Month: March 2014

The New Calvinism is not the Old Calvinism

Published on by D. G. Hart251 Comments

We can be sure of that thanks to Jared Oliphint:

Twelve Thirteen features of the New Calvinism:

1.The New Calvinism, in its allegiance to the inerrancy of the Bible, embraces the biblical truths behind the five points (TULIP), while having an aversion to using the acronym or any other systematic packaging, along with a sometimes qualified embrace of limited atonement. The focus is on Calvinistic soteriology but not to the exclusion or the appreciation of the broader scope of Calvin’s vision.

1. The Old Calvinism begins with the doctrine of Scripture summarized in confessions like the Westminster Confession of Faith and is willing to use TULIP as a handle for understanding Calvinist soteriology. Old Calvinism also relies on systematic thought.

2. The New Calvinism embraces the sovereignty of God in salvation, and in all the affairs of life in history, including evil and suffering.

2. The Old Calvinism affirms divine sovereignty in everything, even in Christ’s death on the cross for the elect.

3. The New Calvinism has a strong complementarian flavor as opposed to egalitarian, with an emphasis on the flourishing of men and women in relationships where men embrace a call to robust, humble, Christ-like servant leadership.

3. The Old Calvinism follows biblical teaching on male ordination and refuses to describe human life this side of glory as flourishing.

4. The New Calvinism leans toward being culture-affirming rather than culture-denying, while holding fast to some very culturally alien positions, like positions on same-sex practice and abortion.

4. The Old Calvinism understands salvation to be distinct from culture, hence Old Calvinists’ belief that deceased saints are saved even though they no longer inhabit a culture.

5. The New Calvinism embraces the essential place of the local church. It is led mainly by pastors, has a vibrant church-planting bent, produces widely-sung worship music, and exalts the preached word as central to the work of God locally and globally.

5. The Old Calvinism does not exist apart from congregations where the marks of the church are evident and which are part of regional, national, and ecumenical assemblies.

6. The New Calvinism is aggressively mission-driven, including missional impact on social evils, evangelistic impact on personal networks, and missionary impact on unreached peoples of the world.

6. The Old Calvinism actually calls and supports home and foreign missionaries through assemblies of presbyters that oversee such ministry.

7. The New Calvinism is inter-denominational with a strong (some would say oxymoronic) Baptistic element.

7. The Old Calvinism is Reformed Protestant and seeks fraternal relations with communions of like faith and practice.

8. The New Calvinism includes charismatics and non-charismatics.

8. The Old Calvinism excludes charismatics because Old Calvinists believe in the sufficiency of Scripture.

9. The New Calvinism puts a priority on pietism or piety in the Puritan vein, with an emphasis on the essential role of affections in Christian living, while esteeming the life of the mind and being very productive in it, and embracing the value of serious scholarship. Jonathan Edwards would be invoked as a model of this combination of the affections and the life of the mind more often than John Calvin, whether that’s fair to Calvin or not.

9. The Old Calvinism does not drop names and includes Reformed Protestants who are temperamentally restrained (read Scots, Dutch, Germans, Swiss).

10. The New Calvinism is vibrantly engaged in publishing books and even more remarkably in the world of the internet, with hundreds of energetic bloggers and social media activists, with Twitter as the increasingly default way of signaling things new and old that should be noticed and read.

10. The Old Calvinism has more books than New Calvinism, and many of them are ones that New Calvinists need to tell the difference between Calvinism and other kinds of Protestantism.

11. The New Calvinism is international in scope, multi-ethnic in expression, culturally diverse. There is no single geographic, racial, cultural governing center. There are no officers, no organization, nor any loose affiliation that would encompass the whole. I would dare say that there are outcroppings of this movement that nobody (including me) in this room has ever heard of.

11. The Old Calvinism was and still is international in ways that the New Calvinists would not understand. Old Calvinists also appreciate in ways that New Calvinists don’t how European and Western Calvinism is. This means that Old Calvinists speak English without feeling guilty.

12. The New Calvinism is robustly gospel-centered, cross-centered, with dozens of books rolling off the presses, coming at the gospel from every conceivable angle, and applying it to all areas of life with a commitment to seeing the historic doctrine of justification, finding its fruit in sanctification personally and communally.

12. The Old Calvinism teaches that Christ died on the cross only for the elect and Old Calvinists are happy to let the Reformed creeds and confessions define the way that Reformed pastors teach and apply the atonement (among other doctrines taught and professed by the Reformed churches).

13. The New Calvinism uses words like robust, vibrant, embrace and lots of adverbs.

13. Old Calvinists don’t.

What If We Are In Communion with Celebrity Pastors?

Published on by D. G. Hart61 Comments

Carl Trueman takes stock of the celebrity pastor phenomenon and calls on the revived Presbyterians to spend some of their leadership capital (is Tim Keller paying attention?):

But here is the rub: If there are people out there who still believe that there is such a thing as reformed evangelicalism as a trans-denominational movement, if they believe that this movement will play a key role in the future of the church, and if they believe that they are important leaders in this movement, then they need to speak directly, clearly, and firmly to precisely these issues. You cannot be a leader without leading publicly on the major issues and major personalities of the day who impact your movement and your chosen constituency. It is not enough to say ‘That person is no longer one of us’ when you helped to create a culture in which accountability is not transparent and where your public silence encouraged the big names to think they could do what they wanted and not be held publicly to account. That is where today’s problems started.

That accountability question has always been the Achilles’ Heel of the evangelical parachurch movement. Now that there are huge sums of money involved, that question is far more pressing and yet far more complicated than ever before. We who are associated with the so-called reformed evangelical movement, whether because we want to be or because others just make the connection, now look as corrupt and worldly as the despicable televangelists of a previous generation.

I’ll see Carl’s rub and raise him one. The problem is not one simply for the heavy artillery in the Gospel Coalition. This is also a Presbyterian and Reformed problem. The reason is that some Presbyterian ministers are celebrity pastors and these celebrities are accountable (supposedly) to the assemblies of their communions. So what are officers in the PCA, for instance, to do with someone like Tim Keller who needs, as Trueman argues, to speak directly and precisely to the issues involved in the recent controversies surrounding Mark Driscoll and others? But this is not merely a PCA problem. It is also one for folks like Carl and me, who are in the OPC and are in fellowship with Keller and the PCA, or for men like Scott Clark and Mike Horton, who are in the URC and in fellowship with Keller and the PCA.

I don’t know what the answer is, even though I have tried to point out the dilemmas posed by a prominent PCA pastor’s poor ecclesiology. But if connectionalism is one of the aspects of Presbyterian church government, then all of us, celebrity or not, are connected to the problem of celebrity pastors.

Golden Oldie (part three)

Published on by D. G. Hart15 Comments

From Make War No More?: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of J. Gresham Machen’s Warrior Children

J. Gresham Machen may not be the gold standard for twentieth-century Reformed orthodoxy but he does stand out not only in every account of American Presbyterianism but in most accounts of religion in United States as arguably the most important defender of historic Christianity. Some of the reasons are circumstantial. Machen happened to be teaching at a seminary, Princeton, that was firmly linked to the Protestant establishment and that had a long history of educating conservatives in other denominations. This placed Machen at the center of a the fundamentalist controversy when it erupted in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. with support and admiration from non-Presbyterian conservatives. If he had been teaching at Columbia Seminary in South Carolina or at Wheaton College, the reporters who covered the religion beat in America would likely have been less interested than in a Princeton professor. Other reasons for Machen’s reputation stem from those attributes he brought to bear in his circumstances. His writings show remarkable acumen, courage, and even fairness to his opponents. In addition, Machen carried on in his battles with liberalism for the better part of two decades and, not being content with celebrity or individual effort, recognized the importance of establishing institutions to sustain a Reformed witness. As a man of his times and a person who distinguished himself from his contemporaries, Machen was, in the words of the novelist, Pearl Buck, “worth a hundred of his fellows who, as princes of the church, occupy easy places and play their church politics and trim their sails to every win, who in their smug observance of the convention sof life and religion offend all honest and searching spirits.” That is why Buck, whom Machen had opposed, wished that he had lived longer so he could “go on fighting them.”

Yet, for all of Machen’s accomplishments, the verdict on his efforts has been mixed even among conservative Presbyterians and evangelicals. Much of the discomfort with Machen surrounds his flair for controversy. Of course, critics such as Robert Moats Miller, the biographer of Harry Emerson Fosdick, might be expected to focus on the unflattering aspects of Machen’s career. In fact, Machen’s combativeness was so extreme for Miller that he could, without qualification or fear of misinterpretation, in a respectable academic journal refer to Machen as “quite loony.” Ernest R. Sandeen, one of the first American historians to give fundamentalism an even-handed inquiry would not let his impartiality extend to Machen whose belligerency was supposedly characterized by “perverse obstinacy.”

