I am in broad agreement with much here, in my seventh decade of first-hand experience in Protestantism. But since fighting is what Protestants do best and find most enjoyable, I'll take exception.
First, Protestantism has rituals. Just try changing the place in a traditional Baptist service where the offering plate is passed and watch heads explode.
Which is to say, there are ALWAYS rituals.
And therefore, where they are few, they tend to have more weight. Group prayer, singing, preaching, the Lord's Supper, baptism, funerals, visitation of the sick, charitable works, evangelism and revivalism—these are all highly-structured and formulaic, even where "formalism" is (formally) rejected.
Second, 500 years is a looong time in the imminent anticipation of death. Relative to two thousand years of Christianity, especially.
Third, and this is where I have the least authority to speak, doesn't this assume a particular vision both of Catholicism as well as of Protestantism?
The Mass is consistent as ritual. But are the modalities of architecture, music, etc.—ESPECIALLY across time, culture, and geography?
Fourth, across the millennia of biblical faith, there have been periods of "the priestly," adding to, adding to, adding to. And there have been periods of "the prophetic," pruning back, pruning back....
Protestantism has LESS, in almost every sphere of ritual, but it has SOME, and such as there is, is not without merit.
And it is growing.
I never heard mention of Lent as a child. Its practice is increasingly widespread. Same with Advent. Younger Reformed ministers are more liturgical than their elders. Richard Foster's "Celebration of Discipline" (1978) was a rediscovery of the spiritual disciplines in Protestant circles. Books in that vein are common now and popular.
But in the conclusion towards which we all should be headed, I hope and pray that this will end in the reunification of the splinters into the whole. That will not happen without repentance and reconciliation on all sides.
Thanks for the pushback. Of course you're right that Protestantism has rituals. Every culture has rituals. And you're also on point that the priestly and prophetic strains go back and forth over the course of history.
My sense, though, is that the prophetic took on more than it could handle at the advent of the Protestant era. The priestly is what supports culture -- the rounds and routines of temple worship, the rites that keep the cosmos in order. The prophetic challenges the order and calls people to recommit in an inward way to the truth of faith. But you ultimately can't build a sustainable culture on challenge and protest. Sure, 500 years is a long time in some ways, but Armenia has been a culture for more than 2,500 years. China has been a coherent and roughly unified culture for 3,000 years. I think Western European Protestantism is a flash in the pan compared with examples like this, and I think the signs are clear that it's boiling away. If you teach an entire civilization to ground their approach to cultural life on critique, you won't get thousands of years of coherent stability. Maybe you'll get half a millennium of immense creativity and change, followed by...something else. A different culture. A break in history.
Also agreed that Protestants are taking up ritual and church traditions more and more. All to the good -- that's where I discovered them! But it kinda supports my point that, in order to keep a culture going, we'll have to look deeper than the last 500 years of protest. I think others are sensing this as well, which is why Lent and things like that are making comebacks.
The Enlightenment borrowed heavily from the Renaissance and romanticism just subverted through the huge gaps Enlightenment had. Modernism and postmodernism (and metamodernism) are just recognitions of the failures of romanticism, and obviously we aren't in a culturally deep era right now. Any cultural developments are reacting to the failures of the 500 year project.
Rituals exist, but they're explicitly what protestantism is against. Protestantism put a lot of effort into separating science from theology that thomism was doing. I personally find it hilarious that protestants are now trying to say faith and science can be reconciled. Keep in mind, this isn't coming from any protestant disposition, similar to now celebrating Lent isn't, but from that underlying truth that rituals do exist. This protestant-enlightenment project has gone on for 500 years and through communist criticisms (which are good even if I disagree with them), fascism and all that stuff, it's been thoroughly shown to have deficits even if not the amount (or quality) of deficits those others have. Now that there are no competing political ideologies, the cracks are being worked through by newer ideologies like DEI. It simply does not reconcile man fully.
Very cool. I wanted to add that the worship of Dionysus was the basis of tragedies and comedies. Plato gets a lot of flack for being against poetry, plays and these arts, but he was responding to something that's been romanticized then secularized later in our cultural ethos. For him, he was more in line with Apollo hellenism. Dionysian hellenism built upon what Apollo did (he supplanted the fertility cult Python which was Dionysus adjacent beliefs for a more ancient culture) and is hellenistic, but it was very much still about emotism (tragedy) and destroying hierarchies (comedies).
