I am not having a great Sunday morning. The blogs have been down, (which still continues: the connection is cutting in and out throughout this) and I seem to be getting flooded with spam relating to a Lipitor lawsuit.
But today’s text is important: it reflects again on the duty of us lay people. The other text for today is I Peter, which gives the commands for those who are elders.
shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly; not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock.
We are not elders. We don’t qualify: very few are called to be so, and that is not about intelligence or credentials but a gift or duty (it is both) given to an individual. For we may not lead, but we have the Spirit of God within and we were given a brain and the tools to reason with. We also have two thousand years of scholarly argument and debate about issues, which we can refer to. This time we live in is not the only time or the only circumstance under which the Church has been tried or the Church has had to deal with apostates, and the practices of the church in times before stand in marked contrast to what is happening now. I am quoting from Mundabor, who is referring (and I say this with shame: I may be Protestant, but I am a New Zealander) about the Bishop of Wellington).
As he sees things, the problem is not that the behaviour is sinful. The problem is that the language is negative! Therefore, we must change the language! But look: if you tone down the language you will destroy the very message, because the harsh language is there exactly to point out to the gravity of the behaviour!
‘course, says the man. It is so obvious to him that the biggest problem is that… there are rules! Let’s not be concentrating on rules, then!
How someone who cannot even hear that his behaviour is “intrinsically disordered” and get all in a tizzy even at being told that his situation is “irregular” (“irregular”? “Irregular”, my foot! Concubinage! Grave scandal! Mortal sin! Satan at the door!) would, then, be encouraged to abandon it once he is told that he will not be told anything unpleasant to him and no one will concentrate on rules is beyond me. Only an idiot with no experience at all of life, or an effeminate priest, could ever come to this kind of conclusion.
It’s not only that this is a complete capitulation and renunciation to basic Christianity.
Well, yeah. The reason that we are called haters and are publicly shamed is because of that old doctrine called total depravity. Now, the Romans may blanch here, but they also are quite aware — if they have been catechized properly — that they themselves have sinned, grievously, frequently. They are wise enough to have a ritual of confession and reconciliation that should make that very apparent to anyone who is faithful. Denying our sinful state is denying the gospel. But that must remain unspoken.
“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’
“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”
And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.
Now some may say that this is an argument against the logical error of ad hominem. That if someone is personally holy, and their fruit are good, then we should follow them. But the saintly, those who do not have to deal with gluttony, lust, wrath and bleakness, may be in error. There are people who are saintly in all religions, and many of the greatest heretics have lived a quite sober life.
But those who have defended the truth have been attacked: from Luther being called drunk and Calvin a Sodomite to Schaeffer and Solzhenitsyn puppets of the Republicans.
Look instead at what happens to their church, and their doctrine. Even though you think that the church is alive, you can see children, the elders are righteous and clearly pray for and bleed over the congregation, look at the consequences. Consider what happens when a church turns to a doctrine of the inner light, as the Quakers and Shakers did historically, and many liberal churches are now. Those churches die out. The number of Quaker congregations is less than the number of synagogues in my nation, where the Jewish people are outnumbered tenfold by recent Islamic immigrants. And the endgame of this is an integration into the community, with no manner of distinguishing those of living faith from the general run of humanity.
We have cultivated a marked hostility to spiritual teaching, insisting that ‘Quakerism is caught not taught’, and as a result many Friends who have been members for decades remain ignorant about traditional Quaker practices and spirituality. We have developed a hostility towards any suggestion of leadership or authority, and by failing to encourage and support each others’ gifts and leadings we have deprived ourselves of direction. We have become collections of like-minded (because socially similar) individuals, rather than true communities of people who are both accountable to and responsible for each other.
We have rejected the Quaker tradition, with its embarrassingly fervent early Friends and old-fashioned religious language, and ended up with a Quakerism that is almost evacuated of religious content, in which our spiritual experience is something ‘private’ that we cannot share with each other. Consequently we have little to offer to people who are seeking a deeper spiritual reality beyond an accepting ‘space’ for their own solitary spiritual searchings.
There is considerable momentum within Britain Yearly Meeting towards an increasingly attenuated version of Liberal Quakerism, as first Christian and now ‘theist’ language is steadily rejected as too exclusive and old-fashioned. The current trajectory of Liberal Quakerism is towards a secular friendly society, which has replaced any spiritual content with a vague concept of Quaker ‘values’ that are almost indistinguishable from the background liberal middle-class culture. With nothing deeper to offer people who are genuinely seeking a path of spiritual transformation, Quakerism would no longer have any distinctive identity or any reason to exist.
I would go further: the Quakers rejected Christianity and even Theism as being far too exclusive. In doing so, in a manner eerily akin to the liberal Presbyterians, Anglicans and Methodists, they became an arm of the social justice movement, looking very much at language and process and inclusion, and losing any ability to confront or reform. The future of the liberal branches of the church is staring them in the face of closed meeting halls of the Friends.
There is a reason that I continue to quote the Papists. It is because they understand the need to reform their lives, and they have been exposed to the gospel. They have errors — in particular their over reliance on ritual for salvation (shared with the followers of Arminius, who are mainly Methodists and Anglicans, by the way) their syncretic introduction of the cult of the Feminine (“Teste David cum Sybilla” from Dies Irae: what is pagan cult priestess doing there?) and their understanding of the table. But the liturgy, particularly the older version, has sufficient bible to let the gospel come through.
Which is why modern heretics and apostates hate the older liturgies and rituals. They sacrifice beauty so that we will fall, blindfolded, into the pit. As if it is not the fate of all men to die and then be held to account.