Like the trucker with a family on both coasts, I'm two-timing this blog again by posting elsewhere.

update: A senior staff member here at millinerd.com has drafted a memo informing me that if one writes a blog post that's loooong, it most likely will not be read. And so, I summarize myself:

Knowing when to approach something allegorically and when to take it literally is hard to teach. It's like knowing when to laugh, and more importantly perhaps, when not to. I find it regrettable that some Christians today seem to be laughing at the wrong times, and dead serious with the jokes. As Protestants (I still am one), we're under no obligation to follow the Reformers at their worst. But, I should add, at least their impatience with apocrypha and allegory left them with more time for the essentials that too many of us have discarded.

Staying Protestant?

R.C. or not R.C.? That is the question.

Protestants who don't ask themselves why they're not Catholic (or Orthodox) puzzle me; as do Catholics (or Orthodox) who don't seek to convert Protestants to their respective communions.

I once listened to a Peter Gomes sermon, Where Are the Protestants?, hoping for some light on this important question. What I got was a pleasant sermon illustration on ecumenism (competing church bells of Harvard ought ring in harmony, not discord), along with Gomes' curious assertion that to be Protestant is actually about protest itself. Aside from the fact that this definition carries little historical weight, one wonders why adherence to a Protestant church is necessary to continue that good work of protest. In fact, if Gomes is right, then those who convert to Catholicism or Orthodoxy are the most genuinely Protestant, protesting as they are Protestantism's reduction to mere protest.

Gomes is to be commended, however, for at least attempting to publicly answer the question of the day, on which many Protestants observe an uncomfortable silence; uncomfortable because so many bright and faithful Protestants are Protestant no more.

It is natural for a Protestant to appeal to Scripture in tackling the question, as Scripture - not personal autonomy or protest - was, believe it or not, the point of the Reformation. Might there be one particular Bible passage with the power to keep someone Protestant? C.S. Lewis (whose reflection on this subject are most profound), suggested John 20:21-22 was appropriate. I'll add a few more possibilities, provided no one accuse me of "prooftexting" as a shortcut to thought. It this case the verses are an encapsulation of much (perhaps too much) thought.

1. 1 Cor. 7:20. Self explanatory, and by far the cleverest. Granted the "bloom where you're planted" does not account for toxic soil.

2. Luke 11:27-28. In the 16th century Protestant arsenal, some verses were used illegitimately. This Lukan line, however, was fair game, and can still stir that Ulster blood. It's the Protestant equivalent to the Dyothelite's Matthew 26:39 (as to "Dyothelite," again I refer you to theo-blogging rule 3). Problem is, triumphantly pointing this verse as Protestant vindication requires a caricature of Catholic and Orthodox thought on Mary.

3. Along similar lines there's Mark 7:8, which still has some punch when protesting an undeniable historical tendency. Granted this requires ignoring John Henry Newman on development of doctrine.

4. Matt 8:20. Who says we get ecclesial satisfaction this side of things anyway? This one perhaps encapsulates Radner's thought, and gets problematic with extreme ecclesial dissatisfaction.

5. Gal. 5:6-8. This one's quite dangerous, as to make the direct Catholic/Orthodox parallel with the Judaizers would be to equate both those communions with "yokes of slavery" that "alienate from Christ." This is as unfounded as a Protestant claiming Catholics or Orthodox need become Protestant to be saved (though, as Peter Kreeft concedes here, on occasion they do). Still, the verse again warns of the danger in adding essentials to the gospel that aren't essentials.

6. Finally, while the Protestant with lingering anti-Catholicism needs consider Exodus 20:12, the Protestant overcome by desire to become Orthodox or Catholic might consider Exodus 20:17. Depending on your upbringing, that first one can work for staying Protestant as well.

If I may quote some earlier reflection, the competing claims of Catholics and Orthodox "should be more than enough to scramble any hasty conclusions." When struggling with this matter, as I often do, I think back to King Kong. Alone, the girl [Protestant ecclesiology] is no match for the beast, but then the T-Rex comes along.

