Nelson Kloosterman May Not Be But I Am Thankful for David VanDrunen

Darryl G. Hart says:
November 27, 2010 at 10:36 pm

Mark, I can understand your not liking me. I’m a goyim. But VanDrunen is ons volk. Where’s the love?
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Darryl G. Hart says:
November 29, 2010 at 4:22 pm

Mark, is this the way you behave in court? I believe Bob is sane in his Kuyperian convictions. I believe that you and Kloosterman are not sane on this. Why you would describe tolerance for DVD or me as latitudinarian is further evidence that you cannot tell the difference between what is and is not important to the health of the church.

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As Mark van der Molen points out, the issue isn’t being non-Dutch. I’m no more Dutch than you are, and furthermore, I spent a great deal of time fighting against a narrow ethnocentric Dutch approach of how to “do church.”

I have a long history of polite sparring with Dr. Kloosterman and his supporters on that issue, almost always out of print because I think both “sides” in that debate realized that fighting Christian Reformed liberalism was far more important than fighting each other. In fact, I used to get invited to preach in ex-CRC congregations on the grounds that I was the most non-Dutch person they could think of to invite to their pulpit and prove that you could be a Calvinist without being a Hollander.

Now that I’m down here in the South, when PCA people ask if I’m Dutch because I’m a Calvin graduate, I still laugh a little at how totally impossible that question would ever be in my hometown of Grand Rapids. Maybe the fact that I wear a black suit and polished shoes to church and the fact that I can sing a lot of the Psalms makes me look and sound Dutch? If so, I guess I plead guilty to being the shortest Hollander ever made — perhaps Ellis Island made a mistake and my family name is actually Vander Marinus from Rotterdam rather than Maurina from Spormaggiore in Italy.

Let’s cut the ethnic stuff, Dr. Hart. The issue is whether your theology is inherently Anabaptist and therefore un-Refomed or whether Kuyper’s political views are unbiblically triumphalist and therefore un-Reformed because they minimize total depravity. I’m very willing to criticize Kuyper and you’ve got a point that transformationalism can transform the church rather than the world, and historically it did exactly that when the emphasis was lost on the importance of the antithesis and of total depravity.

But perhaps you’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

As I’ve written over on CO-URC:

“Not only are there lots of people in the United Reformed Churches who will see the irony of DTM defending Dr. Nelson Kloosterman, those who are aware of how profoundly disgusted I became with Calvin College’s transformationist garbage know that it takes a lot for me to come to the defense of **ANYTHING** called ‘neo-Calvinism’ or ‘transformationism.’ I saw firsthand how the ‘transformationalist’ language was used by Calvin College professors to transform the church into the image of the world, not the other way around …

Furthermore, on the three-groups taxonomy of the Dutch church world into Reformed Scholasticism, Reformed Pietism, and Kuyperianism, I am most emphatically in the Puritan camp. If I had lived in the Netherlands in Kuyper’s day, knowing my own views on ecclesiology and soteriology, I’d probably be one of Kuyper’s opponents helping organize the Gereformeerde Bond or perhaps would be in the CGKN (equivalent to Free Reformed), and I would be fighting Kuyper tooth and nail on his presumptive regeneration.

However, the stakes here are too high to stay silent. What we’re seeing from the “Two Kingdoms” people is not a legitimate Old School opposition to social action in the name of the church.

We’re not fighting over whether to allow use of alcohol or some other issue on which the Scripture speaks very little or not at all. We are fighting over issues of sodomy, of baby-killing, and of gross immorality called good by our government. Furthermore, we are fighting those battles while a resurgent Islam stands poised to take over much of Europe with the next generation, and has showed itself very willing to use the power of the sword against the “infidels,” i.e., us. …

I’ve said for a long time that Ronald Reagan may have been the last good thing to come out of California; that state is falling apart and reaping the rewards of decades of outright rebellion against God in its government, its schools, and its popular culture, and with Gov. Moonbeam (Jerry Brown) back in office, it will only get worse. I can sympathize with a group of conservative Calvinists in Southern California who have decided the culture has gotten so bad that they need to retreat, give up, and leave the world to the Devil. Okay, fine. Go do that if you feel you must. It might even be what God wants you to do in your circumstances, much like persecuted Christians in China, Iran, or other anti-Christian societies.

But don’t go attacking those of us who still have a chance to stop the persecutors from wrecking what remains.

Dr. Hart — I agree about the irony of the names. It’s probably good for both of us that I spend most of my time dealing with murder, mayhem, government incompetence and corruption, car crashes, fires, and — last but most certainly **NOT** least — the War on Terror and its human consequences back on the homefront. Otherwise, if I were still on staff at Christian Renewal, there’s a good chance we’d find ourselves trading ink back and forth more often, and somebody would call it the “War of the Daryls.”

