Milk and Meat

“So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction . . . .”

“Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age . . . . But I, brethren, could not address you as spiritual men, but as men of the flesh, as babes in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it.”

Many of the controversies within and between churches have not to do with practices that are right or wrong, but good or better, about ways of thinking and acting and teaching that serve higher and lower forms of Christianity--and with these controversies come many of the incompatibilities that cement the differences between Christians. The apostolic doctrine here addresses intellectual and sociocultural root problems only secondarily. The primary concern is a spiritual one, a problem of deficiency in charity, expressed in inability to understand the deeper wisdom of the faith, inability to grow past its rudiments in all things that have to do with the cultivation and encouragement of the life of the Spirit, and hence the lives of the spirits, within the churches.

I will not point an accusing finger here at any particular Christian group, because I think they all go astray somewhere in this regard. The things that irritate me in particular, against which I have spoken, are known to my readers: orthodox but poor quality preaching and teaching (the subcatholicity of denominationism is theological error, not “milk”), over-emphasis on affective aspects of worship to the detriment of the more substantive, doctrinal ones, the dumbing-down of scripture, and of hymn in word and music (I do not include sexual “equalizing;” this is not a good/better phenomenon, but heresy), and the general infantilization of the worship service imposed in the name of liturgical renewal among Catholics and of evangelization among Protestants.

I have written elsewhere and for other audiences about inordinate love of beautiful church properties, ceremonies, furniture, and vestments, of aesthetic preference for antique language masquerading as doctrinal rectitude (one of the more malignant forms of conservatism), and the problems connected with uncritical attachment to certain forms of church procedure. Beauty and order in the creaturely realm are, like the Temple of old, icons pointing to God, but are lost as such when they no longer bear effective witness to the Truth: once again, the question here is of which is greater. Those who are on the right side of the controversies will make the correct identification and move in the right direction.

All of these, and others, cannot be resolved in argument on what is right and wrong, what is scriptural or not, or settled with convincing finality by reference to church tradition--the latter can very easily end up in an intractable draw between development-of-doctrine advocates and those who reasonably ask them if an earlier church, to whose practice they wish to return, was deficient. The real argument in view in all these matters, like that pertaining to the circumcision of Christians or their adherence to Jewish laws, is what pertains to milk, and what to solid food, what is good and what is better. The conundrum is that such things are only decided rightly in council of those with advanced dietary habits, complicated beyond communal solution by the fact that in large populations of milk-drinkers, those so recognized will less often be the true eaters of solid food than those grown conspicuously fat on milk.

This is not an argument for giving up on the whole business, but suggestion of a way to begin thinking about certain perennial problems in and among the churches. The rules by which they govern themselves and their relations to those outside their gates, the mind that they seek to cultivate, should favor the higher things, with temptations toward the lower, usually hard-ingrained in the tribal constitution, always before the eyes.