Young uses a common rhetorical trick: if there is dissent on a topic historically, we can’t call it the orthodox position. By this rationale, there is no such thing as orthodoxy, which is ultimately what he would like us to believe. But this is a ridiculous position that confuses unanimity and consent. Vincent of Lerins spoke of the faith confessed “everywhere, always, and by all.” He didn’t mean there was never dissent. He meant that despite dissent, this faith was confessed broadly across the Christian world and across time.
It is very surprising to me that a single designer could come up with something as ugly as the new TEC shield. In most cases, it takes a committee to produce such wretched ugliness.
Sometimes it’s good to step out of our time and place to gain some footing on how to approach the insanity around us. I can’t recommend enough Csezlaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind in that it shows how artists and citizens alike fell under the hegemonic thinking of the Soviet Union, or Dostoyevsky’s Demons which confronts the rise and absurdity of Nihilism in 19th century Russia, or the poetry and essays of Seamus Heaney which give us a portrait of how to write something beautiful and sure within a society that was torn in two by the “Struggles,” a poetry of hope rather than optimism.
I keep coming back to Milosz’s poem “A Task,” and was reminded of it again by the sheer amount of sophistry and revisionism in De Young’s tweet and then all of the press releases by the TEC. He could have been more blunt and simply said, we reject all of history and have decided that all of human thought and social structure up until the last 20 years was simply wrong. Or. He could have been brave and simply said, Orthodoxy doesn’t matter. De Young, matched with the sort of revisionist TEC flag in which the Cross exists as a negative space, and then a paid position that will remind everybody that the original words of The Lord’s Prayer are patriarchal and oppressive, perhaps does not realize that he is building a system in which nobody can have confidence that anything they say is sure or true, or can be given grace. It is in fact that sort of landscape that Milosz describes in which we have to second guess everything we say. My only response to this has to be Milosz’s exhortation:
A Task
In fear and trembling, I think I would fulfill my life
Only if I brought myself to make a public confession
Revealing a sham, my own and of my epoch:
We were permitted to shriek in the tongue of dwarfs and demons
But pure and generous words were forbidden
Under so stiff a penalty that whoever dared to pronounce one
Thank you, Anne, for again clearly communicating the gospel AND defending the truth of God's word. Shame on you, Which (or is it, Witch?) Doctor Kevin for obscuring truth and redefining the gospel in the spirit of the erring Galatians. Listen to Anne; she has it right.
Every time you write about Kevin M. Young I confuse him with Kevin De Young, the Reformed theologian, and I'm somewhat dismayed until I remember that they're not the same person.
I guess your Dr. Young must believe those lies that he's telling, but I find the bit about the bent of the historic church toward "evil Empire" particularly odd. Does he think that all those early Christian martyrs were showing their support for Rome by refusing to worship the emperor?
Young uses a common rhetorical trick: if there is dissent on a topic historically, we can’t call it the orthodox position. By this rationale, there is no such thing as orthodoxy, which is ultimately what he would like us to believe. But this is a ridiculous position that confuses unanimity and consent. Vincent of Lerins spoke of the faith confessed “everywhere, always, and by all.” He didn’t mean there was never dissent. He meant that despite dissent, this faith was confessed broadly across the Christian world and across time.
Young is a poster child of the Church of What’s Happening Now.
Good content today, Anne!
It is very surprising to me that a single designer could come up with something as ugly as the new TEC shield. In most cases, it takes a committee to produce such wretched ugliness.
When you include everything you are often left with nothing.
Wow. This response got long. Sorry about that.
Sometimes it’s good to step out of our time and place to gain some footing on how to approach the insanity around us. I can’t recommend enough Csezlaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind in that it shows how artists and citizens alike fell under the hegemonic thinking of the Soviet Union, or Dostoyevsky’s Demons which confronts the rise and absurdity of Nihilism in 19th century Russia, or the poetry and essays of Seamus Heaney which give us a portrait of how to write something beautiful and sure within a society that was torn in two by the “Struggles,” a poetry of hope rather than optimism.
I keep coming back to Milosz’s poem “A Task,” and was reminded of it again by the sheer amount of sophistry and revisionism in De Young’s tweet and then all of the press releases by the TEC. He could have been more blunt and simply said, we reject all of history and have decided that all of human thought and social structure up until the last 20 years was simply wrong. Or. He could have been brave and simply said, Orthodoxy doesn’t matter. De Young, matched with the sort of revisionist TEC flag in which the Cross exists as a negative space, and then a paid position that will remind everybody that the original words of The Lord’s Prayer are patriarchal and oppressive, perhaps does not realize that he is building a system in which nobody can have confidence that anything they say is sure or true, or can be given grace. It is in fact that sort of landscape that Milosz describes in which we have to second guess everything we say. My only response to this has to be Milosz’s exhortation:
A Task
In fear and trembling, I think I would fulfill my life
Only if I brought myself to make a public confession
Revealing a sham, my own and of my epoch:
We were permitted to shriek in the tongue of dwarfs and demons
But pure and generous words were forbidden
Under so stiff a penalty that whoever dared to pronounce one
Considered himself as a lost man.
Thank you, Anne, for again clearly communicating the gospel AND defending the truth of God's word. Shame on you, Which (or is it, Witch?) Doctor Kevin for obscuring truth and redefining the gospel in the spirit of the erring Galatians. Listen to Anne; she has it right.
Every time you write about Kevin M. Young I confuse him with Kevin De Young, the Reformed theologian, and I'm somewhat dismayed until I remember that they're not the same person.
I guess your Dr. Young must believe those lies that he's telling, but I find the bit about the bent of the historic church toward "evil Empire" particularly odd. Does he think that all those early Christian martyrs were showing their support for Rome by refusing to worship the emperor?
Have fun in Latrobe, Anne, and don’t forget to visit the statue of Mr. Rogers on the park bench and the world’s largest banana split!