So I’ve have a strangely debilitating and demoralizing summer cold. No comments, please, about my lack of manliness in whining about something I should find easy to fight through and rise above. But I’ve started to work on my talk next week at the ISI honors program. It’s on American Exceptionalism and includes stuff you’ve already seen. Here’s a paragraph that you haven’t:
Why are heresies not all bad? They highlight something that’s been neglected by the tradition. They usually have a Christian point. When I watch a low-church movie starring Robert Duvall—Tender Mercies or The Apostle—I know I’m seen the portrayal of Christian truth, if far from the whole truth. The murderer on-the-run preacher in The Apostle who founds a church where class and status make no difference, a congregation of displaced misfits who are poor and poorer, dumb and dumber, black and white, male and female, and fatter and fatter still, is telling people who need to hear (because they can’t read) what they most need to know to turn their lives around: They can be saved, despite it all, if they believe in Jesus and “Holy Ghost power.” There’s something exceptional about a country that carries the truth about amazing grace in its popular culture and its country music. Conservatives often exaggerate what a techno-wasteland America is by denying that evangelicals and Pentecostals are really Christian. Sure, no other country is plagued so much by warehouse churches, touchy-feely platitudes posing as theology, and the soul-challenged music that’s called Christian contemporary, praise music, and so forth. But none of those criticisms get to the question of whether the low-churchers really believe or whether they really practice the virtues—beginning with charity—that flow from love of the personal God.
July 10th, 2012 | 6:45 pm
Gary Gutting, of the Notre Dame philosophy dpt, recently did an article in the NYT that I think is pointing to an “American exceptionalism” (well-understood) too. He grounds it in the aspirations of the Declaration and the “animating ideal of American patriotism” though: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/03/is-our-patriotism-moral/
My favorite line: “We are a MacIntyrean community that is still trying to live out a modern morality that seeks the freedom of everyone.”
July 11th, 2012 | 10:28 am
I’m getting to the Declaration. That is an interesting line, but it does read like mission impossible.
July 12th, 2012 | 10:08 am
I am guilty of not appreciating PoMoCon irony. However, your bias swamps these series of thoughts while projecting, what appears to be a deep antipathy toward the poor, white, Southerner.
Perhaps the irony is that it also appears you, as a high churchman, are involved in a deeply personal inquiry regarding the righteousness of the Pentecostal/Evangelical. On the one hand your perfervid anti-Southernism stands in constrast with your appreciation of the spiritually alluring nature of the fundamentalists and their love, and sweet surrender to the Word; so primitive, so first century.
Or, perhaps. the irony is the method of worship between the Southern Blacks and Whites, at least those of the Pentecostal perspective, is so strikingly similar.
July 12th, 2012 | 11:05 am
There’s no irony here at all. I mean what I say in genuine appreciation. It’s a very pro-southern post.
July 12th, 2012 | 2:08 pm
I think what a lot of the low-churchers get right is the notion that the basic message of the Gospel is a simple one, available (especially) to fishermen, tax collectors, etc. Excessive emphasis on the individual interpretation of Scripture will of course mean that much of the profundity of the message is often lost.
Many of the “heresies” widespread in low-churches, such as the gnosticism of the “left-behind” dispensationalists, have unfortunate consequences for the conduct of many believers, but I doubt this bad, I’ll Fly Away theology will be held against them when the time comes for them to learn it isn’t true. Plus, “I’ll Fly Away” is fun to sing.
July 13th, 2012 | 9:31 am
i really don’t think the message of the Gospel is injured by any professing Christian who engages the Word in obedience and love.
I do agree with the potential problem related to the gnostic movements inherent in Christianity with the caveat that we’ve been in ‘end times’ since the Golgotha event, and no one knows ‘when’
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