Posts Tagged ‘Confessionalism’

My confession of faith is not the Westminster Confession. It is the confession of my communion, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Of course, our confession bears many resemblances to the Westminster Confession. But if folks look at the publication of our confession, neatly produced by the Committee on Christian Education, it reads, the “Confession of Faith and Catechisms of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church with Proof Texts” (the proof texts are especially all the OPC’s). Again, the OPC did rely upon standards handed down from the Westminster Divines, adopted by the Scottish Kirk, and then in 1729 by the Synod of Philadelphia for the communion that was taking shape in the British colonies in North America. Still, when OPC officers subscribe our confession and catechisms, they are embracing documents that are different from those produced during the 1640s, and also with different understandings (because of the development of history) of several of the doctrines taught.

Many of the controversies in our current setting stem from originalists who insist that the contemporary church has abandoned the original sense of the Standards, and those who seek a different elaboration of Reformed theology. I myself find that I am on different sides of this debate, on the one hand wanting to find room for genuine theological developments within our communions, and on the other, realizing the folly and danger that usually attends adapting to the times.

Jason Stellman wants to break through the impasse and proposes the writing of a new confession. At his blog he writes:

Here’s where a new confession comes in. What is needed is the ability to avoid the task of divining the ever-elusive “system of doctrine,” the confession-within-the-confession, the bits and pieces of our doctrinal standards that really matter. But as long as we theoretically subscribe to the Westminster Confession and Catechisms but allow countless exceptions to be taken to them, we leave ourselves no choice but to scratch our heads over whether things like refraining from recreation on the Sabbath and 6/24 creation are intrinsic to the system. My proposal is simply that if we all agree that something is not intrinsic to the system, then why not omit it altogether? Then, once we have identified what our system of doctrine actually is, we can confess it strictly and with confidence. It is just this kind of approach—one that calls for strict subscription to the system of doctrine but allows laxity on incidental matters—that could potentially be the impetus for an ecumenical Reformed church consisting of believers from British Presbyterian and Continental Reformed backgrounds.

Maybe it comes from having studied with Scott Clark, but Stellman has a point. And though I can’t find it at Scott’s blog, he has for many years been maintaining that we need a new confession of faith, one that reflects both the tradition and the developments in theology since 1647. And while I can’t identify precisely the points of the argument, I think it runs something like this: if we continue to hold creeds and catechisms written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they run the risk of functioning like dictionaries – reference works we simply pull off the shelf when an ordination exam comes along or when going to a trial, but seldom used in the day-to-day life of a congregation and its broader communion. Richard Muller has proposed a helpful remedy to this situation, one that makes our adopted creeds and confessions part of the warp and woof of church life (in corporate and family worship, and in member’s piety).

But another way to give us more ownership of our confessional standards is to write a new one.

The more I study the history of the Reformed churches, the more sense this proposal makes. The Westminster Assembly was an incredibly complicated affair, and the issues before that body are virtually unknown to contemporary readers (unless you’re Chad Van Dixhoorn). For instance, here is what Philip Benedict writes about the Divines:

The majority of the delegates who favored a presbyterial-synodal form of church government worked to bring the others around to their position by demonstrating the form’s biblical basis point by point.; but the exegesis proved a time-consuming, contentious business. As the divines puzzled over Scripture, the clash of arms realigned the political situation. The New Model Army proved more successful that the Scottish forces in the warfare against the king and did a better job of claiming credit for joint victories. As the army’s power increased, the Independents and Erastians within the assembly grew more assertive and forces the initiation of regular consultations with Parliament, which was less sympathetic to clerical independence. As in the cities of Germany and Switzerland in the first century of the Reformation, the issue of who controlled excommunication became a bone of contention. . . . The new form of church government for England finally decided upon in conjunction with Parliament and spelled out in measure of August 1645 and March 1646 approximated the presbyterial-synodal churches of Scotland, France, and the Netherlands . . . . But it contained major compromises with Erastian and congregationalist concerns . . . . These accommodations displeased the Scottish envoys, who castigated the new system as a “lame Erastian presbytery.”(Benedict, pp. 400-401)

Aside from questions of church polity and ecclesiastical authority, England was also facing antinomianism and neo-nomianism churning out of sixteenth-century debates over predestination. Puritan practical divinity was also in the air, as were debates over prayer books and liturgical forms. The point is that the confession can be read as a historical document to see what was animating Reformed English and Scottish churchmen in the seventeenth century. In fact, it needs to be read this way if it is going to function as a reliable standard (has anyone heard of grammatical-historical exegesis?). And as a state-appointed committee, its documents can also be read like Obama’s recent health care provision – a statement that bears all the compromises that come with politics, which is the art of compromise.

