Comment by geye1234
8 months ago
I'm responding a bit late to this.
The objection to your point is that the teachings of Christianity are timeless if true. And therefore so is (the object of) Christians' belief. And so therefore, a 'modern Christianity' is an oxymoron.
I happily claim to practise the religion of St. Anthony, since our intellects adhere to the same thing (God's Self-Revelation in the God-Man Jesus Christ), and our wills pursue the same thing (Union with the Divine Nature). The reason for belief and the goal of religious practice is the same in St. Anthony's case as in mien.
As for Waugh, he believed that 'modernity', taken to mean the beliefs that inform contemporary thought and behaviour, was contemptible. (Obviously, if we took 'modern' to simply mean 'contemporary', this would make no sense. 'Modern' is a notoriously ambiguous word.)
> The objection to your point is that the teachings of Christianity are timeless if true.
"The teachings of Christianity" are, in fact, not consistent across time or across subsets of Christianity at the same time, and for any given time and group of Christians tend to include a mix of teachings that are held by those Christians to be fundamental and eternal, and teachings that are held by those Christians to be applicable in the current context (the latter tend to be presented as an application of the former to the perceived current circumstances, but may or may not be the result of applying any rational process to explicitly held eternal beliefs to any specifically articulated beliefs about the modern world.)
Your objection seems to be grounded in claims about the "teachings of Christianity" that are empirically untrue of the actual teachings of actual Christianity as it has actually existed in the material world. They may apply to some abstract ideal of Christianity, but in that case a "modern Christianity" could still exist as a concrete Christianity that more closely approached the abstract ideal than current concrete forms.
That's fair. Let's replace 'Christianity' with 'the Catholic Church', since what you say undoubtedly applies to Protestantism, and in a less obvious way to Eastern Orthodoxy. And remember, I'm saying 'timeless if true'; the 'true' part is assumed for the purpose of this argument.
As someone who has been Catholic most of my life, it certainly applies just as much to the Catholic Church (even to there being diverse beliefs within the Church at any given time, and certainly to change over time.)
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> I happily claim to practise the religion of St. Anthony, since our intellects adhere to the same thing
Well, and me too. But also you should read the book I mentioned. I'm not qualified to summarize it but others have. It has been extremely valuable to my spiritual life.
Thanks. I've heard good things about Taylor and I will try to check it out one of these days.