Nevertheless, in the words of Timothy George, ours is a time when callings "to a deeper discipleship to Christ across the historic divides" are not uncommon. The point - it is so easy to forget - being deeper discipleship.

Chastity: The Movie

Lest I be misunderstood on the salacious subject below, here is (another) reminder of how seriously chastity was taken by the medieval mind, using Emile Mâle's paraphrase of Prudentius' Psychomachia, that is, "Soul Battle:"

Chastity (Pudicitia), a young girl in shining armour, encounters the sudden shock of Lust (Libido), a courtesan who brandishes a smoking torch. She overturns the torch with the blow of a stone, and drawing her sword slays Lust, who as she dies vomits turgid blood which taints the purity of the surrounding air. Pitiless as a Homeric warrior, Chastity apostrophises the corpse of her enemy, extolling Judith in whom chastity first triumphed, then she washes her polluted sword in the sacred water of Jordan (p. 99-101).

How is that not a screenplay? The title, "Psychomachia," is a given.

Mel?

Too late for the film on this one, but roughly contemporary to Prudentius was Pope Leo the Great, who suggested that Israel's mortal struggle with the seven tribes tropologically (see point 3) suggested our own battle with the Seven Deadly Sins.

Today something I wrote got posted On the Square. Should you not have noticed, shame on you for checking millinerd before you checked First Things. I'm flattered, but where are your priorities?

Saint Ludwig

Said Paul of believers, "Not many of you were wise by the standards of this world." Some however, were. Diogenes Allen once related a story of Princeton philosophy professor Gregory Vlastos, who closed his career with a lecture explaining that, exalted as Plato's ideals may have been, for the concept of love of enemies the world would have to wait for Jesus Christ. Coming from a world authority on Plato, that's worth a ponder.

The best philosophers, it seems, know the limit of their discipline. Maybe it's not so odd then that the man who was, arguably, the 20th century's most distinguished one - Ludwig Wittgenstein - had this to say in a private notebook entry, dated 1937:

What inclines even me to believe Christ's resurrection?... -If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like any other man. He is dead and decomposed. In that case he is a teacher like any other and can no longer help; and once again we are orphaned and alone. So we have to content ourselves with wisdom and speculation. We are in a sort of hell where we can do nothing but dream, roofed in, as it were, and cut off from heaven. But if I am to be REALLY saved, -what I need is certainly not wisdom, dreams or speculations - and this certainty is faith. And faith is faith in what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence. For it is my soul with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind. Perhaps we can say: Only love can believe the Resurrection. Or: it is love that believes even the Resurrection; hold fast even to the Resurrection. What combats doubt is, as it were, redemption. Holding fast to this must be holding fast to that belief... So this can come about only if you no longer rest your weight on the earth but suspend yourself from heaven. Then everything will be different and it will be 'no wonder' if you can do things that you cannot do now. (A man who is suspended looks the same as one who is standing, but the interplay of forces within him is nevertheless quite different, so that he can act quite differently that can a standing man). The issue has been put before us clearly: do we stand on earth on our own feet or are we suspended from above, attached to a living Lord (p. 6)?

Why I Am Not a Christian author Bertrand Russell's prize student declaring faith in the resurrection? Count it as further evidence to support Charles Taylor's thesis that Modernity is misunderstood as monolithic secularism. Instead, according to this reviewer, it actually "implies a huge range of possible ways of thinking, including many variations of theism and atheism."

Constantine's Hammer

Patriarchy? Boo! Constantinianism? Boo! But according to some church history amateur named Jaroslav Pelikan, you can really only hate one. Amongst Constantine's reformulations of Roman law,

"socially, the most important were probably those that proscribed certain ancient Roman practices now deemed immoral and antisocial [such as] the Christian laws modifying the patria potestas, under which in ancient Rome the father of the family or clan had the right to decide the question of life or death for a newborn child, especially for one that was born deformed. Constantine struck down that provision of the patria potestas, thereby helping to initiate the legislation against abortion that was to characterize the legal and moral position of most nations in Christendom, both Eastern and Western, until comparatively modern times, but thereby also making it necessary to invent other forms of care for such unwanted children." (26).