But such historical investigation and political intrigue is a long way from embracing the Westminster Confession as our own confession of faith. For that reason, I do believe that Stellman and Clark are on to something. Maybe if the NAPARC churches ever adopted Bob Godfrey’s proposal for a federated denomination of Reformed churches, their first item of business would be to call an assembly to write a Reformed confession for the twenty-first century.

Reformed Protestants these days tend to be absorbed with the Three Forms of Unity and the Westminster Standards and for good reason. These are the confessions of most extant Reformed and Presbyterian communions. But as the current project of Jim Dennison indicates, the confessional output of Protestantism was vast and many of the Reformed churches’ oldest creeds remain unknown.

One creedal endeavor that has received almost no scrutiny was the Harmony of Confessions, published in 1581 in Geneva. It was an effort by Zanchi and Ursinus, called by German electors, to reflect the unity of Protestants in Europe by publishing parts from eleven confessions – Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican. These included: the Augsburg Confession (1530), Tetrapolitan (1530), Basel (1534), the First (1536) and Second (1566) Helvetic Confessions, Saxony (1551), Wirtemberg (1552), Gallican (1559), the Belgic (1561), the Thirty-Nine Articles (1562), and Bohemia (1573).

Philip Benedict concedes that the Harmony was a more hopeful than a realistic expression of Protestant unity. But he adds that it was “one example of the conviction of many Reformed that the bonds of brotherhood ought to encompass the Lutheran churches as well. Those who had taken part in Lutheran services were allowed to attend the Lord’s Supper at Geneva without undergoing the rite of public contrition required of those who had attended a Catholic mass; and the French Reformed decided in 1631 to admit visiting Lutherans to their communion services without impediment, asserting that the churches of the Augsburg Confession agree with ‘the other Reformed churches’ on the fundamental points of true religion.” This magnanimity came despite the constant bluster and huffiness of Gnesio Lutherans.

One of the sections of Augsburg that the Harmony included was article twenty, Of Good Works:

Our teachers are falsely accused of forbidding Good Works. For their published writings on the Ten Commandments, and others of like import, bear witness that they have taught to good purpose concerning all estates and duties of life, as to what estates of life and what works in every calling be pleasing to God. Concerning these things preachers heretofore taught but little, and urged only childish and needless works, as particular holy-days, particular fasts, brotherhoods, pilgrimages, services in honor of saints, the use of rosaries, monasticism, and such like. Since our adversaries have been admonished of these things, they are now unlearning them, and do not preach these unprofitable works as heretofore. Besides, they begin to mention faith, of which there was heretofore marvelous silence. They teach that we are justified not by works only, but they conjoin faith and works, and say that we are justified by faith and works. This doctrine is more tolerable than the former one, and can afford more consolation than their old doctrine.

Forasmuch, therefore, as the doctrine concerning faith, which ought to be the chief one in the Church, has lain so long unknown, as all must needs grant that there was the deepest silence in their sermons concerning the righteousness of faith, while only the doctrine of works was treated in the churches, our teachers have instructed the churches concerning faith as follows:—

First, that our works cannot reconcile God or merit forgiveness of sins, grace, and justification, but that we obtain this only by faith when we believe that we are received into favor for Christ’s sake, who alone has been set forth the Mediator and Propitiation, 1 Tim. 2:5, in order that the Father may be reconciled through Him. Whoever, therefore, trusts that by works he merits grace, despises the merit and grace of Christ, and seeks a way to God without Christ, by human strength, although Christ has said of Himself: I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. John 14:6.