You know, one of the real problems with the “Two Kingdoms” stuff is how often I agree with you and your friends on lots of other things. I don’t like arguing with fellow Calvinists. I live and work in the Bible Belt. The local Baptist and Pentecostal pastors are charitable enough not to call me a “D— Yankee” (lots of them respect Dr. D. James Kennedy and some have even attended his conferences or listened to his preaching on television, so they know Calvinists aren’t totally nuts) but virtually nobody has any idea what I’m talking about when I argue that most Christian music stems from emotion disguised as devotion, and a few of them who know a little bit about Iowa ask if I’m one of those “frozen chosen” types. You’re absolutely right about the PCA nonsense with worship — there are reasons I fought hard to keep my local church out of the PCA when the URC was no longer an option (it’s in process of joining the ARPs, by the way, which does understand Southern distinctives and will be a much better fit than the URC).

As recently as a decade ago I used to rail against the “culture transformation” garbage being taught at Calvin and say that we need to focus on preaching and teaching the gospel in our churches with the goal of personal conversion (not merely historical faith) of our covenant children and those brought into our churches through evangelism.

Then I moved to the South and saw what firsthand what kind of damage is caused by lack of Christian nurture in families and lack of doctrine-based discipleship in churches which truly are evangelical and believe the basics of the gospel, contra liberalism.

The Dutch got a lot of things wrong — no doubt about it. But raising kids to know their catechism and how to apply doctrine in their home, church and business life was not on the Dutch list of mistakes.

We have no disagreement that you **CAN** have a catechetical Reformed church minus transformationalism. Reformed churches have existed under persecution for centuries.

Furthermore, there are lots of places in the United States where a good Dutch Reformed officebearer or confessing churchmember is going to be known to the outside community mostly for working very hard, raising a large family of well-disciplined children, donating lots of money to Christian causes, and being very frugal otherwise with his personal and business checkbook. Hopefully (but not always) he’ll also be known not only for his work ethics and personal thriftiness but also for his high quality of workmanship. If there aren’t enough Reformed people in a community to affect the broader culture, Reformed people aren’t going to waste their political campaign dollars trying to do so.

The question is whether that is all that a Reformed person is called to do. In some places, it is; I don’t doubt that.

In other places, Reformed people are a large minority or even a majority of the population. Do they have a civic responsibility in such cases? If so, what is it? Does the Reformed faith tell a candidate for civil office what he should do if elected? Does the Reformed faith tell a candidate how to run a political campaign?

You and I are going to disagree on the answers to those questions. However. I don’t think we disagree that former Westminster-Philadelphia professor Dr. Rick Gamble had the right to run for and serve on the city council. I think he’s the only Westminster professor or Orthodox Presbyterian minister to ever serve in elected office while serving in church office, and I’d be interested to know if he’s ever written on the subject.

Dr. Hart, as you know, the rule that ministers did not have civil voting rights was established English common law dating back to the medieval concept of the three estates of nobles, clergy and commoners. The Puritans had no choice if they were to claim that their ministers were still part of the Church of England. It is my understanding that the same was true for Abraham Kuyper so long as he was a minister in the Dutch state church, which under establishment rules in the 1800s still had the same bar on ministers voting; he had to resign his ministerial ordination to run for office and did much of his work as an elder, not as a minister.

I’m not sure how that applies to a modern state in which ministers are ordinary citizens and not part of an established church, and therefore not barred from voting in civil elections.

Sorry for not elucidating more. I’m sitting at the scene of a two-alarm fire writing my article on the blaze; earlier today I spent hours at the courthouse dealing with our local prosecutor who is suing the county for allegely not paying her enough. When I get back to my office I have a ton of work to do on other stories. I want to keep this up, but it may be difficult at times.

For whatever it’s worth, I live in a community where it’s pretty common for Baptist and Pentecostal ministers to run for or actually be elected to office — and that’s from both political parties.

Among them:

* A former Richland city alderman was an Assemblies of God pastor.
* A current St. Robert city alderman is a Missionary Baptist pastor.
* The 2010 Democratic nominee for county treasurer was a Campbellite pastor.
* One of three 2010 Republican candidates for county treasurer was an independent charismatic pastor.
* The 2006 Republican nominee for circuit court clerk was a Southern Baptist pastor’s wife (ok, not exactly the same thing, but pretty close)
* The current Republican county prosecutor is a Southern Baptist pastor’s wife.
* The 2006 Democratic nominee for county collector was a Southern Baptist pastor.

This is not a new development. On a wall of our courthouse, there’s a newspaper article written by our current sheriff on the last legal hanging in our county a little less than a centry ago, before all death penalty cases were subject to Missouri Supreme Court appeal and were carried out by the state rather than by counties. In that case, the county prosecuting attorney was also a well-known Baptist minister.

I realize that none of these churches are Reformed (although one of the pastors mentioned is an an associate pastor position in a very large Baptist church that has attracted some people from a Reformed background,and apart from views on baptism, is pretty close to a middle-of-the-road PCA). I raise this simply to indicate that from what I’ve seen of the rural South, any objection against pastors running for political office seems to have pretty much disappeared.