Month: March 2013

Defining Idolatry Down

Published on by D. G. Hart43 Comments

Now that Roman Catholics have a pope, attention has turned to Washington D.C. and arguments before the Supreme Court over the Defense of Marriage Act. A couple of posts by the Allies caught (all about) my eye. The first came from Joe Carter who went all in by tying Christian tolerance of gay marriage to idolatry (I haven’t even seen the Baylys try this one):

The idolatry of Christian same-sex marriage advocates takes two general forms. The first group still recognizes the authority of God’s Word, or at least still believes in the general concept of “sin.” They will freely admit that, like other types of fornication, same-gender sex is forbidden in the Bible, and even excluded by Jesus’ clear and concise definition of marriage. Yet despite this understanding they still choose to embrace same-sex marriage because they have made an idol of American libertarian freedom. They have replaced Jesus’ commandment—”You shall love your neighbor as yourself”—with the guiding motto of the neopagan religion of Wicca, “Do what you will, so long as it harms none.”

In endorsing laws based solely on the secular liberal-libertarian conception of freedom (at least those that produce no obvious self-harm), they are doing the very opposite of what Jesus called them to do: They are hating their neighbors, including their gay and lesbian neighbors. You do not love your neighbor by encouraging them to engage in actions that invoke God’s wrath (Psalm 5:4-5; Romans 1:18). As Christians we may be required to tolerate ungodly behavior, but the moment we begin to endorse the same then we too have become suppressers of the truth. You cannot love your neighbor and want to see them excluded from the kingdom of Christ (Eph. 5:5).

The libertarian-freedom idol (LFI) has not been manufactured entirely by millennials, the generation of Protestants who seem most comfortable with laws that allow gay marriage. LFI was at least a factor in the baby-boomers implementation of worship forms that entirely capitulated to the aesthetics and impulses of music that these adolescents and young adults were listening to on the radio (music that was celebrating sex and drugs no less). In other words, Protestants outside the mainline churches (sometimes called evangelical) abandoned the restraints of Scripture when they turned to praise bands and 30 minutes of swaying and singing before the motivational speech (that used to be called a sermon). If they want the rest of the culture to resist the temptation of freedom, they might actually start to reflect such resistance in their own worship services, a branch of human activity that has much more to do with the first four commandments of the Decalogue than the seventh (sixth for Roman Catholics) that pertains directly to sex and marriage.

If readers think the parallels between P&W (for the charismatic challenged, Praise & Worship worship) tolerance of gay marriage are far fetched, they may want to consider Kevin DeYoung’s post which echoes Carter’s complaint. DeYoung expands the list of cultural factors that have made it impossible for Christians to oppose gay marriage meaningfully: “Gay marriage is the logical conclusion to a long argument, which means convincing people it’s a bad idea requires overturning some of our most cherished values and most powerful ideologies.”

DeYoung lists five such values:

1. It’s about progress. Linking the pro-gay agenda with civil rights and women’s rights was very intentional, and it was a masterstroke. To be against gay marriage, therefore, is to be against enlightenment and progress. . . .

2. It’s about love. When gay marriage is presented as nothing but the open embrace of human love, it’s hard to mount a defense. Who could possibly be against love? But hidden in this simple reasoning is the cultural assumption that sexual intercourse is necessarily the highest, and perhaps the only truly fulfilling, expression of love. It’s assumed that love is always self-affirming and never self-denying. . . .

3. It’s about rights. It’s not by accident the movement is called the gay rights movement. And I don’t deny that many gays and lesbians feel their fundamental human rights are at stake in the controversy over marriage. But the lofty talk of rights blurs an important distinction. Do consenting adults have the right to enter a contract of their choosing? It depends. Businesses don’t have a right to contract for collusion. Adults don’t have a right to enter into a contract that harms the public good. . . .

4. It’s about equality. Recently, I saw a prominent Christian blogger tweet that she was for gay marriage because part of loving our neighbor is desiring they get equal justice under the law. Few words in the American lexicon elicit such broad support as “equality.” No one wants to be for unequal treatment under the law. But the issue before the Supreme Court is not equality, but whether two laws–one voted in by the people of California and the other approved by our democratically elected officials–should be struck down. Equal treatment under the law means the law is applied the same to everyone. Gay marriage proponents desire to change the law so that marriage becomes something entirely different. Surveys often pose the question “Should it be legal or illegal for gay and lesbian couples to marry?” That makes it sound like we are criminalizing people for commitments they make. The real issue, however, is whether the state has a vested interest in sanctioning, promoting, and privileging certain relational arrangements. . . .

5. It’s about tolerance. Increasingly, those who oppose gay marriage are not just considered wrong or mistaken or even benighted. They are anti-gay haters. As one minister put it, gay marriage will eventually triumph because love is stronger than hate. Another headline rang out that “discrimination is on trial” as the Supreme Court hears arguments on Proposition 8 and DOMA. The stark contrast is clear: either you support gay marriage or you are a bigot and a hater. It’s no wonder young people are tacking hard to left on this issue. They don’t want to be insensitive, close-minded, or intolerant. The notion that thoughtful, sincere, well-meaning, compassionate people might oppose gay marriage is a fleeting thought.

What is striking about this set of cultural assumptions is how much they were also part of the arguments for getting rid of “traditional” worship and ushering in the praise bands and worship leaders. With the exception of the notion of rights, contemporary worship was about updating the church (progress), reaching out to our children (love), a leveling of musical and aesthetic forms (equality, as in Shine Jesus Shine is as good as Of The Father’s Love Begotten), and making the church less elitist (tolerance). Even the notion of rights was evident in the arguments for contemporary worship even if the word did not show up in the sense that few critics of P&W argued that believers had no right to worship God contrary to Scripture or in ways that would harm the fellowship of Christians. Put another way, no one has a right to worship God irreverently, which is form of blasphemy. But whether contemporary worship triumphed or simply became a legitimate option along with older reverent forms, P&W opened up Protestants outside the mainline to levels of tolerance and related confusions that are also evident in the way that some Protestants make room for gay marriage.

DeYoung suggests several ways forward, though he rightly avoids the word solution. In effect, he says Christians need to be more thoughtful and less prone to employ ideas that dominate the culture. This is true. I suggest the way forward is to chant psalms. If Christians became accustomed to a different sensibility in worship on Sundays, if they saw a difference between what they do on the Lord’s Day and what they do during the rest of the week, if they got used to spiritually eating the religious equivalent of broccoli, they might have the stomach to resist trends in the wider culture. It won’t be effective before the Supreme Court rules, but it actually may be successful by 2040.

Postscript: Lest readers object that “traditional” worship was novel in its own right, they have a point. “Traditional” worship of the 1970s was largely the worship that prevailed from the 1920s. In other words, it was not the way that Calvin or Knox worshiped. But that so-called “traditional” worship did have a built-in sense that you didn’t not goof around in worship, and that frivolities of contemporary music and humor and this-worldiness were forbidden. Could that worship have been more biblical? Of course. Get rid of the choirs, the trumpets (which I sometimes played), and the observances of Mothers’ Day. But did those worshipers have a sense that they might offend God and should be careful not to? They did. That sense has vanished in most sectors of Protestantism in the U.S. thanks to contemporary worship.

The Evangelical Leviathan

Published on by D. G. Hart18 Comments

In another post about gay marriage I noticed that Tim Keller does not like the term evangelical. He prefers to be called orthodox. Yet, the piece continues to call Keller evangelical.

Tim Keller is widely regarded as one of the leading intellectuals of evangelical Christianity, having pastored one of the most successful Protestant churches in New York City and written several best-selling books over the past few years.

Keller, who is in his early 60s, does not even like the “evangelical” label, preferring to call himself “orthodox,” and has largely steered clear of politics.

I also object to being called evangelical and have argued for some time as Moses did with Pharaoh, “let my Reformed Protestant people go.” Providentially, we have no Pharaoh to whom we can send our petitions. Evangelicalism is the creation of 1940s ex-fundamentalists who wanted a word different from fundamentalism to describe Protestants whom the mainline churches did not represent. Now it is a term kept alive by journalists and scholars.

The beast won’t let Keller or me go. I feel his pain even if I think it would be better for him to acknowledge his ordination and call himself a Presbyterian.

Americanism: Protestant and Roman Catholic

Published on by D. G. Hart7 Comments

Scott Clark reposted a piece recently on the ways Protestant conjure with dominant forms of American religiosity. His conclusion ran as follows:

There are conservatives, who embrace the past but must negotiate a modus vivendi with American Religion, and there are liberals who are quite ready to discard the past and go where ever the culture demands so as to try to remain “relevant” and influential. There is a third way to relate to American religion, however, and that is confessionalism, which is neither liberal nor conservative, but it is what the Reformed Churches have always confessed to be the theology, piety, and practice revealed in the Word of God.

The relationship between confessionalism and Americanism also has ramifications for 2k and its reception. Critics of 2k usually equate its proponents with selling out to American notions of the separation of church and state, or worse. These critics would have us return (even though the churches have also come round to church-state separation) to Geneva of 1560, Edinburgh of 1590, or Boston of 1640. But any political theology that embraces the U.S.’s novos ordo seclorum is a capitulation of Christianity to liberal politics.

Curious to observe is a similar dynamic among Roman Catholics. It is sometimes named a debate between Whig and Augustinian Thomists (though the Augustine invoked here ironically sounds more like the Anglican John Milbank than the Bishop of Hippo). The so-called Augustinians are critical of folks like George Weigel, Michael Novak, and the late Richard John Neuhaus for conforming Roman Catholicism to American political and economic conventions. Tracey Rowland outlines the differences in an interview here (almost a decade old):

What I argued in my book “Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II” is that there is a division between those who think that the Thomist tradition should accommodate itself to the culture of modernity, particularly the economic dimensions of this culture — the self-described “Whig Thomists” — and those who believe that modernity and its liberal tradition are really toxic to the flourishing of the faith.

Those who take the latter position do not want to supplement the Thomist tradition with doses of Enlightenment values. They are very broadly described as Augustinian Thomists for the want of a better label because, in a manner consistent with St. Augustine’s idea of the two cities, they reject the claim of the liberal tradition to be neutral toward competing perspectives of the good and competing theological claims.

While the Whigs argue that liberalism is the logical outgrowth of the classical-theistic synthesis, the Augustinian Thomists argue that the liberal tradition represents its mutation and heretical reconstruction, and they tend to agree with Samuel Johnson that the devil — not Thomas Aquinas — was the first Whig.

There are thus two different readings of modernity and with that, two different readings of how the Church should engage the contemporary world. While the Whigs want the Church to accommodate the culture of modernity, the Augustinians favor a much more critical stance.

She goes on to draw the contrast this way:

The Whigs want to baptize the current international economic order, while the Augustinians take a more critical approach, arguing that there are economic practices characteristic of this order that cannot be squared with the social teaching of the Church.

Moreover, the Augustinians are more likely to point out that most people do not sit down and develop a worldview for themselves from hours of philosophical and theological reflection. They tacitly pick up values and ideas from the institutions in which they work.

The Augustinians argue that there are aspects of the culture of modernity that act as barriers to the flourishing of Christian practice and belief, and unless the culture is changed, no amount of intellectual gymnastics on the part of the Church’s scholars will be of help to those 1 billion Catholics who have to make a living within the world.

In other words, if one has to be a saint not to be morally compromised by the culture in which one works, then there is something wrong with that culture.

So, the Augustinians are critical of liberalism in the fashion of American political and economic arrangements, and believe that Whigs don’t understand the incompatibility between Roman Catholicism and the kind of modernity that the United States has embodied. The Augustinian complaint is another lament about what America does to religion. (About this debate among Thomists the Callers are generally ignorant.)

But what the Augustinians want to see replace the liberal order is a dicey proposition. The Augustinians, whether they know it or not, are echoing Leo XIII’s condemnation of Americanism as a heresy. Leo’s verdict was far from clear, nor was it free from ultramontanist fear mongers. But the thrust of Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae (1899) was that efforts to accommodate Roman Catholicism to the American way of life were erroneous. This included the efforts of bishops who argued for the legitimacy of the separation of church and state as a viable way for the church to conduct its affairs. Leo still had the Syllabus of Errors (1864) echoing throughout the halls of the Vatican and he was not going to be the pope to give up resisting modern civilization.

An important difference between the Reformed Protestant and Roman Catholic developments is that 2kers do not praise or even baptize the American system the way that Whig Thomists do sometimes. 2k advocates appropriately give 2 cheers for the American political order (and are fairly silent about economics — though Jason Stellman used to sound Occupy-Wall-Streetish). Weigel and company usually give 3 cheers for the U.S. and regard the nation in Lincolnian terms — the “last best hope of earth.” 2kers know that the church through its ministry of the gospel of Jesus Christ is humanity’s last best hope. Which leads me to think that the Augustinians have a point about their Whiggish brethren if the latter confuse the blessings of liberty with the redemption purchased by Christ.

Belief Suspended

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

I believe Chesterton said, “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.” I suppose he wrote that before the advent of motion pictures. But after watching Sky Fall last night, I am thinking he had a point.

If chase scenes and narrow escapes make the resurrection look plausible, then why do more people (seemingly) love James Bond than Jesus Christ? I supposed a lot more is on the line with Christ, not merely the fortunes of a former world empire. And then there is that business of human nature and the need for the work of the Holy Spirit for someone to believe in the resurrection. But a guy who never dies, no matter how battered, shot, cut, submerged, or infected with STDs (okay, made that one up).

So I guess we chalk up the Bond series to escapism. It still seems odd that people find the Bible incredible when they’ll sit through two hours of one unbelievable scenario after another. How about some character development? How about witty or poignant dialogue? How about fighting evil empires?

Don't Blame Secularism; Blame the GOP

Published on by D. G. Hart50 Comments

Conservatives (religious and cultural) addicted to the notion that ideas have consequences are tempted to interpret the current trend toward the acceptance of gay marriage as the outworking of secularization and its moral relativism. This assessment seems to go with the philosophical cast of mind that afflicts both neo-Calvinists and Roman Catholic apologists, both of whom have found each other (as they did in 19th-century Netherlands) as allies in the contemporary “culture wars” against secularism.

But Daniel McCarthy’s piece in the current issue of the American Conservative lends support to my suspicion that the shift toward support for gay marriage has much less to do with marriage or tolerance than with a rejection of the Religious Right. Gay marriage is a perfect rejoinder to “family values.” Let’s see how firm your commitment to marriage is when gays want to become families. This was a move the Religious Right did not see coming. Whether the domestication of homosexuality, which used to thrive on being anti-bourgeois and counter-cultural, will last in its “family values” form is another matter. (Could it be that Jerry Falwell really did get the better of Andrew Sullivan by prompting gay advocates to follow Christian conventions of domesticity?)

Dan McCarthy extends this intuitive sense to compare the consequences of the Vietnam War for Democrats and the Iraq War for Republicans.

The root of the GOP’s problem now is the same as that of the Democrats in 1969: the party’s reputation has been ruined by a botched, unnecessary war—Vietnam in the case of the Democrats, Iraq for the GOP. This may sound implausible: every political scientist knows that Americans don’t care about foreign policy; certainly they don’t vote based on it. But foreign policy is not just about foreign policy: it’s also about culture.

That the “culture war”—as well as the “War on Drugs”—assumed its present shape in the wake of the Vietnam conflict is no accident. Vietnam polarized, realigned, and radicalized cultural factions. During the Lyndon Johnson administration, Republicans in Congress were still more likely than Democrats to support civil rights legislation. Attitudes toward abortion and homosexuality did not clearly divide left from right: Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, and even William F. Buckley favored liberalizing abortion laws in the early 1960s, while as late as 1972 Democratic vice presidential nominees Sargent Shriver and Thomas Eagleton were antiabortion. Few mainstream figures in either party supported gay rights, but it was clear enough from their social circles that right-wingers such as Reagan, Goldwater, and Buckley were not about to launch any witch-hunts.

Nor were attitudes toward drugs a mark of partisan distinction: Clare Booth Luce was an early evangelist for LSD. She urged her husband, Time proprietor Henry Luce, to try it, and he “did much more to popularize acid than Timothy Leary,” in Abbie Hoffman’s opinion. Buckley, of course, was a longtime supporter of marijuana decriminalization.

One could find many more right-wingers who took the opposite views—but one could find just as many Democrats who did as well. The civil rights movement and the sexual revolution had supporters and opponents on both sides of the aisle.

And in the early ’60s, Democrats still had a reputation for military prowess. Their party had led the country against Nazi Germany, and while Republicans blamed them for losing China to Communism, John F. Kennedy gained more traction against Richard Nixon in 1960 when he accused the Eisenhower administration of letting a (fictitious) “Missile Gap” open up with the Soviet Union. Republicans certainly weren’t the only party considered competent to handle foreign affairs.

That changed with Vietnam. President Johnson seemed to have started a war he couldn’t win or even end. It split his party and transformed the American left: until then, labor muscle and social-democratic brains were the left’s principal organs. They tended to support the war and oppose the cultural upheavals that coincided with it—positions diametrically opposite those of the student movement and nascent New Left.

McCarthy goes on to argue that the culture wars are simply hangovers from the Vietnam era and only make sense to baby boomers.

The “culture war” that Pat Buchanan spoke of at the 1992 Republican convention was, among other things, a symptom of Vietnam syndrome: a chance to right the wrongs of the 1960s and 1970s, if not in the rice paddies of Indochina then in the hearts and minds of Americans, turning back the clock to a more wholesome time before the war and its cultural coattails.

For younger voter cohorts, this couldn’t make sense. They were a postwar generation, culturally as well as militarily, and the idea of winning back what had been lost in the wars of the 1960s was emotionally incomprehensible. These voters lacked the psychological backdrop that pulled the Boomers toward the GOP after Vietnam. And over the next 20 years, as talk radio and Fox News continued to pitch the Republican message to Boomer ears, Americans born after 1975 simply tuned out.

This is why President Obama may be the real successor (for Democrats) to Ronald Reagan:

While Republicans wage a war on the past, Barack Obama has staked claim to the future—in the same way that Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan once did. The reputation for competence in wielding power that Nixon (before Watergate) and Reagan accumulated now accrues to Obama’s advantage. He brought the troops home from Iraq—however reluctantly—and is on course to end the war in Afghanistan next year. His foreign policy, like Nixon’s and Reagan’s, involves plenty of military force. But like those Republicans, the incumbent Democrat has avoided debacles of the sort that characterized the administrations of Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush.

Meanwhile, Obama is winning the culture war because that war continues to be fought by the right in the terms of the Vietnam era. That mistake, coupled with the natural credit a leader gets from keeping the country out of quagmires, gives the president’s party a tremendous advantage among the rising generation. (Sixty percent of voters under 30 supported Obama in 2012, as did 52 percent of those age 30–44.) And older conservatives, seeing that generation’s disdain for the culture war, are apt to write them off completely. If you’re not outraged by same-sex marriage, how can you be any kind of conservative?

But the reason even young conservatives aren’t interested in those kinds of battles is that they’re fighting others closer to home. Americans born after 1975 have grown up in an environment in which, Todd Gitlin admits, “only the most sentimental ex-hippie could fail to recognize the prices paid on the road to the new freedom: the booming teenage pregnancy rate; the dread diseases that accompanied the surge in promiscuity; the damage done by drugs; the undermining of family commitment…”

Young adults who have come from home backgrounds marked by divorce, or from intact families that nonetheless never sat down at a dinner table, want to form stronger bonds than their parents did. Boomers who view post-Boomer attitudes toward sex in light of a “revolution” are doing it wrong. It was the Boomers, or at least a key cohort among them, who believed in free love as a salvific concept. Young American have grown up with promiscuity and knowledge of drugs, aren’t panicked about these things, but don’t see them as possessing redemptive significance either. Even most young progressives do not believe in personal “liberation” of the sort that was at the core of the ’60s left—just as no one today believes in the kind of “liberation” once associated with Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh.

The Republican Party may not be able to escape its McGovern phase, even if Democrats screw up (as they will) and we briefly get a Republican Carter. . . .

Ross Douthat agrees largely with McCarthy’s interpretation:

In a similar way, even though Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney weren’t culture warriors or evangelical Christians, in the popular imagination their legacy of incompetence has become a reason to reject social conservatism as well. Just as the post-Vietnam Democrats came to be regarded as incompetent, wimpy and dangerously radical all at once, since 2004 the Bush administration’s blunders — the missing W.M.D., the botched occupation — have been woven into a larger story about Youth and Science and Reason and Diversity triumphing over Old White Male Faith-Based Cluelessness.

Of all the Iraq war’s consequences for our politics, it’s this narrative that may be the war’s most lasting legacy, and the most difficult for conservatives to overcome.

Sometimes it makes more sense to look at what actually happened than at what people think.

Religious Tolerance and Its Discontents

Published on by D. G. Hart1 Comment

From Brad Wilcox’s review of Naomi Schaefer Riley’s ‘Til Faith Do Us Part:

On average, Ms. Riley says, interfaith couples are less likely to be happy in their marriages and—in some combinations—more likely to divorce than couples who share the same faith. There may be a religious cost as well—for the married couple, a loss of steadiness in observance and belief. Meanwhile, the children raised in interfaith homes are more likely than the children of same-faith homes to reject their parents’ faiths. ” ‘Til Faith Do Us Part” finds that the children of interfaith couples, in their early years, are less likely to attend religious services and less likely, as adults, to affiliate themselves with a religious tradition. A record-setting 32% of young adults say that they have no religious affiliation, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. The rise of interfaith marriage may well be a cause.

It turns out, then, that interfaith marriage shores up the American Experiment in certain ways, fostering tolerance and reciprocal regard, and yet undermines it in others, weakening the family and the religious ties that have long bound Americans to one another. Religious groups in particular have reason to be concerned, as the chain of belief and affiliation, from one generation to the next, is broken. But what can they do in a society as pluralistic and tolerant as America has become?

Conversions Gone Bad

Published on by D. G. Hart31 Comments

News about Magdi Cristiano Allam, an Egyptian-born Muslim whom Pope Benedict publicly baptised at Easter five years ago in St Peter’s Basilica, leaving the Roman Catholic Church was the top story for a while yesterday at New Advent.

“My conversion to Catholicism, which came at the hands of Benedict XVI during the Easter Vigil on 22 March 2008, I now consider finished in combination with the end of his pontificate,” Mr Allam wrote on Monday in the right-wing Milan daily, Il Giornale.

The 61-year-old journalist and right-wing politician has long been an Italian citizen. He said he had pondered his decision to leave the Church for some time. However, he affirmed that the “last straw” was the election of Pope Francis, which he said was proof that the Church is “troppo buonista” – excessively tolerant.

“The ‘papolatry’ that has inflamed the euphoria for Francis I and has quickly archived Benedict XVI was the last straw in an overall framework of uncertainty and doubts about the Church,” he wrote.

Edward Peters responds to Allam’s announcement:

Maybe it’s just me, but this modern proclivity to parade one’s spiritual angst in the blogosphere is wearing pretty thin. Besides, as Chesterton remarked, there are a thousand reasons to leave the Church and only one reason to stay: It’s true. So, Magdi cited two or three reasons to leave the Church, and not reasons especially high up on the “Top 1000 Reasons To Leave the Catholic Church” list at that. Whatever.

If it wears thin when someone rejects the Roman Catholic Church, isn’t it a tad grating to have a blog dedicated to parading one’s new found epistemic certainty?

Aggiornamento Resumed?

Published on by D. G. Hart11 Comments

Here is an early assessment of Francis’ papacy, which suggests a perspective on changes within Roman Catholicism since 1960 that the Callers can only fathom as a straw man:

For the past 34 years, the church has been run essentially by two men: Karol Wojtyla, who became Pope John Paul II, and Joseph Ratzinger, who served as a kind of first lieutenant to John Paul for most of 25 years and then served nearly eight years as Pope Benedict XVI.

The church owes an enormous debt of gratitude to the two men for their distinctive and substantial intellectual offerings and for leading the church into more profound interfaith relations. Those achievements, of course, have been amply documented and heralded, sometimes to the exclusion of any mention of the serious ills within the church that also characterized their tenures.

It became evident that the church’s troubles had grown to such proportions that they could no longer be ignored, not even by the gathered cardinals. This interregnum and conclave were quite different in tone and content from the last precisely because subjects that were swept aside in the tide of sentiment accompanying John Paul’s death came roaring back to shore. Curial corruption and infighting had been documented and were no longer a matter of mere speculation. Figures like the late Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado and his order, the Legion of Christ, still seen eight years ago as unfairly under siege, were now, beyond dispute, a world-class fraud and a failed project respectively.

John Paul II’s notions of heroic priesthood lay in tatters, his episcopal appointments too often a collection of hot-blooded and imprudent ideologues who love to parade around in yards of silk and fine lace. Eight years ago the gathered cardinals would have smirked at talk of a church in crisis; this year they spoke of it themselves.

The 34 years of Wojtyla and Ratzinger comprised a three-and-a-half-decade attempt to rein in the impulses of the Second Vatican Council. The first 15 post-conciliar years were alive with a rich, if at times messy and excessive, enthusiasm for the possibilities of this Christian community called Catholic. Wojtyla and Ratzinger set out to re-square the corners and redraw the lines. What once was so outward-looking became inward and withdrawn, in Francis’ term, “self-referential.” Both popes spent an inordinate amount of time and energy going after those who raised inconvenient questions or explored areas of theology that didn’t fit their prescriptions of church. All the while, the real sins against the community were being committed by priests and hidden for years, under elaborate schemes and at unconscionable cost, by the community’s bishops.

Francis will, very soon, have the opportunity to show how serious he is about re-establishing integrity and sound judgment within the church with appointments to major sees, such as in this country the Chicago archdiocese, and with appointments to the Curia. Our hope is that his humility and sense of service and concern for the poor will guide his choices. Without such qualities, his wish that the church look beyond itself will remain unrealized.

No Assembly Required

Published on by D. G. Hart1 Comment

Another batch of back issues from the Nicotine Theological Journal has been posted. The July 1999 issue proves just how cutting edge the NTJ is. Well before Keller or Piper were debating multi-site congregations, other technologically driven pastors were conceiving of an entirely different understanding of gathering with the saints and angels. Here is an excerpt:

“I will tell of thy name to my brethren,” David vows to God in Psalm 22. “In the midst of the assembly I will praise thee. From thee comes my praise in the great assembly; I shall pay my vows before those who fear Him.” David understands that redemption has consequences. His praise must not be private or domestic, but it must be public, in the presence of fellow God-fearers. Not until we worship solemnly with the saints do we express adequately our gratitude to God for our deliverance.

Unlike the psalmist, evangelical Christians today seem terribly confused as to why they are to gather for worship. Consider this metaphor, popularized by Chuck Swindoll. Worship is still important, we are assured, and it is as vital for the church today as the huddle is for a football team, for in both cases that is where the players gather together to learn the plays. The flaw in this metaphor is obvious. The huddle is not the action in football. It is the lull in the action, a moment so uneventful that the well-conditioned TV viewer can use it to race to replenish his beer. So to compare worship to a football huddle is to encourage the mistaken notion that the real world is “out there,” and that the church gathered for worship is somehow something less.

As bad as that is, far worse yet is the increasingly popular conviction that Christians can engage the world with a no-huddle offense. As far as assembling together, more and more are encouraged merely to phone it in. This is not entirely new. As early as the 1950s, dial-a-prayer services were as popular as phoning for the time or the weather or for movie announcements. In a 1964 article in Christianity Today, many pastors were extolling the efficiency of this automated ministry. Said one, it was the only way he could talk to 200 people a day. What is more, his church could minister this way to people at two in the morning without waking up the pastor. Beyond efficiency, its popularity owed to parishioners enjoying anonymity without feeling lonely.

AND THEN CAME THE INTERNET. Any surfer knows that religious communities are thriving in cyberspace. We visited one recently, the First Church of Cyberspace (found at “Godweb.com”). Characteristic of an age that cannot distinguish between profession and self-promotion, the website opens not with a description of its beliefs but with positive comments from recent visitors. Guest book kudos come from Baptist, Presbyterian, and Universalist circles, from as far away as Germany and Japan. Much of the enthusiasm is brief and to the point: “Wow!” or “Cool!” Perhaps what impresses visitors most is the non-fundamentalist character of First Church. From the church’s home page, the surfer is but a couple of hyperlinks from what is euphemistically described as “Adult Christianity.”

OF COURSE, A CYBERCHURCH IS admittedly unconventional, and that is its great advantage, boast its afficionados. One church website designer has claimed that “all elements of congregational life can be experienced through the Internet,” including the sacraments (don’t ask). And all the while – and here is the real virtue – it is in the “real world.” By contrast, a church gathered traditionally is mired in the past, with members who are missing the action. We know of one Presbyterian megachurch that recently appointed to its large staff a “Minister of Technology.” This minister is urging his church to make room for technology, lest it become “too painfully obvious that we have become completely irrelevant.” (He omits the other painful reality of ecclesiastical technophobia: that ministers of technology will find themselves unemployed.)

This then is the church in the technological age – no assembly required. We can forgo the gathering, because technology has conquered the restraints of time and space. One megachurch in Central Florida is explicitly making this claim. Recently this church changed its name from a “Community Church” to “a Church Distributed,” because it had discovered a “new form” of the church (which will eventually become the norm, it predicts). . . .

Ministering Moses in the Michigan Mitten

Published on by D. G. Hart30 Comments

The Christian Reformed Church has had a historic presence in western Michigan. But according to a recent story in Christianity Today, the Grand Rapidians are turning their cosmological gaze eastward toward Detroit.

First, there’s the Detroit Kingdom Enterprise Zone (KEZ), a church planting and community development effort empowered by the CRC and RCA’s Church Multiplication Initiative. Led by pastors Dan Jongsma from Dearborn Christian Fellowship and Jon Beyers from Crosswinds Church in Canton, the KEZ brings together 10 Detroit CRC and RCA congregations to evaluate, empower, equip, and expand ministry partnerships in the city.

Through the KEZ, local leaders are receiving funding and assistance from Grand Rapids as they begin the process of developing collaborative efforts to invest in the city and raise up local leaders to establish new Reformed communities of faith within in the city. The hope is that these church plants—which KEZ leaders hope include a Reformed campus ministry at Wayne State University, a city center church in the style of Tim Keller’s Redeemer Presbyterian in New York City and City Church in San Francisco, a Reformed African American church, and a more contemporary community church—will be able to reach out to Detroit with a new message of hope, redemption, and renewal; a vision that is thoroughly Reformed and thoroughly local.

Part of the theological rationale for this initiative is a commitment to shalom:

Reformed theology also includes the call for Christians to seek shalom. Mark Van Andel, pastor of discipleship at Citadel of Faith, is working with the CRC and RCA leaders to help them understand what it means to work for justice in Detroit. He points out that the comprehensive vision for shalom and commitment to justice, righteousness, reconciliation, and working for the common good that flows out of Reformed theology are key strengths of the KEZ.

Van Andel, whose first job in Detroit was working with Lisa Johanon at Central Detroit Christian Community Development Corporation, sees all of this as being a major part in how Reformed theology can speak to the Motor City. “Reformed theology belongs in a city like Detroit,” says Van Andel, “precisely because it offers this powerful message of shalom to the poor, destitute, and depressed.”

Somehow the author of this piece missed the work of Rabbi Brett who ministers in a CRC congregation almost halfway between Grand Rapids and Detroit, in the small town of Charlotte. He also actively promotes Old Testament teaching:

Jesus was theonomic. Paul was theonomic. Augustine was theonomic. Centuries later the Magisterial Reformers were theonomic (look at all the quotes on Iron Ink from them on theonomy), the Puritans were theonomic (look at all the quotes on Iron Ink from them on theonomy). Some R2K defenders have pointed out theonomy in the Kuyperian tradition accusing our Kuyperian brethren as being “soft theonomists.” (Oh the horror of it all.) Hence my pedestrian contention that the Reformed faith is indeed theonomic. Now, naturally, different theonomic men interpreting God’s law-word had different wrinkles regarding their theonomy and it is doubtful that the Church will ever be universal in how it understands that God’s law should be applied, but the Church throughout history — and especially the Reformed Church — has always been theonomic, and that is simply because that is what Biblical (i.e. — Reformed) Christianity is.

How the folks in Grand Rapids, Detroit, and Charlotte work this out is almost as mysterious as the NCAA Division I’s scholar-athletes.