RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.

Countrymen,

Letter to Katherine A. Kersten regarding her essay of 17 September 1999 in the Wall Street Journal, To Hell With Sin.

Your essay is very nice, right on the reality. The line that especially resonates with me is:

Largely drained of doctrine, [the church] strikes the observer as little more than a club for good works, a kind of Red Cross with a steeple on it.

The first part of this sentence echoes Tillich to the effect that what passes for a church — by implication: a Synagogue, Temple, etc. — today is really just a moral club. I do not remember the exact location of the statement but he uses the words moral club to contrast with a church, implying that the former is in no way deserving of being indicated as of the nature of the latter.

The word doctrine means learning, simply, and does not mean propositions that require assent or invite dissent. Doctrine is acquired directly through unconditional awareness, unmediated, or it is not doctrine but only empty talk and mental lumber. So you are right to identify doctrine as the key that is lacking and the lack of which makes of the [formerly, perhaps] church a mere moral club.

Hoping not to bear old news: The Red Cross is an arm of the Knights Templar in etiology, as is its geographic base, Switzerland. It is the Crusader’s Cross which we sometimes identify as the Templar Cross, although it is only one of the Templar Crosses and, at that, an abbreviated version. Templars, like all Pythagoreans/Benedictines/Cistercians, were doctors and particularly had to be because of their occupation as warrior monastics. But they were not and are not a church. They are a military order of the church … and a moral club in one of their public service faces, as you imply.

The process by which an aspect of the church becomes and is seen as a moral club — e.g., Red Cross — is part of the genius of the era, the spirit of the times. In the 60s, building from Dutch and German Theologians of the 30s and 40s, who underwent the trial by fire, we called this phenomenon “the church inside out” or “the church without walls.”

A guy at Madrassa Harvard Divinity School (later part never strikes me as accurate) named Harvey Cox and some philosopher wannabes at Emory and other schools took this awareness and stripped it of the high incarnation theology doctrine which produced it and short-circuited the spiritual and the cultural processions by declaring, seductively, that God is secularity, anything you want to do (Cox) or that secularity is God, do anything you want (“Death of God Theologians”).

Philosophically this apparent construction is a form a superficial unity or non-duality and is really no construction at all but a destruction, as events demonstrated. Harvey Cox is a very bad man.

So if you were wondering where/when the stripping of doctrine occurred, that is where and when. Cox’s Secular City is the indication. And if you want to know what caused Cox and the other young leaders of the day to go this way, the answer is simple: Hugh Hefner and the money he gave them for interviews.

Take a look at the Playboys through the 60s, and see how often “Theologians” were interviewed, some from Union. It was the money. I remember the Dean of Auburn Seminary, which was and I think still is attached to Union, telling me in plain terms that this is what he, too, was doing. He said, “Dave, I can’t refuse the money.” I was a student and he wasn’t saying this to defend himself but to entice me to stay on the course so that one day I could have such perks.  Hefner was trying to kill the Church.

I ended up not going to my Union graduation ceremony, telling the UCC that I renounced my ordination and trying to live as I thought St. Benedict might live given modern circumstances and the fact that children were inside me. I was fortunate in “finding” Mary, the mother and wife par excellence.

There is not any hope for the moral clubs which call themselves church. That means for their leaders. Any guy or gal who is drawing income from a church is a charlatan. Doctrine is catholic, ecumenical, and these moral clubs definitionally cannot be catholic because their leaders are not.

The way forward is in clear language describing what actually is and then clear language indicating what is available. Something fresh, nothing new. What we need is always with us, as with a large denomination bill we hid in a book on the shelf and then forgot was there until someone picks it up one day, thumbs through and out falls the bill. This is the lesson of the Templars, that the treasure we need is already in us. It is the ur-type of homeschooling.

Update 1: Why The American Church Should Go Off The Grid.

AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA