Archive for the ‘Wilderness Wanderings’ Category

Yesterday, in between the Billy Graham and Greg Laurie shows came a news feed from Focus on the Family. Among the three or four stories covered on the weekend edition was news about a Portland, Oregon seven year-old girl who had set up a lemonade stand at an arts fair only to be shut down by the big bad health inspectors from the county health department.

The girl’s plight prompted a local Portland radio station, through one of its morning disc jockeys, to intervene. The girl gained approval to set up the stand outside a tire store and sell what must have been some very good lemonade. She cleared $1,800.

The Focus on the Family report concluded with the all’s-well-that-ends-well news that the little girl was going to use her money. . .

to go to Disneyland.

Unbelievable.

Why? Back in the day, the evangelical happy spin to come out of such an episode would have been that the little girl decided to give the money to missionaries to China. Or, she gave half to the missionaries and saved half for her future college tuition. Now, the evangelical, family-friendly news editors at Focus think consumption and tourism is a laudable use of stick-to-itiveness and entrepreneurial spirit?

Granted, the subjects of the story may not have been Christian. The radio station involved, Portland’s KRSK, is apparently some version of a rock ‘n’ roll station — a SECULAR one. And the girl, who is taking her mother to Disneyland, has a different last name from her mother, suggesting divorce (especially since no father seems to be involved). So Focus may not have been reporting on exemplary evangelical behavior.

But wouldn’t you think they would want to report on exemplary family behavior? And while going to Disneyland is not wicked, did the entire project of engaging the culture and restoring family values really come to making the world safe for Donald Duck? Is this progress on the culture wars front from inside command central in Colorado Springs?

Maybe, if the Graham Crusade folks were not busy sponsoring “Rock the River” tours and greasing the skids for hipster Christianity, the editors at Family News in Focus could spot the difference between worldliness and self-sacrifice. Back in the day, the Graham Crusade officials knew the difference between George Beverly Shea and Larry Norman. But once again, when rock music becomes the cultural and musical norm, Christians seem to be incapable or making simple but important distinctions.

The federal court decision on California’s Prop 8 legislation has prompted many responses. One significant theme is that conservative Protestants, who oppose gay marriage, whether from the pulpit or in ordination standards and hiring practices, should prepare for continued marginalization and even legislative harassment if they continue to publicly oppose gay marriage. In this vein, Carl Trueman writes:

Those evangelical leaders, academics and evangelical institutions that prize their place at the table and their invitations to appear on `serious’ television programs, and who enjoy being asked to offer their opinion to the wider culture had better be prepared to make a choice. As I have said before in this column, we are not far from the place where to oppose homosexuality will be regarded as in the same moral bracket as white supremacy. Those types only appear on Jerry Springer; and Jerry generally doesn’t typically ask them their opinion on the ethics of medical research, the solution to the national debt, or the importance of poetry to a rounded education.

(BTW, Trueman adds that the older generation of conservative Protestants dropped the ball on this one and failed to produce an exegetical argument against homosexuality. He remembers that for his peers, “now in middle age, dislike of homosexuality . . . had more to do with our own cultural backgrounds than with any biblical argumentation.” He even admits that “we were basically bigots and we needed to change.” Trueman may be too young and too English to remember – if he is middle-aged, what does that make me? – that when John Boswell’s much read and discussed book came out, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality [1980], this geezer remembers any number of evangelicals responses to Boswell, all before the age of the Internet, peppered with important historical and exegetical arguments about biblical teaching on homosexuality.)

I may be as naive as I am old, but I do not agree with Trueman’s assessment that opposition to gay marriage will become synonymous with white supremacy and other crack pot ideas from the perspective of the cultural mainstream. At a deep level, Americans identify with the underdog. Homosexuals have used this to gain acceptance, even though people with the kind of access they appear to have to cultural elites are generally not eligible for the category of the oppressed.

Minority groups in the United States do oppose homosexuality and they do so without any noticeable threat. For instance, Muslims are not keen on gay marriage, nor are orthodox Jews, or African-American Protestants for that matter. And yet, the thought of the state threatening these groups with penalties for their stances on homosexuality seems far-fetched. If Andrew Sullivan were to come to a place in policy debates where he wound up on the other side of a dispute with Jesse Jackson, I bet Sullivan would have enough sense not to charge Jackson with bigotry – something that rarely sticks on minorities. And if Jackson were a spokesman for African-American ministers opposed to homosexual marriage, I doubt he would be banned from the Sunday morning talk shows for doing so. I could actually see lots of bookings (though I wouldn’t be at home to watch them).

The problem for evangelicals is that they are the minority who thinks like a majority. It would be one thing to look at the numbers, recognize you don’t have the votes, and look for ways to protect your own sideline institutions. This was the approach to public life in the United States by Roman Catholics and they found their political outlet in the multi-cultural Democratic Party. But evangelicals have readily identified as the mainstream tradition in the United States, with claims about the nation’s Christian founding, and an accompanying political theology that says God loves republics and freedom. Evangelicals have also tended to approve of the Republican Party’s efforts to impose cultural uniformity on the nation. In which case, evangelicals may like to think that they are a minority only seeking toleration for themselves what other minority groups want (or have). But they have a uniformity-by-majority disposition that seeks to establish their norms as those of the nation.

