site banner
PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   21700 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

7
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Okay, this is obviously a very minor point, but a Calvinist church... with a monastery?

Also, bishops? I thought the Reformed had Elders, not bishops (which are a papist custom). I looked them up and the Reformed Calvinists in Hungary do have a Presbyterian polity.

I think this is a translation issue, as "bishop" and "elder" seem to be used interchangeably for the highest offices, but the English version of the website definitely says "elders" who seem to be the highest lay persons, as well as bishops who are the highest church ministers. I don't think it's the same as bishops within hierarchical churches, though, and may be a hold-over from Catholicism before the Reformation in Hungary?

And here's the guy himself, and he's certainly not dressing like a bishop (in fact, given that liturgical purple shirt, I'd have taken the guy on the right, the lay elder, to be the bishop): Zoltán Balog – Presiding Bishop, Ministerial President of the General Synod of the RCH.

As to the Austrian monastery, since Calvinists don't have similar institutions and he needed somewhere to lie low out of the public eye for a while, he may have had contacts that he used to get him there:

He was a caretaker at the Catholic Social Home of Hosszúhetény from 1979 to 1980.

Though I don't know enough about Hungarian history, there's an odd reference here:

He recalled that he was called to the Carmelite monastery, home of Orban’s office, when he was about to separate with Varga and was asked not to do "anything foolish".

Possibly this was a monastery taken over during the Reformation and the buildings repurposed. Anyway, for once it's not a Catholic sex scandal, interesting to see it happening in one of the Protestant churches with married clergy and lay people in positions of authority and all the rest of the things we are told the Church should adopt so as to stop sex abuse scandals!

Anyway, for once it's not a Catholic sex scandal, interesting to see it happening in one of the Protestant churches with married clergy and lay people in positions of authority and all the rest of the things we are told the Church should adopt so as to stop sex abuse scandals!

Protestant sex scandals are if anything more common than catholic ones.

I think you have to make a distinction here between the leaders of the Radical Reformation and those of the Magisterial Reformation. The radical reformers wanted to fundamentally reshape the church, shed the theological and aesthetic accoutrements of 1,500 years, and move back to a pure, primitive form of Christianity. The magisterial reformers saw themselves as still very much a continuation of the medieval church; their goal was to keep as much as possible while fixing only those things that were clearly broken. I suppose you could liken it to two people being given a shitty piece of code. One decides the best approach is to tweak it as necessary but otherwise to make as few changes as possible, while the other decides the best approach is to start from scratch.

You mentioned that the confessional Protestants in America take their confessions’ ideas on church order more seriously than their European counterparts. I won’t speak to the Reformed, but at least among Anglicans and Lutherans, that’s just not the case. Anglicans don’t have an agreed-upon set of confessions to draw on, but they universally have bishops, while the Lutheran confessions explicitly say that bishops are fine:

Concerning this subject we have frequently testified in this assembly that it is our greatest wish to maintain the old church regulations and the government of bishops, even though they have been made by human authority, provided the bishops allow our doctrine and receive our priests. For we know that church discipline was instituted by the Fathers, in the manner laid down in the ancient canons, with a good and useful intention. But the bishops either compel our priests to reject and condemn this kind of doctrine which we have confessed, or, by a new and unheard-of cruelty, they put to death the poor innocent men. These causes hinder our priests from acknowledging such bishops. Thus the cruelty of the bishops is the reason why the canonical government, which we greatly desired to maintain, is in some places dissolved.

In Germany, all but a couple of bishops opposed the Reformation, so the Lutherans changed their governance structure to eliminate bishops. In the Scandinavian and Baltic countries, the bishops were split, so those churches were able to continue on with the same structure as before.

From a Lutheran perspective (and all Finns are by culture at least a bit Lutheran) there's nothing strange about it. Luther did the correct amount of reforming; the reformers after him started doing weird stuff and all of that spun out of control and that resulted to 50,000 weird sects and also the United States of America.

It's probably best to think of the Nordic/English state churches less as having a strict confession and more like just the Church of [Country]. That's how they all were basically established, as far as I know - first you had the kings deciding to detach their national church from Rome (bishops and all) and then, in the Nordic countries, they (haltingly, with a bit of a back-and-forth movement like what I described here), they adopted Lutheranism as the formal confession of that church. Technically it wouldn't be impossible for them to de-Lutheranize - that's what Rome spent decades (centuries) trying to get them to do, still does in a way.

