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Plan of Life

It's time to restart my Plan of Life. It's not a great existential thing; it's a phrase that describes a generally set way to pray and live each day in order to reach maximum holiness. On the other hand, what's more existential than that?

A little piece of advice from the spiritual hinterlands: If you get an idea to change the plan, and it didn't come from your spiritual director, there is an 84.2 percent chance that it came from Satan. That was a terrible month! And we know the reason now, don't we? Even though immaterial beings are not composed of matter by definition, there should be no doubt that Satan is a piece of crap. He will do anything to pull us away from God, leave us lonely, confused, and chained to our sins.

You thought you had me, didn't you? Yeah, well, I don't think so. I may go to Confession soon, just to spite the monster. But that is what the old priest had said: God speaks quieter. I should have remembered Elisha.

It's true that we often have mixed motives in doing good things. I'm probably the guiltiest one. Yet if we say "the prayers," it is far worse not to say them at all, or to think we are better than we are. So we should say them. And quite literally to Hell with all the rest. [You just associated your pagan devotional practices with the liturgy in Acts 2:42.--ed.] Yes, I did. And what's it to you? You wouldn't know any licit practices or beliefs if we hadn't taught them to you. [Pshhh.--ed.] We're still waiting for the credible reason why we should care what Calvin says. Or any of them. The bishops of the first millenium quake in fear as they wait for your "unmasking" of their "usurpation" of the "true Church." There are 200 odd successors of Peter having a good laugh, too.

If the nothingness of consumer-driven Christianity is to be beaten back by theology in community, as we are told countless times and ways, this is where the two-fold vise-grips of the means of credibility really starts to crank. On the one hand, theological continuity/stability, and on the other, visible unity. It still remains that the answer to the question, "Who asked us?" for any Protestant community is that no one did. On the other hand, to even ask the question that way supposes that the community has real authority. Which is the real heart of the problem, actually: Whether the church has real authority that is binding on the faithful in the Protestant world. The Leithart thing actually had nothing to do with Leithart. It was the perfect picture of the failure to really answer this question. And it's no one's fault. They're both right, and both wrong. The confessionalists rightly nail Leithart to the wall for failing to uphold tradition; Leithart gently reminds them that this whole movement was started as a rejection of tradition. Tradition, that is.

The quest to build the more perfect fundie has reached its pinnacle in guys like Leithart. But here's the funny part: he's no different than the mega-church guys; he's Rob Bell with a bigger bookshelf. At least with respect to who decides what is dogmatically true. It's the faith once-delivered, with a line-item veto. Same question: Who asked you? Or better said, "Who sent you?"

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