![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Michele Bachmann has been the subject of some pieces excoriating her for her Christianism, that is, for an understanding of Christianity that is literal and statist. I haven't read the pieces, but I expect I would agree with much that is in them, for that is my understanding of Bachmann.
However, I came across a response that strikes me as being more wholesomely Christian, calling for Secularist to gain a deeper understanding of Christianity. It sounds like Bachmann is also being defended, which I probably wouldn't accept, but I do like this apology for Christianity.
_ _ _
Such a symposium, I believe, could go a long way towards clearing up basic misunderstandings between the secular world and the Christian world. In the same issue of the New Yorker as Lizza's pice about Bachmann, literary critic James Wood has an essay about secularism. In it, Wood claims that "religion cannot be identified with the promise of fullness or enchantment." According to Wood, "both Christianity and Islam harshly challenge the self with an insistence on submission, sacrifice, and kenosis -- and emptying out of the self, and exchange of the wrong kind of fullness for the right kind of humility -- and Buddhism seeks to undermine the very idea of a sovereign, unified self."
To me, this displays a deep and fundamental misunderstanding of Christianity. As with Lizza, it doesn't even seem malicious -- just wrong on a fact or two. Anyone who has read Gerald Manley Hopkins, Chesterton or Teresa of Avila knows that to many Christians, especially converts, awakening to Christ makes the world positively pop with enchantment.
We believe that the universe was created by an endlessly creative force of love -- a love that created the grand magnificence of the oceans, the beauty of the animals, and the joy of children. God is love, a love that manifests itself in the world. It is a love, as Dante wrote, that "set the stars in motion." Further, we believe that kenosis, the emptying of oneself that Wood sees as a type of confinement, is actually a form of liberation.
-- Mark Judge for RealClearReligion
However, I came across a response that strikes me as being more wholesomely Christian, calling for Secularist to gain a deeper understanding of Christianity. It sounds like Bachmann is also being defended, which I probably wouldn't accept, but I do like this apology for Christianity.
_ _ _
Such a symposium, I believe, could go a long way towards clearing up basic misunderstandings between the secular world and the Christian world. In the same issue of the New Yorker as Lizza's pice about Bachmann, literary critic James Wood has an essay about secularism. In it, Wood claims that "religion cannot be identified with the promise of fullness or enchantment." According to Wood, "both Christianity and Islam harshly challenge the self with an insistence on submission, sacrifice, and kenosis -- and emptying out of the self, and exchange of the wrong kind of fullness for the right kind of humility -- and Buddhism seeks to undermine the very idea of a sovereign, unified self."
To me, this displays a deep and fundamental misunderstanding of Christianity. As with Lizza, it doesn't even seem malicious -- just wrong on a fact or two. Anyone who has read Gerald Manley Hopkins, Chesterton or Teresa of Avila knows that to many Christians, especially converts, awakening to Christ makes the world positively pop with enchantment.
We believe that the universe was created by an endlessly creative force of love -- a love that created the grand magnificence of the oceans, the beauty of the animals, and the joy of children. God is love, a love that manifests itself in the world. It is a love, as Dante wrote, that "set the stars in motion." Further, we believe that kenosis, the emptying of oneself that Wood sees as a type of confinement, is actually a form of liberation.
-- Mark Judge for RealClearReligion
