Guilty as charged. My own posts drip with that lately. I too have many friends in that camp - friends I’d like to keep, and whom I still respect, though I respect them in spite of their obsession with political power, not because of it.
An interesting (selectively depressing) social thing has happened to me in that those friendships are not dissolved or broken; but they are hermetically sealed off from anything that might have a whiff of criticism of any of their current political sacred cows. We can play rowdy games of pickleball together. They can send me excited posts about the “revival happening in America”, and will respond back to any generic “praise God” posts I may respond with. But if I send a link to an article (even religiously conservative articles, but ones that have any whiff of anything straying from party line) … radio silence. Not even pushback. Just… nothing. Total failure to engage (so far as I could know). They probably think of me in “mission project” terms too. But the difference seems to be that I will read and engage with stuff they send me, and happily respond to them about it.
I guess one question in my mind then is: “Whose bubble is bigger?”
One observation, is that the silence is perhaps a sign of progress. A year or so ago, those same people would be vocal in their defense of some positions they are now uncertain of now. Of course, a few are still vocal
The discussion was supposed to be about the aptness of Hart’s one-line assessment of American Evangelicalism, not his entire life work or idealogy though.
It reminds me of Kierkegaard’s criticism of the Danish state church.
"Official Christianity is the saving truth; that Christ in the most dreadful tortures, abandoned by God, expired on the cross in order that we should have the pleasure of spending our time and diligence and energy on sagaciously and tastefully enjoying this life; that his purpose in coming to this world actually was to encourage the procreation of children, and that the unforgettable significance of his life is (like a true benefactor!) to have made possible by his death (one person’s death, another’s bread!) a new way of making a living, the pastors’, a way of making a living that must be regarded as one of the most advantageous, just as it also engages the greatest number of tradesmen, shippers, and shipowners, whose business is to ship people for an unbelievably cheap remuneration to the blessedness of eternity, a business, the only one of its kind that has, compared with all the shipping to America, Australia, etc., the inestimable advantage of insuring the shipper against even the possibility of getting a bad name because no news whatever is received from those transported.
In typical Kierkegaard fashion, that’s all one sentence, and I even left out a few bits.
The enculturation is an influential factor, not only in the past but also today. We are the children of our time and culture; we grow into the culture and worldview of the surrounding society and it directs our behaviour and thinking in ways we do not realize. Christianity brings a possibility to overcome the limiting weaknesses of our cultural bubble but it does not happen automatically. The surrounding culture, even some local Christians, may become hostile if we try to step too far from the culturally accepted behaviour and thinking.
That leads to the question of what is beneficial or acceptable accommodation to the local culture vs. stepping away from the original Apostolic teaching?
One of my professors commented on this indirectly (the issue was actually ANE literature) when he said that too many scholars spend their time commenting on previous scholars’ commentary rather than dealing with the original material. It’s kind of like accommodating to a culture right from the apostolic teaching vs. accommodating from previous accommodation.
That is your imagination. The author doesn’t understand Augustine and most likely has not read him. Given his hyperbolic thrashing (following Hart) of American evangelism, he can take the criticism.
They are definitely dug in in my experience as well. I try to avoid politics now though. That might be due to the algorithms though and echo chambers are out of control. I rarely even watch the news. It is just me getting angry over things outside my control. Arguing politics with people doesn’t have much upside to me. I’m commissioned to preach the Gospel. Politics is divisive and I avoid it because I find there is a disconnect between who people are and their political views (again, my example would be pro-choice individuals whom it would be real easy for me to vilify from a pro-life stance). There is a disconnect for some Christians as well (“I never knew you”). All that glitters is not gold not everything valuable is shiny. Logical fallacies play a huge role in day to day thinking for most people. Strict logic is tiring. The brain likes its shortcut. But I suspect we could all use a little more charity and grace.
Speaking from the UK, I have a few problems here. The first is that the Orthodox church is the last to criticise western Christians for having an “overly priestly” attitude to salvation (although evangelicals don’t like the term “priest”) Go into an Orthodox church and you find that the ordinary people are not even allowed to see into the sanctuary most of the time. In the churches I have attended both in the US and UK, the laity are very much encouraged to read the Bible and to discuss and debate. But without guidance people will be like scattering sheep. We hope the Holy Spirit will provide guidance, but it seems that well informed human help is also needed. People have to judge the guidance that is offered. In practice what is going on is very varied, and I agree that we must be very wary of putting powerful individuals on pedestals. I find it hard to decide whether this essay is criticising those who are too worldly or not worldly enough. This is the kind of polarisation that “orphism” will lead to, and I think it’s not a helpful theme for most of us. Orthodoxy has had plenty of world-denying traditions. We’d better try to talk and pray together in a constructive gospel spirit. Unlike orphism, modern western Christianity, including its many evangelical streams, is a very public affair.
This seems to oversimplify in the other direction. Yes, Augustine saw physical reality as good, but a lesser good than spiritual realities because it is mutable – changeable. The immutability of God, the way good angels are “frozen” in their goodness, and the way saints will someday likewise be joined to God’s immutable self (while remaining distinct creatures) – all of it is based on the idea of the timeless and changeless being the goal for all creation. And yet, to achieve that, it seems to involve giving up what is essentially different about physical reality and its history. There is a real tension in Augustine’s declaration that physical creation is good and his neoplatonic vision for where creation is headed.
