Month: July 2012

Freedom's Boomerang

Published on by D. G. Hart2 Comments

On the eve of July 4th — here in Hillsdale residents are gearing up for the city’s annual parade — many Americans may give a thought or two to the ideal of political freedom. Roman Catholics in the U.S. have been having more than a couple thoughts of late since they have been observing what the American bishops have called a “Fortnight for Freedom.” According to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops website:

The fourteen days from June 21—the vigil of the Feasts of St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More—to July 4, Independence Day, are dedicated to this “fortnight for freedom”—a great hymn of prayer for our country. Our liturgical calendar celebrates a series of great martyrs who remained faithful in the face of persecution by political power—St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More, St. John the Baptist, SS. Peter and Paul, and the First Martyrs of the Church of Rome. Culminating on Independence Day, this special period of prayer, study, catechesis, and public action will emphasize both our Christian and American heritage of liberty. Dioceses and parishes around the country have scheduled special events that support a great national campaign of teaching and witness for religious liberty.

But now to spoil the fun or complicate the prayers comes a piece at Religion & Politics on the limits of the bishops’ stand for freedom. Jessica Coblentz reports on parts of the American church where skepticism about the bishops’ project are evident:

Catholics for Choice (CFC), a reproductive rights group, has orchestrated the most expansive effort to actively engage the USCCB argument about religious liberty. In a statement, CFC asks the question, “Whose religious freedom are we talking about?” They argue, “No-cost contraception for the average woman, including many Catholic women, can mean following her religious beliefs, following her conscience.” Likewise, parishioners at The Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament parish in Washington D.C. released a public statement criticizing the campaign’s narrow depiction of religious liberty. “We, the faithful, are in danger of becoming pawns,” they stated. “In no way do we feel that our religious freedom is at risk. We find it grotesque to have the call for this ‘Fortnight’ evoke the names of holy martyrs who died resisting tyranny.” Other Catholics, from the editors of Commonweal Magazine to Bishop Stephen Blaire of Stockton, California, have criticized the shortsighted, partisan nature of the USCCB’s charge that the mandate poses a threat to religious freedom.

I for one am not about to instruct Roman Catholics on their understanding of religious liberty. Part of the problem stems from apparently conflicting teachings on religious freedom and liberty of conscience. While Vatican I denounced freedom of conscience, Vatican II took a much more expansive and positive view of human rights and freedoms. One plausible attempt to reconcile this tension is here (though how well the bishops are doing at instructing the faithful on the nooks and crannies of church teaching is another matter). What does make sense is that Rome would never construe freedom of conscience in such a way as to permit sinful acts.

An observation a Protestant onlooker may responsibly make concerns the slipperiness of freedom for Christians in the United States. For almost two centuries Protestants believed that their religion was not simply the best to preserve American freedoms, but also that the nature of religious and civil liberty were virtually indistinguishable when Protestants were the ones holding the reins of liberty. This was, of course, a major source of anti-Catholicism among U.S. Protestants: believers loyal to a foreign prince (the Pope) were incapable of participating in a free republic. But this identification of religious and civil liberty was American Protestantism’s undoing. During the 1960s, when the complaints of African-Americans, women, and war protesters raised genuine questions about the extent of “liberty for all” in the United States, Protestant endorsements of political liberty looked remarkably hollow. In response, the Protestant mainline churches went from the biggest apologists for the United States and the West to one of the nation’s constant critics (they found their “prophetic” voice).

It looks like the Roman Catholic Church, with its appeal to religious freedom, may be experiencing the tension that afflicted Protestants. Granted, the bishops are not part of an informal ecclesiastical establishment the way that mainline Protestants were in the 1950s. Also different is the setting for the bishops’ effort — contested federal policies that potentially hurt and definitely disrupt Roman Catholic agencies.

Still, what is similar is the way that liberty is always contested. The liberties one group wants inevitably involve the loss of another group’s prerogatives. In the United States we used to have a political mechanism for resolving this tension — it was called federalism. What the Roman Catholic Church has to resolve the conflict in its midst over the nature and scope of religious freedom is another matter. Whether Roman Catholic officials have the gumption to quell this debate by appealing to the power of church hierarchy is a matter best left to Roman Catholic speculation. Still, it would be a curious feat to see the church resort to clerical authority in the name of religious freedom and liberty of conscience.

Of Paper Popes and Parasitic Presbyterians

Published on by D. G. Hart105 Comments

Perhaps the ruckus over Jason Stellman’s decision has passed but one response by Peter Leithart needs some attention, if only because it highlights a general problem in Reformed and Presbyterian circles. It is the way that Reformed Protestantism sits lightly with folks who are officers in Reformed and Presbyterian communions. Not to pick on anyone in particular, but also not to hide behind vagaries, this problem is not Leithart’s by himself. It is also part of the gift mix that John Frame and Tim Keller have bequeathed to many of their readers and fans.

The problem specifically is one identifying more with the Bible than tradition, relying more on exegesis than the common confession of a Reformed communion, exploring more existing church and intellectual concerns than mining paths trod by saints in the past.

Here is Leithart’s version of this impulse (in the context of Stellman’s decision):

Confessionalists, after all, place a great deal of emphasis on the tradition of Reformed theology, embodied especially in Reformed confessions. Throughout the debates of the past few years, I have presented mainly biblical arguments for my positions, and kept historical concerns subordinate. My opponents have typically been much more interested in testing my views by the Westminster Confession. The touchstone of their theology is a piece of the Reformed tradition as much as, and in some cases more than, Scripture. Confessionalists claim that the Confession provides standard exegesis of Scripture, to which Reformed theologians have to submit. Confessional Reformed theology thus has a natural affinity for Rome that biblicists like me don’t share. Confessionalists want the Confession to be a paper Pope. It’s not surprising that some find the paper Pope inadequate, and go searching for a live one. (If, as some will charge, Scripture is a paper Pope, it’s one whose ring I gladly kiss.)

Behind this Confessionalist elevation of tradition (in practice, over Scripture) is a broader tendency related to what I have critiqued elsewhere as “tragic metaphysics,” the notion that the original and old is necessarily preferable to the derived and the new. In its Trinitarian dogma, Christianity says the opposite: The Son, though He comes from the Father, is equal to the Father in every respect; in fact, there is no pure, unsupplemented origin, because there can be no Father without a Son. It says the opposite too in its eschatology: The golden age is not lost in the unrecoverable past but ahead of us in an eschatological future. Its Trinitarian theology and eschatology give Christian faith an open-endedness that can be unsettling. It’s unnerving to have to seek foundations in a city that is yet to come. (According to Fergus Kerr, this is exactly what Thomas says –Thomas is an “eschatological foundationalist.”)

When I read an argument like this I wonder whether someone like Leithart could just as easily minister in a Free Methodist Church as among Presbyterians. After all, lots of Protestants claim to be biblical and don’t let the past affect what is best for the church today. Or what about the Southern Baptist Convention? Is that set of congregations just as good as the United Reformed Churches? Or could it be that when push comes to shove, a fellow like Leithart really does identify with the Reformed tradition? That something really does differentiate Reformed from other Protestant communions?

I have no idea what Leithart’s response might be to a question about whether to minister as a Presbyterian or Lutheran. But I suspect, even hope, that he would say that Reformed Protestantism is superior in its teaching and practices to other Protestant churches.

If so, it would be a welcome development if he would pay back a little into the Presbyterian heritage fund. I mean, it is one thing to teach and defend the Reformed confessions and another to sit back and let your professional colleagues do it, all the while benefitting from at least some of their labors. It is also one thing to seek unity and discipline in a Reformed communion (through the heavy lifting of service at church assemblies) and allow the efforts of others to provide a cushion for you to do your own work. Furthermore, it is one thing to build on insights of generations of theologians and pastors (after all, Leithart isn’t starting from scratch, not even with his exegesis) and not show some gratitude for what has gone before.

Not everyone has to do the same amount of work or heritage maintenance. But is it too much to ask for everyone to be pulling in the same direction?

It is a free country, of course, and we have Reformed communions that are more or less confessional. So Leithart doesn’t have to do anything to keep up with his teaching, preaching, blogging, and writing. But for the sake of truth in advertising, identifying with his Presbyterian credentials, communicants, and past would certainly be desirable. It would even be responsible.

Postscript: I hesitated to employ “parasitic” in the post’s title but wanted to maintain the alliteration. “Free-riding” is obviously less inflammatory but at least I (always gracious) didn’t use “bloodsucking.”

The Gloating Coalition?

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

The news of Jerry Sandusky’s conviction for child molestation has some Christians beating their breasts over their faith’s influence on western civilization. Joe Carter, one of TGC’s aggregators, has a quotation from a piece at the Catholic World Reporter that argues Sandusky would not have been found guilty in the ancient worlds of Greece or Rome:

If Sandusky would have lived 2000 years ago, he would not have been found guilty of anything. He would not even have been noticed. His actions would have been entirely unremarkable. There would have been no disgust, no anger. The verdict would have been innocent, and in fact, the notion that he was guilty of anything would have been unintelligible.

Carter jumps on the bandwagon:

For 2,000 years, the influence of Christ has had a profound—yet underestimated—influence on all aspects of Western culture. We often take for granted that without the “salt and light” of Christianity, behaviors that we consider disgusting and taboo would be accepted and commonplace. But what will happen if the influence of Christ and his followers continues to wane?

Discerning which is more remarkable here — the bad taste or the theological blunder — is difficult to say. Why would someone use this occasion to boast about the cultural effects of one’s faith? Why not show a little humility, mixed in with a dose of compassion for both Sandusky’s family, not to mention the victims (and their families), and back away from exploiting this story in the culture wars? Is this really going to persuade anyone on the other side or will it confirm the Religious Right’s reputation for self-congratulatory righteousness (and thus inspiring the faithful)?

