Month: September 2010

My Brush With Greatness

Published on by D. G. Hart21 Comments

Maybe it is just me, but back in the day when I could stay up late enough to watch the talk shows I wondered what I would say if I were ever in Letterman’s audience and his staff chose me to talk about my encounter with a celebrity.

One instance, and I mentioned this to the college newspaper reporter who was interviewing new faculty, came in 1993 when the Bulls were playing the Lakers in the NBA Finals. We were living in Wheaton and I was flying to LA for a meeting the same day that both teams were traveling from Chicago to Los Angeles for the third game. On my flight were the television announcers, Marv Albert and Mike Fratello. Of course, they want to the front to sit in first class and I took my place among the plebes. But first-class and business-class passengers have the same needs and when we arrived at LAX I saw that Marv Albert was heading in the same direction as I was — to the men’s room. And there, low and behold, we occupied adjacent urinal stalls. Thankfully, LAX has stall dividers. So at one point I might have told Dave that I relieved myself next to Marv Albert.

But I could also mention that back when I was waiting tables to support myself through seminary, I waited on the pitchers Steve Carlton and Larry Christiansen, who were coming back to Philadelphia ahead of the Phillies to rest for their respective starts. I’m less inclined to bring this one up, even though I was privileged to be working at one of the best restaurants in the city — Frog — and even though this was the year the Phils won their first championship. Truth be told, I was serving them on a Sunday night. My sabbath convictions not being what they should have been, it’s not a moment of which I am proud.

One last instance is my running into and exchanging pleasantries with Wendy Grantham. She is the actress who played the night club dancer that wound up with Lester Freeman in The Wire. I happened to see her while in line at a Trader Joe’s in Wilmington and tried not to look too carefully at her lest her very big boyfriend think I was checking her out. But I finally summoned up the courage to ask if she had acted in The Wire, she said yes, we shook hands, and talked a little about the show and her career (mainly a singer). I left walking on the clouds since I believe The Wire is the best moving image production ever made.

But all of these encounters pale in comparison to my new found greatness — the Baylys have publicized one of my speaking events. Last night I lectured for the Great Lakes Presbytery of the PCA. Once again the theme was two-kingdom theology. And once again I encountered some criticism — some were even willing to speak of 1k — but also much good will and fraternity.

I can’t say that the Baylys post gave me the same feelings as meeting Wendy Grantham, and I am a little perturbed that they used up two of my fifteen minutes of fame. But, what an honor.

Mencken Day 2010

Published on by D. G. Hart7 Comments

Tomorrow H. L Mencken would have turned 130. Today, to honor that anniversary, the folks at the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore and the Mencken Society put on a program that included Jonathan Yardley, book critic at that Washington Post, giving the annual Mencken Day Lecture. What follows is from the newly published set of Mencken’s Prejudices from the Library of America Series.

Almost the only thing I believe in with a childlike and unquestioning faith, in this world of doubts and delusions, is free speech; nevertheless, I find it increasingly difficult to sympathize with the pedagogues who, ever and anon, are heaved out of some fresh-water college for trying to exercise it. Why? Mainly, perhaps , because I can’t get rid of the suspicion that nothing a pedagogue ever says, as pedagogue, is worth hearing – that his avocation is as fatal to sense as that of an archbishop, a Federal judge, or one of the automata in Mr. Ford’s great squirrel cage at Detroit. But also, no doubt, because I am obsessed by the superstition that, assuming him miraculously to have sense, he is so much out of place in any ordinary American college as an archbishop would be in a bordello.