Should you know of a more blatant historical instance of patriarchy (a pater with archy over life and death) being forcefully dismantled, do tell.

Of course, that's not the story whole. Military action has its justifications, but it seems slightly contrary to the spirit of the crucifixion for Constantine to have melted down the nails from the true cross and have them "made into a bridle-bit and a helmet, which he used on military expeditions" (Socrates Scholasticus' Ecclesiastical History 1.17). I imagine CNN's history gophers for "God's Warriors" would love that last bit, while politely ignoring the first.

eight cents per day

If you had to read one thing on the Emerging Church, you would do well to make it a short article entitled "Evangelical Amnesia" by Dean C. Curry (a Messiah College professor of politics) in the current issue of First Things.

This post is also intended to dish out some "tough love" to those who are not yet subscribers of First Things (which, to see Curry's article anytime soon, you must be). Send my your address by email and I can ensure the first few of you get a free trial issue. Also notice that Stanley Hauerwas is back in those pages with a feature article. Eight cents, as you may have guessed, is thirty bucks per year divided by 365 - approximately equivalent to one sip of good coffee.

The Joy of Distinction

While in Seminary, I witnessed a student get publicly corrected by a professor only once. The correction was due not to a grave theological error (which there were ample opportunity to correct), but due to the student referencing the God who revealed himself - sorry, I mean "Godself" - as Father Son and Spirit with the pronoun "He." If only for the sake of diversity, consider Kathryn Greene-McCreight (who, if I'm not mistaken, is part of that remarkable batch of Yale Ph.d's back in the Frei/Lindbeck days). At the risk of public correction, she writes,

I do not, as a policy, adopt "inclusive language" in reference to God.... Many feminists would not use the terms Father and Son, for example, to speak of the first and second persons of the Trinity. However, it is not the nature the Christian God to "include" either males or females within its being in this way. I use inclusive language only for humanity, since there is nothing in the reality of God that allows us, whether male or female, the luxury of being "included" in the first place. Since God is generally referred to in the Bible with the pronoun he, this is also the pronoun I generally use to refer to God. I thereby suggest neither that God is male nor that the female is "underrepresented" and the male "overrepresented" in the Godhead" (p. 8 of a fine book).

Contra Greene-McCreight's point on inclusion, some might actually believe we are ontological members of the Godhead, as (it seems) did Meister Eckhart:

We are an only son whom the Father has been eternally begetting out of the hidden darkness of eternal concealment, indwelling in the first beginning of the primal purity which is the plenitude of all purity. There I have been eternally at rest and asleep in the hidden understanding of the eternal Father, immanent and unspoken. Out of that purity He has been ever begetting me, his only-begotten son, in the very image of His eternal Fatherhood that I may be a father and beget him of whom I am begetting (Sermons and Treatises 2, 63-64).

But you see, that would be dangerously close to one of those grave theological errors referred to above. The doctrine of divinization, following testaments old and new, is something else entirely, and is so much more interesting. With it one gets all the benefits of divinity (immortality) but none of the responsibility (presiding at the final judgment). Boethius succinctly explains this often misunderstood concept (if you'll pardon the non-inclusive translation) in this way:

Since men are made blessed by the obtaining of blessedness, and blessedness is nothing else but divinity, it is manifest that men are blessed by the obtaining of divinity... wherefore everyone that is blessed is a god, but by nature there is only one God; but there may be many by participation (Consolatio, para. 10, 23-26).

Neglecting his Boethius, Eckhart - who was no dummy - slips uncomfortably close to the "You are God in a physical body... You are all power... You are all intelligence" of Rhonda Byrne's The Secret. The real secret is, as far as women writers on spirituality in English, there's long been a much better one (free here). But as it also has some pitfalls, I'd stick with Kathryn Greene-McCreight, who seems to firmly grasp the joy of distinction between herself and God, whose English is consequently much less awkward ("Godself"?), and whose Theological Commentary on Galatians is due out eventually from Brazos Press.