The mindset of protestantism is revolutionary and unique too. Enlightenment, through protestantism, isolated rationalism from the other virtues (renaissance on down contested virtues in balance with each other as what a man was) and used the specificity of analyticity to separate things. The ancients were much more interested in synthesizing things. You see this with the deities like Athena who was the spirit of owls, olive trees etc in one deity. The early languages as well were agglutinative in morphology and velarized phonetically. Now they're analytic and palatizing. Talk about missing the forest for the trees.
Thanks for these thoughts. Not sure about the language thing though. Your argument seems like a kind of overextension of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, and I can think of lots of counterexamples. Eg, German is an inflected language but German cultures are very individualistic; Mandarin is extremely analytical yet China is the textbook example of a collectivistic (in the psychological sense) society.
Language is more stabilized and transcends culture a bit. German is becoming more analytic and palatized. It's even losing its formal you and has already lost grammatical cases. Keep in mind, the German industrial revolution model did not succeed over the American one because it was heavily based in credentialism and hierarchies (they focused on high quality goods like chemicals and engineering in contrast to America's laissez-faire spirit). That was just a century ago.
For China, it's interesting to note that creole languages are analytic in grammar. Originally Chinese was way more synthetic (the character system is still obviously synthetic). Chinese has developed and been abstracted from a lot of characters and contexts (yin-yang symbols originally, as characters, referred to hill abundance cults where the evil mother goddess reigned) for 3 millennia now. If that counts as effective creolization it wouldn't surprise me, but I'm sure it can be proven. That being said, I don't think "collectivism" is what is being rotated around here. I'm not sure I buy it has any real semantic quality being so relativistic (it's the inverse of the individual for liberalism). I think "collectivism" happens derivatively of having strong values, culture and, therefore, meaning. Once there's a separation of context from land, language etc everything becomes differentiated sorta in the manner Baudrillard means.
Edit: I also wanted to add that the character reform under the cpc is actually a characteristic of this abstracted nature. It tries to simplify characters, but what is simple for us is what we already know (or what's immediately available from what we already know). If you took out brush strokes from English letters, that wouldn't make English simpler for anyone who already speaks English. Obviously it has some benefits in itself, but my point is to pile on how language becomes more analytic, palatized and abstracted with this enlightenment mindset rather than the synthetic aspect which was based on lived experience.
I am in broad agreement with much here, in my seventh decade of first-hand experience in Protestantism. But since fighting is what Protestants do best and find most enjoyable, I'll take exception.
First, Protestantism has rituals. Just try changing the place in a traditional Baptist service where the offering plate is passed and watch heads explode.
Which is to say, there are ALWAYS rituals.
And therefore, where they are few, they tend to have more weight. Group prayer, singing, preaching, the Lord's Supper, baptism, funerals, visitation of the sick, charitable works, evangelism and revivalism—these are all highly-structured and formulaic, even where "formalism" is (formally) rejected.
Second, 500 years is a looong time in the imminent anticipation of death. Relative to two thousand years of Christianity, especially.
Third, and this is where I have the least authority to speak, doesn't this assume a particular vision both of Catholicism as well as of Protestantism?
The Mass is consistent as ritual. But are the modalities of architecture, music, etc.—ESPECIALLY across time, culture, and geography?
Fourth, across the millennia of biblical faith, there have been periods of "the priestly," adding to, adding to, adding to. And there have been periods of "the prophetic," pruning back, pruning back....
Protestantism has LESS, in almost every sphere of ritual, but it has SOME, and such as there is, is not without merit.
And it is growing.
I never heard mention of Lent as a child. Its practice is increasingly widespread. Same with Advent. Younger Reformed ministers are more liturgical than their elders. Richard Foster's "Celebration of Discipline" (1978) was a rediscovery of the spiritual disciplines in Protestant circles. Books in that vein are common now and popular.
But in the conclusion towards which we all should be headed, I hope and pray that this will end in the reunification of the splinters into the whole. That will not happen without repentance and reconciliation on all sides.
Thanks for the pushback. Of course you're right that Protestantism has rituals. Every culture has rituals. And you're also on point that the priestly and prophetic strains go back and forth over the course of history.
My sense, though, is that the prophetic took on more than it could handle at the advent of the Protestant era. The priestly is what supports culture -- the rounds and routines of temple worship, the rites that keep the cosmos in order. The prophetic challenges the order and calls people to recommit in an inward way to the truth of faith. But you ultimately can't build a sustainable culture on challenge and protest. Sure, 500 years is a long time in some ways, but Armenia has been a culture for more than 2,500 years. China has been a coherent and roughly unified culture for 3,000 years. I think Western European Protestantism is a flash in the pan compared with examples like this, and I think the signs are clear that it's boiling away. If you teach an entire civilization to ground their approach to cultural life on critique, you won't get thousands of years of coherent stability. Maybe you'll get half a millennium of immense creativity and change, followed by...something else. A different culture. A break in history.
