Churches on the Wrong Road
Atkins, Stanley & McConnell, Theodore
CHURCHES ON THE WRONG ROAD Edited by Stanley Atkins and Theodore McConnell Regnery Gateway/$7.95 paper T. John Jamieson looking for our holed-up hero. And it's just a matter of time until...
...Student $20 ^ Faculty $25 ^ Contributing $30 ^ Supporting $50 ^ Friend $100 Please send with remittance to: Membership Secretary CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF THE PRESIDENCY 208 East 75th Street, New York, NY...
...A Perfect Spy is currently a best-seller, no doubt on the strength of George Smiley's worthy reputation...
...One of the two most remarkable essays is Father Schall's, which frankly asserts that radical leftism in the Church, and the blatant contempt of dogma that goes with it, are no longer mere aberrations...
...Roman Catholicism used to be the religion of dramatic conversions, like John Henry Newman's...
...I shall never forget the pious resolution brought before the Episcopal Church's 1985 General Convention, to better the wretched lot of left-handed persons in this world, by abolishing all liturgical references to the right hand of God...
...Churches answers, like that old parody of the liberal Protestant hymn, "Stand Up, 0 Men of God": Sit down, 0 men of God: His Kingdom He will bring T John Jamieson is a writer living in Evanston, Illinois Exactly when it pleases Him—You cannot do a thing...
...C/ THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1986 49...
...Many clerics and theologians hide their atheism in a linguistic blind taken from German Idealism (Hegel), but the fact remains that they do not believe in a transcendent, real, personal God...
...lb the young Protestant looking for a living, authoritative tradition and a piety rooted in dignified liturgy, Rome was the place to go...
...It would also serve extremely well in college and seminary courses on religion and social issues...
...And, as Stephen Tonsor notes of the obsession with "praxis," It is odd indeed that 475 years after the Reformation and the condemnation by both Luther and the council of Trent of a religion of works, that a religion of works Faculty, students, administrators, business and governmental leaders are cordially invited to become members of the CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF THE PRESIDENCY, a non-profit educational corporation chartered by the Board of Regents of the State of New York...
...Except for Niemeyer, however, the Anglican contributors are disinclined towards any comprehensive diagnosis of leftist alienation as a spiritual disease...
...Churches on the Wrong Road will not matter greatly to committed radicals...
...Most of the essays are highly commendable...
...And by creating a central character who has no standards at all, who will betray every-body in order to be loved by everybody, le Carre ultimately devalues Pym's deceit...
...The problems with this book exist, like Pym, on many levels...
...John Paul II is a voice crying in the wilderness: hierarchy and clergy in Europe and the Americas generally tolerate the anti-religious left and fail to assert sound doctrine strikingly or effectively...
...according to James Schall S.J., it's now widely perceived as standing for universal leftism...
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...And it's just a matter of time until frantic agents converge on little Miss Dubber's doorstep...
...the rest doesn't matter much because all the characters are obviously doomed from the start...
...Orthodoxy is on the defensive throughout the Church...
...But Rome no longer stands, in many minds, for the Universal Faith...
...The other truly remarkable essay here is Gerhart Niemeyer's, which sums up the whole history and theory of Christian politics with Chestertonian speed and Voegelinian accuracy...
...The editors of Churches on the Wrong Road are High Church Episcopalians, sick of their communion's political manias...
...Starting with the medieval contest between Pope and Emperor, he notes that both sides essentially agreed on the ends of Christian government: "During all those centuries of struggle . . . neither the nature of the order of human existence, nor the necessity of authority and power, nor the principles of justice were disputed...
...Upon receipt of this form, the center will mall you a membership card and begin a year's membership...
...Instead, it attacks the generic heresy of millennialism, well represented by William Blake's famous gnostic hymn: I will not cease from Mental Fight Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green and pleasant land...
...Radicalism and anti-supernaturalism are now one enterprise...
...They do not work to reform individual men and women, as Christ did...
...This is sad not least because the character of Pym's father, Rick, is modeled somewhat on le Cane's own father, while le Carre himself once worked for British Intelligence...
...What modern radicals rebel against is that very inherence—reality itself...
...Anyone who has looked at "liberation theology" knows it to be a theology without God about a liberation without freedom...
...This book could explain to the majority of sane, orthodox Christians why they should repudiate the ideological pirates in their Churches, and how they would succeed if they stood up together...
...CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 9) liberal mugged by reality...
...they dream of reforming the cosmos—a cosmos within which the only abiding intelligence arises from the human mind...
...nor to conservatives who are well read in the growing conservative literature on the modern Church, promoted by journals such as This World and the Religion and Society Report...
...In fact, as the book opens Pym already accepts that his espionage medicine show is over...
...The irony is that "basic Christian theses never seemed more intellectually valid...
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...Like the Estates General of revolutionary France, such jamborees attempt to legislate the world's ills out of existence through pious resolutions...
...the rejection of supernatural doctrines such as the Resurrection is not just amateurish skepticism among self-indulgent biblical scholars...
...They exhibit a kind of bouncy optimism about a Church of political latitude—although this has less to do with the Anglican faith and more to do with the Anglo-Saxon temperament, its love of consensus, and its distrust of metaphysics...
...The Episcopal Church elected a new primate last year, one who could be described as a classical McGovernite...
...Spies may employ the tricks of the confidence man, but then, both writers and forgers use ink...
...That leaves only the socialist utopia to believe in, and they are rewriting Christian dog-ma, to read as revolutionary allegory...
...He doesn't really care how the British, Americans, and Czechs go about cleaning up his mess...
...ae, ctaize, Atadcaae, die g/radeve.J,*cta.to(, 26aae a0%t‘, 4-P 4xg.r.Qdor ya~.t., Jac~.6~oce~o,Gm >b br...
...He hears that young fundamentalists and evangelicals, yearning for a reasoned faith and formal worship, are turning to Anglicanism, with C. S. Lewis and the Book of Common Prayer as their guides...
...In fact, radical theologians desire the suppression of orthodox supernaturalism, because it distracts people from revolutionary "praxis...
...Social distinctions of class, race, and sex have often given rise to social evils...
...For Pym, unlike Smiley, there is no duty thatmust be done...
...What remains is the portrait of a ruined man...
...As a matter of historical record it will not do to suggest that Niebuhr abandoned socialism after the twenties, or to minimize the vintage Niebuhr's leftist orientation in terms of "lingering socialist postulates" or "not fully examined assumptions" from Niebuhr's Marxist past...
...but radicals dream of eradicating "difference...
...The trouble with the Church seems to be that there is no one about who can think about them...
...The plot unrolls as predictably as an old carpet, raising a cloud of dusty detail in its path...
...Yet Schall doesn't single out "liberation theology," be-cause the radical anti-orthodox enter-prise is much bigger than the Brazilian school of Friar Boff...
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...10021 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1986 vative contributors, the Church performs the useful social function of maintaining contact with the transcendent realm of truth, particularly that of true justice...
...The whole corpus of Catholic doctrine is being refashioned"—and one sees the new doctrine, again and again, "at the very heart of the Church...
...their book makes a clear, well-moderated attack on the political perversion of Christianity in all denominations...
...Name Mailing Address Zip This Is an application for membership...
...Most of the action takes place in memory alone...
...Moreover, the works in this new Pelagianism are not even the constructive works of culture, of charity and religion, but the works of violence, hatred, class warfare and Promethean pride...
...By giving itself over to revolutionary politics the Church transforms itself from a social resource to a mere ideological cadre among other cadres and leaves the soul and human society naked to their spiritual enemies...
...It is a "conservative" work, not in any partisan sense, but rather in the more broadly benign sense of a normative attitude—conceding (1) that reality imposes certain limits on politics, and (2) that sanity imposes limits on political passion...
...Distinguished board of editors including Harry A. Bailey, Jr., Thomas E. Cronin, Kenneth E. Davison, Hedley W. Donovan, Fred I. Greenstein, Erwin C. Hargrove, Dorothy B. James, Richard S. Kirkendall, Louis W. Koenig, Seymour Martin Upset, Harvey C. Mansfield, Ruth P. Morgan, Richard E. Neustadt, C. Dwight Waldo, and Aaron Wildaysky...
...With historical and analytical perspective, the Center examines both domestic and foreign policy, decision-making, relationships with the Congress, and organization...
...To put it sharply, Lefever's review is fair neither to Niebuhr's life nor to the current questions of American politics...
...Radical leftism is not just a strain of humanitarian sympathy anymore...
...But though the implied parallels between Pym and the author may be poignant, they don't redeem this book...
...In one of them, Russell Kirk pungently describes the 1976 Catholic According to this volume's conser- activist congress, "A Call to Action," which shall ever stand for all self-convened assemblies of sanctimonious churchmice, world without end...
...Add $5 for foreign postage...
...But if le Carre writes more books on the order of A Perfect Spy his readers would do well to defect...
...But such conservatives ought to circulate this book on their own, especially among their pastors and Church councils...
...To Anglicanism maybe, but not to official modern Episcopalianism...
...D,‘;f...
...Both civil and ecclesiastical powers agreed to seek the best possible solution to inherently flawed conditions...
...The equation between hucksterism and espionage also breaks down...
...A symposium with such standard conservative authors as Schall, Kirk, Niemeyer, Tonsor, and John Howard, and several less well-known Anglican authors, Churches on the Wrong Road makes a timeless, largely apolitical condemnation of political religion—that is, without referring specifically to topical heresies such as Sandinista worship, or typical partisans such as Bishop Gumbleton...
...He is a confidence man for whom spying is just another con, a way to scam a little love before hightailing it out of town...
...While I think most can agree that Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) is a benchmark in the emergence of Niebuhr's Christian realism, and that for the period after his crippling stroke and toward the end of his life we must exercise caution, Lefever's presentation of the vintage Niebuhr studiedly ignores Niebuhr's continuing affinity with the left in American politics and radically contracts the issues that would-be Niebuhrians have to grapple with today...
...That doesn't mean they're in the same business...
...They only lament the fact that political dogmas divide and distract us from being good Churchmen together...
...In a rare display of mature judgment, the bishops and deputies shoved this folly aside...
...Nevertheless, while this book provides little evidence of one, there is a coherent Anglican orthodoxy—emerging from Hooker and the Caroline divines, and continuing through the Oxford Movement—by which to distinguish between healthy varieties of Christian politics, and the morbid and patently heretical ones...
...FOR ThE STUDY OF ME PRESIDENCY The first national public policy research center with its primary focus on the American Presidency...
...Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) should reappear so strongly in Western Christianity...
Vol. 19 • September 1986 • No. 9
