Luther Seminary's Beyoncé Mass

5/13/2022

"a womanist worship service that uses the music and personal life of Beyoncé as a tool to foster an empowering conversation about Black women—their lives, their bodies, and their voices.

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Didaskalos link

9/13/2023 08:27:42 pm

Do people actually pay money to attend Luther Seminary, whose guiding credo is self-evidently "World, how may we pander to you? Let us count the infantilizing ways."

Caleb Knox makes trenchant distinctions between the robust heretics of yesteryear and the vacuous sophists who surfeit today's milksop churches:

"We no longer battle explicit Gnostics. Gone are the Arians. Manicheism, Donatism, and Marcionism have passed. Each of these were heresies of a fanatical age, when men sought, in 20th Century author Whittaker Chambers’ words, something to live for and something to die for. Each of these doctrines was wrong, but they were genuine attempts to find and understand God. In combat against these falsehoods, the energetic wisdom of the church met men of equal conviction. The heretics they faced were horribly wrong, and they were terribly brilliant. Their creeds were codified, and their conclusions were definite. They were learned. Their doctrines were perverse but clear, wrong but articulate. They were wolves and fierce as such. They had conviction—true conviction. The Church was writing against fanatics, but these fanatics were not simplistic. Their spirituality pointed to darkness, against the Church’s light.
[ . . .]
"The modern heretic is not zealous but mild, and that is his danger. I have found that those who practice this domesticated Christianity rarely have the intellectual might or will to express their beliefs clearly. Given its undefined nature, I myself struggle to name the modern heresy, but we can at least say: it is the disbelief in firm belief; the belief that it does not matter what we believe. As Chesterton once said, our ancestors made the error of burning those at the stake who fell outside of what was commonly held to be true. Our error is the opposite, and just as serious. We figuratively burn the man who upholds orthodoxy, perhaps for no other reason than that he holds to a belief. (If I were to speculate, this is a strain of thought that has been with us since the birth of Liberalism at the end of the Religious Wars. Following two centuries of passion and war, Europe sought, in the Enlightenment, a worldview without such zeal. Self-interest, consent, and conscience replaced courage, glory, and moral purity.)

"They who propagate a neutralized Christianity are often unclear and rarely learned. Their errors are neither immense nor developed and, therefore, are not doctrinally neat. Often the one explaining them could not do so in a syllogism; they are instead taught with simple tautologies. I suspect that most doctrinal errors of today are not the product of scholarly errors, but mindlessness. They are not presented in a summa or treatise; they instead bypass both the speaker and listener in vague platitudes and slogans. This ambiguity is their amnesty. Rather than fight on the battlefield in daylight, with clear lines, they sneak into congregations quietly. The Trojan Horse is filled with lies that are hidden until they enter and burn the city.

"Church teaching is becoming less rigorous, less zealous, and less distinct. Messages now slide toward a more general mean, bound together by vague clichés that neither elevate nor disturb. We are led astray, not by persuasion, but by telling us what we already know and keeping us where we presently are. I do not fear the strength of these orations but their simplicity, not their power but their pusillanimity. It is vague moralisms, not strong, developed doctrines that the Church must guard against. Such heresies may be less clear, but they are not less dangerous."

"Subtle Modern Heresies"
-- https://juicyecumenism.com/2022/06/16/subtle-modern-heresies/

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Luther Seminary's Beyoncé Mass

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