Also agreed that Protestants are taking up ritual and church traditions more and more. All to the good -- that's where I discovered them! But it kinda supports my point that, in order to keep a culture going, we'll have to look deeper than the last 500 years of protest. I think others are sensing this as well, which is why Lent and things like that are making comebacks.
Great observations, all.
"A break in history."
Yes, particularly in tandem with the tech revolution, our increasingly post-literary cultures, rises in nationalism, the twilight of atheism....
The question remains: When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?
The Enlightenment borrowed heavily from the Renaissance and romanticism just subverted through the huge gaps Enlightenment had. Modernism and postmodernism (and metamodernism) are just recognitions of the failures of romanticism, and obviously we aren't in a culturally deep era right now. Any cultural developments are reacting to the failures of the 500 year project.
Rituals exist, but they're explicitly what protestantism is against. Protestantism put a lot of effort into separating science from theology that thomism was doing. I personally find it hilarious that protestants are now trying to say faith and science can be reconciled. Keep in mind, this isn't coming from any protestant disposition, similar to now celebrating Lent isn't, but from that underlying truth that rituals do exist. This protestant-enlightenment project has gone on for 500 years and through communist criticisms (which are good even if I disagree with them), fascism and all that stuff, it's been thoroughly shown to have deficits even if not the amount (or quality) of deficits those others have. Now that there are no competing political ideologies, the cracks are being worked through by newer ideologies like DEI. It simply does not reconcile man fully.
Very cool. I wanted to add that the worship of Dionysus was the basis of tragedies and comedies. Plato gets a lot of flack for being against poetry, plays and these arts, but he was responding to something that's been romanticized then secularized later in our cultural ethos. For him, he was more in line with Apollo hellenism. Dionysian hellenism built upon what Apollo did (he supplanted the fertility cult Python which was Dionysus adjacent beliefs for a more ancient culture) and is hellenistic, but it was very much still about emotism (tragedy) and destroying hierarchies (comedies).
The mindset of protestantism is revolutionary and unique too. Enlightenment, through protestantism, isolated rationalism from the other virtues (renaissance on down contested virtues in balance with each other as what a man was) and used the specificity of analyticity to separate things. The ancients were much more interested in synthesizing things. You see this with the deities like Athena who was the spirit of owls, olive trees etc in one deity. The early languages as well were agglutinative in morphology and velarized phonetically. Now they're analytic and palatizing. Talk about missing the forest for the trees.
Thanks for these thoughts. Not sure about the language thing though. Your argument seems like a kind of overextension of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, and I can think of lots of counterexamples. Eg, German is an inflected language but German cultures are very individualistic; Mandarin is extremely analytical yet China is the textbook example of a collectivistic (in the psychological sense) society.
Language is more stabilized and transcends culture a bit. German is becoming more analytic and palatized. It's even losing its formal you and has already lost grammatical cases. Keep in mind, the German industrial revolution model did not succeed over the American one because it was heavily based in credentialism and hierarchies (they focused on high quality goods like chemicals and engineering in contrast to America's laissez-faire spirit). That was just a century ago.
For China, it's interesting to note that creole languages are analytic in grammar. Originally Chinese was way more synthetic (the character system is still obviously synthetic). Chinese has developed and been abstracted from a lot of characters and contexts (yin-yang symbols originally, as characters, referred to hill abundance cults where the evil mother goddess reigned) for 3 millennia now. If that counts as effective creolization it wouldn't surprise me, but I'm sure it can be proven. That being said, I don't think "collectivism" is what is being rotated around here. I'm not sure I buy it has any real semantic quality being so relativistic (it's the inverse of the individual for liberalism). I think "collectivism" happens derivatively of having strong values, culture and, therefore, meaning. Once there's a separation of context from land, language etc everything becomes differentiated sorta in the manner Baudrillard means.
Edit: I also wanted to add that the character reform under the cpc is actually a characteristic of this abstracted nature. It tries to simplify characters, but what is simple for us is what we already know (or what's immediately available from what we already know). If you took out brush strokes from English letters, that wouldn't make English simpler for anyone who already speaks English. Obviously it has some benefits in itself, but my point is to pile on how language becomes more analytic, palatized and abstracted with this enlightenment mindset rather than the synthetic aspect which was based on lived experience.