Mirror Christianity: Through the Christian Looking Glass
In ages past, a certain corpulent gentleman by the name of G. K. Chesterton penned a book entitled, Heretics. I still remember the library copy of that book—an impressive tome that, much to my consternation, left a sticky, red, molasses-like film on my hands. By the end of each reading session, my hands bore an uncanny resemblance to those of Old Scratch himself.
The attentive student of history may recall that yet another gentleman—one G. S. Street—took it upon himself to challenge the contents of Chesterton’s book. “I will give my philosophy,” quipped Street, “when Chesterton has given us his.” Not to be outdone, Chesterton replied that this was “perhaps an incautious suggestion to make to a person only too ready to write books upon the feeblest provocation.” The outcome of such spirited literary ripostes, dear subscribers, was none other than the celebrated book Orthodoxy.
I am G. S. Street. A few weeks ago, I made the incautious suggestion to
that he write an article. Such brazen conduct on my part was prompted by a note of his, reproduced below:“Y’all really need to chill with the constant trashing of other branches of Christendom. We get it: none of us know anything about what and why the other believes. You’re fighting the wrong battle; show the world that Christianity is true and that denominational differences don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. If we took the time we dedicated to saying the Catholics/Orthodox/Protestants/Evangelicals aren’t real Christians and instead dedicated it to saying “Christ is the Way, Truth, and Life”, the world would be a significantly more Christian place. Keep it up and you’ll make me write an essay on this, and no one wants that.”
Well, I did. Mr. Hack’s ensuing article, Grace in Disagreement is a much-needed respite from the sprawling wasteland that is online Christendom. I hope that my own reflections on these matters—offered at Mr. Hack’s request—may be conveyed with a similar thoroughness and charm.
Before we begin, however, we must ask ourselves: how did we arrive at our present winter of discontent? Of course, one should look on the bright side—we’re no longer burning each other at the stake, which surely marks some measure of spiritual growth. Nonetheless, it is a serious predicament that the online Christian community often resembles a digital Mordor far more than the internet version of the Kingdom of Heaven—and such a reality, as Mr. Hack points out, makes for a decidedly dismal witness to the outside world.
On my part, I must say that Catholics bear no small part of such disgrace. The blasé acceptance of profanity; the Foghorn-Leghorning about of Twitter Catholics imagining their latest infantile tweet to be more “based” than Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors; the red, puffy cheeks of some chubby Traditionalist in a three-piece suit, hurling Patristic florilegia like so many theological pipe-bombs (is that mirror in the corner taunting me?)—it all becomes rather exhausting. If the simplicity and modesty of a Bishop Schneider or a Cardinal Sarah were the norm rather than the exception, Catholics might just manage to lower the Church’s collective blood pressure a bit—a feat I suspect would be rewarded with a kindly smile gracing Pope Leo XIV’s benevolent countenance.
Of course, given my ecclesial loyalties, one might expect that I would cast a wary gaze at Protestants next. Here, however, I have nothing but praise to offer. I speak from experience, mind you, having once been counted among their flock. Without question, their devotion, pious acts of religion, and earnest pursuit of holiness far surpassed that of the Catholics I knew in my youth. Maybe this is where I part ways with Mr. Hack: I don’t know what his Substack feed looks like, but mine is rarely bombarded by misbehaving Protestants.
And yet, I really cannot bring myself to say the same for the Orthodox. Here, I confess a certain desire to poke fun at them—but not too hard, lest I disturb their pious hesychasm. Their online demeanor, needless to say, speaks volumes—a testament to an austere spiritual discipline that sets them apart from the rest of the rabble, no doubt forged by their timely escape from the vast, poisonous expanse that is Western Christianity.
But here I find myself doing exactly what Mr. Hack perhaps cautions me against. Indeed, the line between wit and semantic abuse is perilously thin, often because humor has a way of cloaking offense beneath the peals of laughter (which are mostly mine, no doubt). And, of course, I have yet to encounter in real life any Christian from these three ecclesial communions who even remotely resembles their online caricatures. So, I will tip my hat and say what is already abundantly clear: I agree with the general thrust of Mr. Hack’s article, with the exception that I have a more favorable impression regarding the online behavior of Protestants. It is at this point, however, that I am obliged to move forward to those areas where we differ significantly: namely, in our respective views on what the essentials of the Christian faith are.
If I understand Mr. Hack correctly, he proposes the Nicene Creed as the doctrinal standard encompassing all essentials of the Christian faith. For example, he writes:
“If we can all agree that the beliefs stated in the Nicene Creed are sufficient, other positions remain important but ultimately do not exclude branches from communion with Christ.”
Moreover, Mr. Hack states elsewhere:
“This statement of faith is a barebones understanding of Christian theology, but all four branches of Christianity affirm this creed, although often not explicitly (i.e., Baptist denominations). The claims made here are what should be understood as core or primary doctrine, and most, if not all, other claims can be considered secondary or tertiary positions.”
Though I greatly sympathize with this viewpoint and acknowledge its prima facie plausibility, for me it presents two significant problems.
First, it seems to me that the early Christians often treated as essential to the faith various doctrines that were not contained within the boundaries of the Nicene Creed—and, indeed, Christians continue to do so to this day. One striking example comes from St. Ignatius of Antioch, a disciple of the Apostle John, who regarded denial of the Real Presence in the Eucharist as outright heresy. In his letter to the Smyrnaeans, he writes:
“Take note of those who hold heterodox opinions on the grace of Jesus Christ which has come to us, and see how contrary their opinions are to the mind of God . . .They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, flesh which suffered for our sins and which that Father, in his goodness, raised up again. They who deny the gift of God are perishing in their disputes”
—(Letter to the Smyrnaeans 6:2–7:1 [A.D. 110]).