This is the main reason for quick and ready dismissals of evangelicals as bigoted and intolerant, not their actual views or practices on homosexuality. Gay marriage is an emblem of a deeper cultural divide that prevents white conservative Protestants from embracing some form of cultural diversity. If they could concede ground to homosexuals (I don’t know if it should be civil marriage), they might be able to gain concessions for their own churches, schools, and families. But for the better part of 200 years, evangelicals have approached public life as a zero-sum game.

Scott Clark is sensitive to the particular consequences that gay marriage would have for the entire culture, and not for a certain sector of it, and argues plausibly for considering the social consequences of gay marriage. Scott is particularly concerned about the fallout for the family:

By analogy it is not possible to re-define the fundamental units of society without a cost. Consider any society. Assuming a certain degree of natural liberty and mobility, if people are living together in a defined space, those people have consented voluntarily to live together. They have made a society. What is the basic unit of that society? It cannot be the isolated individual if only because no mere individual is capable of forming a society or of perpetuating a society. There must be a basic social unit. Historically that social unit has been understood to be a heterosexual family, a father, mother, a grandfather, a grandmother and their children and grandchildren because it is grounded in the nature of things.

I tend to agree with this but sense it is almost impossible to use this line of reasoning in a plausible way. For forty years our society has been experimenting with a host of new social forms. Some of those were surely welcome – racial integration, and redefining women’s roles. But the impetus to overturn unwanted hierarchies did not leave much room for recognizing the value of hierarchy more generally and the way that social order depends upon other kinds of order. And so along came sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll as the baby boomers’ favorite idioms for resisting cultural and moral conventions.

Evangelicals may have taken longer and been more selective in appropriating the cultural shifts of the 1960s and 1970s, but when it came to worship and sacred song they did so with abandon. Granted, it is a leap even to suggest – let alone argue – that Praise and Worship worship was a step on the path to gay marriage. But if Christian rock did to religious conventions what rock did to cultural conventions, it is possible to wonder where the bending of conventions ultimately leads.

Scott points in the direction of his observation when he writes of the generational differences on opposition to homosexuality. The younger generation has:

been raised in a culture which not only tolerates homosexuality but celebrates it. Consider the contrast between the way homosexuality was regarded in popular culture in the first half of the 20th century. Liberace was openly effeminate and made only the thinnest of attempts to protest his heterosexuality. Homosexual movie stars regularly went out of their way to create a heterosexual image and especially when it was contrary to fact. Some movie studios had a policy requiring single male actors (e.g., Jimmy Stewart) to visit a studio-run bordello in order to demonstrate their heterosexuality.

In the second half of the 20th century the old conventions, which has lost their grounding in nature and creational law, were deconstructed. . . . All of this took decades but it happened. It’s a real change of culture, of attitude, of stance, of definition of what constitutes acceptable social and sexual behavior and norms.

If Scott is right, and I think he is about the gradual ways in which the culture has changed since 1960, then evangelicals may want to rethink why it is that their disregard for what the created order reveals as appropriate for Christian worship is okay but homosexual disregard for the created order of sexual reproduction is not. It could be that Trueman’s point about bigotry has a point: can you really sing Christian rock in praise of God and oppose gay marriage with a straight face?

You inherit odd habits when you grow up in a fundamentalist Baptist home (the advantages should not be minimized either). In my case, my parents were devoted listeners to Christian radio, a practice that I keep alive as part of my Sabbath routine. Instead of listening about balls and babes on sports-talk radio while brewing coffee, on Sundays I turn on the local Christian station (and actually hear, depending on the hour, Hugh Hewitt summarize the weeks headlines, which is not what I want to hear when I’m preparing to enter the heavenlies).

Yesterday, I heard Cliff Barrows and his sidekick on the Hour of Decision make available Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps, the original source for the “What-Would-Jesus-Do” craze of fifteen years or so ago. For donations of – I can’t remember the level – contributors would receive a copy of Sheldon’s novel. What the folks at the BGEA failed to mention was that Sheldon was a Social Gospeler and a proto-liberal Congregationalist minister. I guess it would take too much time away from soul-winning to acquire the discernment necessary for refusing to promote Sheldon’s novel. But then again, if you are committed to spreading the good news of Jesus Christ you might want to warn people away from proclamations, no matter how much cloaked in the aura of Jesus, that were very influential in turning the mainline Protestant churches in the United States away from the very good news of Jesus Christ.

