Welcoming Antichrist
S. M. Hutchens on Living Comfortably with the Sectarian Impulse
J. W. Nevin identifies the spirit of sect and schism as the spirit of Antichrist in his essay by that title. Here he lays out, in what I would make required reading for any curriculum in divinity, the marks of this spirit as found in the churches. He quite deliberately places his own ecclesiastical world of nineteenth-century denominational Protestantism (with Roman Catholicism being no help at all) in the guilty middle of this sectarian stream.
In his summary, titled “The Sect Plague and Its Remedy,” Nevin identifies the beginning of the cure as faith in the existence of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, just as one believes the other articles of the Creed—a faith that cannot co-exist with a mind that identifies its own sect as the Church.
These catholic ideas are not arbitrary or accidental; they form the necessary outbirth of a true Christian life; and to refuse them their proper honor, is of itself to do homage always to the spirit of Sect as a higher power. Only as such feeling gives way before the sense of Christ’s one universal Church, and room is made thus for true inward sympathy with catholic ideas, may we hope at all to understand or settle satisfactorily, the questions involved in the restoration of our present captivity. Faith in the Church is not of itself all that the case requires; but it is the first and greatest thing, that must open the way for all ulterior counsel and action; and it is worse than idle to prate sentimentally of our good purposes in its absence. Half of our Sects would be at once dissolved by it, like mists before the rising sun, while the field of division and debate, among the rest, would be narrowed to less than half its present dimensions. . . .
The footnote I would make, after having been immersed in the sect system all my life, by birth, experience, and training at its highest levels, is adding my belief that there is no, or scarcely any, innocence of the mind of Antichrist among the intellectual leaders of the sects, liberal or conservative. I refer here to highly intelligent and well-trained people who in their lives and studies have most certainly been confronted time and again with the wrongness of transforming the Mystery of our Faith into the avatar of their sects and theological systems.
Nevin lays down their typical marks: denial of the Church as a real supernatural constitution that is always present in the whole world, a low view of the ministry and sacraments, contempt for history and authority, freedom of the individual to interpret the Bible as seems good to him, alternation of hyper-spiritualism and sterile rationalism, dualism that separates nature and spirit, a tendency towards fanaticism, an implacable drive toward endless division which invariably ends in the flesh, and false theology.
Making Esau’s Bargain
Not every sectarian mind expresses all these crotchets, or operates at the same intensity or level of self-awareness. One can be, for example, a rationalist for whom apprehension of his affinity with the fanatic is kept at a long arm’s length, or a believer in historic church authority who regards his own sect as the True Faith without seeing his identity with the radically independent. Some have become so far gone they have forgotten, past recovery, memory of the time and place where they first made Esau’s bargain for value received and their orientation toward God and the world was changed.
But it is impossible for me to believe, having undergone it myself, that during the course of their study and observation they have not been confronted—not once but many times—with the quiet admonition to stop and consider honestly what they have read in the Bible or heard in the urgings of Reason against the defining convictions of their party. Nor do I believe that these very bright people are not paid at the door of the church with the coin of the world for what they are doing to rend the body of Christ—with greetings in the marketplace in anticipation of the greater condemnation promised by St. James’s Epistle for those who are called teachers and teach what they should not.
No, they know what they are doing, even when they try to keep consciousness of it at bay, and they can easily deceive average people into thinking them good because they have already deceived an expert and much brighter than average self.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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