Hello, welcome to this edition of the Theology Pubcast. I'm Sierra Weile and I am a senior editor at Tushdoh Magazine and I kick it over to you, Glenn. I'm Glenn Sunshine, retired history professor, senior fellow at Goldson Center for Christian World View and writer. Okay, it's Tom's day and he's going to be very spontaneous. He's going to be... Yep. I'm a spontaneous introduction. Go ahead and introduce yourself and bring us into the subject of the day, Tom. I'm Tom Price. I teach theology Christian ethics and philosophy and it is my day. So I am going to be riffing a little bit off of a very interesting work, a historical... Well, I work on a certain historical time and influence. It's by a Laurie Branch, I believe is a professor at Baylor University. I could be wrong, but I think I got that right. But wrote a fascinating book called Rituals of Spontaniety, Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth. That's kind of the stretch. It gives you kind of the time frame as well. Yeah, now is this a man or a woman with a name like that you can never tell? I believe it's a woman. Yep. I think. And also, you probably know one of the ones who talked highly about it was Deborah Sugar, who I remember from my church history days. Renaissance in the Bible or something along those lines. I think a group of good historians doing interesting work. But anyway, what's the central thesis? Maybe that's a good place to begin. And it's basically that modern secularism did not simply emerge just by rejecting religion or rejecting tradition or ritual or even spiritual experience. Rather, it was largely a byproduct as we've talked before shifts in kind of theological and philosophical assumptions, but also transformations, especially in Protestant religious practice itself. And some of these we could say that elevated what she will call spontaneity, sincerity, personal feeling, experience. And what you would basically look at is unmediated religious experience over inherited forms. And so this becomes really an examination of different sermons and different writers during kind of this period, both in the church, a lot of kind of Puritans fighting with the Anglicans. And then it spills over into the US. And then also what's going on in literature and even some of the kind of birth pangs of romanticism. And it's really a fascinating work. But one of the sub kind of almost ironies of sub thesis is that well, it didn't replace ritual. It just kind of made a different kind of ritual. And this ritual is our rituals that form us into privileging the spontaneous. That this is more authentic. It's more direct. It shows, you know, kind of a, you could maybe use a religious warmth rather than the coldness of just saying written prayer. And it has definitely a kind of emphasis on, you know, kind of where one's subjectivity and interiority are in relationship to, you know, authentic religious expression, I guess, could be one way of putting it. So that's kind of the first point spontaneity becomes its own ritual. And it's interesting the way she does it because she looks at the wave and with, you know, the pilgrims, pilgrims progress sees that as a prime example, the kind of anxiety expressed in it. In the kind of, in the kind of anxiety created by weighing whether or not one sentiments are kind of authentic. I mean, it becomes its own, its own ritual. And so that's kind of, I kind of will just throw that out there and let you guys comment on that first part, the kind of modern elevation in the religious context of spontaneity. Yeah, I would say that that's definitely something that we can more or less take for granted today that this shift has happened. But where I think this maybe goes that would have been so maybe surprising to people in the, you know, the early days of this development is that now we live in a world where unchurched people expect that to be kind of the default position of the church. In other words, if that's what they're looking for, even if you've never had, you've never spent a day in church, you know, unless you've had some kind of introduction to the, you know, to the beauties of the Western tradition and you're looking for that, you're looking for something that feels authentic. And if you walk into a church and a strike, she was formal, you think fake. That's where a lot of people are, unless they're just completely disillusioned with the modern world, where, where, you know, we're seeing more and more of that. Yeah, well, that's, I think that, you know, we'll get to that kind of shift that I think is kind of from a world that is this is now the default position. Some of the kind of, you know, things she identifies and she does, it has impacted all traditions, but she's talking about kind of the contribution of certain lines of the Protestant tradition. It's critisisms of certain things and had its own theological reasons for these, but you saw all these fights, especially in England, on try to get rid of and make illegal the prayer book. There were times where it was, then there was flip times where they were forced to basically have to use it. So there's all this kind of. Bickering and fighting around it, rather than just kind of a, maybe a compromise has said, you know what we can do both, you know, hurt everybody. When you look at the continent, the continent really plays by different rules. Or I, as I prefer to say it, Britain plays by different rules. The continent with Luther, of course, what he does is simply translate the mass from Latin into German and clean it up theologically. You know, get rid of the things that he found objectionable. Swingley comes up with a much more stripped down liturgy, but it continues to be surprisingly formal. And when you look at the Hugenots, for example, the groups that I worked with the most, what you find with them is the pasture was not allowed to do any spontaneous prayers, except at the Lord's supper. The consecration prayer, I guess, at the Lord's supper was allowed to be spontaneous, but otherwise it's all the surgical prayers. And this is pretty much standard, even in the reformed tradition on the continent. And again, you know, it's a stripped down liturgy. It's nowhere near as elaborate as what you get in the German or the Lutheran or the Catholic or well, for that matter of