6 posts tagged “christianity”

by Father Stephen

Part of the spiritual landscape of American religion is the sizable role played by choice in a culture shaped in the free market - with freedom as a mythic symbol. It is not unusual to hear American politicians describing solutions to social problems as a matter of “trusting Americans as consumers.” It is as though we could “shop” our way out of life’s difficulties.

And thus it is that Calvinism, as a Protestant option, has never quite captured the mind of the American religious “consumer.” Our culture has long been driven by its own sense of freedom and the inherent right of every individual to make his or her own choice. Thus Christian teachings which do not give heavy weight to the importance of free-will (such as classical Calvinism) have never come to the place of dominance in American life. For Americans, religion is about a choice.

This is not all wrong - human beings do have freedom and it plays an important role within the life of salvation - even in Orthodox understanding. However, Orthodoxy sees our freedom as something flawed - we do not always choose as we should - nor do we always know what the good is to be chosen. Freedom has a role to play in the life of salvation - but is not itself what constitutes salvation. Indeed, our freedom is itself in need of salvation.

This brings me to the title of this short piece: the Kingdom of God is not a choice we make. There are many ways to describe the Kingdom - a variety of metaphors employed in the New Testament - but in every case the Kingdom is God’s Kingdom - not our response to God.

I occasionally state in sermons that “the Kingdom of God is coming whether you like it or not.” In this sense, particularly, it is not a choice we make - it is a gift that is given from God. In Christ, particularly in the fullness of His death and resurrection - the Kingdom of God has come. Though we still pray, “Thy Kingdom come,” we are not devoid of its presence now. “Thy Kingdom come” is a prayer for its fullness - but not for its inauguration.

The Kingdom of God is a reality already among us - though we frequently are oblivious to its presence. The heart of secularism is its assurance that the Kingdom of God is not here now, not yet, and perhaps only refers to something somewhere else or even nothing more than a utopian vision of the future. Of course, secularism and its infection of Christian thought is commonplace in modern culture. The world is not seen as sacramental, capable of bearing the Divine, but at best as a neutral playing field in which human beings choose sides in the religious contest of Christianity (or other religions or none of the above).

But the fullness of Christian truth and revelation is that the Kingdom of God has already broken forth among us, and the Christ who brought it forth promised that it would remain. Thus we eat and drink His Body and His Blood - not reminders of a historical event - but a foretaste of the fullness of the Kingdom. It is the Bread of Heaven - food, though not of the world yet in the world.

The whole of the sacramental life has this character of the Kingdom. And the sacramental life extends far beyond the Seven Sacraments that are traditionally described. The Kingdom has a quality that breaks into all of life unable to be restrained or hindered by man. We are not in charge of its arrival nor are we the masters of its growth. We may participate in its life and serve as its witnesses - even as citizens - but it is not our creation or something we offer to God. It comes from God and bears God.

I reflected on the song shared in the last post, written by St. Nikolai Velimirovich. There it seems clear - “Christ is risen, joy has been given.” Everything is made bright with the resurrection of Christ. It is not a choice other than for us to say: “Indeed He is risen!”

Here's a compelling article I found on the history of slavery and how it came to end in the West. The writer draws a distinction between Christianity and Islam -- how Christians were solid advocates for abolition in the West based on their readings of significant biblical passages, and how anti-slavery Muslim activists have no corresponding passages to appeal to in the Qu'ran, which ultimately enables slave-owners and traffickers to persist in widespread slave trades in many Muslim nations. Check it out.

Slavery, Christianity, and Islam

So it's quiet at the cafe tonight. The last of my few customers just polished off their glasses and took their leave. As I reckoned they were about to leave, I put on Del tha Funkee Homosapien to try and appeal to what I surmised was their hip-hop persuasion. But no luck. Now I'm looking at three empty hours ahead, unless some of the late-night rowdies come in.

Last night was a pretty successful evening, though. I had a steady stream of regulars, and most of them stayed until closing time. Chris, Jana, and another friend, Andy, even came in for a while. I put on Fugazi's documentary, Instrument, and I made some good tips.