This doctrine concerning faith is everywhere treated by Paul, Eph. 2:8: By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of your selves; it is the gift of God, not of works, etc.

And lest any one should craftily say that a new interpretation of Paul has been devised by us, this entire matter is supported by the testimonies of the Fathers. For Augustine, in many volumes, defends grace and the righteousness of faith, over against the merits of works. And Ambrose, in his De Vocatione Gentium, and elsewhere, teaches to like effect. For in his De Vocatione Gentium he says as follows: Redemption by the blood of Christ would become of little value, neither would the preeminence of man’s works be superseded by the mercy of God, if justification, which is wrought through grace, were due to the merits going before, so as to be, not the free gift of a donor, but the reward due to the laborer.

But, although this doctrine is despised by the inexperienced, nevertheless God-fearing and anxious consciences find by experience that it brings the greatest consolation, because consciences cannot be set at rest through any works, but only by faith, when they take the sure ground that for Christ’s sake they have a reconciled God. As Paul teaches Rom. 5:1: Being justified by faith, we have peace with God. This whole doctrine is to be referred to that conflict of the terrified conscience, neither can it be understood apart from that conflict. Therefore inexperienced and profane men judge ill concerning this matter, who dream that Christian righteousness is nothing but civil and philosophical righteousness.

Heretofore consciences were plagued with the doctrine of works, they did not hear the consolation from the Gospel. Some persons were driven by conscience into the desert, into monasteries hoping there to merit grace by a monastic life. Some also devised other works whereby to merit grace and make satisfaction for sins. Hence there was very great need to treat of, and renew, this doctrine of faith in Christ, to the end that anxious consciences should not be without consolation but that they might know that grace and forgiveness of sins and justification are apprehended by faith in Christ.

Men are also admonished that here the term “faith” does not signify merely the knowledge of the history, such as is in the ungodly and in the devil, but signifies a faith which believes, not merely the history, but also the effect of the history—namely, this article: the forgiveness of sins, to wit, that we have grace, righteousness, and forgiveness of sins through Christ.

Now he that knows that he has a Father gracious to him through Christ, truly knows God; he knows also that God cares for him, and calls upon God; in a word, he is not without God, as the heathen. For devils and the ungodly are not able to believe this article: the forgiveness of sins. Hence, they hate God as an enemy, call not upon Him, and expect no good from Him. Augustine also admonishes his readers concerning the word “faith,” and teaches that the term “faith” is accepted in the Scriptures not for knowledge such as is in the ungodly but for confidence which consoles and encourages the terrified mind.

Furthermore, it is taught on our part that it is necessary to do good works, not that we should trust to merit grace by them, but because it is the will of God. It is only by faith that forgiveness of sins is apprehended, and that, for nothing. And because through faith the Holy Ghost is received, hearts are renewed and endowed with new affections, so as to be able to bring forth good works. For Ambrose says: Faith is the mother of a good will and right doing. For man’s powers without the Holy Ghost are full of ungodly affections, and are too weak to do works which are good in God’s sight. Besides, they are in the power of the devil who impels men to divers sins, to ungodly opinions, to open crimes. This we may see in the philosophers, who, although they endeavored to live an honest life could not succeed, but were defiled with many open crimes. Such is the feebleness of man when he is without faith and without the Holy Ghost, and governs himself only by human strength.

Hence it may be readily seen that this doctrine is not to be charged with prohibiting good works, but rather the more to be commended, because it shows how we are enabled to do good works. For without faith human nature can in no wise do the works of the First or of the Second Commandment. Without faith it does not call upon God, nor expect anything from God, nor bear the cross, but seeks, and trusts in, man’s help. And thus, when there is no faith and trust in God all manner of lusts and human devices rule in the heart. Wherefore Christ said, John 15:5: Without Me ye can do nothing; and the Church sings:

Lacking Thy divine favor,

There is nothing found in man,

Naught in him is harmless.

Some historians of seventeenth-century British Protestantism are dismissive of attempts to distinguish between Puritans and Presbyterians. Part of the problem, of course, involves definitions and categories. When it comes to politics, differences between Presbyterians and Puritans do not become clear until the 1650s with the regime of Oliver Cromwell since Puritans in Parliament joined forces with Presbyterians to do battle with the Stuart monarchy partly on the basis of the Solemn League and Covenant. When it comes to religion, Puritans and Presbyterians shared an intense and introspective piety that again makes differentiating them seemingly pointless.

I was surprised to read, then, in his treatment of John Owen Carl Trueman’s distinction between Puritan and Reformed. On the one hand, he argues that Puritan, at least with reference to Owen, is an unhelpful category.

First, . . . there is little consensus on exactly what constitutes a Puritan, let alone the reification of that elusive essence in the phenomenon known as Puritanism. Second, whatever else Puritanism is, it is fairly minimalist in terms of theological content – if John Milton, the quasi-Arian counts as a Puritan, for example, we can scarcely include even that most basic of Christian distinctives, the doctrine of the Trinity, in our definition. Third, Puritanism has, on the whole, far too parochial a range to allow us to see the full context of Owen’s thinking. . . . Thus, the use of a category like “Puritanism,” which brings with it all manner of narrowly parochial connotations, really needs to be deployed very carefully and in very specific contexts if it is to be at all helpful in our understanding of [Owen’s] thought.

The category that Trueman prefers to apply to Owen is Reformed Orthodoxy since it “is at once both more easily defined and less limiting that the category of Puritanism.” By Reformed Orthodoxy Trueman means:

. . . the tradition of Protestant thought which found its creedal expression on the continent in such documents, as, among others, the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism and the Canons of Dort, and in Britain in the Westminster Assembly’s Confession of Faith and Larger and Shorter Catechisms. Historically speaking, the immediate roots of this tradition are to be found in the work of Reformers such as Huldrych Zwingli, Johannes Oecolampadius, Martin Bucer and, a generation later, such men as John Calvin, Heinrich Bullinger, Peter Martyr and Pierre Viret. (Trueman, John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man, pp. 6-7)

This is helpful, but it does raise a couple questions. First, since the Parliament that called the Westminster Assembly was dominated by Puritans, is it so easy to distinguish the Puritanism of Parliament from the Reformed orthodoxy of the Westminster Assembly, especially since Puritans were not in short supply at the Assembly?

The other questions concerns the original oldlife effort to distinguish Presbyterianism from Puritanism. If Presbyterians adopted the Westminster Standards as their church’s confession, then that would appear, following Trueman, to make them not Puritan but part of Reformed Orthodoxy. In which case, if Puritanism lacks substantial theological content and is not synonymous with the work of the Westminster Assembly, is distinguishing Presbyterianism from Puritanism really so peculiar?

The Evangelical Manifesto has pretty much come and gone. (It’s domain name has actually expired.) It was supposed to give evangelicalism, sagging with the worries and fears of the Religious Right, a face lift. And then along came Sarah Palin and the chances for evangelicalism finding a prettier face happened, but not the way the Manifesto’s writers had intended.

Even so, recalling the way that EM defined evangelicalism is useful for reminding confessional Protestants why born-again Protestants don’t get us and why they leave us scratching our heads. The defining features of evangelicalism, according to EM, are first a devotion or experience of reverence: being evangelical at its core “is always more than a creedal statement, an institutional affiliation, or a matter of membership in a movement.” This means that evangelicalism cannot be limited to “certain churches or contained by a definable movement.” It is “diverse, flexible, adaptable, non-hierarchical” and takes many forms. Also key is evangelicalism’s positive, as opposed to its negative, posture. “Evangelicals are for Someone and for something rather than against anyone or anything.”

For this reason, evangelicals are different from liberalism and fundamentalism. These are in fact the extremes that define evangelicalism. The fault of liberalism was its capitulation to “alternative gospels” that are characterized by “an exaggerated estimate of human capacities, a shallow view of evil, an inadequate view of truth, and a deficient view of God.” Fundamentalism’s error is to embody a “modern reaction to the modern world” and romanticize the past. This leads fundamentalists to part company with “the Evangelical principle” of loving “our neighbors as ourselves” and even our enemies.

These oppositions would seem to connote a negativity that conflicts with evangelicalism’s commitment to being positive. But aside from the implicit inconsistency, the “accent the positive” theme of EM betrays evangelicalism’s glaring intellectual defect. By eschewing institutional means for being an evangelical and for reinforcing its identity, evangelicals have abandoned any reasonable creaturely means for giving coherence to their movement, constituency, market – what is the right word when no criteria for membership exist? It actually gets worse. Evangelicals revel in not being a church, in not having a creed, in not being tied down by those structures that lead to formalism or narrowness – those barriers that restrict the free movement of the Spirit and the good intentions of regenerated saints.

How is it possible to have any sort of human identity without being embodied institutionally. For politics we have parties, for business we have companies, for sex we have marriage. All of these human activities require some kind of exclusion based on a positive identity. Democrats are not Republicans. Ford’s cars are not Toyota’s. The Harts do not sleep with the Bartons. The same is even true for Christianity where God has given us the church and its ordinances to disciple the nations. The ministry of the word has always involved distinguishing and excluding. The keys of the kingdom were given to open the gates of heaven to believers and to shut them to unbelief. At the denominational level, Presbyterians are different from Pentecostals. But evangelicals, according to EM, do not want to be tied down either the way God’s creatures are by virtue of our embodiment or the way his church is by virtue of his revealed truth about the way he cares and shepherds his people through the church.

The result is a form of Christianity that does not want to have enemies but knows that it has them because its positive assertion of evangelical identity means that evangelicalism is not fundamentalism or liberalism. The reason it cannot have enemies is the same as why it cannot have members. Evangelicalism eschews institutional embodiment. It transcends any organizational or formal arrangement that is narrow or excludes. As such EM is yet one more betrayal of a spiritual identity that knows no formal mechanisms of membership.

Contemporary evangelicalism, consequently, suffers from an inherent inconsistency which pits its spirit against its body. Born-again Protestantism cannot resolve its inherent tension between the anti-formal nature of the conversion experience – the gateway into evangelicalism – and the need for formal qualities that will make evangelicalism cohere as a distinct Christian identity. As Mark Noll has observed, “Evangelicalism never amounted to a full-blown religious tradition, but was rather a style of personal living everywhere combined with conventional attitudes and actions.” Because of its flexibility and experiential character, evangelicalism can be found almost everywhere. That also means it is one of the least disciplined and impossible to define expressions of Christianity. In fact, because of its inability to achieve the heft of a religious tradition but only to add up to a spiritual style, evangelicalism has left many of its adherents with the dilemma of not knowing how to practice, maintain, and pass on a faith that eschews the means of practicing, maintaining and passing on any form of Christianity.

Even so, evangelicals have over the centuries devised a number of other ways to indicate their membership in the evangelical movement, from listening to contemporary Christian music, buying niche-marketed study-Bibles and the vinyl covers that adorn them. This could be a betrayal of the original genius of evangelicalism. But the formalism of evangelicalism could also reveal the naivete of its original proponents. That is, folks like Whitefield, Wesley and Edwards failed to recognize that as ensouled bodies (or embodied souls if you prefer) human beings cannot avoid forms. Christianity needs more than religious affections.

At some very basic level, physical existence requires that Christianity take external form, except in those very rare, and impossible to know, circumstances where the Spirit acts directly upon the human soul independently of external stimuli and physical existence after conversion. This kind of mystical experience may happen but it is not normal. The ordinary way that God saves is through the means of his word, read and preached, and visibly signified and sealed in the sacraments, with the enlivening work of the Spirit. In other words, God instituted forms to mediate grace through the external senses of the human body. Evangelicals implicitly recognize this whenever they publish books, set up preaching tours, arrange Christian Rock festivals, or print a new line of t-shirts. These evangelical forms mediate evangelical devotion. And they show that the original impulse of evangelicalism, to escape forms, is impossible.

The $64,000 question, then, is which are the right forms. Whatever the answer to the question, evangelicalism will always have a hard time maintaining an identity and keeping its children if it teaches adherents that their formal Christian activities are matters indifferent. If it doesn’t matter if you go to a Lutheran, Presbyterian or Baptist church to be an evangelical, then a time may (and possibly has) come when it doesn’t even matter if you go to church . In which case, evangelicalism would have achieved the ghost-like status of all spirit and no body.

(Or, show me your confessionalism!)

In Recovering the Reformed Confession, Scott Clark argues for and understanding of the Christian ministry and piety that informed the confessions of the Reformed churches pretty much all the way down to when Boy George (Whitefield) set foot in the North American British colonies. Among the points Clark makes is that the teachings affirmed and practices prescribed in the Reformed confessions are a better gauge of Reformed identity than the sort of zeal and experience that the likes of Whitefield encouraged and sought.

One way to test Clark’s argument is to ask by what measure do we evaluate a college that claims to be Protestant. Some who are sharply critical of Clark have recently faulted one of the leading evangelical institutions on two grounds: first, a majority of the faculty voted for Barack Obama; second, its teachers education program encourages students to embrace notions of tolerance and diversity that various secular state teachers’ agencies affirm, thus forcing Christian college education majors into a secular mold of “social justice.” (The same critics of Clark have faulted Covenant College for its faculty’s support for Obama in the 2008 presidential contest.)

What does not seem to matter in such evaluations is whether the college’s faculty are members or attend churches where the Reformed creeds are the confessional standard. In fact, one could well imagine a college qualifying as a flagship institution because it was consistently pro-Republican (as long as the pro-life plank of the platform was in place) and minimally doctrinal. If memory serves, this was exactly the kind of place that Wheaton College was before 1990. Culturally activist while doctrinally tolerant on dogmatic minutia is likely the ideal for Clark’s critics, meaning that creeds and confessions do not matter significantly when evaluating Christian higher education.

So why do such critics object if the confessionalist shoe does not fit? It isn’t an accusation of infidelity (though it has implications for this.) It is simply a question of definition: do the creeds inform the way you assess Christianity or do you have a different list of allegiances and personalities that in effect constitute your confession? If you are confessional you are going to evaluate Christian institutions and expressions on the basis of the creeds, as well as the health of the communions with which an institution affiliates. But if you are more inclined, in this case, to Whitefield and Edwards, you end up criticizing a school for its politics. In other words, pietism generates activism; while confessionalism nurtures perseverance.

Put another way, a confessional “world view” (as much as I hate the phrase) esteems the cult and the culture in inversely proportional relations. The higher one’s view of the creeds, the less one cares about politics. And the more one cares about culture, the less the creeds matter.

Makes sense to this confessionalist.

Doug Wilson joins the Bayly Bros in heaping scorn on our good friend Scott Clark and the case for recovering the Reformed confessions. To Doug’s credit, he avoids the vituperative edge that characterizes the Baylys’ outbursts.

What unites Wilson and the Brothers Bayly in their criticism of Clark, apart from disdain for Meredith Kline, mind you, one of the true geniuses of twentieth-century Reformed Christianity, is nostalgia for Geneva. Of course, this is not the Geneva that sent Castellio packing or Servetus to the flames – well, it is, but most contemporary pining for Geneva manages to overlook the downside of Constantianism even when practiced by Reformer pastors.

Wilson is writing in response to a piece that Clark did for Table Talk on what evangelicals should expect from a Reformed church. Clark tries to cushion the blow that might come from the doctrinal, polity, and liturgical trappings that disorient the average born-again Christian. When Clark explains that “confessional churches are isolated from both the old liberal mainline and the revivalist traditions” and so offer an alternative to liberal and evangelical Protestantism, Wilson goes off.

First, Wilson laments Clark’s isolationism. Not only are Reformed confessionalists separated from evangelicals and liberals, but also “from the cultural potency of Reformed theology and piety.” This is lamentable because for Wilson, the Reformed theology that he has read and studied “built a great civilization.” In contrast, Clark’s brand of Reformed theology, that of “the truncated brethren,” “would have trouble building a taco stand.”

Wilson also takes exception to Clark’s claim that confessional churches today approximate the churches of the sixteenth century more than other Protestant congregations. For Wilson, this is patently untrue because the sixteenth-century Reformed churches were actually Reformed cities – that is, they were more than merely religious institutions. They were civil polities where supposedly Calvinism shaped all of Geneva’s or Strasbourg’s or Edinburgh’s life (tell that to the magistrates who stuck their neck out against the Holy Roman Empire and hired the Reformed pastors). This suggests that Wilson regards Reformed Protestantism as a way of taking names and kicking butt.

Furthermore, when Clark claims that evangelicals coming to Reformed churches will need time to acclimate to the new spiritual environment, Wilson retorts that Clark has the picture “exactly backwards” because Clark’s otherworldly version of the Reformed faith turns out to be warmed over evangelicalism (read: pietism). According to Wilson:

As an evangelical, and the son of an evangelical, allow me to give my testimony. I was part of the exodus from pop evangelicalism (not historic evangelicalism). I was sick of the cultural irrelevance and impotence of “believe in Jesus, go to Heaven when you die.” I was sick of a pietism that couldn’t find its way out of the prayer closet. I wanted to stop confessing that Jesus was Lord of an invisible seventeenth dimension somewhere. Why not here? Why not now? It was a long story, but the trail to historic evangelicalism, God-honoring worship, and a culturally potent and world transforming faith led me straight to the Reformed faith — the same faith that John Calvin and his successors confessed. Calvin preached to milkmaids and Calvin wrote letters to princes. Calvin drafted catechisms, and he drafted ordinances for the city council. Calvin thought that the idea of a civil society without enforcement of the first table of the law was “preposterous.” Calvin was a loyal son of Christendom, as am I.

It is remarkable that Wilson would seemingly dismiss the idea of people going to heaven, unless he thinks that this world is more than a foretaste but an actual embodiment of the world to come. I mean, people who milk cows to the glory of God still die, at which point the realities of the after life become fairly pressing compared to a Reformed way to pasteurize milk.

Also odd is Wilson’s sleight of hand regarding “pop” and “historic” evangelicalism. My own testimony (both from experience and study) instructs me that appeals to historic evangelicalism generally depend less on historical realities and more to the point the appellant is trying to make. Does Wilson really mean to suggest that Clark has more in common with Joel Osteen than Carl Henry? Let me testify again and say that I’ve spent time with Clark and know that his locks cannot compete with Osteen’s.

But the really arresting aspect of Wilson’s critique of Clark is the idea that cultural relevance and effective change of this world is what characterizes Reformed Christianity. I get it that post-Niebuhr and post-Kuyper Wilson’s brand of transformationalism is par for the course. But what is shocking is the conceit that Reformed are more effective than evangelicals in changing things.

The history of Protestantism in the United States shows that the groups that were most influential in creating the Protestant establishment and its many institutions, along with a civil religion that made the greatest nation on God’s green earth unfriendly to Roman Catholics, Jews, Mormons, and other forms of infidelity, were those evangelicals like Charles Finney and Lyman Beecher, or the ecumenical and liberal Protestants like Josiah Strong and Reinhold Niebuhr. Funny how Calvinism did not characterize those influential voices.

The reason for evangelicalism’s can-do body (as well as spirit) has to do with the inherently activistic and this-worldly faith of born-again Protestantism. Here I am reminded of Mark Noll’s response to a paper by Nick Wolsterstorff about the need for evangelicals to become more engaged in cultural and social matters. Noll said that telling evangelicals to be more active was like pointing an addict to dope.

So Doug Wilson may be the real evangelical. He may be more culturally relevant and effective than Clark and other two-kingdom proponents, though I hear that even in Moscow, Idaho the work of cultural clean up is not perhaps a model for taking on the rest of the nation, globe, or cosmos. Granted, if Wilson can rid the United States of automobiles, Walmart, and illegal drugs, I won’t complain. But I would ask that he put church reform higher on his list. All the infidelity among churches that claim to be Christian (even some Reformed communions) certainly appears to be a matter of greater alarm than getting non-believers to conform outwardly to the manners and customs of Credenda Agenda ‘s readers.

Which means that if Wilson think’s Reformed confessionalism’s dualism is bad ju ju, his works righteousness is bad do do (is the works righteousness of do doism ever good?).