What ails all these bogus martyrs is a false theory of education. They seem to believe that its aim is to fill the pupil’s head with a mass of provocative and conflicting ideas, to arouse his curiosity to incandescence and inspire him to inquiry and speculation – in the common phrase, to teach him how to think. But this is surely nonsense. If education really had any such aim its inevitable effect would be to reduce nine-tenths of its victims to insanity, and to convert most of the rest into anarchists. What it seeks to do is something quite different – something, in fact, almost the opposite. It is financed by the state and by private philanthropists, not to make lunatics and anarchists, but to make good citizens – in other words, to make citizens who are nearly like all other citizens as possible. Its ideal product is not a boy or a girl full of novel ideas but one full of lawful and correct ideas – not one who thinks, but one who believes. If it actually graduated hordes of Platos and Nietzsches it would be closed by the Department of Justice, and quite properly. (“In the Rolling Mills,” Prejudices: Sixth Series [Library of America] vol. 2, p. 509.)

Forensic Friday: Why It Goes with Two-Kingdom Tuesday

Published on by D. G. Hart24 Comments

Our mid-western correspondent alerted me to a piece over at American Vision which is critical of the recent resurgence of Calvinism — as in Young, Restless, and Reformed — for regarding personal salvation as the essence of Calvinism. For the author, TULIP is well and good. It affirms God’s sovereignty. But it hardly covers what it means to be Reformed.

. . . TULIP is not the essence of the Reformed theology. Of course, the doctrines of Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and Perseverance of the Saints are an important starting step to the immense body of theological truths called “Reformed theology.” It follows directly from the greater concept of the Sovereignty of God. It correctly describes the fallen state of man and the work of God in saving the individual. When we look up to God to give thanks for what He has done for us personally, we think “TULIP,” even if we never knew the term or never understood it.

To summarize, TULIP is the acronym for the “mechanism” of our personal salvation. And that’s it. Nothing more than our personal salvation. But Reformed theology encompasses immeasurably more than just personal salvation. And when a church makes TULIP the summa of its theology, that church is not Reformed. Yes, it has taken the first step to becoming Reformed, but it is still far from the goal.

So if the doctrines of grace are just a start then where does the Reformed faith lead?

It was not churches full of believers who earnestly study theology only to revel in their personal salvation. In fact, with two exceptions – Scotland and Hungary – the early Reformers didn’t leave us any lasting churches at all. It was not intellectualized sermons of elaborate psychological verbiage that pick on every feeling and every emotion a believer may have. It was not courageous sermons on irrelevant topics of peripheral importance to our age and culture. And it certainly wasn’t a belief in a God who is only sovereign to save individuals, but nothing else.

Their most lasting legacy was on the cultivation of societies, whole cultures based on the practical applications of Reformed theology, from top to bottom. Geneva, Strasbourg, Holland, England, Scotland, Hungary, the Huguenot communities in France and later in North and South Carolina, the Oranje-Vrystaat and Transvaal. Societies that became light to the world, an embodiment of Christ’s liberty and justice for all. The Reformed believers of earlier centuries built a civilization that influenced the world permanently. They changed the world not by the selfishness of the focus on salvation but by the obedience of teaching the nations and building the Kingdom of God.

To counter this Whiggish and transformational view of Reformed Protestantism, one could seemingly emphasize a number of truths. But the one that seems to make the biggest dent is justification by faith alone, where personal salvation is the point of Christ’s saving work, and where the kingdom comes not through civil kingdoms or magistrates but where believers confess and worship Christ as Lord and savior.

On the other hand, a view of salvation that looks for the proximity of faith and good works, and sees personal transformation as a barometer of Christ’s work will often be hamfisted in opposing transformationalism. It’s as if the Reformed faith is chopped liver for serving up an alien righteousness when what we really need for the kingdom to exist and thrive is a personal and active righteousness.

Anyway, arguments like American Vision’s are part of the reason for countering with justification-priority.

Where's Waldo Wednesday: Word Count

Published on by D. G. Hart12 Comments

Assessing the historical significance of a person is not an activity that suits quantification. But when historians put together reference words such as dictionaries and encyclopedias, they need to assign word counts for subjects to control the project’s size and scope. In which case, the people with the more important biographies receive more space or words.

I made this point during Sunday school talks on J. Gresham Machen last Spring and continue to think the point has some merit. The standard biographical reference work for the United States, Oxford University Press’ American National Biography gives a window into the collective mind of professional historians and how they judge a figure’s significance. Online access allows readers to generate a quick list of word counts for those persons who made the editors’ cut.
Here is a sampling of presidential word counts:

George Washington 8,025
James Buchanan 3,150
Abraham Lincoln 11,125
Woodrow Wilson 8,400
Ronald Reagan 9,900

Buchanan’s tally as the president consistently rated the worst (but Pennsylvania’s lone national executive) makes sense, but surprising is that Washington takes a back seat to Wilson and Reagan. Lincoln is, well, St. Abraham.

Here are some Reformed theologians:

Charles Hodge 2,925
Benjamin Warfield 1,525
John Williamson Nevin 1,450
Archibald Alexander 1,250
John Witherspoon 2,550

And here are some figures from the Presbyterian controversy of the 1920s:

Henry Sloane Coffin 1,100
Robert E. Speer 1,375
Charles Erdman 850
Clarence Macartney 1,025
William Jennings Bryan 3,500
J. Gresham Machen 1,325

Of course, Bryan was more than a Presbyterian controversialist and his running for the presidency three times on the Democratic ticket explains why he receives more space than Buchanan.
Finally, the tallies for Orthodox Presbyterian notables (or would be OP’s):

Cornelius Van Til 0
John Murray 0
Geerhardus Vos 0

I guess, when the lights and cameras were packed up, the OPC’s theologians looked a lot less interesting to historians.

So what does this have to do with union with Christ? I have engaged consistently with union advocates about the doctrine’s relative importance and have asked repeatedly why the doctrine does not receive more coverage in the Reformed creeds and confessions. The response often is that the Holy Spirit does not merit a separate chapter in the Westminster Confession but that doesn’t make it unimportant. The point that usually follows is that union was so important to the Divines that they did not need to assert it. But I continue to wonder about this argument and a handy search of the Westminster Standards reveals the following word counts:

Union 6
Spirit 79

Some may want to claim that because union and communion go together in the Standards, then references to “communion” should also be counted. In which case, the same should go for all uses of spirit, as in “spiritual.” Here are the results:

Union and communion 33
Spirit and spiritual 114

Which leads me to continue to wonder about the import of union with Christ for defining Reformed orthodoxy. I do not deny that it is there or that the Divines wrote about it in their personal writings. But if it were so crucial to Reformed soteriology – and if it were so important for delineating Reformed and Lutheran doctrine – then you would think union would receive more words and space. After all, the Divines were not bashful as going into specifics.

Tim Bayly Is Doing His Gilbert Tennent Impersonation Again

Published on by D. G. Hart63 Comments

. . . and along the way denies the teaching and authority of Peter and Paul.

That is, if you use the logic that Tim does in his drive-by post (comments are closed), then you may reach the conclusion that he (and by implication, his brother, David) consider the apostles (except for Matthew) to be unworthy of contemporary Christians’ obedience. Here’s the exact reasoning:

If an officer of Christ’s Church today is not known, as all the Christians were known in the ancient Roman Empire, for taking up the cause of the children being slaughtered, loving the little ones as their Master does, he merits no reading, no listening, no following as a teacher of the church or shepherd of souls.

Tim’s pleasant little introduction to this deduction was another piece of generic slander against two-kingdom and spirituality of the church theology.

Reformed men who promote that hatred of God legislated by the judiciary these past fifty years or so, justifying their cuddly relationships with evil men under the rubric of “two kingdom theology” and “the spirituality of the church,” are unconcerned about the injustice, oppression, and bloodshed of innocents that has long been the foundation of our civil compact here in these United States. They simply don’t give a rip

It’s self evident on any terms a civilized man accepts for the foundation of common law that sending wives, sisters, and mothers off to fight our enemies is evil, but you’ll look in vain for the spirituality of the church men to address the civil magistrate condemning this evil. It’s self evident on any terms a civilized man accepts for the foundation of common law that ripping unborn babies apart in their mothers’ wombs for money, no less is an evil as great as the world has ever known, but you’ll look in vain for the two kingdom men to write about it on their blogs, speak against it in the public square, preach against it in their pulpits, or show up at the killing place to lift a finger to stop it..