So what to do to fill the empty hours, you ask? That's was my question, as well, and then I remembered the seriously under-appreciated, nearly forgotten foxhole.info. What an unused, shucked potential. What a great design, what a pretty sound, what beautiful words adorn the page. Some of those words make up a pair of essays I wrote a while back and posted up there, for you see, foxhole.info was designed with grand purposes in mind. Greg formed it as he did to include Foxhole's thoughts as well as our music. Only that forum has been mostly neglected. Justin and I have both posted a couple pieces, and as I'm pretty sure little to no one takes the time to search out bands with essays on their sites, I figured I would transfer those I wrote here, so as to open them up to a better (thought I doubt exponentially) readership.

Both of these essays were written some time ago. The first was published right after the site went up in 2004. The other was published much more recently, but it took me a couple years to actually get it all out and into the word processor. So this will be an exercise in review, as well. How strongly do I still support the agendas presented in these essays? That, I suppose, I'll find out as I spend time reading them over again, and if anyone reading is willing to engage the essays in discussion, then that process will surely be helped along.

I'll post the two in succession here in this post, and thanks ahead of time to anyone who finds the time to read them. EDIT: When it comes to color-coding my vox posts, I'm at a complete loss. There doesn't seem to be a lot of logic involved. So please excuse the variating color schemes. Guard against seizures.

Essay 1: The Need of the Church - Originally published June 7th, 2004
Among younger Christians, I have noticed a lot of talk about how the message of the church, as well as its "appearance," should consider our surrounding culture's needs, how we need to love non-believers and avoid turning them away from the Gospel. While these sentiments are noble and most worthy of consideration, there is something much greater that we, as Christians, should focus on if we truly hope to see the world reached for Christ, which goes against current notions of our "individual" relationships with God. Although it is of great importance to sow tangible seed with the non-believers of today, loving them as Jesus does, it is even more important (most important, even) for Christians to genuinely display the love of Christ to other Christians, i.e. the Church at large. Consider the biblical accounts of how the Church began, and consider the biblical instruction for how the Church should be; this notion of love between Christians always comes before the notion of loving non-believers.

Acts 2:41-42 Then those who gladly received his word were baptized... And they continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayers.
Acts 4:32 Now the multitude of those who believed were of one heart and one soul; neither did anyone say that any of the things he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common.
Phillipians 2:1-4 Therefore if there is any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and mercy, fulfill my joy by being like-minded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind. Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself. Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others.
1 John 4:11-13 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us, and his love has been perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him, and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.

In Ephesians, which can be considered a description of what the Church will be when it is fully matured, Paul is greatly concerned with the way Christians act toward one another: in love, in forbearance, in submission. And throughout the New Testament we see command after command for Christians to express the love of Christ to other Christians far more often than we see commands to love non-Christians.

Consider the sort of world in which the Church originated. The times were plagued with war, oppression, greed, and hatred of many kinds. Then along comes the early Church, called "The Way": A group of people who genuinely love one another, who provide for one another's needs, who put their very lives on the line for the sake of their brethren-- quite a stark contrast to what people outside of the church would have known. The advent of the Church would have been wholly new and unheard of, the stuff of faerie tales. When considering the life of strife non-believers lived, and comparing their own lives to the loving and beloved lives of those within the Church--not to mention the communion established between the individual and the God of the universe, the enabler of love--once that individual put faith in that enabling God, the Church would have been very appealing to a great many people.

Now consider our present world. Is it much different than the world of antiquity? Is it not ridden with strife and confusion, hatred, destruction and a false sense of tolerance? However, the Church today is anything but a haven to which non-believers can look to and see something wholly different, something so radical that it has to be of God. That radical something is called genuine love, and frankly, the Church at large lacks it. Instead of being the example of the ultimate love that God bestows to humans, the Church is in many places a microcosm of the hate and division from which the world itself suffers. You unsettled believers have reason to be unsettled; the Church certainly does not match up to the biblical standards it should emulate. However, thinking that non-Christians will fall in line with God because individual churches "jazz up" or "contemporize" their messages or their worship services is off base. Is it really appealing to the world if all the Church offers is upbeat music or messages? Some may be brought into the fold by these methods, but can it be as efficient as what the Church is commanded to do: to love one another?