Desolation

Regarding the apparent "scandal" of Mother Teresa's doubt, has anyone consulted the locus classicus of spiritual direction, Saint Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises? The ninth rule in the discernment section (very worth your time, found here, continued here) reads:

There are three principal reasons why we find ourselves desolate.

The first is, because of our being tepid, lazy or negligent in our spiritual exercises; and so through our faults, spiritual consolation withdraws from us.

The second, to try us and see how much we are and how much we let ourselves out in His service and praise without such great pay of consolation and great graces.

The third, to give us true acquaintance and knowledge, that we may interiorly feel that it is not ours to get or keep great devotion, intense love, tears, or any other spiritual consolation, but that all is the gift and grace of God our Lord, and that we may not build a nest in a thing not ours, raising our intellect into some pride or vainglory, attributing to us devotion or the other things of the spiritual consolation.

Is it news that a woman so far along the path to sainthood was being taught advanced lessons in the spiritual life? I suppose ignorance about basic Christianity ensures it is.

update: For more extended treatment, do consult this article from 2003:

We may prefer to think that she spent her days in a state of ecstatic mystical union with God, because that would get us ordinary worldlings off the hook. How else could this unremarkable woman, no different from the rest of us, bear to throw her lot in with the poorest of the poor, sharing their meager diet and rough clothing, wiping leprous sores and enduring the agonies of the dying, for so many years without respite, unless she were somehow lifted above it all, shielded by spiritual endorphins? Yet we have her own testimony that what made her self-negating work possible was not a subjective experience of ecstasy but an objective relationship to God shorn of the sensible awareness of God's presence...

Mother Teresa learned to deal with her trial of faith by converting her feeling of abandonment by God into an act of abandonment to God. It would be her Gethsemane, she came to believe, and her participation in the thirst Jesus suffered on the Cross. And it gave her access to the deepest poverty of the modern world: the poverty of meaninglessness and loneliness. To endure this trial of faith would be to bear witness to the fidelity for which the world is starving. "Keep smiling," Mother Teresa used to tell her community and guests, and somehow, coming from her, it doesn't seem trite. For when she kept smiling during her night of faith, it was not a cover-up but a manifestation of her loving resolve to be "an apostle of joy."

Cramtastic!

Over at the SoMA Review you can read a review I wrote on an important recent book regarding the man who made Princeton a town people love to live in: Ralph Adams Cram.

More Orthodox Women

Some may not understand why, here at millinerd, the subject of medieval women increasingly comes up. Perhaps, as with the musical numbers in Grease, when the topic arises you look the other way and await resumption of the normal plotline. Yet there is a reason.

In the last several decades, outspoken historians have gone to the Middle Ages in search of fast and loose heretical women - women they wished to posthumously recruit to help subvert patriarchy. Fine as it may be to criticize patriarchy (or any other disordered archy), more recent historians have been waking up to the fact that this approach made for grossly unrepresentative history: most medieval women weren't burned at the stake for heresy (a fact accounted for by the perpetuation of the human race through the medieval period).

There were problems with the method besides its inaccuracy. Never mind that such behavior is uncomfortably similar to that of an unrestrained frat-boy on Spring Break (searching for fast-and-loose women); another problem with the method was that it left many orthodox women of the present assuming that church history is against them, when in fact it is heretical women of the present who are, historically speaking, so much more alone.

Corrections to the historical record, so lately warped, have not been coming from sideline scholars. I've already mentioned the esteemed Carolyn Walker Bynum. Also to be noted is Harvard's Jeffrey Hamburger, who has made a successful career out of correcting theoretical trend-mongering in medieval art history:

"Despite the temptation to enlist medieval women in modern struggles, they should not be interpreted exclusively in terms of the opposition between repression or resistance, authority and subversion. Some women, especially those outside religious orders, championed heterodox or heretical beliefs and paid with their lives. But to rehearse or even to romanticize the notion that heresy ran rampant among women is merely to reiterate the preferred charge of their most hostile critics. More often than not, female mystics, at least as idealized by their advisers, served (or were co-opted) as champions of orthodoxy and ecclesiastical reform. Moreover, many nuns were little interested in mysticism, if by mysticism we mean extravagant forms of piety beyond those prescribed by rules and liturgical rites. We should no more imagine enclosed women in a permanent state of ecstasy than we should give credence to the salacious stories of 'wayward' nuns so widely circulated during the later Middle Ages." (31).