the Anglican. Now, you know, in England, you have a far more folk. It seems to me there's much more of a focus on individualism, and it particularly individual conversion. The example I always use is forkins golden chain. William Perkins, a really important Puritan divine, wrote a book to help people who are struggling with the question of whether their faith was authentic. And he argued that there was what he called a golden chain. There's a series of steps that you would go through to reach true conversion. And you could use this book as a diagnostic to tell where you were on that process. So this is where I've talked before about the issue of conversionism and how important it becomes within Puritanism. And I think that that ends up being at least part of the reason why there is less of a focus on formal ritual among the Puritans than you see in other Protestant groups. Yes, that's fascinating Glenn. And it makes me just wonder what is it about the English that made them go down that road. I mean, is it just a kind of a strange, you know, a development that we can't attribute to anything more than maybe just a, you know, kind of an anomaly or is it got some roots in the English Constitution, meaning the nature of the culture. Yeah, I've never really tried to dig into that. I'm a continental historian among other things, but it would be interesting that there's a lot of English mysticism that comes up in the late Middle Ages. You know, and you know, you have people like Julian of Norwich, who is an anchor right anchoress, whatever. And, you know, who I would argue is a genuine mystic. I mean, when you read Julian's writings, there's a depth to them. But you also have Marjorie Camp. Marjorie Camp is the first English woman to write in autobiography, possibly the first woman period. I'm not entirely sure about that. But when you read Marjorie Camp, you really get the distinct impression that she's a mystic wannabe. You know, it, she doesn't strike me as being a serious genuine mystic. However much she tries. She's engaged in fan fiction. Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, after having 14 children, she decided God was calling her desolabacy. I mean, you know, I think we can find other reasons for that. But, but there is, there is this quality of, you know, she is, she's a lay woman. She owns, Jack Shoyones businesses. She does a whole bunch of other things as well. But she wants to see herself as very much a unique mystic individual, you know, that she has special revelation from God and things like that. So there may be something in in late medieval English religion that sort of predisposes people toward, you know, this, this sort of more, you know, me and God kind of thing. I don't know. I don't know a parallel on the continent. Well, I think when did she write? When was she writing? She's done 1400s. Okay. So it's a little ways back. Okay. By the time you get sort of 18th, 19th, you do star me, Schliamarker. You can't get more individual sense of absolute dependence and feeling or that kind of pietism. And I think German piet, like you said, the individualism is there. I'm going to kind of get into that because I'm going to look at where a thread ends up, especially with mainline liberal, liberal Protestants that have a similar kind of disposition, but they don't throw out the forms. You certainly get it a little later. I mean, pietism is sort of post-reformation. Yes. You know, you certainly get it in pietism. I think the purest and strain is coming from a different direction in this earlier. Yeah. And with this very strong emphasis on conversionism that you see a moment. Yeah. Well, there is what she talks about the way that also they both the ideas that are developing theologically in that context, especially with covenant, certain notions of covenant theology and economics, that of course, you know, they're going to do the economic analysis that the emerging kind of market scale culture starts to play into measures. And she goes through all these places in which you can see the kind of value of an almost like market language being used to describe salvation and and and you know, it's benefits. But she talks about that being one side of it and that the empiricism that is growing the need to measure these things in sensible ways, especially with Humes influence ironically and other thinkers Hume being a little bit later. But the kind of the seeds are there for it. And she basically talks about kind of this notion, this developing notion. I think Charles Taylor does a thicker job of describing the steps that get you to kind of authenticity and that that kind of change perception of the self. But you know, she's really trying to talk about this tendency where we associate authentic religion with inwardly generated experience to the point that genuine prayer has to be immediately from the heart. The logical language seems insincere and mechanical. And another one is sort of the way and when ex-temperanias prayer is defended as kind of the ultimate and the Holy Spirit basically is a big contrast to anything prescribed in religious language. So I mean, you really see this strong kind of anti formalism. I mean, she she does put some of it also in the in just radicalizing the kind of the the iconoclasm and religion that the I mean, you talk about a book that even if it's anecdotal that gets that kind of the fervor. I mean, if you look at this work by Amon Duffy, right, the stripping of the altars traditional religion and 141580. I mean, you're you're seeing a passion to clean house. You know, almost the same scale that you see when you see the videos of the communist destroying the churches in Russia. I mean, it's this kind of intensity. Yeah, with with what was going on though in the church, my guess is that because of say that the practice of like sending the third son off to the ministry, you know, the first son gets the estate. Second son goes into the military third son is given to the church. You can end it with a lot of guys who just really don't belong just in and people who took their faith seriously could easily get fed up with the you know, the dalliances of these guys and their tendencies to just read from books and go through motions and you leave you wondering whether or not they actually believed anything they were talking about. Yeah, the I think the the issue of the iconoclasm is connected with several other things that are going on. One of them, for example, is the reaction against relics. Okay. You know, a lot. Well, the the cult of relics was a big deal in 1500. And so the reaction against that is going to go in that direction. There is also a reaction against images based on a reading of the commandment against graven images, although actually the origin is a little bit different from that. You know, so you have a whole bunch of other things having to do ultimately with the relationship of the physical to the spiritual. Is it possible that you can have holy items? Can you have holy places? So you know, these kinds of things and there is a sharp reaction against that in the reformation with Luther, but even more pronounced in the reformed world. Yeah. And you know, the question is to the degree to which they went overboard there. You know, some people defended some people say, you know, there was really no point in destroying the stiches in the artwork and all that kind of thing. Well, it's in, but I think this is you're dealing now with a generation is probably internalized in ways the earlier ones were just setting it out. And so I mean, you definitely see some of it is passion, you know, for purity, some of it, I think is just kind of getting caught up with, you know, a mood and trend. But whatever the case is, there is this opposition developing between sacramental kind of classic central, you know, sacramental way of seeing reality and now a kind of oppositional relation between fallen material world and its capacity to be a means of grace. And so you are seeing that's that's what I mean on the larger level, you're seeing kind of the the volunteerism and and nominalism and the theological outflow of that all all start to spread. And its oppositions are starting to spread and and so you do have so I think they did just the, you know, even Descartes point in philosophy, I need to find a certain ground because the secure world that was knit together well is not here anymore, right. So you understand that that move to to find a kind of certainty and then there is this measure of mediation, if mediation is out and I can't take that world for granted then where in the world you find the genuine article and yeah, you can say this, the scriptural part but the other part is you have 10 to 15,000 different kind of, you know, the anabaptists and the Baptists and the pure. So where is the often authentic genuine article and I think, you know, again, just like there is this move, you know, later with the Cartesian drive to certainty, I think there is an element of looking for places of authenticity and places to ground the self that no longer are from these communal, this kind of communal mediation. And this is why the suspicion with these things, but it is it is very interesting that it is this is something I think our talk on Nostek religion in America was also hinting at this is kind of where it leads doesn't it what is that. You know, ghost in the machine that is that is you know, supposed to be the only ghost right and and I think that I mean for her it basically contributes to a set of dispositions and attitudes that carry far beyond the the churches it's something that is part of the shifts and movements that are happening in all these different layers and going to predispose. Modern worshiper to the same set of temptations, tendencies and dispositions of the rest of secular culture, this is where we all internalize the secularism and therefore makes technological manipulation and some of these other things much more. much easier for us because we've contributed to it we participate in it and we're ready for it and it also makes developing a way forward and out much more difficult because it is it is everywhere it is the default so time I'd like to have you work through the connection to the technological developments are you saying correct me if I'm misreading it. Because we no longer think of the physical world as having some kind of spiritual significance we feel maybe we're free to do anything we want with it and manipulated or or something else that you're getting. Let me see I have it I have a good set here. Find where I did I did actually know that was coming and I put it somewhere and now I cannot find it but while I find oh here you go there what I what I the connection I kind of put together is the first. I put together is some things from shows we've done in the past anyway but this will kind of help you see if I was kind of looking at a kind of big larger description of these different elements. One of the things like we did with the Roger Lundin book was that in this same period we have the displacement of nature right participation in a Sacramento world is now very far removed and an objectively meaningful cosmos has gone. And so the emphasis shifts in this line to individual consciousness subjective experience and self expression those are a buffer those are where reality is and our representations of them don't allow us to know anything beyond them so we're already locked in a remove from from you know creation in itself we can't know that all we can know is creation has been filtered through our representations right. And so the next thing is kind of what she's after kind of the displacement of received ritual liturgical formation and then spontaneity sincerity and emotional immediate these become authentic religious life. What is that do well this leads to the transformation of worship into an experience that must be produced consumed and evaluated according to its effects on the individual right it already has a technological shift there rather than being kind of an orientated object. So I think that's a very interesting kind of an orientation to you know a trans trans yet yeah I see where you're going with that so the liturgy becomes technology. Yes, it's kind of a way to manipulate people. And that's exact so then you get the emergence of technologically mediated self this is what gets internalized who desires their intentions their identity and their sense of authenticity are basically increasing increasingly formed by these commercial pressures and the media environment. So I just like to as a