If we want to show the world something different, we must put aside the things that divide us and put on the love of God. When they see that love within us, pouring out of us onto one another, then they will be unable to deny that he is with us. Do not misunderstand; we need not sell all our possessions and join communes. It is necessary, however, to achieve and abide by the principles that lay beneath such a situation: considering other believers better than ourselves, and harboring the willingness to go without in order to provide for others' needs. Nor should we disregard the importance of an individual, personal relationship with God. Indeed, it is very important that each and every individual understands that God loves him/her specifically. However, our personal relationship with God should not take precedence over God's relationship with the Body of Christ. A Christian should develop his personal faith in order that he may bear fruit, fruit that would go to feed the needs of the Body, so that the Body may work as one unit to the calling which God has given it: to bring in the lost, to give thanks and honor to God, and to emulate Christ. You are not your own, and neither is your faith given you so that you may keep it to yourself. As a Christian, you have obligations to other believers, and in reality, obligations to God. Someone once said to me that we should look to serve and please God rather than the Church; I cannot exaggerate the absurdity of the statement. By serving the Church, we serve God; by serving people, we serve God; and by following his call, we serve God. An individual church (congregation) that is not aware or considerate of the others around it is doing more to defame God than serve him. However, the Church at large is likened unto Christ's bride; Christ is concerned with his whole bride, his whole Body, of which he is the Head. The Christian's duty is to pray and work with the entire Body in mind, not just the foot or the ear. (For a more eloquent and enlightening read on this notion of the Body, I encourage you to read C.S. Lewis' essay, "Membership," found in the book The Weight of Glory.)

Finally, I do not purport that we should not love non-Christians with a Christ-like love. Obviously, we should. But we miss the point, and ultimately cut ourselves off from the source God wishes us to use to draw much of our strength, if we put all our effort into loving non-Christians the way Christ would love them, yet choose to neglect our more pressing responsibility to love other Christians with Christ's love. As 1 John claims, we see God in the love that we show one another; how will we know how to love non-Christians if we have no visible example among ourselves? When the love of Christ is exemplified in the Church, then we will see God's love in us and we will know how to express it to non-believers. Everything is founded on love: first GodÌs love toward us, then God's love through Christians toward other Christians, then God's love through Christians toward non-Christians.

I know it is a long one, but make every effort to meditate on this message, in order to discern whether the Truth rests on it. If so, please begin to seek God to such an end.

Grace and peace, Derek

Essay 2: American Christendom - originally published December 26th, 2006
Yesterday I read an article in the Christian Science Monitor about how a loud and proud Christian video game is receiving flack due to its depiction of violence against non-Christians and perpetuation of an "us vs. them" mentality. The game, based on the wildly popular Left Behind series, purports that when the end comes and "true Christians" are raptured to heaven, those left behind will have to do battle with the forces of the Antichrist, that a war for peoples' hearts will break out, and no one will be able to remain neutral. Hence, violence may be necessary.
Two days ago I read about how the City of Chicago threatened to pull its funding from the local Christkindlmarket (Christmas Market) when it found out the recent film The Nativity Story was also a sponsor to this year's market, citing that under the Constitution's first amendment, the government cannot expend to promote any particular religion (nevermind that Christkindlmarket translated from German simply means Christ-child market). Certain Christian organizations have retorted by saying that Chicago’s actions are obviously "a form of anti-religious bigotry and indirect censorship," and that "it is ludicrous that the city would blatantly attack a movie that will be exceptionally well-received by millions of people in and around Chicago, most of whom are members of one Christian denomination or another."
A couple months ago I read (and received multiple forwards) of how the AFA persuaded, nee "forced NBC to cancel a scene in the upcoming Madonna special in which she mocks the crucifixion of Christ" with nearly a million TV viewers who emailed NBC and demanded the program’s cancellation, citing that NBC is not showing Christians due respect.
Then, of course, just a few minutes ago, I read about how last year several Christian organizations jumped on board in the boycott of Target, due to its disuse of "Merry Christmas" with in-store promotions, and its forbidding of Salvation Army kettles from in front of Targets everywhere.    

In these times in which our nation is struggling to determine just how pious it wishes to be, I often find myself at pause and wondering how christ-like American Christians act. Are we visiting the sick and imprisoned; are we clothing the naked and feeding the hungry? This is where we must concern ourselves the right and left – that is, are we at Christ's right hand or left hand, with the sheep or the goats? Are we acting a priori or simply reacting? This is not to say that there aren't Christian organizations that busy themselves about this good work; there are in fact many doing it well. But this isn't what draws national headlines. 

