Via VirtueOnline:
Mary Eberstadt's "Christianity Lite" article fails to deal with "Christianity Heavy's" continued moral scandals
To the Editor
"First Things"
Dear Sir:
As an Episcopal Anglican I read Mary Eberstadt's article, "Christianity Lite," with mixed reactions. I agree with her regarding James Pike, Joseph Fletcher, John Spong, and even Rowan Williams. The latter's views regarding homosexuality and Romans chapter one have been thoroughly repudiated by Robert Gagnon and is in contrast to the official teaching of Lambeth l:10.
I would even go further to add that the censure of James Pike by the House of Bishops was not for the substance of his denial of the creedal affirmation of Christ and the Trinity but lamentally only for his "tone and manner." The Christianity Lite that she correctly sees in the Episcopal Church and in England is as bad as she asserts causing such eminent scholars as my friends Rusty Reno, Douglas Farrow, and Edward Norman to leave Anglicanism.
Her critique, however, is itself an example of Christianity Lite. The identification of Henry VIII with the English Reformation is characteristic of theologically challenged observers inside as well as outside the Anglican Church. Henry's official theology was in the act of the Six Articles which affirmed transubstantiation, celibacy of the clergy, and chantry masses which provided the indulgencies that lessened time in purgatory and was empty of any recovery of Reformation theology and doctrine. Henry himself had an endowed chantry mass said for his soul each year in the Cathedral of Notre Dame until 1792. On the grounds of present day Roman Catholic teaching he was doubtlessly released from purgatory a long time ago.
Anyone with serious theological concerns knows that Cranmer's prayer books, homilies and articles were produced after Henry VIII's death and, although repudiated by Roman Catholic Queen Mary, were established in the Elizabethan Settlement under her half sister in 1659. The present break with Rome dates not from Henry but from Elizabeth.
The English Reformation expression of Christianity produced Richard Hooker, John Donne, George Herbert, John Newton, William Temple, Dorothy Sayers, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, and C. S. Lewis, and the unappreciated missionary efforts in Africa and Asia. Christianity Lite is producing such falling numbers in North America and England that the whole center of Anglicanism is moving from Canterbury which is caught in Erastian ties to an increasingly secular state, to the so-called third world where Anglicanism is showing unprecedented growth. Third world Methodists are also providing votes to stem the tide of secularism against the United Methodist Church.
Ms. Eberstadt's heavy focus on holding to the traditional rules as a way to displace Christianity Lite for true orthodoxy is like starting with Romans 12 with its forty exhortations in 21 verses while ignoring the eleven chapters that proclaim, explain, and enable response to the duties. Eberstadt's Christianity Heavy has not been notably successful against our common foe, secularism, in Italy, Spain, Ireland, or Quebec. Christianity Heavy continues to produce moral scandals in the use of annulments to domesticate divorce and cover-ups in pederasty cases.
Roland Bainton once quoted Jacob Burckhardt to the effect that "Luther saved the papacy," by forcing its reluctant leadership from its unbelievable corruption as a secularizing Italian city-state to something of its spiritual identity. Modern secular power has curtailed any lingering tendency to ecclesiastical coercion on the part of the church forcing her to evoke what she cannot command. But this requires friendly and respectful critiques from the Protestant principles, not merely from secular unwillingness to obey the pope.
The crucial contribution of non-Roman Catholic Christians should be to help Rome recover the defeated teaching of Cardinal Seripando and Reginald Pole at the Council of Trent. They objected to the claim that our given righteousness before God is the single (only) cause of our justification which thereby denies any sin in the regenerate (simul justus et peccator).
This is what Richard Hooker called the "grand question that yet lieth between us and the Church of Rome." Diego Lainez, General of the Jesuit Order, claimed that the position of Seripando and Pole "would undercut the structure of satisfactions, indulgences, and purgatory" as indeed it would. There remains some Christianity Heavy today when even the wise and cogent voice of Pope Benedict can today issue plenary indulgences. The world still needs, and will have, a Reformed Anglican Communion despite Ms. Eberstadt's accurate description of Episcopal Christianity Lite.
We must never wink away our real differences but engage them in common courtesy, knowing we desperately need each other in the all dwarfing issues of secularism and Islam. I know of no publication more effective in this cause than "First Things" and no one more a catalyst for common witness than the late and much lamented Richard John Newhaus.
C. FitzSimons Allison
Bishop of South Carolina (Ret.)
*****
CHRISTIANITY LITE
By Mary Eberstadt,
First Things
(Clip) Looking even further out to the horizon from our present moment-at a vista of centuries, rather than mere decades, ahead of us-we may well begin to wonder something else. That is, whether what we are witnessing now is not only the beginning of the end of the Anglican Communion but indeed the end of something even larger: the phenomenon of Christianity Lite itself.
By this I mean the multifaceted institutional experiment, beginning but not ending with the Anglican Communion, of attempting to preserve Christianity while simultaneously jettisoning certain of its traditional teachings-specifically, those regarding sexual morality. Surveying the record to date of what has happened to the churches dedicated to this long-running modern religious experiment, a large historical question now appears: whether the various exercises in this specific kind of dissent from traditional teaching turn out to contain the seeds of their own destruction. The evidence-preliminary but already abundant-suggests that the answer is yes.
If this is so, then the implications for the future of Christianity itself are likely to be profound. If it is Christianity Lite, rather than Christianity proper, that is fatally flawed and ultimately unable to sustain itself, then a rewriting of much of contemporary thought, religious and secular, appears in order. It means that secularization itself may be fundamentally misunderstood. It means that the most unwanted and unfashionable traditional teaching of Christianity, its sexual moral code, demands of the modern mind a new and respectful look.
Read here: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/01/christianity-lite
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