Romanticizing heretical women (or men) is to parrot the charge of their most hostile critics. It's a thought worth considering.

Vanity, Vanity

Woody Allen's career has been subject to comment in the five years millinerd has been up and running. An early post (back when my writing style was unforgivably bloggish), posited the connections between Manhattan and Lost in Translation. And it should not go unremarked that Manhattan (bedding a teenager) has become a self-fulfilling prophecy in Allen's life. Yet, it was a necessary film, because Woody, while venerating the town with his black-and-white reverence, sees straight through Manhattan intelligentsia and cuts it perfectly to pieces.

However, Manhattan does not qualify as a pole of Woody's career. The poles are better located between Crimes and Misdemeanors, which brilliantly posits the question of meaning; and Match Point, a remake of the same film which definitively answers the question in the negative. (I suppose one needs there to be no meaning to justify sleeping with one's stepdaughter.)

Aside from some unconvincing acting from Scarlett Johansson, Match Point is one of Woody's finest films, as is it one of the finest atheist films imaginable. Not that I agree with the verdict of meaninglessness, but it's so perfectly expressed. If only Woody had swerved God-ward, what might he have done? Perhaps he still will. But in the meantime, screenings of Match Point might as well accompany Christopher Hitchens' book tour, while verdicts of meaning will depend upon lesser (but not awful) films such as M. Night Shyamalan's Signs.

Woody never had to preach in Crimes and Misdemeanors. Never, in that film, did he invoke the supernatural without a trace of humor. But in Match Point, for the first time in his career (correct me if I'm wrong), he introduces the supernatural with unmistakable seriousness, only to just as seriously dismiss it. This time, for the first time, Woody preaches. One senses in these deus ex machina tactics a fear that he might be wrong on the meaning question, which he is.

In Match Point Allen creates a vacuum-sealed, impenetrable universe with no possibility for meaning. Similar to the film's plot is the novel Crime and Punishment, which makes a brief appearance. But perhaps Allen should read it again, as Dostoevsky's novel and Allen's film come to completely opposite conclusions regarding redemption. Who knows? At the end of the age, Dostoevsky might arise and judge Woody Allen for daring to let Crime and Punishment into his film.

Consider a dinnertime dialog near the beginning of Match Point: "I think despair is the path of least resistance," someone chimes, only to be corrected by the main protaganist who calmly insists, "I think faith is the path of least resistance." But it is at the end of the film when [spoiler alert] the question raised so beautifully by Crimes and Misdeameanors is answered: "It would be fitting if I were apprehended," the perpetrator suggests. "At least there would be some small sign of justice. Some small measure of hope for the possibility of meaning." But no apprehension, no meaning. It's all pure chance. We're left with the sentiment that it's better for a newborn child to be lucky than to be good.

The tragedy is that Woody, at the peak of his powers, is half right; and one does not have to give up on meaning to agree with him. Contained within the canon of Holy Scripture is the same idea:

"the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all."

Indeed Solomon wrestled with the theme of Match Point already, but knew that such pockets of meaninglessness did not lead to the same overall verdict. Instead, meaninglessness is being slowly conquered by meaning, otherwise known as the Kingdom of God. Ecclesiastes submits Match Point moments to a God who brings meaning still, not to mention fitting apprehension.

Ahh... the Bible. Where one gets all the insights of atheism without having to subscribe to false premises. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

Visitations

Church doesn't get much better than last night at Ocean Grove. It's good to go down to Jerusalem-by-the-Sea at least once a season to visit that Hagia Sophia of camp meetings, that Cane Ridge colossus, The Great Auditorium. Careful calculation however is necessary; as it's quite depressing to find that venerable holiness pulpit selling out to stale Seminary trends. Almost as depressing is seeing it host a Willow Creek simulcast to provide - gulp - long-term future direction. Not that there's anything wrong with what God is doing in suburban Chicago; but there does seem to be something wrong, perhaps very wrong, with thinking God must be up to the same thing everywhere else. For more on the heritage that Willow Creek will never have, consult this decent book.

