored is what Robert Nisbet called in his great work “The History of the Idea of Progress” a “sense of the sacred.”

This is why the Patriarch’s recent encyclical, particularly the tepid approval of the political currents that drift toward statism (all in the name of the common good of course) displays at best a cultural naivete and at worst irresponsibility.

Just to clarify, is this referencing the parable of Jesus in Matthew 21:33-42?

The problem with this and similar conversations is that it is posited that these are the only two options. Any criticism of our current social/economic regime (and especially criticism of its underlying Enlightenment philosophy, even a soft and indirect criticism like that which can be vaguely sensed in the EP’s rather bland and unremarkable statement on the environment that caused such great offense to the ideological feelers of some) is seen as an endorsement of socialism or statism. A word, from a Patriarch no less, at least referencing if not grounded in Holy Tradition is met with denunciations and recommendations to read secular philosophers like Friedman and Hayek. Something is undeniably off-kilter in such a reaction.

I’m certainly no friend of the Modern state. It’s greatest damage has been it’s destruction of the authority of intermediary associations (Church, culture, region/state, community, guild, family, etc.) in its ever-expanding claims of sovereignty and its sustained policy of turning us all into consumptive machines “free” to be ruled by our passions (aka children or Last Men or slaves to sin), but the Libertarian embrace of individualistic freedom is just this same logic in its fundamentalist or deconstructivist form. It’s the cancer of the Enlightenment’s “freeing” of man from obligation through the power of the State, turning on the State itself.