Fold 'Em
No Sunday School post today. Josiah & Paton we're out camping this weekend, and Isabelle took ill with something involving projectile pooping, so needless to say I'm glad Frederick & Gretchen kept her home.
I did have the pleasure of sitting in on the adult Sunday School class, which I've been wanting to do since the new "A Philosophy of Children for the Entire Christian Family" (or something like that) class started. My fear was cheap moralisms being passed off as cultural criticism. Rather difficult to tell having only sat through one class.
A few thoughts:
Teacher asserted that the problem with America's rapant individualism and consumerism was because it broke from its Reformed, Christian roots and the corrective was a return to Biblical Christian i.e. a "new Reformation."
While true in one sense, it fails to see America's rapant individualism and consumerism as a product of the Reformation + the Enlightenment. While they were not necessary consequences of course, they were consequences nonetheless, and my feeling is that to miss this connection and to simply assert a return to a more idyllic Reformed/Protestant cultural state is both naive and dangerous. It fails to learn from our mistakes and it fails to own responsibility for certain cultural factors prevalent today.
Further, and I think this is the deepest assumption on the side of the "return to an idyllic Protestant/Reformed/Christian America", it is not the case that the Reformation and its culture coupled with that of an infant America was a perfect situation, even pragmatically speaking. Its this bais and this assumption that is, quite frankly, the most ignorant and dangerous in the Reformed Church when it comes to approaching the issue of the Church & Culture.
Specifically, the reason why Christian children are so prone to leaving the church today is because 450 years ago a group of Christian me, necessarily mind you, set the precedent for personal preference/ideology/truth over and above community & tradition.
Add the secular Enlightenment with a dash of a Dutch/English/Scottish protestant work ethic and you get what we've got here today. And lets be honest, that's the way we like it and want it, and its wrong.
Josiah Q. Roe | By Josiah Roe | 10:21 AM
Comments
So do like I'm doing and become Anglican. It's really encouraging to be around people who take seriously their communion with congregations and churches in other parts of the country and the world at large. Really opens up your perspective. And they're all about community, in some of the best ways I've seen.
Granted, the ECUSA has its problems. One of them being that the leadership and a significant chunk of the denomination as a whole stopped believing the gospel a few years ago. This is a bad thing, and it's why I probably won't be joining the ECUSA, just All Angels' Church (at least until this mess settles out, but I think I'll probably have left NYC by the time it does). But there's a reason why they call the Lord's Supper Communion, and a lot of that is lost in many of the Presbyterian churches I've been to.
Oh, and true Anglicans are Reformed too.
Posted by: ryan at November 1, 2004 10:59 AM
I often long for a return to America's original deistic roots. We've really lost our way.
...
Wait, what did you say, again?
Posted by: Phil at November 1, 2004 01:30 PM
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