But last night we hit it right. I knew so when the speaker opened her message with a story of a recent research stint at Harvard, not to show off that she'd been to Harvard, but to show that Christians have what Harvard, in this case, does not. Pippert related her psychotherapist professor describing the "psychodynamics" approach which was able to accurately diagnose that the source of a patient's problems. In the case under discussion, the patient hated his mother. Pippert raised her hand and asked what might we then do to help the patient forgive and love his mother. The professor said that was too much to ask, as diagnosing the problem alone is already much to ask. "If you want changed hearts, you're in the wrong department." Following Pippert's anecdote, she delivered a beautiful and intelligent message on Christ's encounter with his disciples in the resurrection, which did in fact change hearts. How encouraging (and rare) to find a Christian not whipped (read: dumbstruck, infatuated) by the Ivy League.

The service was closing communion for the 139th annual camp-meeting, and whoever is running the Great Auditorium is wise enough to lift their Eucharistic liturgy straight from the Book of Common Prayer. The Eucharistic minister who gave us the bread and (of course) grape juice, had the audacity to grab my wife and my hand after we knelt at the altar, look us dead in the eye, and vigorously charge us to rise in the name of Christ "and be well." It was a very Methodist audacity that... cut us both to the heart and ministered to us profoundly - a big risk in pastoral manner that, in this case, paid off.

Such was almost as powerful as the Eucharistic minister at St. Thomas Fifth Avenue last week. When she pointed me with a full-armed gesture towards the altar to receive communion, I felt like she was St. Peter ushering me into heaven itself. It didn't hurt that the Bertrand Goodhue's reredos at St. Tom's surpasses, according to one art historian, any Gothic sculpture in Europe, let alone the U.S.

Two Sundays, two opposite poles of the denominational spectrum: Grassroots Jersey holiness Methodism and the highest of high Manhattan Anglo-Catholicsm, merging thanks to the wisdom that gravitates towards time-tested Eucharistic liturgies. Exciting times these. Especially (perhaps only) when the aforesaid denominations can be caught offguard.

Tibersplashing

I received a most encouraging email. Seems someone was looking for a new church, and they went to a place that was talking about, wait for it... brace yourself... this is really going to get radical so deep breath please... here we go... are you ready? 3, 2, 1... Postmodernity! Oh blessed five syllables... hushed silence please. Alas, typing that sweetest of thirteen-letter combinations has caused me to suddenly transfigure. Down from the mountain, millinerd, come down. You are needed.

On first thought, what could be more certain to send scores of thirsting young minds into languishing churches than replacing robust theological claims with foam from a wave of academic style that crested in 1985? My correspondent, a young hipster, was indeed the target audience of this agenda, but strangely, was not impressed. Indeed, it had the opposite of the intended effect. He was not drawn, but repelled. Later that afternoon, he consulted millinerd, and was encouraged by some posts that remain in the "post-postmodern" left-hand sidebar, hence my encouragement. My work here is done.

However, after eye-rolling at the state of contemporary Protestantism, my correspondent's eyes - longing for truth - turned to Rome. And who can blame him? The unmodified Trinity, which Catholicism is reputed to promote, will always be preferable to the Father, Son and Spirit of the Age. Furthermore, were one not attracted to Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy, one would need a spiritual checkup. Admiring one's elder siblings is always preferable to ignoring or hating them. There may also come a time when one realizes that one is in fact the other sibling. But for the younger to wish to become the elder sibling would make for odd family dynamics indeed.

The words of Timothy George on Francis Beckwith's conversion in the latest First Things come to mind.

"A year or so before his decision, Beckwith remarked to one of his friends that he wished he had time to delve more deeply into the writings of Luther and Calvin. I, too, wish he had found time for such an encounter, together perhaps with long sojourns in Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, Herman Bavinck, and Karl Barth. He might have found deeper resources and a sturdier faith than that on offer in much of the pop evangelical culture today. He would certainly have found there a way of thinking and a pattern of Christian life much more resonant with the apostolic witness and the orthodox faith he so clearly loves."