Or consider St. Jerome, who famously branded Vigilantius a heretic for his rejection of the veneration of relics:
“Do you laugh at the relics of the martyrs, and in company with Eunomius, the father of this heresy, slander the Churches of Christ? Are you not afraid of being in such company, and of speaking against us the same things which he utters against the Church?”
—(Against Vigilantius, 8, A.D. 404)
Now, I am not attempting to demonstrate the veracity of these doctrines from a mere two quotes (trying to do so would not only be asinine, but also touchingly naïve); I am only aiming to illustrate certain instances within early Christianity where certain doctrines, though absent from the Nicene Creed, were considered essential to the Christian faith, such that rejecting them was considered heretical. Before I finish these thoughts, I should also mention that other foundational Christian beliefs, such as the canonicity and divine inspiration of the New Testament, are likewise absent from the Creed. And yet, no Christian today could be considered orthodox while denying the inspiration of any book within the New Testament canon.
In other words, treating the Creed as a kind of minimal standard for Christian orthodoxy is a distinctly modern notion—another variant of C.S. Lewis’s idea of Mere Christianity, I suppose. This is not to suggest that a modern notion is necessarily mistaken; rather, I am attempting to highlight how such a position takes Protestant ecclesiology as the neutral or default starting point. It can also be quite easy (for all of us, I might add) to resort to Mere Christianity when nothing else suffices to justify our Mirror Christianity.
Second, we face the problem of properly interpretating the Creed. Indeed, all four major branches of Christianity (here I would like to add a fifth branch, so that we not only include Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Protestantism, and Evangelicalism, but also Oriental Orthodoxy) disagree over the interpretation of key phrases within the Creed itself, most notably the meaning of the phrase ‘baptism for the forgiveness of sins.’ Lutheran and Anglican views of baptismal regeneration are strikingly consonant with those of Catholics and Eastern Christians; however, this is not the case for Baptists and Evangelicals who remain heroically unmoved by two millennia of consensus. If this be the case, then the Creed cannot serve as a true unifying standard, precisely because our differing understandings of its most essential affirmations are the very reason we are fractured in the first place.
It is here that we arrive at the central, implicit question both Mr. Hack’s article and mine seek to answer: What does it mean to be a Christian, and does heterodoxy necessarily exclude one from that sacred company?
Mr. Hack’s contention is that the “primary tenets of the Christianity are present [in the Creed]” and that “we can use this as a metric to determine whether someone is Christian or not.” However, the real question, to me at least, is not whether one is a Christian, but whether one is a heretic. A heretic is merely a Christian gone amusingly astray, like a small child who wanders off the path but never leaves the garden—though sometimes eyeing the gate with unsettling interest. There are three types of heretics: the first is a heretic through ignorance; the second is a heretic who errs due to accidental mistakes in reasoning; the third is the willful heretic who, fully aware of his error and suffering from pride of understanding, has fallen beyond fraternal correction.
And here comes a particularly jolly realization: from each tradition’s perspective, all other Christians are, technically speaking, heretics. This was certainly the normative way of viewing the general situation, especially after the dust of the Reformation settled, when our ancestors had a more severe understanding of primary doctrine and closely monitored dissenters with stern gaze and jaundiced eye. That this has changed within recent years is an obvious fact; we need only consider the approach of John MacArthur or R.C. Sproul versus that of Dr. Gavin Ortlund to see that this is the case.
Which leads to yet another question: “who is a heretic?” Answering such a question is the cheery business of another article, but suffice it to say that charity lies in recognizing that many—if not most—people are not culpable for any heresies they may unknowingly participate in. On the contrary, most are merely striving to be faithful within the limits of their station in life and understanding. Of course, it goes without saying that many of us are deathly afraid of apostatizing from our own respective communions, a fact that should inspire compassion within ourselves for one another (as it surely does in the heart of God, no doubt). The fact is, in an age of abundant and conflicting sources of information, doctrinal questions have become more difficult to resolve. This doesn’t mean the truth is undiscoverable, unclear, or even particularly difficult to find; rather, it calls for patience and kindness toward what may well be a person’s very genuine existential struggle.
As I finish this article, I find myself increasingly unsure what my central point is, what precisely I was meant to respond to, or indeed whether I was meant to respond to really anything at all—such is the special burden of a stream-of-consciousness mind, graciously bestowed upon me by the Almighty, presumably for His own inscrutable purposes and perhaps the good pleasure of others.
Indeed, I am aware that Christians ought to be more charitable to one another—a fact which, apparently, is not as self-evident as one might hope, given that both Mr. Hack and I have felt compelled to write entire articles lamenting the lack of it. In addition, I suppose I am feebly gesturing toward a broader view of primary doctrine than that proposed by Mr. Hack. One man’s primary doctrine is another man’s secondary doctrine—or even another’s theological footnote. Perhaps once we understand this, we shall recognize that our divisions are not so much the result of misunderstandings as they are the result of sincerely held convictions.
In the end, how to arrive at an internally consistent manner of theological triage (i.e. the appropriate ranking of doctrine) is one of the main concerns of the contemporary Christian, especially because it has immediate effects upon how to go about the life of virtue. Given that each ecclesial communion gives different answers to such questions, it is up to the individual Christian to discern which of these solutions is most consonant with the data given to them by Our Lord in salvation history—whether in Scripture, history, or Tradition. Of course, there will always be those obstinate few who dispute whether some of those are even the proper data points to consider—which persuades me that I have reached the end of this article, and perhaps the beginning of another. In the meantime, I shall fetch a dose of absinthe and let the intrusive thoughts whirl round and round, yet again.