pastor you know who who you know did a lot of reading in church growth back in the 80s and 90s one of the things that you you didn't have any treatment of is a critique of this technological approach to liturgy there was no no introduction to older ways of thinking so like the older way of thinking. It would be that in some sense the liturgy is a recapitulation of reality so in other words you got the big picture of the cosmos and what we're doing is we're we're we're on a smaller scale it's microcosm the liturgy is talking about a very big thing in a very small space whereas with the technological approach which would be like you know everything from you know the emotionally charged alter call to the smoke and light show. At the big box church down the street is all intended to generate an emotional response so it's a manipulation of the listener or the or the audience or whatever you want to call it. And it both reaffirms the kind of authenticity ones looking for but it also feeds and directs it so this is the authentic you know and this is why I always said why was it so easy to put the guard down with. With certain things especially let's you know we remember the huge things going on with during covid right the racial tensions and social critical theory coming in and churches just jumping on board and of course I understand. Some of that capitulation and why that happened but also people that I know that should have known better were predisposed to you know to to say no no no I'm one of you so how what what formation was going into that no I'm one of you not not who you know you're judging and condemning and then. And then likewise with the trans movement and kind of or just the exception the continued acceptance of kind of relationships that just historically have been looked at as. Disordered and in need of repentance I mean and so the church is continuous oh they're good people just you know and so what's going on to just you know so many years ago I mean I understand there's another trend I'm going to get to that's the kind of the lot. That's the kind of theological liberalism but i'm talking about a group that didn't capitulate to that at one time but now is just as much almost on board with most of that or increasingly will be if it continues this path so there's been a critique of the second grade awakening. And that is the 19th century Charles Finney deal moody thing and that you know and Kane Ridge and all of the revivalists and the camp meeting movement and all that kind of stuff it's not a coincidence that this is developing alongside the transcendentalist movement and the romanticism all it's so this it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's it's the way that it's done. It's it's it's it's as much a product of a of that of that atmosphere yeah as all those other things so you know we we'd like to think that this is you know just a you know a getting back to the New Testament or something like that's directly directly yeah that's how it's that's how it's presented that we're getting back to primitive Christianity or we're getting back to you know the second chapter of acts or something like that and we're getting rid of all the stuff that came between you know all these forms and traditions and things like that's really other than the Bible the Bible because you know don't worry about how it got to us just the fact that it's kind of thrown out of heaven straight into the pulpit. Yeah I actually have a funny funny I had an experience one time I was in the Sunnisville class and I asked just rhetorically you know where do we get our Bible and a woman actually just said the store. No I mean before it got to the store. Yeah so what what's interesting about this is you know I talked to me to go about conversion is them but when you look at the second grade awakening you were seeing the thing you were seeing technology. Yeah in terms of you know Finney's manual that if you do this God is obligated to send you a revival. Yeah so you do it like this and it's it's it's pretty clearly psychological manipulation but it also goes into you know starting with the wealth of nations in 1776 and before you have an idea of a free marketplace but all so parallel a free marketplace of ideas this is what's behind really the first amendment and the idea was the first amendment that if you allow religions to compete with each other it will flourish better. And so what you're trying to do is sell people on your particular religion and so you've got that going on you've got the emotive stuff going on the the the technique and manipulation and things like that going on all all of these things are part of of of American religion and that idea of marketing. You know for all practical purposes that's what we're dealing with is going to continue straight through the church growth movement it's going to continue into a lot of the mega church as I wouldn't I don't know enough to say all of them but it's a really it's really critical part of that look at what the audience wants and give it to them. You know make them as comfortable as possible don't ask and don't be too demanding of them and so on so there's a whole lot of cultural things that are going on that and then on top of that you get in America a kind of enforced in formalism in relationships culturally which is going to result in enforced lack of formalism in in in literaries all of these different things are cultural elements and to I would put them primarily cultural but they've got intellectual foundations to them that really shape American religion and in particular the kind of thing that that this book is talking about the the liturgy of informality liturgy of personal personal personal personal you know peace and affluence whatever which then in the long run is going to give you also transgenderism culturally. Yeah we have to live authentically with who you are on the inside yeah yeah so what is that so that so there are there are radical things going on and I think you know you know I'm not someone to weigh the details of her argument but I do think that she is wrong and I've seen it and you know I've seen it in Taylor's work and others who weren't specifically focused on that but I was able to pick up that I mean several David even Wells is a David Wells used to write