Strong stuff. Tim claims that this is the “entire argument,” but he goes on to throw in comparisons with the Third Reich, I guess, just to throw caution to the wind.

Apparently, the Baylys have encyclopedic knowledge of the writings and thoughts of all 2k pastors. I’d have thought this was the kind of comprehension reserved for God. But I guess they have one of those worldviews.

Or maybe they are so right and righteous that they don’t need to be careful with the facts. Have they followed Tennent in donning a the attire and following the diet of John the Baptist?

But one fact they should consider is that the only mention of the slaughter of babies in the New Testament comes in Matthew. I am open to correction since my Bible knowledge could be better. Still, I don’t recall Paul or Peter addressing the slaughter of innocents or abortion in their epistles, let alone women serving as soldiers.

It is also worth mentioning that in the Roman Empire, slavery existed, as did human sacrifice, not to mention infanticide. And yet, the very same apostles who cautioned against the dangers of self-righteousness, also instructed Christians to be subject to the imperial authorities.

So, if the Baylys’ logic holds, since Peter and Paul were not known for condemning the evils the Baylys list, then Christians should pay no heed to the New Testament epistles (for starters). Apparently, Peter and Paul did not give a rip the way Tim and David rip.

Of course, there is a solution to this predicament. It is the teaching of 2k and the spirituality of the church. If the Bible commands something, or if it forbids it, then Christians must follow. If the Bible doesn’t speak to a matter, then Christians have liberty. This is of the essence of sola scriptura and the formal principle of the Reformation. The Roman Church, like the Baylys, tried to bind consciences with their own extra-biblical requirements. In the Baylys’ case, we must not only refrain from certain actions but we must publicly oppose it the way Baylys do – otherwise, you’re not a true minister they way they are. To this logic, the Reformers said that only the Bible should be heeded in matters of conscience because only Christ is Lord of conscience. When it comes to public life, the only real guidance to Christians is to submit to the ordained powers.

So the Baylys fundamentally misunderstand a basic building block of the Reformed faith and are grossly uncharitable in displaying their ignorance.

Of course, they are not wrong to oppose the slaughter of innocents or even women serving in the military. They may do that and likely have plenty of good reasons from the created order and even the sixth commandment (in the case of abortion). They stray when they beat their breast and bray that only those ministers are worthy of hearing are the ones like the Baylys. If they are right about their own example and reasoning, then the apostles – and even Jesus himself – stand condemned.

Strong stuff, indeed.

Confession of Faith or Health Care Legislation?

Published on by D. G. Hart23 Comments

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.

The New York Times: A Better Way?

Published on by D. G. Hart69 Comments

Many conservative Presbyterians and Reformed believe – along with the idea that no neutrality exists – that secular America is intolerant of red-blooded Christianity. The current alarm over gay marriage and abortion on demand is evidence of the Reformed-sky-is-falling-world-and-life-view.

Could it be that consolation might come to these upset souls from the secularized (as opposed to hallowed) pages of the New York Times? It could if conservative Protestants would take a gander at the columns written by Ross Douthat. When the Times hired him away from the Atlantic Monthly, some conservatives worried that Douthat, a smart, Roman Catholic, and remarkably wise-for-his-age-writer, might succumb to temptation to fit with the liberal intelligentsia (as if Atlantic is Chronicles) in by soft pedaling his conservatism. But this has hardly been the case. Within the past month Douthat has posted at his Times blog (in addition to columns) a number of serious and thoughtful posts against gay marriage that conservative Protestants should well consider, both for encouragement in culture-war well doing and for learning how to make an argument with people who don’t share your faith (or any).

