Faith: July 2023 Archives

Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option, p. 103:

"...Our imaginations have been colonized by a mentality that holds older, inherited forms of worship to be impediments to authenticity. On the contrary, we need to be instructed in how to pray and worship to train our minds to think in an authentically Christian way. As Paul exhorted the Romans, we must be transformed by the renewing of our minds, by adopting thought patterns and behaviors that are not actually natural to us. This is not bondage but liberty.

"When Christians ignore the story of how our fathers and mothers in the faith prayed, lived, and worshiped, we deny the life-giving power of our own roots and cut ourselves off from the wisdom of those whose minds were renewed. As a result, at best, the work of God in our lives is slower and shallower than it might otherwise be. At worst, we lose our children.

"A big part of the falling away today is that our children don't know the history of Christianity or grasp why it matters. One Eastern Orthodox friend, raised an Evangelical, said she had no idea what the early church taught, or even who the fathers of the church were, until she became Orthodox -- a tradition that emphasizes their writings and teachings. For this friend, the Christian faith amounted to the Bible as interpreted by the most popular Evangelical pastors of the day.

"It's not that Evangelicalism rejects the foundational theological writings of early Christianity, she explained, but that it never mentions them. Nor did the church of her youth dig deeply into the Reformation tradition from which it sprang. n her church and religious school, she was fed nothing but the thin gruel of contemporary Christianity, with its shallow theology and upbeat sloganeering."