My impression was that he was fine with it, but didn't think it necessary, and the reason that he didn't end up with bishops is that the Protestants generally failed to attract bishops to their cause. But in Sweden, which went Lutheran, it was done top-down enough (like England) that they managed to keep the bishops.

Luther was in a strange position, he was more like The Last Catholic than being The First Protestant. He had a very mystical bent to his theology, which is partly why he hated the (stultified version of) Thomism which was big at the time. A bit like Henry VIII, he didn't want much more than "The Pope should agree with me" and he'd have been happy enough to leave things much as he found them, if only that had gone his way 😁

The merry band of Reformers soon fell out, and had to do some desperate papering over the theological cracks, because all of the big names had their own views on everything, and backed that up with "I'm an expert theologian" (Luther liked using 'I have a doctorate' to smack down opposition). Often the only thing on which they all agreed was "the Pope is wrong and we're not Romans". So yes, bishops are Lutheran, it was the Reformed/Calvinists who went 'the only church office is pastor and then elder'.

The Low Church and Pietist movements which came later probably were influenced more in that direction, and of course the way things developed in America put their own spin on things.

He had a very mystical bent to his theology, which is partly why he hated the (stultified version of) Thomism which was big at the time.

Not exactly. There were major Thomists at the time (he interacted with some noteworthy ones, most importantly Cajetan, who was perhaps the most important Thomist in history), but I believe in northern Europe Aquinas wasn't terribly popular, and people more frequently made use of other authors, such as Scotus or Biel. The mystic part is fairly accurate. He republished Theologia Deutsch, a work written centuries earlier due to the influence of German Dominican mystics, in which work you can pretty clearly see the influence on Luther's thought, with its emphases on humility and the worthlessness of the self (probably not the best summary, but that's from memory).

A bit like Henry VIII, he didn't want much more than "The Pope should agree with me" and he'd have been happy enough to leave things much as he found them, if only that had gone his way 😁

True, and not true. Henry VIII did not solely want that the pope would agree with him, but did actually have committed religious beliefs. He was named Defensor Fidei by the pope for his writings against Luther, arguing that there are actually seven sacraments. Henry maintained his belief in the seven sacraments his entire life and tried to crack down on the Protestants at some points, even after he'd broken with Rome. I'm not extremely knowledgeable on it, but I'd believe that Henry's actions could have been sincere as to what he thought right, not merely a power grab.

Luther definitely did have a bunch of things he wanted corrected, though (far more than Henry). There's a sense in which he merely wanted the pope to agree with him, but what he wanted agreement on was far more extensive, and more about teaching (as well as the moral reform of the church). His thoughts on the pope changed fairly quickly at the beginning, going from that the pope was good etc. but not able to do quite as much as was claimed re:indulgences, to thinking that the pope was the antichrist. (but even at that later point, in 1520, when he thought that the papacy was the Antichrist, he still would have reconciled had the pope just fixed things—stop seizing power, clean out the corruption, and correct the problematic teachings and practices.)

The merry band of Reformers soon fell out, and had to do some desperate papering over the theological cracks, because all of the big names had their own views on everything, and backed that up with "I'm an expert theologian" (Luther liked using 'I have a doctorate' to smack down opposition).

This is overstated. Assuming you're not talking about the anabaptists, there was a general consensus on quite a lot, and a lot of the theologians were more conciliatory than Luther. Calvin wanted to be considered Lutheran and wanted to reconcile, and there were others pushing for unity and moderation (e.g. Melanchthon, Philp of Hesse, Bucer). But Luther and some others were prone to be scathing rather than charitable, and did not think Zwingli's view within the range of being acceptable on the Lord's Supper. (Though Luther did put up with some in-between stances like Melanchthon's or Bucer's, if I remember correctly).

So yes, bishops are Lutheran, it was the Reformed/Calvinists who went 'the only church office is pastor and then elder'.

