A Nation of Heretics

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat writes that American Christians have fallen from faithfulness into heresy in his new book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics.

According to Douthat, Americans create and experiment with a variety of offshoot religions. We are no longer orthodox. We are influenced by Christianity, but we are not traditionally Christian. We are heretics.

For instance; believers often commit to political causes at the expense of their faith convictions. Americans have also bought into the self-help journey and finding the god within. Many believers now blush at the exclusive claim that “I am the way and the truth and the life.” They are more interested in the “pray and grow rich” gospel than the journey from spiritual impoverishment.

Julia Thompson writes a most interesting review of Douthat’s book titled, “Have we Become Heretics?” You will find it here at tothesource. . .

Presenting Christianity As Something Charming

Dorothy L. Sayers is one of my favorite mystery writers and she was also a Christian with a very keen insight into the importance of doctrine. Below, she explains why doctrine is so important:

And when he is come, he will convict the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: of sin, because they believe not on me; of righteousness, because I go to the Father, and ye see me no more; of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged.(John

Dorthy Sayers

16:8-11)

Teachers and preachers never, I think, make it sufficiently clear that dogmas are not a set of arbitrary regulations invented a priori by a committee of theologians enjoying a bout of all-in dialectical wrestling. Most of them were hammered out under pressure of urgent practical necessity to provide an answer to heresy. And heresy is, as I have tried to show, largely the expression of opinion of the untutored average man, trying to grapple with the problems of the universe at the point where they begin to interfere with his daily life and thought. To me, engaged in my diabolical occupation of going to and fro in the world and walking up and down in it, conversations and correspondence bring daily a magnificent crop of all the standard heresies. As practical examples of the “life and thought of the average man” I am extremely well familiar with them, though I had to hunt through the Encyclopedia to fit them with their proper theological titles for the purposes of this address. For the answers I need not go so far: they are compendiously set forth in the creeds. But an interesting fact is this: that nine out of ten of my heretics are exceedingly surprised to discover that the creeds contain any statements that bear a practical and comprehensible meaning.

If I tell them it is an article of faith that the same God who made the world endured the suffering of the world, they ask in perfect good faith what connection there is between that statement and the story of Jesus. If I draw their attention to the dogma that the same Jesus who was the Divine Love was also Light of Light, the Divine Wisdom, they are surprised. Some of them thank me very heartily for this entirely novel and original interpretation of Scripture, which they never heard of before and suppose me to have invented. Others say irritably that they don’t like to think that wisdom and religion have anything to do with one another, and that I should do much better to cut out the wisdom and reason and intelligence and stick to a simple gospel of love. But whether they are pleased or annoyed, they are interested; and the thing that interests them, whether or not they suppose it to be my invention, is the resolute assertion of the dogma. . . .

I believe it to be a grave mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offence in it. Seeing that Christ went about the world giving the most violent offence to all kinds of people it would seem absurd to expect that the doctrine of His Person can be so presented as to offend nobody. We cannot blink the fact that gentle Jesus meek and mild was so stiff in His opinions and so inflammatory in His language that He was thrown out of Church, stoned, hunted from place to place and finally gibbeted as a firebrand and a public danger. Whatever His peace was, it was not the peace of an amiable indifference; and He said in so many words that what He brought with Him was fire and sword. That being so, nobody need be too much surprised or disconcerted at finding that a determined preaching of Christian dogma may sometimes result in a few angry letters of protest or a difference of opinion on the Parish Council. (“Creed or Chaos?”)