As Americans, we learn from a very young age about the priority of our rights as Americans – that Americans are free to speak, free to write, free to dream and accomplish that dream, and free to worship as they please. We are emboldened by the notion of Human Rights, that no one has the right to tread over us as human beings, our hopes, desires, expectations, expressions of belief, etc. If anyone tries to do so, we learn just how quickly we must stand up and against them to declare our rights – it's this reactionary spirit that makes the newspapers (and when the Press is for you, who can be against you?).  As Christians, on the other hand, we (should) learn from a young age that the first will be last and the last first, that we should turn the other cheek, go the extra mile (not referencing ambition), give up not only our coat but also our shirt, that all men will hate us because of Christ (rather than respect us), and that those who are peacemakers, poor in spirit, meek, etc. will be called blessed. How can the two worldviews coexist? Does one play more to our natural inclination to sin than the other? If yes, will that one dominate, even submerse, the other? Can the meek spirit master the fighting spirit? 

We see just this fighting spirit in the mouths of Christians in several of the articles I cited above. Such cases are certainly not isolated or rare, and it is in these and others like them I notice an underlying assumption in American Christian circles which we often argue from perhaps without ever even realizing it. It is the belief that, as both Christians and Americans, we are somehow responsible for the path our surrounding nation takes in terms of morality. We attempt to assert the "god-given rights" we learned about as children to enforce the nation's collective piety, regardless of the fact that most inhabitants of this nation do not worship the Living God (despite what statistics say). We've come to firmly believe that in order for Lord's will is to be done in this nation, we must take a stand for our morals and principles, whether its in petitions, picket lines, and even to the point of legislation. In doing so, we end up fighting for a nation of morals without the Spirit which breeds them. Were we to fail at rectifying the nation's moral trajectory, the degradation of our society would fall at our feet.

In the New Testament, however, I find no injunction from which we can derive this sense of responsibility. As the Church, it seems we feel compelled to redeem the society around us, but based on what authority? The gospel and apostolic messages are much more concerned with the Church and its sanctity than the moral standing of the surrounding non-Christian, even un-Christian, society. We ask for our politicians to honor and abide by our moral wishes because we feel that it is by this maintenance of moral uprightness our nation will continue to prosper and Christians will still have a promising inlet for the gospel message. However, I argue it is by this continued appeal that we maintain not good morals, but a connection to a society which is always corrupt, more at times and less at others, with its own humanistic ideals and goals for itself. Officially, the sub-society of Christians has never been attacked, as, say, Nero or Diocletian attacked Christians. Yet whereas persecution might help to bring us together, meddling in the moral affairs of our nation by imposing our own moral agenda seems only to divide us. Whether it's the reverse effect of being influenced rather than influencing, be it the growing worship of sex or celebrity and the assertion of our inherited rights rather than their sacrifice, or the divisions that surface at an international level whenever Christians debate morals with themselves, these factors contribute to, even dig the roots for, the weakening of and corruption within the Church.

The American Christian's first duty has somehow switched from building on the sanctity of the Church and stretching out to the lost to maintaining the sanctity of our Nation, so that by this national sanctity the Church might somehow flourish. Is not a Christian first and foremost a Christian, concerned with his or her fidelity to Christ and place as a portion of the Bride? But Christian politicians and Christian patriots oft delude themselves with thoughts of somehow miraculously keeping this nation from spiraling downward using legislation. As paradoxical as it may sound, it seems the Christian politician's first duty is to the Bride and then to the nation which he or she works for. Granted, this complicates the position to the point that few might be willing to accept it, but shouldn't such caution always be taken when one assumes leadership?

As our society becomes ever more multicultural and pluralistic, the favor Christians long held with the American government is fading – we should not expect otherwise. But this loss of favor is just what will one day enable us to understand the good thing we have in the separation of Church and State. At present, this separation is merely a farce. It only shows up in name on occasion, such as in the Chicago incident or the ongoing (never-ending) 10 Commandments debate. I don’t believe we've seen the Church and State actually working separately yet. But this is much due to the fact that the farce is upheld and fought for tooth and nail by many Christians. This fight plays into our everyday beliefs, and comes to the fore every four years at election. We find our presidential candidates putting on faces and tethering their campaigns to so-called (or so-treated) "top issues" regarding abortion, stem-cell research, and gay marriage, and Christians often vote for or against a candidate based solely on these issues! What of education (well, there is the intelligent design debate), social reform, healthcare, social security, ad infinitum? This phenomenon is evidence that we expect our nation and our church to be one in the same entity, that our nation should be governed like the Church, and vice versa. At present, it may be so that Christians have great influence in directing the government, but I wonder if the converse is not also true. The door may not swing both ways for long.     

Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that the solution to this issue is a total withdraw from society, such as the Mormons once did or the Amish continue to do. This does not comply with the challenge Jesus gave us at his resurrection, nor does it fit anything the Apostles instructed us to do. We are not to hole ourselves in and wait for the second coming. Of course the solution is not that easy. What I am advocating, however, is that we begin to question our assumptions about our responsibilities in this nation. Where and when did we begin to think in this way? (It may not be as old as you think.) What can we expect from a people who are finding themselves more and more at another point on the spiritual spectrum – can we honestly expect them to want to share our morals if they don’t share our spirit? What does making demands based on these expectations do to our ability to relate to them, to comfort and disarm them, to be a witness to them, and to love them? Do these expectations not perpetuate the very "us vs. them" mentality the aforementioned video game was accused of? Furthermore, if we begin to relinquish these aggrandized notions of responsibility and instead set ourselves about the work of the Lord – healing the sick, helping the poor, visiting the imprisoned, and humbling ourselves – in other words exercising the fruit of the Spirit, then, I suspect we can declare with St. Paul, “against such things there is no law.”

Peace,
Derek

Memory Loss

Deltron

Ten propositions on heresy

by Kim Fabricius (This post borrowed from Faith & Theology, various links provided by yours truly)

1. Heresy comes from the Greek hairesis (literally “choice” or “thing chosen”) and denotes an “opinion” or a “school of thought.” In I Corinthians 11:19 the RSB translates haireseis as “divisions”, the NRSV as “factions”; and while Paul suggests that “there have to be (δεῖ) factions among you,” as a way of separating the wheat from the chaff, nevertheless, as the context confirms, he deploys the word in a negative sense. See also the list of vices (“works of the flesh”) in Galatians 5:20: “factions” (NRSV), “party intrigues” (REB).

2. Of course what constitutes heresy is not pre-packaged; there is no timeless, pure dogma, discovered, simpliciter, like a diamond. On the other hand, a purely constructivist account of orthodoxy is inadequate, as if it were costume jewellery. There is a real sense in which dogma gives expression to what has been given to the church from the beginning, to what the church already knows before it recognises it, yet comes to recognise it only through relentless arguments about it, arguments issuing in fine and fragile articulations that say neither too little nor too much, and sometimes say it in negatives (cf. the apophaticism [sic] of the Chalcedonian Definition). The rough diamond has to be cut.

3. The early cuts, set in the creeds, were made in the context of ferocious Christological controversies. In dispute was the very identity of God, the God who creates and redeems us, to whom the church witnesses and prays (lex orandi, lex credendi). The arguments were not “academic,” what was at stake was “personal,” viz. the experience of salvation in Christ, and the transmission, through careful conversation, of the parameters within which the experience may be realised. Augustine called sound doctrine the hedge that protects the field where the Christian encounters God. I would only add that a hedge is made of shrubs, not bricks and barbed wire.

4. Another image: if orthodoxy is the bull’s eye, heresy is, as Rowan Williams puts it, the “near-misses” – which actually help guide the church towards the target (cf. Schleiermacher’s reference to his own teaching on God as “inspired heterodoxy”). The early heretics were generally neither knaves nor fools but pious and passionate men, zealous for God, morally serious, scrupulously scriptural. They were very clever, but conventional, fetchers and carriers for the zeitgeist. Heretics like a “wrap”, and heresies are fastidiously neat and tidy, the product of minds stuck inside the box of common sense. “Consistency,” said Oscar Wilde, “is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” Unsurprisingly, then, heresy is aesthetically unattractive, even ugly.

5. I think it was Alfred North Whitehead who said that there are no such things as whole truths, there are only half-truths, and treating half-truths like whole truths plays the devil. Whitehead might have been talking about heresy. Heretics are one-eyed, they lack the “vision thing”: failing to see the bigger picture, they take the part for the whole. That’s why heresy is inevitably rather boring. Heretics have no sense of adventure; they go only so far, they won’t go “all the way.” You could say they are theological prudes, often wearing philosophical chastity belts, who resist being ravished by revelation.

