I have had my doubts in recent weeks abouts the Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Orthodox Ministers in Baton Rouge the last few weeks.
As I ponder LSU BASEBALL decent into a level of hell only Dante could write about I am thinking that God himself must be displeased with something happening in the RED STICK. How else to explain this tragic LSU baseball chain of events?
Still it appears there are some brain cells working down there and Live The Trinity has a great post here at Is Christianity about faith or *reverence*?
He has been doing some post about Ecclesiastes which have been interesting. He uses that as a departure point into a much bigger subject.
I wonder if he is really on to something.
I think one reason I became Catholic (and this was in the post Vatican II days) was the whole reverence thing. I can recall being in high school and going to a Episcopal Church during Holy Week. I was blown away. It seemed reverence was the key. You worshiped with your whole body and darn it there was something important happening on that Altar at that very moment in the middle of no where north Louisiana. I was awed and I was thankful to actually have to humble myself.
As a modern day Baptist this was a sort of foreign concept. I think the closest I got to that was when the youth group would haul the cross around town on Good Friday. Pretty powerful but that was it.
Why is this? I don't think this was always so. Even Protestants in the tradition I was raised in had this since of awe or reverence at one time. Did Vietnam and Watergate and inflation etc etc sort of make people cynical about all this stuff in both the Catholic and Protestant communities?
I have a theory. We rightly talk about the WWII greatest generation. But one can not help but notice that under their watch a lot of things went to hell in a hand basket. Look at Europe!!! Look at Japan and then yes look at us.
Archbishop Sheen said:
[I]n his series of talks titled What Now America? [Sheen] said that, by our tacitrefusal to recognize the evil of the atomic bomb, Americans became susceptibleto a new notion of freedom — one divorced from morality.'When, I wonder, did we in America ever get into this idea that freedom means having no boundaries and no limits?' he asked. 'I think it began on the 6th of August 1945 at 8:15 am when we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. … Somehow or other, from that day on in our American life, we say we want no limits and no boundaries.
Now the reason I bring this up was because something the noted author Ann Rice talked about in her book where she talks about coming back to their Catholic faith. Basically she said that the Catholicism she was taught could provide no answers to this new reality where we could literally destroy the human race in minutes.
The reverence of an all powerful God takes a hit there to say the least. Maybe that is what happened. Maybe even the best of Christians thought heck what is this talk of an powerful God when a guy in China or D.C. or Moscow can pretty much end it all. I was born in the last generation when nuclear war was a very serious thing we all pondered.
If you think about it reverence has taken a mighty hit. I can recall the days of blue laws on Sunday that the Christian and heathen alike respected. Think how taking the Lords name in vein is really seen as no big deal anymore.
I am hoping Live the Trinity expands on his thoughts here because I am not sure where I am on this. However reverence has taken a big hit in the last few decades. From God , to his Church, to people in authority, to the family, to motherhood, etc etc etc. It seems that for good or bad my parents produced a generation of cynical folks that are now taking it to more extremes.
Reverence or as I think he is trying to get at an proper conception of our place in the world relative to the almighty has well seen better days. I can you have Reverance we we seem to have become GODS our ourselves. Our technology which I think in the end we are moral midgets in using and thus destroy us is a major problem
As he quotes another author:
To fear God is to embrace one’s creaturely status as well as acknowledge the impenetrably enduring work of God, who freely extends the blessings of life to finite, ephemeral beings.
The stand in awe before the God of mystery is to position one’s character in relation to God, as opposed to defining correct behavior that presumes the ways of God…
Not only does reverence for God correct the rigid logic and extremes of the individual enterprise, it constitutes the source from which all virtue and right conduct are to flow. Qohelet has given godly reverence its orthodox due without reducing it to primitive terror, on the one hand, or human pretense, on the other. (William Brown, Character in Crisis: A Fresh Approach to Wisdom Literature in the Old Testament, 145, 146)
Do we have that? What is perhaps more traumatic than the atomic bomb is now we have taken this to a whole new level. That is in the murky field of bio ethics. I can recall when TEST TUBE BABIES were controversial. Trust me I saw the LIFE MAGAZINE cover when I was young. That is now old hat. We cannot only destroy 99 percent of humanity in a second we think we have the right and power to be the new creators of the new Garden of Eden through our technology.
Is there any doubt that Christanity is in crisis in all its faith communites when we take these powers. That is the power to destroy and create at our whim. I don't think we have come to terms with this yet. In fact if there is a crisis in Christian Theology and message it might be this was never addressed in a sufficent matter.
In fact that might be the most striking failure of Protestant thought. The Catholic faithful pretty much ignored the teachings of their Church as we went on the if it feels good do it mentality. However where were the Baptist, the Methodists, the evangelicals. All I can recall from this period when things seemed to being going off the rails was as ten year old the Pastor talking about the book The Late Great Planet Earth. The problem as we have seen is no the Earth did that end and now we have all these problems we thought would go away with the Second Coming.
If the protestants had recognized these problems in time well maybe we would be someplace different. I AM NOT BASHING PROTESTANTS. Lets face it the Catholics and Orthodox who should have known better on a local level were AWOL. Still goodness it seems we should have been more of adult conversation about all these things and the possible consequences. SO therefore it would have been great if the Evangelicals did not get all board with some of this stuff early on.
That appears to be changing partly because I think Evangelicals and Catholics are starting to get a clue what things they had to give up to be accepted. It is rarely noted but the Irish Catholic immigrant in New York and the Southern Baptist in Alabama often were on similar paths that dealt with a lot of discriminaton and the big WANT of acceptance. It seems compromises that both made have had consequences.
So I am thinking at this point of pondering that there is a essential link between "faith" and "reverence".
Hopefully more later.
Interesting read. I like the quote "The stand in awe before the God of mystery is to position one’s character in relation to God, as opposed to defining correct behavior that presumes the ways of God"
ReplyDeleteIf you ever get a chance (if you haven't already), you should read Christianity's Dangerous Idea by Alister McGrath about the history of protestantism. I love McGrath, he is a great historian and theologian - and his books are very readable. One of his thesis in this book that he touches on, and goes into more detail on in his other books, is that the reformation (particularly Calvinism) with its stressing of a rational faith and a downplaying of the mystery of faith eventually led to a high percentage of non-religion in areas that were previously Calvinist strongholds. The lack of the supernatural in traditional protestantism, he speculated, may also account for some of the explosion of Pentecostalism with its emphasis on the emotional and miraculous, as opposed to traditional protestantism lack of emphasis on these matters.