While I was listening to the radio promo, I couldn’t help but think of a book that the OPC is featuring as part of its effort to educate its members. Stuart Robinson is not nearly as popular as Sheldon, though without the WWJD bracelets Sheldon may not be much of a celebrity either. But the Louisville Presbyterian pastor wrote one of the best books on Presbyterian ecclesiology and he did so from a redemptive historical perspective even before Geerhardus Vos was a glint in his father’s eye. In 1858, four years before Vos’ birth, Robinson wrote The Church of God As An Essential Element of the Gospel, a book that combines two-kingdom, spirituality of the church, and jure divino Presbyterianism in a suprisingly compact and potent combination. To the OPC’s credit, its Committee on Christian Education has reprinted the book with a helpful introduction by pastor, A. Craig Troxel, and is selling it in hard cover for modest price.

I know many evangelicals think that conservative Reformed Protestant are mean, critical, and belong to denominations that do a lot of things wrong. But do these not so winsome and complaining evangelicals ever factor in the bad things that parachurch organizations do in the name of the gospel? This is not a rhetorical question.

A minor kerfuffle broke out last week at Reformed Forum thanks to remarks I made during an interview about the history of American Presbyterianism. This subject invariably leads to questions about the historical differences between the OPC and the PCA and how these factor into their current relationship. And discussion of current OPC-PCA relations inevitably brings up the potentially delicate subject of the comity agreement that determines how each denomination should consider the other when planting a congregation. The current policy that guides OPC and PCA church planting endeavors is as follows:

Comity has meant different things to different people. We representatives of the home missions agencies and committees or boards of our denominations resist territorial statements on comity in the light of the social and cultural complexity of North American society and the great spiritual need of our many countrymen who are apart from Jesus Christ. Out of a concern to build the church of Jesus Christ rather than our own denominations and to avoid the appearance of competition, we affirm the following courteous code of behavior to guide our church planting ministries in North America:

1. We will be sensitive to the presence of existing churches and mission ministries of other NAPARC churches and will refrain from enlisting members and take great care in receiving members of those existing ministries.

2. We will communicate with the equivalent or appropriate agency (denominational missions committee or board, presbytery missions or church extension committee, or session) before initiating church planting activities in a community where NAPARC churches or missions ministries exist.

3. We will provide information on at least an annual basis describing progress in our ministries and future plans.

4. We will encourage our regional home missions leadership to develop good working relationships.

I raised concerns about the failure of each side to abide by the terms of the comity agreement. I illustrated my worries by mentioning two cities where conservative Presbyterian churches already existed and the other denomination went ahead anyway with a plant of its own. I did not mention “sheep stealing,” but that was how some interpreted my remarks. Since the PCA is a lot bigger than the OPC, some may have also inferred that I was taking issue more with the PCA than the OPC. Taking members in good standing from another congregation is a legitimate reason to object to a church plant, but not really the one I had in mind when I more or less made an off hand remark about comity agreements and also illustrated the point with examples my fading memory scanned and found.

The difficulties surrounding comity agreements have less to do with the transfer of members between communions than with the state of church planting among conservative Presbyterians. One concern first has to do with the market mentality that seems to go with home missions in the United States, the second with the branding of churches that follows said mentality.

In the good old days, denominations planted churches when a group of families (usually from the home denomination) found themselves in a new setting without a congregation from their communion. If the families numbered as many as five, the home missions committee would designate funds and find a church planter to minister to the group in hopes of establishing a settled work. To be sure, and the OPC has some examples of this, home missions executives would think about “strategic” locations for new churches in order for the denomination to gain a reputation and presence among a larger section of the American public. But generally speaking, home missions leaders went where groups of people wanted their services. No core group, no church plant.

Today, the model appears to be different and more like a business. Certain locations are highly desirable, these places have no Presbyterian churches, and denominational leaders decide to start a work or two there. This mentality would appear (I know nothing about business and marketing) to follow the logic of companies who have a product and are looking for ways to increase patrons and profits. Granted, we live in a voluntary church setting, so every congregation needs to “market” itself to gain members who will then pay for the church “services.” At the same time, a strategic outlook has led conservative Reformed denominations to look more at the potential for growth and visibility as a reason for home missions than a duty to send pastors to those places where existing church members can find no church.

Another aspect of contemporary home missions logic is the idea that Presbyterians should be able to plant as many churches as there are Americans. I am not sure anyone actually has a manual of population density, roads, health of the local economy, zoning regulations, etc. before thinking about planting churches across the USA. But because home missions is in the business of evangelism, and because the logic of the Great Commission is to take the gospel everywhere, home missions types tend to equate church planting with evangelism and the mandate to leave no soul unturned.

The problem is that as much as every American (and resident of the earth, for that matter) needs to hear the gospel, not every place can sustain a Presbyterian church. Once the novelty of being missional, for instance, wears off, and once denominational funding runs out, a church plant finds itself in the surprising position of being a settled congregation in maintenance mode, no longer being cutting edge but adjusting to the routine if not the boredom of the same people, each Sunday, year after year. Maintenance is a good thing. After all, sheep in a flock need to be fed and prepared for slaughter (read: die a good death). Shepherds who run off to new flocks and abandon old ones are not what our Lord had in mind when he taught about the Good Shepherd.

So missional inevitably morphs into maintenance and then denominational leaders need to consider how many congregations a locale can sustain. Actually, they should have thought about this before thinking strategically about a city or region and planting missional churches. But it is a serious question. Can a city of 300,000 support seven Presbyterian congregations, all of them conservative? Does a city of 500,000 have enough unchurched who might come to four Presbyterian churches? I know this may sound like Finney, trying to calibrate the work of the Holy Spirit. At the same time, Calvinists have a pretty good sense that not everyone is elect, and know there are ordinarily limits to the sovereign working of the Spirit. They also have a sense of stewardship and recognize that pastors and their families need to eat, and that ordinarily the Holy Spirit does not do home delivery. In which case, church planters might do well to turn to sociologists at least to understand the dynamics of communities, churches, and their sustainability. Meanwhile, the agrarian in me says that if farmers should know what the carrying capacity of a certain kind of soil is, church planters need to consider a similar dynamic. If an area like New England, that has not had a history of supporting Presbyterian churches, becomes the strategic place for church planting, shouldn’t the denominational executives consider why the soil in the North East is harder than the mid-Atlantic region when it comes to Reformed seeds?

So if part of my concern about comity agreements is about what seems to be the naivete of “strategic” church planting (I put it in quotes because it doesn’t seem very strategic to be ignorant of a place’s capacity to sustain Presbyterian churches), the other goes to the techniques necessary to plant a “Presbyterian” church in an over saturated church market (I put it in quotes because often the methods are not Presbyterian).

If part of the basis for a comity agreement is the notion that the communions entering the agreement are “of like faith and practice,” it does not make a lot of sense to establish a church in a community with an abundance of churches if it is going to offer the same goods and services as the existing congregation. Of course, this is not a problem for Starbucks or McDonald’s where consistency of product is precisely what makes a franchise work. Someone back at headquarters needs to calculate how many frappucinos can be sold in a day within a city of 350,000 potential drinkers, but once the math is complete, the companies’ engines are finely tuned up to deliver the same fructose, burnt coffee, and whipped cream to every single Starbucks store.

The demands of franchising and the consistency of brand, however, do not appear to apply to Presbyterian churches. One congregation may be traditional (read: 1950s United States), another neo-Puritan, another contemporary, and still another blended (read: incoherent). In which case, a town may support a new Presbyterian home missions work if it offers a liturgical recipe different from the existing church. This is even true for congregations within the same denomination. Within the metropolitan Philadelhpia area, the OPC has almost as many flavors (the high-church topping is somewhat beyond the finances of the average Orthodox Presbyteiran) as the PCA.

The variety of approaches to being and worshiping as a Presbyterian is likely the greatest challenge to comity agreements. Many a church plant can justify its existence by saying that its product and delivery will reach a demographic different from an established work. As true as this may be (although the cultural diversity of OPC and PCA churches would strike a modern-day Tocqueville as extraordinarily thin), this diversity seriously undermines claims to be “of like faith and practice.” John Frame and I swatted this one around almost fifteen years ago and I am still convinced that Reformed theology and ministry normally assumes an appropriate form that should prevail in all churches claiming to be Presbyterian. I am also convinced that congregations that vary greatly from the sobriety, decency, orderliness – not to mention the reverence – implied and explicitly stated in the Reformed creeds and catechisms are letting their practices alter their faith.

These reflections may explain the comments made during the interview at Reformed Forum. The latter were the tip of an iceberg that may be responsible for sinking the good ship Conservative Presbyterian, U.S.A. The worship wars and church growth theories – from McGavren to McLaren are sucking the vitals from Reformed confessionalism in North America. But I need to live with it because the current flavors of Presbyterianism – like the menus of Applebees and Cheese Cake Factory (why would anyone eat at a factory?) – are what the Reformed market place will bear.

The following was originally intended to appear in the next issue of the Nicotine Theological Journal. But when my father died on April 28th, the timing for tributes changed. Since today is the birthday of Ellen Marie Hart (nee Jones), it seems a fitting day on which to run it.

Within thirty-six hours of my mother’s death on March 26th, 2010, I was responsible for teaching a lesson in Sunday school on J. Gresham Machen. Since this was the second of a thirteen-week series, I needed to cover his upbringing, education, and church background. This meant that I was going to be talking about Machen’s relationship to his mother, Mary Gresham Machen, aka Minnie. In turn this involved talking about her background as a native of Macon, Georgia, her father’s business and political activities, the townhouse of the Greshams, now a four-star Bed and Breakfast – the 1842 Inn – that still features photographs of young J. Gresham Machen attired in a dress (the custom of the day), and Minnie’s own literary pursuits; she wrote The Bible in Browning and was published by MacMillan – the same company that published her son’s Christianity and Liberalism two decades later.

As I prepared and taught I became aware of a major problem in my own existence, namely, that I know more about Machen’s mother and family than I actually do about mine. This reality became all the more glaring on the day of my mother’s burial when one of her sisters and one sister-in-law traveled to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, from Green County, North Carolina for the service. I had not seen these aunts for almost four decades. They seemed to revel in catching my brother, wife and me up on family news. And through it all they let us know, not in a didactic way, but simply as part of the ordinary quality of their lives, that all of my mother’s siblings had remained in North Carolina, reared their families there, and that most of their grandchildren were still in the Tar Heel state. Not only was I jealous of this side of my humanity – after all I am as much a Jones as a Hart. But the Jones and the Crawfords and the Murphys and the Sullivans and the Pridgeons – the other families with whom they had bonded in marriage – were practically the embodiment of the localism, agrarianism, and family ways that I have come to admire and be haunted by in the writings of Wendell Berry.

One of the most pressing questions I have had about my mother which bears directly on my growing up in the suburbs of Philadelphia rather than in the land of Jesse Helmes, is why she decided after graduating from high school in 1941 to move to Washington, D.C. and work first as a telephone operator and then for the federal government in the accounting office. It made no sense that a woman, the oldest of ten children, would leave a farm and nine young siblings to work in the “big” city. Since she was a born-again Christian, it made even less sense, given the fears that evangelicals generally have of cities, combined with the unwritten code governing a young single woman’s opportunities. My aunts, however, made some sense of the move by explaining that mother had moved to Washington with her oldest sister, and that they lived with one of their future aunts. So it was not a career move but a family connection that brought my mother to the nation’s capital during wartime.

But that move was decisive for her and me because she met a man in a Marine’s dress-blue uniform at a Baptist church (Mark Dever’s, by the way) and fell in love. That man, my father, hailed from southeastern Pennsylvania and after he served in the Pacific and then attended college at Bob Jones University, thanks to the G.I. Bill, they bypassed North Carolina on the way to “go” in Levittown, Pennsylvania, the armpit of Bucks County and the horror of post-war suburban development. But much like my Jones relatives in the South, my parents didn’t know any better. They hadn’t read Jane Jacobs or Howard Kunstler or Wendell Berry or Russell Kirk. They simply did the best they could to rear a family. For the Harts that meant finding affordable housing near a good church and close to kin; for the Jones that meant rearing families and supporting them in the opportunities provided by ditch digging, tobacco farming, auto sales, and real estate brokering.

Unlike my kinfolk, I am a deracinated academic who knows how to find literature on family ties or who devoted a good portion of his life to the life and writings of one man and became so enamored of those ideas that he found out more about Machen than about either of his grandfathers, Robert Jones or Clyde Hart. I suspect that this is a problem that afflicts many aspiring intellectuals – the lure of some author or thinker from the past whose writing has changed their outlook on the big questions. In turn object of intellectual desire directs and guides the student more than the pupil’s own parents and family. Ideas do have consequences. They help to define our understanding of ourselves, and our situations, and become the motive for action. They even tempt us to discount the influence of parents and the legacy of families.

In my own case, I continue to regard Baltimore as more of a home than either Levittown or Greenville, North Carolina. Part of that owes to spending six years there while in graduate school. But a good chunk of it also stems from the subject of my studies during that time – Machen, whose family residence was four blocks from our first apartment, not to mention the reading and writing I did on H. L. Mencken, the bard of Baltimore whose home was only two blocks away from our grad school dwelling. Some of us eggheads get so caught up in a historical figure’s life that we actually place ourselves in their narrative. Meanwhile, the real story to which we belong lies strewn across the informal conversations and fading memories of aging aunts, uncles, cousins, and grand parents.

One way to try to justify this identity confusion is to portray myself as the victim of declining family ties. Whatever the legitimate reasons my parents may have had for moving to Levittown, they did not choose a place that would sustain links to kin (for starters). Again, they were not in the habit of considering pedestrian-friendly streets, interconnected street grid networks, mixed-use zoning, increased density, or “green” transportation when looking for a place to live. They had experienced a depression and a war. Having survived Iwo Jima my father had freedom to buy a home where he darned well (humanly speaking) wanted. He and mother didn’t need some guilt-ridden baby boomer historian of a son to come along and claim his rights as a victim of poor parental housing choices and the accompanying industrial military complex.

That said, as soon as I saw the city I knew I wanted to get out of Levittown as fast as I could because it had none of the interest or energy that people living together in one relatively self-sustaining polity had. And once that switch flicked on, gone were circumstances that would sustain identification at least with the Harts, not to mention the Jones.

Then again, maybe my loss of roots stems from my mother’s own decision to leave the farm in Green County where her grandmother Jones (nee Crawford) was born and move to Washington. Is it too tidy to think that she passed on to me through her egg the appeal of urban life and the dislocation that cities yield? After all, when she moved to D.C. her life would not be the same as her siblings. (The one sister who moved with her married a soldier from North Carolina, thus making easier a return to her native state.)

And what of my mother’s temperament and interests that might have predicted my interest in Machen? Mother’s disposition was toward stubbornness and contrariness, attributes that many have attributed to the Presbyterian “bad boy of Baltimore.” Mother was also militant about the Christian faith in modest ways that resemble Machen. At the same time, she was generous to a fault, something that she also shared with Machen. As difficult as my relationship could be with her – she was the bad cop always telling me to cut my hair, wear a tie to church, and hang around more with Christian friends while my dad was the good cop (except for the execution of corporal punishment, a decidedly male activity), always telling my mother to relax and not be overbearing – she was always sending me back to college stocked with food, clean clothes, and a couple of extra ten dollar bills shoved in my coat pocket.

Of course, it is a stretch of cosmopolitan proportions to attribute my intellectual interests to my genetic inheritance. Too easy is it to let myself off the hook for following ideas more than family. But from the perspective of providence, the gap between ideas and genes is not terribly great. If God could take a privileged, smart, and indecisive son of an urbane and hospitable southern lady from Baltimore and turn him into one of the giants of American Presbyterianism, he can also take the shy, sports-absorbed and sometimes bookish son of a southern exile in the Philadelphia suburbs and turn his life around through studying the kid from Baltimore.

God works in mysterious ways, his wonders and horrors to perform.

P.S. Mother’s birthday is actually June 15th. Having been in Maine for an OPC affair, the sense of the heavenlies caused me to lose track of time on planet earth.

Today is not only the birthday of the OPC. Closer to home it is also the day my recently deceased dad was born. This is not the place or the time to begin sorting through my relationship to him, but a number of thoughts come to mind on this June 11th.

When I first heard my father had died, I was on my way to the emergency room of a downtown Philadelphia hospital. I had fed the livestock, Cordelia and Isabelle, and during the procedure the lid to the can of cat food made a huge impression on the index finger of my left hand. The gash which would not close after an hour of tinkering was my penalty for kitchen awkwardness. After four hours at the hospital, I took five stitches. The wait in ER gave me time to sort out the logistics of burial and memorial service with my brother.

I was – and still am – glad for that cut because the scar not only reminds me of dad but also the wound that I still feel over his loss. And even if it has healed, and will continue to just as my own spirits have rebounded to some degree, it will always be a reminder of my great loss (because my father was a great man). In which case the cut was a providential form of self-mutilation. I may have been tempted to do so on my own, but cutting the body is not a proper way to honor God’s good creation. So rather than having a stud in my tongue or a tattoo on my left buttock cheek, I have a scar on my left hand. I can live with that. This day I even relish it.

On or before June 11th I usually buy my dad a birthday gift. In later years when he and my mother were both in a nursing home the challenge of buying something that he could use became greater. Now that I no longer need to buy a gift, I wonder what my failure as a consumer will do to our ailing economy. In fact, I wonder what the effects of death are generally for the economic health of a nation. Clearly, the funeral and flower industries benefit. And the federal government breaths a pint-size sigh of relief to have one more of its citizens off its role of Social Security beneficiaries, not to mention the inordinate expense of Medicare. But if a death brings savings for some and expenses for others, it also means none of the purchases that go with birthdays, Fathers’ Day, anniversaries, and the annual spending spree we call Christmas.

So to do my part for the economy, I’ll have to go out and spend on some “spirituous” refreshments. If I drink enough tonight to spend the amount I’d normally use to buy a birthday gift, the elixir may not only further heal my wounds but pickle them.

Justin Taylor made me do it.

He linked to Ray Ortlund’s blog from a couple days ago at the Gospel Coalition – calling it a “classic” in which the he warns TR’s (i.e., Truly Reformed) about the danger of falling into the Judaizer trap. Ortlund writes:

The Judaizers in Galatia did not see their distinctive – the rite of circumcision – as problematic. They could claim biblical authority for it in Genesis 17 and the Abrahamic covenant. But their distinctive functioned as an addition to the all-sufficiency of Jesus himself. Today the flash point is not circumcision. It can be Reformed theology. But no matter how well argued our position is biblically, if it functions in our hearts as an addition to Jesus, it ends up as a form of legalistic divisiveness.

This is truly an amazing assertion by the Nashville pastor. Even though Reformed folks think they are following Paul in their teaching and ministry (let’s not forget the Jerusalem Council or the pastoral epistles which say something about presbyterian polity), they become Judaizers by following Paul and insisting that the church heed everything Christ commanded – from theology to worship and polity. I feel like I am in a Coen Brothers movie where up is down, white is black, and rodents are felines.

Ortlund’s post is standard fare among evangelicals who look for a lowest-common-denominator approach to Christian unity and so regard sticklers for doctrine and practice – like the Reformed – as sticks in the mud and unloving sectarians to boot. (Ortlund fails to remark that Baptists, Pentecostals, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Lutherans, who insist on the correctness of their distinct teachings and practices, are also would-be Judaizers. Rather than acknowledge that differences exist within the church because different parts of the visible church interpret the Bible differently, Ortlund, like many a pietist before him, disregards actual differences and chalks up resistance to unity as a lack of love – for both Christ and for other Christians. As the Church Lady might say, “isn’t that charitable?”

But the neat trick that Ortlund adds to this standard kvetch about Reformed particularists is a claim about the psychology and sociology of being Reformed. He comments on Gal 4:17 – “They make much of you, but for no good purpose. They want to shut you out, that you may make much of them” – in the following paraphrase:

“When Christians, whatever the label or badge or shibboleth, start pressuring you to come into line with their distinctive, you know something’s wrong. They want to enhance their own significance by your conformity to them: ‘See? We’re better. We’re superior. People are moving our way. They are becoming like us. We’re the buzz.’”

Ortlund adds, “What is this, but deep emotional emptiness medicating itself by relational manipulation? This is not about Christ. This is about Self.”

Isn’t that charitable, indeed.

Is it so hard to imagine that other people with whom we disagree may actually have good reasons for what they hold, and that they may actually be trying to honor, serve, and love the Lord and his church? Apparently, Ortlund would rather speculate on motives and psychology.

Ortlund concludes with this plea to Reformed Protestants:

My Reformed friend, can you move among other Christian groups and really enjoy them? Do you admire them? Even if you disagree with them in some ways, do you learn from them? What is the emotional tilt of your heart – toward them or away from them? If your Reformed theology has morphed functionally into Galatian sociology, the remedy is not to abandon your Reformed theology. The remedy is to take your Reformed theology to a deeper level. Let it reduce you to Jesus only. Let it humble you. Let this gracious doctrine make you a fun person to be around. The proof that we are Reformed will be all the wonderful Christians we discover around us who are not Reformed. Amazing people. Heroic people. Blood-bought people. People with whom we are eternally one – in Christ alone.

Brother Ray, I have been around the non-Reformed and they are not nearly as much fun as Reformed folks are. As much as I do enjoy Mark Dever’s company (sorry for name-dropping), I refuse to smoke a cigar or drink a Gin & Tonic in his company, not because I find him unworthy of such camaraderie but because I know my smoking or imbibing could get Mark in trouble. Baptists still bulk large in the prohibitionist camp and for that reason the merriment supplied by leisurely conversation over a pipe or a pint (better with both) is off limits to many of the Christian groups that Ortlund wants me to hang out with and have fun.

This may seem like a trivial point but it actually bears much more on the passage to which Ortlund appeals than it might seem at first. Paul’s battle with the Judaizers was over the misapplication of Scripture. In the Judaizers’ hands formerly God-made rules had become man-made norms because the work of Christ introduced freedom from the old covenant norms. In other words, the Judaizers were effectively substituting man-made rules for being Christian than the gospel that Paul was preaching. The Judaizers were denying Christian liberty in the way that contemporary believers do when they conclude that smoking or drinking is sin with (erroneous) appeals to Scripture. Without a proper biblical justification for their prohibitions they wind up enslaving Christians and thus burden the very gospel that Paul was out to protect among the Galatians.

In my own knowledge of church history, it is the Reformed (and other confessional Protestants) who understand much better than the “Jesus only” evangelicals the difference between the word of God and the words of men. And it is this difference that makes Reformed Protestants (with apologies to my friend, Mark Dever) more fun.

It is common to hear believers talk about the death of Christians in positive ways. And this is natural since Christians do believe in life after death, and a good life after death does await those who trust in Christ. So we are likely to say about someone who has been suffering physically upon their death that they are now in a better place, free from their misery. Or we say they are better off because they are with the Lord. We will even console ourselves, at least, that the passing of a widow or widower, who had a believing spouse, is in a better place because he or she has been reunited with a wife or husband. I should know, I’ve been using these lines with myself of late having lost both parents (both believers) within the space of a month.

But I have wondered how exactly a soul, that no longer has a body, will recognize another soul. I also sometimes wonder how resurrected bodies will recognize other resurrected bodies. At what vintage do our bodies come back? If an infant dies, is he glorified as an infant? Will that infant grow? If the body of an 80-year old dies, does he come back as a 35-year old? And if you only knew someone when they were 70 plus, and they come back to bodily existence as a young adult, will you actually recognize them in their gloried state? So how much trickier the recognition of other souls, invisible as they are, by other souls, who are also invisible. The mind reels.

In hopes of keeping it real, here is what the Confession of Faith says about “The State of Men After Death” (it means you too, ladies):

The bodies of men, after death, return to dust, and see corruption: but their souls, which neither die nor sleep, having an immortal subsistence, immediately return to God who gave them: the souls of the righteous, being then made perfect in holiness, are received into the highest heavens, where they behold the face of God, in light and glory, waiting for the full redemption of their bodies. (32.1)

That would seem to indicate that departed souls will “see” and “recognize” God. But it does raise questions about whether they will “see” the face of Jesus. Beholding is not necessarily seeing. And seeing, as we know it, is impossible without eyes.

Maybe union with Christ is the solution. I know that justification by faith alone won’t resolve this one. My pet doctrine has its limits.

In the interest of saying things clearly and with as few words as possible, here’s a little help on the centrality of union versus the centrality of justification discussion.

The question is, “how am I right with God?”

The Justification Priority folks answer in the following: “you are right with God by your justification, that is, an act of God wherein he freely pardons all your sins and accepts you as righteous in his sight, only for the righteousness of Christ, which is imputed to you by faith alone.”

The inquirer says, “thanks, that’s helpful.”

The Union-Centric folks say: “you are right with God by your union with Christ, that is, by the Spirit applying to you all the benefits that Christ purchased for you, including both a forensic aspect (justification) and a renovative aspect (sanctification) and these dual benefits, though distinct, come to you simultaneously without confusion or commingling.”

The inquirer then asks, “but how am I right with God?”

The Union-Centric folks then clarifies, “well, you are right with God by your justification, that is, an act of God wherein he freely pardons all your sins and accepts you as righteous in his sight, only for the righteousness of Christ, which is imputed to you by faith alone.”

The inquirer then says, “thanks, but why didn’t you say that the first time?”

Of course, the same Strunk & White rules would apply to the following scenario.

The inquirer asks, “how am I right with God?”

The Shorter Catechism Devotee responds, “God created man. Man sinned and fell. God established a covenant of grace. God sent Christ, the only redeemer of God’s elect, to execute the offices of a prophet, priest, and king and fulfill the terms of the covenant of grace. All the offices of Christ have two aspects, one of humiliation one of exaltation. The Holy Spirit applies the benefits of redemption purchased by Christ. He calls you effectually. He unites you to Christ by faith. By faith you receive the benefits of justification, adoption, sanctification, assurance of God’s love, peace of conscience, joy in the Holy Spirit, increase of grace, and perseverance. You also get more benefits when you die, and when you are raised from the dead.”

The inquirer has left the conversation.

Really?

According to ABC News, and its report on the resignation of Bruce Waltke from Reformed Theological Seminary, both sides agree that the stakes are indeed that high. Higher than the Scopes Trial? I was glad that they did not bring up William Jennings Bryan and his difficult testimony before Clarence Darrow’s badgering. But from what I could tell, the stakes this news reporter discovered are completely beside the point.

The way the press usually treats these things, it is a case of intolerance versus open mindedness, or science versus dogma, or a religious group’s retrenchment and inability to cope with modern ideas versus a community of faith that swims along quite elegantly in the waters of modern knowledge. And they can generally find religious scholars like Pete Enns and Randall Balmer who, siding more with the reporters than their fellow believers, will back up this set of contrasts (but who actually should know that there are more than two sides since they are experts on religion and the reporters aren’t).

This set of tensions could apply to the Waltke-RTS situation, but they don’t. The major contention has been the historicity of Adam, not whether he emerged from an evolutionary process. And beyond that, the questions have been largely theological, not scientific: what happens to the doctrine of original sin or federal headship if Adam was simply a mythical figure? And what happens to Paul’s two-Adam construction of covenant theology if one of those Adams is an ethereal character of unknown identity who may have hooked up with the mother of all humanity (that mother being confirmed by geneticists and anthropologists and thus supplying the evidence necessary for the unity of the human race).

So have the stakes ever been higher for federal theology? I’m not so sure. I’d need the help of historical theologians to make that call.

But to the idea that if Christians do not accept the idea of evolution they run the risk of becoming a cult, I wonder if Waltke or his supporter Enns, or ABC’s expert interviewee, Balmer, ever considered what belief in the resurrection of Christ makes the church look like before the scientifically knowledgeable world. Granted, the Genesis account of God’s creation of the parents of the human race may from a scientific perspective be hard to believe. I, frankly, am not sure that the naturalistic accounts of human origins are any easier to understand or believe. Be that as it may, do the Christians advocating evolution – and I am not going to give them too hard a time since one of my favorite theologians (sorry, Gary), Benjamin Warfield was one of them – really think the idea of Christ’s resurrection makes Christians soft, cuddly, and scientifically mainstream?

The stakes have been what they’ve always been. The Bible contains a lot of events and ideas that are hard to believe, whether you are scientific or not (think of all the premoderns who saw and heard Christ and did not believe). If not for the longevity of Christianity in Europe and North America, reporters might actually think that Christianity resembles Mormonism more than it does the Unitarian Church.

But for the record, when a three-time presidential nominee and one of the nation’s leading attorneys square off in courtroom proceedings that are broadcast nationally – which is what happened in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925 – the stakes are pretty high, higher I’d say than the recent unpleasantness between Waltke and RTS. (And those stakes had more to do with majority rule and local government than with reason versus faith — but that’s another story.)