On August 9th, Douthat wrote in response to a post by Noah Millman who explained why he was supporting gay marriage:

What I would strongly dispute, though, is his suggestion that it’s possible to escape entirely from ideological conceptions of marriage, into a world where it’s all just people loving people, and the way we treat one another is the only thing that matters. This seems like an extremely naive view of how ideas intersect with human action, and how cultures shape behavior. Of course all ideals and ideologies are imperfect descriptions of reality, and semi-quixotic attempts to graft order onto the inherent messiness of human affairs. But you can’t escape them just by declaring that they’re “artificial,” because such artifice is itself natural to man, and inherent to culture-making and social order. Every society has its ideals and ideologies, about marriage as much as about any other institution. And the fact that wedlock was once somewhat more about property and somewhat less about love than it is today doesn’t mean that our ancestors didn’t have their own theories of marriage, and their own arguments about what the institution meant and ought to mean.

Read the Greeks and Romans; read the New Testament; read Shakespeare and The Book of Common Prayer. There was never a time when human beings weren’t building ideologies of marriage, and there was never a culture where those ideologies didn’t have an impact on how people wed and parented and loved.

This means that if the ideology that justifies defining marriage as lifelong heterosexual monogamy gets swept into history’s dustbin, we won’t suddenly be flung into a landscape where the only real things are people and the people they love. We’ll just get a different ideology of marriage in its place, one that makes a different set of assumptions and generalizations and invests the institution with a different kind of purpose. And we don’t need a judge’s ruling (though Judge Vaughn Walker’s analysis was certainly clarifying!) to know what that ideology will look like: It’s the increasingly commonplace theory that marriage exists to celebrate romantic love and provide public recognition for mutually-supportive couples, with no inherent connection of any kind to gender difference and/or procreation, and with only a rhetorical connection to the ideal of permanence.

Because Douthat is thoughtful and because he writes for the Times, lots of people pay attention to what he writes and so various bloggers and op-ed writers responded to his August 9 post. One of those came from Glenn Greenwald, who argued that whether or not the state supports heterosexual marriage, the ideal of one-man-and-one-woman marrying could still prevail without legal sanction. One example to which Grennwald appealed was racism. Nearly everyone believes racism is wrong even if the state protects the rights of racists to speak freely and associate voluntarily.

Douthat responds this way:

. . . take alcohol and cigarettes. Why are Marlboros more stigmatized than Budweisers in contemporary America? Well, in part, it’s because there’s been a government-sponsored war on tobacco for the last few decades, carried out through lawsuits and public health campaigns and smoking bans and so forth, that’s far eclipsed the more halting efforts to stigmatize alcohol consumption. Here again, public policy, rather than some deep empirical or philosophical truth about the relative harm of nicotine versus alcohol, has been a crucial factor in shaping cultural norms.

And the same is true, inevitably, of marriage law. Culture shapes law, of course: Judge Walker’s decision last week would be unimaginable without the cultural shift that’s made gay marriage seem first plausible and then necessary to many people. But law tends to turn around and shape culture right back. And this is particularly true when the law in question is constitutional law, because constitutional rights carry a distinctive legal weight and an even more distinctive cultural freight. (To take just one example, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the cultural space for making a moral critique of pornography has shrunk apace in the decades since the Supreme Court expanded First Amendment protections for pornographers, and limited the reach of obscenity laws.)

So if Anthony Kennedy follows Walker and finds that the traditional legal understanding of marriage is unconstitutional — and, by extension, that it’s irrational and bigoted to think otherwise — it’s just naive to say that this won’t have a ripple effect in the culture as a whole.

The point here is not to discuss the merits of Douthat’s arguments – though they are considerable. It is instead to take notice and see that people of faith do speak up in public secular life and do not lose their jobs for doing so, even at the New York friggin’ Times! I wonder if more of the anti-2k crowd were to take a page from Douthat the public debates over hotly contested issues would be not only more “fair and balanced” but also more people would “decide” to regard favorably (rather than as kooks) those who defend the way that Westerners have practiced the family lo these many years.

Where's Waldo Wednesday: Keeping the Union Balls in the Air

Published on by D. G. Hart1 Comment

So for my devotions this morning I used a prayer from Calvin and needed to pause to consider what I was requesting (I guess this an argument against forms). Calvin wrote (in French, of course):

Grant, Almighty God, that since thou hast deigned in thy mercy to gather us to thy Church, and to enclose us within the boundaries of thy word, by which thou preserveth us in the true and right worship of thy majesty, O grant that we may continue contended in this obedience to thee; and though Satan may, in many ways, attempt to draw us here and there, and we be also ourselves by nature inclined to evil, O grant, that being confirmed in faith and united to thee by that sacred bond, we may be constantly abide under the restraint of thy word, and thus cleave to Christ thine only begotten Son who has joined us forever to himself, and that we may never by any means turn aside from thee, but be, on the contrary, confirmed in the faith of his gospel, until at length he will receive us all into his kingdom. (Devotions and Prayers of John Calvin, p. 15)

Here is my confusion:

1) Is being united to God different from union with Christ? In this prayer Calvin speaks of union to God, Almighty before union with Christ.

2) If we are united to Christ how do we cleave to him? Doesn’t union suggest a oneness that exists independent of cleaving, such as that between a husband and wife?

3) If we are united to Christ how would we turn aside? Wouldn’t Christ be there when we turned since he is united to us?

My intention is not to mock union. It is to show that its usage is not altogether clear or free of confusion unless we have a map and glossary. Union advocates would really help us out if they could identify the balls.

Two Kingdom Tuesday On Where's Waldo Wednesday

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I have encountered what seems to me a strange notion — in several places where Federal Vision Worldviewism has left its mark — that the differences between Reformed and Anglicans are not that great, and that historically speaking it is wrong to distinguish them. Along with this perspective usually comes great regard for Richard Hooker as providing a proper critique of the Puritans’ ecclesiology and a correction to Calvin’s excesses.

But when you consdier the way the Dutch Reformed and the English Anglicans (I know it’s redundant but you need a place and a tradition and the English made the mistake of confusing the two) related in colonial New Netherland (later New York), you may understand why the Reformed churches were not wild about the English or the way they ran their church. The following is an excerpt that should point Reformed Christians away from the Canterbury Trail (high church Calvinism doesn’t need a bishop):

Dutch Calvinists had brought this notion with them to the New World. Writing in 1628, Dominie Jonas Michaelius, the first clergyman in New Netherland, conceded that although “political and ecclesiastical persons can greatly assist each other, nevertheless the matters and offices belinging together must not be mixed but kept separate, in order to prevent all confusion and disorder.” Indeed, quite often throughout the New Netherland period the clergy and the West India Company directors-general found themselves at odds; the most notorious such conflict occurred between Domine Everardus Bogardus and Director-General Willem Kieft, who battled each other so fiercely that they sailed together back to Holland for arbitration only to be shipwrecked and perish off the coast of Wales.

This adversarial relationship of church and state was foreign to Restoration Englishmen, however. Building on the writings of Thomas Erastus, a sixteenth-century political theorist, Anglicans believed that the church should be subject to the powers of the state. Richard Hooker, apologist for the Church of England, wrote that “there is not any restraint or limitation of matter for regal authority and power to be conversant in, but of religion whole, and of whatsoever cause thereto appertaineth, kings may lawfully have charge, they lawfully may therein exercise dominion, and use the temporal sword.” (Randall Balmer, A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies, pp. 20-21)

It does seem that most of the Reformed leaning folks today who advocate that magistrates get the true religion and enforce it (good and hard) are largely Erastian, while the 2k position is deeply rooted in those Reformed theologians and pastors that were always opposing Erastus and the magistrates who appealed to him. I guess another option is out there. Theonomy.