Sort of true, as German Lutherans didn't really have bishops, because the existing bishops in Germany weren't convinced (not sure to what extent this was motivated by the power they'd lose if they did turn Lutheran). Swedish Lutherans do, as the turn to Lutheranism came from the king, allowing the bishops to be preserved.

I'm not sure to what extent presbyterianism was considered to be instituted jure divino. I know that belief was common in England when there were conflicts with the puritans, but I don't know whether that was something earlier, or whether it was merely something they recommended. I was under the impression that they got along pretty well with the Anglicans for a while. (e.g. Vermigli was in England for some time and worked with Cranmer)

Oh, Henry definitely thought he was a theologian; there's an account in MacCulloch's biography of Thomas Cromwell of Henry personally presiding over a heresy trial, all dressed in white, to argue theology with the accused. It wasn't simply about a power grab, I agree; that's why he was so upset when things did not go his way. He wanted this thing, he had convinced himself he was in the right on this thing, he had been promised this thing, why wasn't he getting this thing? That's why Wolsey fell, when his arrogance and power-grabbing weren't balanced out by being able to deliver the divorce for Henry, and why Henry got his pet scholars and theologians to scrabble up a decision that agreed with him on the rightness of the divorce. He couldn't see why the Pope just wouldn't agree with him, so the Pope must be in the wrong, and the genuine Reformers used that to get Henry to implement certain amount of reform in the new English Church.

That's also why Henry was so angry with the likes of Thomas More and the Carthusians; if people with good reputations at home and abroad were disagreeing with him, this was painting him as being wrong. And he was the King, and the King could never be wrong, so they had to pay for that. He was even-handed about burning as heretics both Catholics and Protestants who went too far from what he considered correct:

MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Thomas Cromwell: A Life

This agenda had its problems, because the autumn of 1538 proved a switchback of religious extremes, always dangerous for what by now we can call a new evangelical establishment. ...The evangelical clergy were much more clear-cut in their views, more committed by vocation and hence more exposed, than the noblemen. Nevertheless, all were painfully aware of their vulnerability, particularly now that one of their most determined opponents, Stephen Gardiner, had returned from near three years of embassy in France, vigilant for any opportunity to arouse the King’s suspicions of evangelical proceedings. The evangelicals’ strategy to cover their backs was to show themselves as severe as possible to those on their more radical flank.

In any case they saw the persecution of Anabaptists as a necessary and congenial task to protect godly religion, as was apparent when the threat first appeared in 1535 ...Radical activity, it turned out, had extended to a printed English tract challenging orthodox views on the nature of Jesus Christ. Cromwell acted straight away, appointing vice-gerential commissioners from the areas around London where the threat was most acute; the commissioners were balanced between evangelicals and conservatives. Burnings of Anabaptists followed in the capital and in Colchester.

Alongside that campaign was an affair potentially far more dangerous to the evangelical cause, because it involved one of their own, a former don of Queens’ Cambridge called John Lambert alias Nicholson. In 1531, when the old Church leadership was still fighting its corner, Convocation singled Lambert out for prosecution alongside such figures of the future establishment as Hugh Latimer. By winter 1536 it was Cranmer and Latimer who found themselves constrained to get Lambert imprisoned by Chancellor Audley for sounding off about prayer to saints. Now, in autumn 1538, Lambert confronted a prominent London evangelical and royal chaplain, John Taylor, with outspoken scepticism about the bodily presence of Christ in eucharistic bread and wine. Taylor called on Robert Barnes to help him defend a real-presence theology which avoided papal error (Barnes was, after all, the most obvious and authentic Lutheran in all England), and he then brought in Cranmer. The Archbishop prudently put Lambert in confinement again – but all in vain: fatally convinced of his own rightness, Lambert appealed to the King to hear his case.

This was a disastrous misjudgement. Henry’s customary inclination to occupy himself with theology when lacking a wife made him take a particular interest in the case, and his mood was currently veering towards the conservative end of his volatile spectrum. That was apparent from a new royal proclamation on religion: a personal public intervention, sidelining his Vice-Gerent, who one might have thought had already produced enough regulation for the Church less than two months before. The proclamation followed up various of Cromwell’s orders, and repeated condemnations of Anabaptism and Becket, but it also imposed censorship on the printing press, including unauthorized versions of the Bible, and it expressly forbade clergy to marry – a reaction to the fact that in southern England a number of clergy were doing just that (not to mention the Archbishop of Canterbury’s wife Margarete, lurking obscurely in one of his palaces in Kent).