At the same time, I thought the gospel was not about punishment for sin but forgiveness from its guilt and penalty. If the Gospel Coalition is going to stand up for the gospel, wouldn’t a fitting perspective here be to suggest that Christ might forgive even a sinner like Jerry Sandusky (if he repents and trusts in Christ)? But that kind of message doesn’t play so well in the culture wars where Christians invariably want more law and less forgiveness. Mind you, this is not a plea for anarchy or libertinism, not even a return to Rome or Athens. It is simply to show that the way of the gospel and the church’s ministry is distinct from the sword of the magistrate and the justice it wields.

This kind of historical credit-taking is downright unbecoming since it seems to attribute to Christianity (in a very whiggish way — how Roman Catholics go whiggy is another matter) all the blessings of modern society. To keep modern historical advances in perspective, a recent piece by Diedre N. McCloskey in The New Republic on happiness may bring these cultural warriors back down to a complicated earth. Here is an important excerpt that suggests Christianity did not give us all the benefits that some would have us think. The Enlightenment deserves a little credit (or blame depending on how you interpret the turn from otherworldliness to worldly preoccupations:

On a long view, understand, it is only recently that we have been guiltlessly obsessed with either pleasure or happiness. In secular traditions, such as the Greek or the Chinese, a pleasuring version of happiness is downplayed, at any rate in high theory, in favor of political or philosophical insight. The ancient Chinese sage Zhuangzi observed of some goldfish in a pond, “See how happy they are!” A companion replied, “How do you know they are happy?” Zhuangzi: “How do you know I don’t know?” In Christianity, for most of its history, the treasure, not pleasure, was to be stored up in heaven, not down here where thieves break in. After all, as a pre-eighteenth-century theologian would put it—or as a modern and mathematical economist would, too—an infinite afterlife was infinitely to be preferred to any finite pleasure attainable in earthly life.

The un-happiness doctrine made it seem pointless to attempt to abolish poverty or slavery or wife-beating. A coin given to the beggar rewarded the giver with a leg-up to heaven, a mitzvah, a hasanaat; but the ancient praise for charity implied no plan to adopt welfare programs or to grant rights of personal liberty or to favor a larger national income. A life of sitting by the West Gate with a bowl to beg was, after all, an infinitesimally small share of one’s life to come. Get used to it: For now and for the rest of your life down here, it’s your place in the great chain of being. Take up your cross, and quit whining. What does it matter how miserable you are in this life if you’ll get pie in the sky when you die? Such fatalism in many religions—“God willing,” we say, “im yirtzeh hashem,” “insh’Allah,” “deo volente”—precluded idle talk of earthly happiness.

Then, in the eighteenth century, our earthly happiness became important to us, in high intellectual fashion. By 1776, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was an unoriginal formulation of what we all, of course, now admitted that we chiefly wanted. John Locke had taught, in 1677, that “the business of men [is] to be happy in this world by the enjoyment of the things of nature subservient to life, health, ease, and pleasure”—though he added piously, “and by the comfortable [that is, comforting] hopes of another life when this is ended.” By 1738, the Comte de Mirabeau wrote to a friend, recommending simply, “[W]hat should be our only goal: happiness.”

“Our only goal.” To see how strange such a remark is, consider whether it could have been uttered by a leader of opinion in 1538. Martin Luther? Michelangelo? Charles V? No. They sought heavenly, artistic, or political glory—not something so domestic as happiness. Yet, in the late seventeenth century, even Anglican priests commenced preaching that God wanted us to be happy as much as holy. They called it “eudaemonism.” Anglicans and, astonishingly, some New England Congregationalists turned against the old, harsh, Augustinian-Calvinist line. We are not, declared the eudaemonists, mere sinners in the hands of an angry God, worms unworthy of grace. We are God’s beloved creatures, his pets.

The eudaemonistic turn was a Very Good Thing, resulting in fresh projects to better our stay here on Earth, some of them remarkably successful. Democracy was one, since, if you followed the fashion for universal happiness, it became impossible to go on insisting that what really mattered was the pleasure of the Duke or the Lord Bishop. Enlightened despots of the era claimed to seek the good of all, which paradoxically gave the populace the idea that maybe they themselves could do it.

Parallel with the stirrings of democracy and its accompanying welfarism, advocating for hospitals and free public education, was a new bourgeois dignity and liberty. Starting in Holland and England, and in the North American colonies of the English, the paired bourgeois revaluations combined to cause modern enrichment. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835 that “all the English colonies [in North America] at the time of their birth … seemed destined to present the development of … the bourgeois and democratic liberty of which the history of the world did not yet offer a complete model.” Or again about the first industrial nation: “Looking at the turn given to the human spirit in England by political life; seeing the Englishman … inspired by the sense that he can do anything. … I am in no hurry to inquire whether nature has scooped out ports for him, and given him coal and iron.”