George continues by reminding us of an obvious reality: Catholic-Protestant conversion is a two-way street.

"An authentic commitment to religious liberty, together with a genuine respect for the truth, requires that we invite and challenge one another to a deeper discipleship to Christ across the historic divides that have separated us into different communions and denominations, even as we renounce un-Christlike attitudes and techniques of proselytism. As we work and pray for Christian unity, we sometimes face ecclesial choices that are difficult to make and even harder to explain to others. While I cannot follow the path Beckwith has taken, I respect the intellectual honesty that has led him to this point, and I bid him Godspeed for the journey ahead."

George concludes with the familiar words of C.S. Lewis: "I believe that in the present divided state of Christendom, those who are at the heart of each division are all closer to one another than those who are at the fringes."

It may be that my correspondent is genuinely called to Rome, that is, "called to a deeper discipleship to Christ across the historic divides." But his background is sufficiently Protestant that he may need to further explore genuine Protestantism - to be the younger sibling - before becoming the other one. That is to say, he may need dwell in the "heart of [the] division," not on the postmodern fringe. Unfortunately, his "relevant" church experience was a lamentable red-herring, distracting from this more important agenda. Had he joined me at the heartbreakingly beautiful service at St. Thomas' Fifth Avenue in Manhattan this morning, where the sermon was (to my surprise and delight) impeccably orthodox, his Protestant coals might have been stoked.

Protestants, granted they don't forsake their Scriptural birthright, have a purpose. They are a troubled, younger sibling - but a beloved one - in the family of God. As speculated one Catholic,

"Could it not be that [historic church] divisions have also been a path continually leading the Church to discover the untold wealth contained in Christ's Gospel and in the redemption accomplished by Christ? Perhaps all this wealth would not have come to light otherwise..."

That italics-loving Catholic, by the way, was John Paul II (see p. 153), and he may have been onto something. It is almost certain that the Bible would not have been as fully explored had Protestantism never existed. One treasures something more when it's all you've got.

So, I would advise my correspondent, explore Protestantism; which is to say, delve deeper into the Scriptures like they're all you've got. If at all possible, avail yourself of what Mark Noll (see p. 245) called one of the rare "bilingual" options in the Pentecost of ecclesial languages - Anglicanism. In God's providence there happens to be a communion to worship in while one straddles the Protestant-Catholic divide, curdled as that communion may be in many, but not all, of its North American outposts. Or, if the Catholic urge is irresistible, find a place where the blessed sacrament is reserved. Protestants can't eat, but they can tarry with the Lord who is truly present there. It's almost as good.

Finally, consult some of the historic Protestant figures mentioned by Timothy George. But whatever you do, don't read John Henry Newman!

Biblicizing Transformers

Biblicizing movies is my custom. I'm beginning to realize it's less piety than the an attempt to avoid boredom. Fooled by good reviews, I found myself watching Transformers. I concede some good parts, but being bored, I biblicized. Using the fallen angels bit on this film would work, but it's too easy. Instead my one Bible verse review reads: "Get behind me Satan."

Consider that (spoiler alert) towards the end of the movie Optimus Prime says to the teenage hero, "If I can't kill Megatron, I will sacrifice myself," which Optimus solicits the boy's help to do. Then Optimus says something which is inexplicable apart from this millinerd-patented interpretation. He says to the boy emphatically, "Get behind me." Why not, "I'll protect you" or "Watch out." No, it was "Get behind me."

Like Peter, the kid doesn't listen. How is this not a reference to Matthew 16? I'm getting tired in my old age of films with teenagers who can do no wrong and who save the world. It was no different with actor Shiah LaBeouf in "Disturbia" which I was forced to see on a plane. Teenagers can do wrong. In Transformers, the kid's Petrine Messianic triumphalism kept Optimus Prime from becoming a Christ-figure who could sacrifice himself to save the world.