6. Marcion was a literalist who couldn’t get his head around the apparent contradictions between Old and New Testaments, and so he hacked the Bible in two. Arius was monomaniacally monotheist and uncompromisingly conservative and resistant to conceptual innovation; his “notion of unity is devoid of the richness – and the mystery – of God’s unity. It is devoid of the unity of love” (Arthur C. McGill). Eutyches was “a confused and unskilled thinker ... blindly rushing forward to defend the unity of Christ against all attempts to divide Him”; while Nestorius, if not perhaps a Nestorian, launched such a “maladroit, crudely expressed exposition of the Antiochene position” on the two natures of Christ that he was never able to explain coherently what constitutes His centre (J. N. D. Kelly).

7. And then there are those perennial pests, Pelagianism and Donatism (technically a “schism,” an error of love rather than faith). A fair-minded comparison of Pelagius’ exegesis of Psalm 14, and Donatus’ interpretation of the parable of the Wheat and the Tares, with Augustine’s is initially embarrassing. But when the bishop of Hippo raises the bar, deconstructing the human soul and insisting that God is always greater than we think, the two heresiarchs, the one monkish and severe, the other hawkish and charismatic, both perfectionists, are out of their depths. They are noble figures, and theirs are heroic theologies, but, as Rowan Williams observes, commenting on Augustine’s legacy, “God asks not for heroes but for lovers; not for moral athletes but for men and women aware of their need for acceptance, ready to find their selfhood in the longing for communion with an eternal ‘other’.”

8. “Remember,” wrote Chesterton, “that the church went in specifically for dangerous ideas; she was a lion tamer.... This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into the foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.” And the mark of the mad: “this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction.” And so: “Whenever we feel that there is something odd in Christian theology, we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth.” Heresy is uncomfortable with the oddness of God.

9. “The truth of dogmas does not depend on the fact that the church maintains them. But is this really so? This is an abiding question, and dogmatics must always leave it open!” (Gerhard Sauter). Tradition always gets the benefit of the doubt, but might some of it be but “agedness of error” (Milton)? An ancient dogma, now widely contested, is the divine impassibility. With Moltmann, Jüngel declares that the cross “has destroyed the axiom of absoluteness, the axiom of apathy, the axiom of immutability, all of which are unsuitable axioms for the Christian concept of God.” Process and liberation theologians join the troops, while Thomas Weinandy and David Bentley Hart mount rearguard actions. Were the Theopaschites (if not the Patripassianists) right after all? In any case, claims to infallibility – a kind of tradition fundamentalism – bring orthodoxy into disrepute, and church history is littered with enough ill-conceived defences of orthodoxy to warrant theological vigilance and modesty. Moreover, while doubt plays black to trust (Wittgenstein), the acute post-enlightenment awareness of the historical and social location of ideas, and the undeniable insights of Tendenzkritik regarding the power-interests that texts serve and legitimate, entail a loss of dogmatic innocence that must give suspicion its due.

10. Finally, what do you do with heretics? Burn ‘em (though in fact none of the early heresiarchs were murdered)? Or at least track them down and corner them? If you’ve got a magisterium, you can fire the Küngs and the Currans. If you’re a powerful and aggressive church leader, you can threaten to take your ball and go home while at the same time invading other pitches (or is it Bishop Akinola who is the [Donatist] heretic?). Karl Barth warned against witch-hunts against Bultmann, and the author of the Barmen Declaration (Barth) found the contemporary “confessional movement” “dead, cheap, fly-sieving, camel-swallowing, and Pharisaic.” On the other hand, I’m sure Barth would have approved of declaring apartheid a heresy. Finally, however, Stanley Hauerwas is right: “That one of the tests of orthodoxy is beauty means orthodoxy betrays itself if it is used as a hammer to beat into submission those we think heterodox.” And, of course, unless orthodoxy itself issues in orthopraxis – because truth is not so much thought as done (John 7:17) – well, hypocrisy isn’t heresy, but it ain’t pretty. The telos of orthodoxy is not conformity but faith working through love in joyful obedience.