Even if we did not possess a draft of this proclamation emended in the King’s own hand, the general shapelessness and theological incoherence of the final version is redolent of brusque royal papering-over of disagreements among his bishops. Worse still for John Lambert, this document was issued on 16 November as part of the theatrics in the most high-profile heresy trial that early Tudor England had seen, with Lambert himself and King Henry as joint and opposed stars of the proceedings. The Supreme Head of the Church of England chose to preside himself over the event in Westminster Hall, symbolically clad in white, with his bishops merely as assistants to undertake the theological detail of prosecution. Cromwell’s only substantial part was to house the condemned prisoner, presumably at The Rolls, before Lambert was taken to the stake at Smithfield on 22 November: the same fate as Forest had suffered there six months before, but for polar-opposite beliefs.

The whole Lambert business hugely embarrassed John Foxe when he wrote it up in Acts and Monuments, given that it implicated some of his chief Protestant heroes in burning a man who looked in retrospect like a good Protestant. Cranmer in particular has come in for plenty of abuse for inconsistency among later writers. Yet the Archbishop’s own theology of the eucharist at the time was opposed to the views of Lambert, who may also have affirmed some real radicalism on infant baptism and the nature of Christ, and the Lutheran princes of Germany expressed no disapproval of the condemnation. Cromwell kept his counsel. Two days later, effectively in a continuation of the same theatre, Bishop Hilsey returned to Paul’s Cross to deliver a definitive exposure and mockery of the Holy Blood of Hailes, this time with the relic on hand as his visual aid – in careful pairing with this symbol of old error, new error was represented by four immigrant Anabaptist prisoners standing beside the pulpit bearing their heretics’ faggots, preparatory to burning at the stake. The occasion was a necessary act of damage limitation for the evangelical establishment in relation to King Henry.

It's certainly political. The reformed church is seen as the "Hungarian national" religion, while German protestants living in Hungary were Lutheran. During the Ottoman occupation when Hungary was divided, the Hungarian ruling princes of Transylvania were Calvinist (or sometimes Unitarian) while the Habsburgs leading Royal Hungary werr Catholic. And some nationalities like Serbs and Romanians living in Hungary were orthodox. Nationality and denomination were and are strongly correlated. Most lay people have no idea about the denominational details, they just get born into whichever church their ethnic community belongs to.

There are curious cases like the Hungarian-speaking orthodox in Transylvania who used to be Greek Catholics (and still earlier they had been Eastern Orthodox) but Greek Catholicism was banned during communism and their churches were converted to Orthodoxy. After the fall of communism in Romania, religious freedom was introduced, so the Greek Catholics got legalized again, but now these Hungarian communities are reluctant to convert back to Greek Catholicism, because they care more about their priests than the denomination and the liturgy is similar anyway. And in these areas actually religious affiliation is often the primary identity. So being orthodox, some of these people think they are "Hungarian speaking Romanians", since Orthodoxy is equated with Romanian.

Note however that political and historic events are much stronger in determining where someone ends up than theological fine points. It's just weird to belong to a church of a different ethnicity in these areas.

Hungarian religious history is definitely something I know much less about than what happened further west, so I appreciate the outline. What familiarity I have with Hungarian religious history is really... messy. I do recall being very confused when I learned about the Hungarian Crown being a gift from the Byzantines to a monarch who remained in communion with the Pope and on good terms with Constantinople well after the communication between the two fell apart. It sounds from your description like that complex situation has continued into the present where Latin Catholics, Eastern Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestants are all significant in their own ways, which is rather a fascinating religious landscape reflecting the ethnic diversity of the country.

Most lay people have no idea about the denominational details, they just get born into whichever church their ethnic community belongs to

That's definitely everybody everywhere, people who study these things and seek something out are absolutely the minority. It's significant that the outcome of the Peace of Westphalia wasn't exactly "everyone gets to decide their own religion" but "every prince gets to decide the religion of his kingdom," though with toleration for dissenting subjects. And as kingdoms evolved into nation-states, this does seem to have developed into closely-knit national churches.