on this like yeah so this stuff isn't you know this isn't stuff that's just brand new but it is interesting the kind of stretch of figures she's talking about kind of compares it with like words words you know poetry you know the poetry becomes a bit more associated with authentic feeling the poetic experience and imagination gain heightened kind of cultural experience and they're good reasons for that too it you know it's not this isn't saying there's no place for these things it just becomes the way you know poetic spontaneity. You know one way of thinking about it I mean I'll give you an example my wife's family from Columbia her father can do they can do poetry that has been handed down they sit around and they get up and they stand and do it off a memory and they passionately give their kind of take on it. And this was kind of a this was classical to culture I mean look at Ireland with music and its storytelling you sit around generation the generation they pass them on maybe they develop them and these form of people they they build you know kind of a shared you know concept of the world and connect us to it. But here the emphasis is that isn't what you do you don't learn someone else's poem to be authentic kind of divine if you will you have to kind of get immediate inspiration and it's almost that immediate inspiration of the profit that becomes almost like the model for religious authenticity and then also poetic you know legitimacy and there there is that jumping over again there is its own form of media. But like jumping over all of historical mediation almost all types of kind of you know tangible material. And this is where I think again that little bit of Nostek Nudge is really you know in a stretched way telling us something about this kind of authenticity and you know. So I've got mixed feelings about all this you know I I I over the last made 20 years I've been growing more and more uncomfortable with with all of this but it's not where I began I mean I began 30 40 years ago you know fully immersed in this way of thinking. And so I'm kind of at a point now where I'm thinking about kind of the strengths of both and what is it you know is it possible to to enjoy the best of both so like when I think about the American influence on the world a lot of it has to do with our openness our willingness to challenge conventions. It's not always bad I mean it's there are aspects to this that are really I think worth praising and then I and then I compare say you know the those those traditions liturgical churches that have really resisted this trend they've not done too well. For example if I think about say this the established churches of Europe they're all in a bad spot so yes we've got some goofy entrepreneurial Christianity here in America but it's got more vibrancy then you know what you see in much of Europe with the state churches this would be one of my questions for our Christian nationalist friends. You know when you're when you're speaking of that are you longing for a state church I get the sense that there's a mixed you know set of opinions on that's not like they're all the same page but then I might the question is we'll point at one that's been tried and it's still in a good place. You know and and I think the thing that's left out of that is modernities impacted all of these places all of these churches and all of their notions of politics so and and there is no simple way you can't just jump out of all of that and jump back to a time golden it was no golden age to begin with but you can't jump back to a perfect scenario I think what what I'll look at in a little bit is kind of what rich things can we reconnect with. That can help us not lose all the good things that have been given to us but help proportion them in a wiser way and help teach us what is what is something across the board that truth goodness and beauty or just kind of got himself in himself that calls creatures to transcend their circumstances to something else at all times in places where they can rise above the limits of of their time in place in C. But that's something that there has always been a remnant within faithful Christianity that has has sought to kind of keep that balance but I think a good turning point here is is really that other side let's not go yet to maybe other traditions so much but just what about the mainline liberal Protestantism that love to retain the liturgy and love to play dress up right. But they basically have transformed all of its meaning right so I'm not sitting here arguing that oh the answer is just ritual and liturgy those two can also it's kind of like the the I always said kind of evangelical experiential trajectory right it kind of got rid of traditional liturgical forms and kind of transform them and put kind of in its place spontaneity emotional immediate city. The personal religious experience but it tried to do it within classic doctrinal forms right it's they you know they didn't throw out the creed and even though a lot of these things have been gutted from their larger implications they still have enough in place to kind of keep that within the parameters of a vibrant I think you know somewhat orthodox faith. They're incarnationalists on the whole they don't deny the deity of Christ the Trinity and their implications but on the flip side you have you know the liberal Protestant reinterpretive trajectory right this is where you basically they have and want to hold to kind of receive liturgical forms but they're basically the meaning of it has increasingly been reinterpreted through modern accounts of religious consciousness you know subjective experience. Spirit of the age the Geist you know as the Germans like to call it ethical progress according to modernism cultural relevance so you know it's it's one of these oddities where again things that should have been held together get ripped apart and then they're ripped out of the participatory view of creation that's supposed to underpin and hold them together so what we have is three things that have kind of become unleashed and they're running their own direction. And and this is you know this isn't about just retrieving the sound doctrine it's not just about retrieving sound the surgical form and it isn't just about getting a hold of a better doctrine of creation so it does include all three. You know as I think about you know those you know the kind of the polls here in the American experience with you know the Tennessee and evangelical circles to hold on to traditional doctrines but feel like they've got full sort of rain to do anything they want with the liturgy as opposed to you know what you see on the main line where as you note the forms are still there they're going to be a little bit more. So there's a lot of investments and all that kind of stuff the buildings are so worth but they've they've you know sort of derasinated everything so that in the in the words are maybe the same but they mean something entirely different when they say them of those two it strikes me that the people who held onto the forms are the more debased if you get my drift like if we think about what's going on and say the Episcopal Church. You say contrast that with I think that a lot of the things that are going on in Anglicanism you know in terms of the ACNA in the United States are healthy and good but a lot of those people aren't coming out of the Episcopal Church they're actually coming out of evangelicalism and recovering so bringing together I guess the you know what they they they brought with them from evangelicalism which is you know genuine faith and the world. And they're recovering the forms and I think there's a lot to be you know there's a lot to be encouraged by that I just wonder what is it with the mainliners they're almost like a post date it. Well yeah I mean a different a different a different world view or however you want to put a different understanding the Christian faith took over. I mean what one thing I will you know it's one thing I because I have I know a lot of a piss just pure people who were in the the the purple list of the Episcopal Church and I know them they left but I know them in their stories and even even still one thing they haven't lost is they do have kept they've they've kept a kind of formation of their clergy for example that even the most debased will be there to show up for you if you're in the hospital. Will that that kind of care dimension it it's an oddity has not in that again I just want to say that's part of good not losing a formation. But yeah on the other flip side it could be the same one sitting up in the in the choir trying to see who they want to you know hook up with at the end of the day I mean it is that kind of discontinuity whereas you know sometimes you may get at least someone trying to live a kind of sexually pure life in the in the evangelical tradition they just won't go visit anyone when they need it right. So I mean there are the kind of weird you know I don't think that's weird at all it makes perfect sense if you look at the trajectory of liberal theology it has to do with helping the poor. There's in the seq fits right in there it's going to the the people who are in need in helping them that's how they see religion entirely so the fact that they would go visit makes perfect sense. Yeah but but what I am struck by yeah I mean I just read a thing on the Episcopal Church and the numbers they have from in the particular period I don't remember when it started. They've lost they're not they're not steady downward trajectory they lost 30% of their members in you know a certain period of time of those who are on the roles two thirds of the maneuver attend church you know they're there are there are all kinds of problems there. But they keep going because of endowments and things of that sort the average the average church has 43 people is the median attendance. Yeah so so there are all kinds of problems there and yeah the fundamental issue it seems to me is that they bought into modernism so much that they don't really offer anything more than you can get at a political action committee you know or something like that. There there's something fundamental missing there they're looking so much like the culture that people don't entirely see the point of going now you do get a visitation if you're in the hospital. Yeah but that's not really enough. Well I think too that they serve a role in the left and that role is to be kind of the the people that get the tap to respond to to conservatives conservative religious people when there's a controversy so they say oh yeah we got a religious person over here what was her name again oh yeah okay yeah bring her out let's give her her 15 seconds of fame so that she can respond to you know Christian nationalism or something like that and then you blew away. Yeah well there is that kind of critique of all you know everything that isn't the spirit of the age that they've adopted so they see the kind of their cultural interpretation based on their kind of progressive aesthetic as you know the immediate revelation that even the Bible and everything else has to submit to and then anyone who doesn't fit it is just fair game for you know classic you know you know. You know idle critique you know these people are nothing more than people been to consumerism and everything else now a lot of times some forms of evangelical Christianity and others can lend themselves pretty easily to those kind of critiques but they but again they they they have nothing to offer in its place and they aren't the genuine article and they're they're perverted version of liturgy and and and even kind of spiritual formation in the long run. But it's but it's just one of those oddities though I mean I know it I know it makes sense in light of what their commitments are but just in terms of that you have kind of evangelical experiential and the kind of liberal Protestant reinterpretive trajectory that's also geared towards kind of individual religious consciousness subjective experience the difference really becomes really that that moral dimension that increasingly you're starting to see more evangelicals and you're starting to see more evangelicals that you know educated in the modern universities gravitate towards which can take it down that that trend and and so for me really to look at it is is that you know my kind of you know if I was kind of take a question to put to all this it would be you know has the modern Christian pursuit of authentic kind of spontaneous religious existence kind of inadvertently cultivated a bunch of habits and desires and kind of focus of attention that make Christians more susceptible to for example trend for you know manipulation and secular technological formation are we ready. Yeah I think it's that's definitely what's happened so I was in a theological tradition that really has its roots in the 19th century and the camp meeting movement the latest movement and all that and everything about their their whole approach to the Christian faith was centered on the generating of experience. You know you're supposed to have this first of all conversion experience and then a second definite work of grace which would be sanctifying experience and the way you measure those experiences is by the intensity of your feeling it's you know the heart strangely warm moments and then everybody if you could if you would say that or if they saw the tears in your eyes or you know then everybody would be deeply moved and say well he's just genuine Christian you know that kind of thing and those people many of those people not all but many of those people have proven to be very susceptible to trends in wokeness so yes and then that in that denomination I don't think any of the colleges can say that they haven't haven't been brought along in that movement. I think there are people in the pews and that denomination that are appalled by what's developed because they're genuinely you know socially conservative lower middle class people who just just sort of like wonder what is going on they don't really understand what's happening but the people who have got a enough education to be dangerous and now are teaching in those schools. They see this is all about kind of like again you know being authentic and being open and being carried along but you know the sort of the next phase of this cultural journey that we're all on or whatever you know. Well that's the interesting kind of you know set notion that that emphasis on kind of spiritually off spiritual authenticity and experience it never occurs often in those context that they may actually just be reflecting habits of kind of perception and desire that are shaped more by that cultural environment than what they needed to be weaned from to begin with so what they're seeing as authentic is that what they're formed to see as authentic and genuine because it really is. It really reinforces the notion of self and you know desire and want that is is already kind of their shaped into and yet those may have seeds in order the very things they need to be kind of really purified from and uprooted from and there that emphasis on on experience that way doesn't have the same discipleship capacity that a richer kind of you know discipleship or you know aesthetic spirituality would be able to foster. I just ran into a block. I haven't read it yet but Rod Dreyer mentioned it on sub-stack believes the author's last name is Han on on liturgy. I think I know who you're talking he's a German writer but is he Chinese? He's Korean. He's Korean. Korean. I think he's like loosely Catholic. I don't know I don't know his background I was unable to trace that but as near as I can tell the book is talking about ritual as the means to hold communities together. Yes. Yes. And the and so the absence of ritual leads to it would seem disintegration of community. Now if it's right about that it seems to me he probably is then this move toward individualism and authenticity is a way that churches self destruct and for that matter culture self destruct. And that I want to get hold of the book and read that because it seems to me that that is an important warning. Another guy I'm reading right now a bit is Richard back he's he's pretty liberal theologically but Beck is doing a series on spiritual formation and the problem of transporting spiritual formation into Protestantism. And he's identifying a whole series of it seems to me very legitimate issues with it starting with individual is the spiritual formation practices were always supposed to be done in community. And you know things things along those lines and I wonder right now given the increasing fragmentation in society and this the role of individualism and the sort of me and Jesus kind of thing that you can find in evangelicalism. I wonder if we're not looking at the beginnings of the crumbling of both of them. Yeah another thing I think that the consider is the spontaneous development of community around other things you know then you know we've seen in the past so if we think about the past you know obviously there's the church there's extended family dynamics there's the local community like the town. I think today sports in particular for a lot of folks fills the void there's been a lot of a fascination with particularly American college sports especially football. Yeah I was going to point out by the way the tailgating is one of the main civic rituals in college towns right and you get this remarkable dedication that you have you know it's in one sense it's a little tongue and cheek because everybody knows it's just a game and maybe that's healthy. But at the same time yeah there are people who go overboard and begin to do things that they later regret and know are stupid to have done but nevertheless you've got this huge cultural event that draws tens of you know hundreds of thousands of people every week particularly in less urban settings like in the south and Midwest where these things form a kind of a you know a you know they they constitute a set of rituals you know there's the game of course but that's that's just like the beginning you know where they excuse you know see excuse to dress up alike it's excuse to to all cheer this excuse to eat a lot it's excuse to bring people from miles around together you know and there's a kind of unity that develops around the fans you know I'm I'm 10 minutes 15 minutes from Notre Dame trust me I understand this and I went to big 10 schools you know there there's there's there's a kind of unity a community that forms through the rituals of the college football game and I suspect it's even stronger down south and in some places it's even high school football. Oh yeah yeah my hometown in Pennsylvania high school team was a big deal the by the way I want to add in think red socks that's not just college yeah there are there are examples in in the in the pro game where you get that but I guess the thing if that's a resting about college the college game is that at least for the longest time nobody was paid you know directly anyway or but you know like I was just I just watched the BYU Notre Dame game I don't know if you got to see the end of that game it was quite quite a quite a game BYU it was you know out in Utah BYU won holding off Notre Dame but there there's also this sort of the roots of that just think about you know you got the Mormons and the Catholics these institutions that both supercharged and great traditions and then you another fascinating is both coaches were black so you have you know Mormons and so you got you know Mormons and you get Irish Catholics and then both is but it has this ability to simulate in ways that really are kind of fascinating so that at the very center of your of your identity is you know something that has the ability to bring in people from outside and make them part of it. And the sharing in those embodied gestures and practices kind of solidify that look the LGBT community understand that what what is the point of all their symbols and their constant they understand symbolically. The significance of these things in terms of creating a kind of group psychology and even if they're loosely connected. You know to do these kinds of things I mean I got you know as a Christian I deepen the kind of sense of what you get I mean the point of ritual isn't so I mean it's connected to the rhyme and rhythm of reality and it's there is a communicative dimension where when we participate in them as as as people the reason community develops and stuff like that is because they're disclosive they disclose. Deeper reality to which we're a part of and when we do lose the thickness of them and replace it with something that that loses connection to our embodied sharedness like these kind of rituals of spontaneity and stuff it does kind of disconnect or reconnects through a set of things that makes us all I think just more manipulatable I don't know yet if I've teased out why and I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that in every direction but I definitely can see it especially with technology. But yeah I think the writer you're talking about hit the book is Biong Chul Han and the book is the disappearance of rituals. Yeah that's one. Yeah I read that earlier in the week I was wondering why it sounded familiar but I saw it come up in a different work I was looking at but yeah he writes a lot on this definitely from the relationship of community but you know one of the things he has in there is he talks about he's reading some Jewish commentators on Genesis and he's talking about the Sabbath as ontological in the way in which we've replaced that with making work almost everything and and I mean we've talked about this with Schmehmann and other people before but it is very interesting of how ontologically significant this kind of this notion of rest is and he contrasts that even the difference between leisure and rest that there's something something you know of course he is kind of something of a mystic he loves the silence but there is this absolute stopping that is one of the ways in which you break you know ritualistically break the cycles of production that technology is always driving us to do but anyway it is interesting I think you know you could have an alternative understanding of authenticity from a much richer Christian vision if I were kind of end on anything it's not simply expressing what we feel but it is what is bound up with a genuine relation to God and the created order and the means of grace but also the way we're going to do it. It's a very important case but also the way in which all of creation does share in mediating something of of God's presence and goods and requires something that shouldn't make us push away a lot of those things as if they're not significant will they look exactly like you know what was going on and I don't know you know traditional England and 1400 no probably not. So even in even in the churches that you know overemphasize spontaneity and authenticity they still they still say the Lord's Prayer you know and they still sing the national anthem when they go to a football game and they actually tear up when they build up the national anthem. So it's possible to receive forms and then feel them. Yeah you know and I think that's maybe the thing to to notice that is that when we receive these forms there's there's something about what we bring to it but also something that happens to us. So it isn't just like ginned up from within. Well I think it's the happening to us that that we think oftentimes that the only way we know something's happening to us is if there is some kind of measurable way like emotion and stuff but it is those oddities I'm similar when I when I watch when I was at Columbia and I watched all of them stand up and do their anthem with the guy I was about to cry I mean it was that moving to see that Dean connect so yeah it's there it's that that isn't something that's not going to be a good thing. Yeah that isn't something that you know I would agree with the kind of this element that you don't want that not to be a part of what it means to be a human and and connected to these things. You just I don't think you have to get into the oppositions and I think it's the the opposition to you know it can get dry and routine ish but still it could be doing something because it's bound up with reality in ways that we're not sure of but it will show up once and well like the way in. Which we passionately connect in a game. Yeah that's a good note to end up. Anyway thanks a lot for listening to this episode of the podcast we're really glad that you've gotten to this point and if you like what we do we invite you to go to the show notes and click on the link to our Patreon page and become a supporter help us pay the bills and we also are very grateful for those who are already done that so that's enough for now. I guess that's it so bye bye. Theology podcast is a ministry of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Battleground, Washington. The Theology podcast is produced and edited by a widely craft productions of Nashville Tennessee.
