Followers

Sunday, September 27, 2020

Cultivating the Christian Mind

We need to cultivate Christian minds. We need thinkers like Chesterton, Tillich, Lewis, Merton, Watts, Chambers, and even Pope John Paul especially when we look at his writings on Genesis and the importance of the body to salvation. But if evangelicals believe that we have a Christian thinker in our newest Supreme Court nominee, I believe they are mistaken.  I don't think we have a Christian mind in regards to this new Supreme Court nominee. We have a pedantic Catholic mind. C.S. Lewis warned us of the pedant:

In a way I quite understand why some people are put off by Theology. I remember once when I had been giving a talk to the R.A.F., an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, "I’ve no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I’m a religious man too. I know there’s a God. I’ve felt Him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that’s just why I don’t believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone who’s met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!” (Mere Christianity, p. 135)

We need to cultivate Christian minds. We need thinkers like Lewis "who's met the real thing." Pedants haven't met the real thing. They follow the dogmas and formulas. Their faith is based on ritual. It's what Bonhoeffer called cheap grace. It is a grace that makes us feel good about ourselves but leaves nothing for God.

I make the distinction between Catholic and Christian because I have heard both Catholics and Protestants distinguish themselves along liturgical lines. Both Catholics and Protestants can be Christian but Catholics can't be Protestants nor Protestants, Catholic. That doesn't mean however that their thinking can't cross the lines. Martin Buber for example is as important to Christian and Catholic discourse as any modern Christian or Catholic writer. Buber is Jewish.

In my opinion, there is nothing more out of sync with Western Rationalism, than a pedantic Catholic. They believe that works come before faith as long as those works benefit the Church or other Catholics, that is, the Catholic community. Yes, I know, the Church has officially stated that faith comes before works but that is how Catholic scholars write at the scholastic level not what the priests preach from the pulpit. 

The Vatican though minuscule exerts a great influence globally. Territoriality is even less important today as it was during the Victorian Period for a small island country like Great Britain. The sun never set on the British Empire and the same can be said of the Vatican.  Great Britain colonized the world by its commerce and military. The Vatican colonizes the world by its pedanticism. 

Liberation Theology is one example of the Catholic Church trying to win back the hearts and minds of the people after decades of being instrumental in supporting dictators in predominantly Catholic countries like Italy (Lateran Treaty) and Spain (Concordat of 1953) not to mention Latin America. 

Pedantic Catholics do not believe in contraception and believe that populating the earth with Catholics benefits the Church. They are very much like Masons favoring other Catholics in their daily lives. The Irish Catholics and Italians are infamous for this practice which has resulted in a generational influx of fresh members to organized crime. I am not sure which is worse ethnic centrism or religious centrism but when they are combined into a ethno-religious centrism, there are big problems. Northern Ireland is an example; Sicily another.

Amy Coney Barrett is one of the pedantic, out-of-sync Catholics of whom I speak. Seven kids in a non-agrarian culture is a bit much even with two adopted children. Is she more blesséd than the Catholic woman who chose to bear two children and use birth control? What were her motives for adopting two Black, Haitian children? Did she do it to relieve their suffering or did she do it to increase the Catholic population by two? If she adopted them to bring two souls to Christ, I am all in support, but if she did it to bring two children into the Church, I don't support her motives. Did she do it to give herself a more diverse public persona? 

If there is one act that I would use to vote against her being nominated, it would be her willingness to risk a pregnancy late in life. That is pedanticism at its purest. Of her own brood, she went for number five late in life around 43 years old, without any regard for the well-known risk of Down Syndrome and hence she conceived a Down Syndrome child. This in my opinion was poor judgement and it was linked to her pedantic religious beliefs. I hope she didn't take the pregnancy to full term  knowing that the child would be handicapped simply to make her family appear as with the adoption of the Haitian children...   more diverse. There is a pattern here, however. 

By any rational Western opinion, her choice to get pregnant at that age was a bad choice. Her choice to keep the child however was not a bad choice. Adhering to either a ProLife or ProChoice position is rational. That's what makes the abortion issue insolvable. When there is a conflict between two goods, as in the case of abortion, a person's bodily right versus the rights of the unborn and innocent, to have an abortion must be left to the individual's decision as long as all prerequisites are met. 

The abortion issue does not come into play here when considering Coney Barrett's aptitude for the position. What comes into play is her poor judgement based upon her pedantic religious views. Her choice to have a child at 43 years of age is as poor a choice as an ignorant teenager's choice to have sex without protection. In both cases neither accepted the consequences of their actions for the child or for the people around them. For Coney Barrett burdening us with her pedantic Catholicism is as self-righteous as the teenager feeling entitled to share her burden with parents, grandparents, and the state.

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