One reason for this diversity is the geographic location as the buffer zone between Western Catholicism / Habsburg / HRE, Byzantine Christianity as well as the Ottoman Muslim influence in the occupied area and the Ottoman-aligned Transylvania (the Hungarian princes of Transylvania rather oriented towards the Ottomans to oppose the Austrian Habsburg push for taking the country).

The Islamic influence was mainly that they simply didn't care which flavor of Christianity people followed as long as they paid the tax, so the counter-reformation didn't happen in Eastern Hungary and Transylvania and protestants could go to extremes in peace (like Unitarianism that outright denies the Trinity and Christ's divinity).

Today's landscape in Hungary (2022) is (note that 40% declined to answer) 28% Roman Catholic, 2% Greek Catholic, 10% Calvinist, 2% Lutheran. Orthodox practically nonexistent (0.16%).

I think, based on cursory reading, it's more a combination of post-Communism and Western secularisation; people weren't raised to go to church, the church didn't have too much influence, so there's a 'national' church now (the Reformed) but nobody much goes to church or gets involved past married/buried in church (if they even go for that). A bit like the Church of England, if I can be mildly snarky, which is the state church but has moved to position itself as 'the church of all the people of the nation', which means including Catholics, Muslims, Jews, and atheists as well because being a state church they represent the entire population (yeah, I know, that's pretty shaky but they have to maintain relevance somehow). Take these figures from 2022:

The Worshipping Community of a church is defined as those people who attend worship regularly, once a month or more (whether in-person or “at home”).
The total Worshipping Community was 1,113,000 people in 2019; 1,031,000 people in 2020; 966,000 people in 2021; and 984,000 people in 2022.
The Church of England’s Worshipping Community in 2022 was 1.7% of the population of England

For comparison purposes, the population of England (not Great Britain or the UK) is around 57 million.

I don't get the impression that Hungarian Calvinism is like American Episcopalianism, which was always a small church and did lean heavily towards 'the elite', hence its continuing pretensions to 'the National Cathedral' and so forth.

Not at all, actually it's more the religion of peasants (whose ancestors are from the east where the Austrians didn't manage to re-catholicize them). Orbán himself comes from a simple background. But also, as Hungary was ruled by the Austrian Habsburgs who led the counter reformation, being protestant was a kind of defiant national opposition against the Austrian rulers.

When I say they are a "national" church, I mean more that they tend to be more patriotic and nation-focused, they even sing the national anthem in their liturgy sometimes, they use the national flag more, etc. Since there is no pope above them outside the nation, nobody stops this type of thing, so as a Reformed Christian himself, nationalism and religion are strongly connected in Orbán's mind too.

I don't think the argument for married clergy etc. is that there's never going to be sex scandals - priests are human and as such sinners - after all - but rather that the Catholic tradition of nonmarried clergy means the position tends to attract a particular type of a person - ie. those who aren't attracted to adult women, pedos being in this category alongside homosexuals and asexuals - and that this in turn tends to eventually leave an increasing mark on the entire church hierarcy, its culture of silence, ways of shunting cases aside etc.

My impression of the "orthodox" Calvinist interpretation is that the words "elder", "bishop", and "pastor" in the New Testament all mean the exact same thing.

Does "pastor" show up in the New Testament? My understanding is only "presbyter" and "episkopos" show up, alongside references to deacons.

‘Presbyteros’ ‘diakonos’ and ‘episkopos’ show up in the Pauline epistles; the translations are literally ‘elder’ ‘servant’ and ‘overseer’ respectively but catholic and orthodox Christians think this refers to priests deacons and bishops(Protestants vary). Jesus in a few parables uses a word meaning ‘shepherd’ to refer to the general category of church leadership(and pastor is of course Latin for shepherd), but more as a metaphor for the role of church leaders than as a literal title.

The literal word is "shepherd", but there are some locations where it is clearly referring to some sort of church leader.

He went to pray in an orthodox monastery, called Maria Schutz. Don't ask why. Here's an fb post of the monastery where he's the guy on the right. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php/?photo_id=785558250264913

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats