Occasional commenter Earl Wajenberg has a site of his own, Wind Off The Hilltop. (Hmm. I should put that on my sidebar. Only five years overdue.) He is part of my Thursday Pub Night and has both wide general knowledge and some specialties. He is both a tech writer and a writer of science fiction. An old friend of his unearthed a piece of his from decades ago which he has just put up Letters to the Seven Churches in Modernity A sample:
To the angel of the church in Suburbia write:
The one who brought division and scandal says this: I know you have kneaded the gospel into the bread of the nations, making it part of custom and law, and that you have quietly and slowly spread the good news through the generations.
But I have this against you, that you have made my name a label, not of righteousness but of respectability. Instead of making holiness your custom, you have called your customs holiness. You have sought reputation from repetition of prayers you have emptied. You have dinned the gospel in your ears until you no longer hear it. You have become lukewarm, fearing to scandalize the scalded.
Therefore repent or the gospel will depart from you and the praise of the world will be your only reward, quickly lost.
He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. The one who overcomes will be blessed for the sake of my name when he is cast out of the assembly.
6 comments:
Someone should have gotten credit for bringing great but dangerous energy, but I am not sure who.
I checked out the link; by "The Church in Sparta", does he mean things like Purity Culture?
I don't really know much about Purity Culture. I was referring to the way some of the faithful are deeply suspicious of anything fun, however innocent--the kind of religious practice that's full of "petty abstinences," as Screwtape called them when Proposing a Toast. The caricature of the sour-faced puritan has a factual root. It calls itself "temperance," but it is in fact just intemperate in the negative direction, and it does no favors for either the faithful or the world.
Gotcha. Makes sense.
The quick and dirty explanation is that Purity Culture was the overreaction to the rise in teen pregnancies and STDs in the 80s and 90s. It tried to encourage people to wait until marriage to have sex, but it quickly turned into its own form of hypersexualization. People got very picky about things like whether or not girls were wearing "modest" clothing, or worried that mouth kissing would automatically lead to people having sex---which it usually doesn't. Girls were told that their bodies were snares for boys, and boys were told that they were hopeless when it can to self-control. The end result was a lot of sexual abuse and porn addictions in many churches.
Purity Culture is certainly a clear example of the problem addressed in the Letter to Sparta. You can also see it just behind the scenes in the musical comedy "Guys and Dolls." The musical itself is a lot of fun and I'm not speaking a word against it: Sgt. Sarah and her never-named Salvation Army are clearly good people and Nathan Detroit and his boys are clearly lovable rascals. BUT, Nathan & Co. are clearly based on organized crime and are a comedy scrim in front of a life of gambling, drinking, and prostitution that seems to be the mortal-world crust on top of Hell, AND you can see that Sarah & Co., in understandable reaction to this, NEVER touch alcohol, not even in moderation (and I would be willing to bet they use grape juice at communion), NEVER play cards, for money or not, and are pictures of self-repression. Would it be hard to believe that Sarah's fictitious denomination doesn't celebrate birthdays or Halloween, celebrates Christmas and Easter only with a couple of seasonal hymns on Sunday, doesn't go dancing or to the movies, et endless cetera?
The extreems lock musical horns in this piece (a study in irony, since neither "knew"):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii2gQI8WA7I
When I was in the fourth grade our teacher was a battle-axe of a nun who was very fierce against any manifestation of vice in her pupils. One day she caught me with a deck of playing cards. Thinking quickly, I told her that the deck was for performing magic tricks, not for any kind of naughty game. She was skeptical, so I showed her a trick. She was impressed. I didn't get punished, and I even got to keep the cards. Rest in Peace, Sister Concepta.
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