You may appreciate reading Mary Clark’s Augustine, a biography she wrote in 1994, since she is generally at pains to show him in a good light and show how he fits with Catholic teaching. She devotes a chapter to “Augustine and Neoplatonism” that tries to do justice to the complex way Augustine integrated, challenged, and kept in tension the various teachings of the neoplatonists – teachings that had earlier convinced him the Christian faith was viable after all.
But the climax is drinking from God’s immutability. The goal of history is the end of history and inhabiting God’s eternal “now.” I think it’s fair to call that Platonic and in tension with the Hebrew instinct.
I agree with others that this was unhelpful. Augustine wrote a huge amount; anyone who claims to have read it all is almost certainly lying. Everyone – whether scholars or dabblers like me – is selective, and because what Augustine says varies not just over time but due to the audience or opponent or topic addressed, many different pictures of Augustine can be legitimately drawn from what he wrote. Trying to harmonize his scattered corpus is probably more difficult than harmonizing the Bible.
I’ve met two people who claimed to and I believe them: one was a professor who did his PhD work on a certain theme in Augustine, the other was a Benedictine monk whose expertise was Augustine.
And in tension with our modernity-shaped instincts now too, to be fair.
We have trouble imagining what that “final eschaton” will be like beyond glorious quotations we have of it where “the lion lays down with the lamb” or “eats straw like an ox” or perhaps more easily available to our eager imaginations: “where they don’t train for war any more”. Or maybe more puzzlingly: “where one who dies at a hundred will be considered a youth” (Isaiah 65:20) … wait a minute … somebody dying?
In any case, even just sticking with scriptural prophetic descriptions doesn’t all seem to jive with modern dispensationalist-style “orthodoxies” if we might charitably call them that.
So could anyone blame Augustine if he didn’t have it all figured out either? Maybe more later.
That’s my sense too. Or perhaps “communal” affair if not always a public one.
Our eschatology both shapes and is shaped by our current cultural outlooks. Do we admire “immutability”? God as “a rock”? Those who long for stability, security, long-term peace will understandably see long-term comfort in that. Do we chase after adventure? That might be the preferred experience for those privileged enough to already have enjoyed some relative stability in this life. Lewis’ Narnia stories, and his eschaton climax of “The Last Battle” spring to mind … “further up and further in!” is the glorious cry of those who “can’t feel afraid even if they try”. No trope of sitting around on a cloud with a harp for them!
But if we have the imaginations for how both of these sorts of things (eternal rest/stability and eternal adventure) can be needed and longed for here and now, why can’t the final redeemed state also include both, and ever more gloriously so? For a picture of that, I recall the pleasure of reading Henry Van Dyke’s “The Spirit of Christmas” - a wonderful short story well worth the read, and can be read online. And while it is about the Christmas event, it meanwhile includes a tantalizing description of the various activities going on “in heaven” during the season of waiting. There is a theme of the activities of heaven and earth being echoes of each other. But it’s the earth that is the focus and center-stage for the important event of the story. Those two settings must remain inextricably and inseparably bound up with each other, I think, if we are to take the incarnation seriously. “What is bound on earth is bound in heaven, and whatever is loosed on earth is loosed in heaven.” Whatever the “new heavens and new earth” mean, they seem to have intertwined futures.
I was fascinated to learn recently somewhere that wherever our English new testaments use the word ‘heaven’, the more accurate translation is “heavens” (plural). Apparently it’s (never!?) referred to in a singular sense. I’d love to hear confirmation of that from the Greek nerds among us. Transformation isn’t just for earth. It’s for heaven (the heavens) too. I’m not sure any Orphic or NeoPlatonic view (or even so much of our contemporary evangelical ‘orthodoxy’) sufficiently acknowledges this, much less accounts for it.
There are tensions in Augustine and some he was aware of. This is part of what I responded to:
>The Hebrew instinct was different: creation pronounced good, history as the arena where God is actually at work, the body as the site of resurrection and not merely its obstacle.
Augustine thinks creation is good (even if qualified). As an Thomist and proponent of classical theism, my definition of good is not the same as that of theistic personalists. Augustine thinks God is at work in history (contrary to his opponents who saw it as meaningless). He even believed in the resurrection of the body though he struggled with it early on. Of course he has platonic ideas and his views changed over time.
Not to mention the myth of univocal Hebrew spirit…the Hebrew spirit is whatever the author at hand thinks it is…
Others plural? I may have missed something. This just looks like peddling doubt though.
οὐρανός (oo-rah-NOHSS) does occur in the singular, just not as often. FWIW, it appears in both singular and plural in the Lords Prayer: “Who is in the heavens” and “on earth as in heaven”.
IMO translations that don’t distinguish do a disservice.
I think this is because “the heavens” were the domain that was not “the earth” or “the underworld,” and they had a three-tiered universe conceptualization. So heaven was not a singular metaphysical place that meant paradise or the afterlife like it does for people in English, it referred to the top-tier of the cosmos as they conceived it. (Which also went along with a flat earth on pillars and a hard dome firmament, you you can’t just neatly map their labels onto our modern “cosmic geography” and have it all make sense.)
“The heavens and earth” or “above the earth, on earth, and under the earth” were figures of speech (merisms, specifically) that expressed totality and meant “all of reality.” So it’s good to keep in mind that sometimes the point in referring to the heavens wasn’t to locate something in physical or metaphysical space, it was more about expressing extent. Deut. 30:4 talks about God gathering people scattered to the farthest reaches of the heavens, and it gets changed in a lot of translations to the farthest places under heaven or the farthest parts of the earth to make it make more sense to us. But in the original, it was probably intended as a figure of speech that represented the furthest extent of separation possible, not a physical location.