But when scholars with ecclesial ties to Machen demonstrate a similar unease with his combativeness, the problem is particularly grave. On the fiftieth anniversary of Machen’s death, Mark A. Noll, then an elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, observed that the cost of Machen’s contentiousness was “large.” He “undermined the effectiveness of those Reformed and evangelical individuals who chose to remain at Princeton Seminary, with the Presbyterian mission board, and in the Northern Presbyterian Church.” Furthermore, according to Noll, Machen “left successors ill-equipped to deal with the more practical matters of evangelism, social outreach, and devotional nurture.” George M. Marsden, in a piece for Princeton Seminary Bulletin expressed similar reservations to Noll’s about Machen’s “cantankerousness.” Even though Marsden was a son of the OPC and his father had been a prominent official in the OPC and at Westminster Seminary, he still could not warm up to Machen’s propensity to fight. Marsden conceded that Machen’s critique of liberalism had merit, but he “had a personality that only his good friends found appealing, and he stood for a narrow Old School confessionalism and exclusivism that many people today find appalling.”

One last example of an Orthodox Presbyterian who could not stomach Machen’s combativeness is John R. Frame, for many years a professor at Westminster (in Philadelphia and at California) and a minister in the OPC. In his book, Evangelical Reunion Frame indicated his discomfort with the militancy that had characterized the OPC since its founding, and more recently in his infamous article, “Machen’s Warrior Children,” he registered a complaint similar to Noll and Marsden: “The Machen movement was born in the controversy over liberal theology.” “I have no doubt that Machen and his colleagues were right to reject this theology and to fight it,” Frame added. “But it is arguable that once the Machenites found themselves in a ‘true Presbyterian church’ they were unable to moderate their martial impulses. Being in a church without liberals to fight, they turned on one another.”

Aside from the merits of these assessments, the verdicts of Noll, Marsden, and Frame all point to a curious phenomenon among those in the second generation of Orthodox Presbyterians – that is, an unwillingness to fight for the Reformed faith combined with a strong dose of theological and ecclesiastical pacifism. None of these scholars thought Machen was wrong to oppose liberalism per se even if each person might assess the strength’s of Machen’s critique differently. But beyond the errors that liberalism posed, like many who were associated with the institutions that Machen founded – the OPC, Westminster Seminary, and the Presbyterian Guardian – these scholars were unprepared to go. Combating liberalism, then, was apparently acceptable because it was obviously wrong. But opposing errors among evangelical or Reformed Christians was apparently unacceptable for many in the second generation. Indeed, the views of Noll, Marsden, and Frame were not unusual among conservative Presbyterians during the 1970s and 1980s. In the OPC particularly, the reasons for contending for the Reformed faith looked increasingly pointless and the church sought ways to escape its rut, first by seeking a merger with the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod, and then with the Presbyterian Church in America. In less than forty years, the fight had left the OPC and with its departure had come reassessments of Machen, his role in the controversies of the 1920s and 1930s, and even his legacy.

Would You Give Up Whiskey for Lent?

Published on by D. G. Hart33 Comments

It’s a curious post for early in a period some call Lent, but Robert Christian thinks Roman Catholics have a drinking problem:

From parishes to parochial schools to university classrooms, the Church is failing in its responsibility to talk about the pernicious impact of alcohol (and even drugs) on so many people in our society, along with the detrimental impact it has on achieving the common good. One is more likely to see devout Catholics being flip about drinking—or even romanticizing and glorifying it—than confronting the nihilism, escapism, and despair that are a big part of our nation’s drinking culture and the wreckage that it leaves in its wake. The Church takes a harder line on drugs, but how often is the topic really discussed? How often does the Church address why people turn to drug use and explain its incompatibility with human flourishing? The Church provides some assistance, but most often it comes after people have already had their lives and the lives of their loved ones (and possibly strangers) devastated by the ruinous costs of addiction. The Church can and should do better. . . .

It is strange that those who identify the emptiness of materialism, consumerism, the sexual objectification and exploitation of others, the lust for power, and other false paths to happiness are failing to address the illusory nature of the “happiness” generated by drugs and alcohol. It is downright embarrassing when one compares the Church to the world’s other religions. Buddhism, Taoism, Mormonism, Sikhism, Islam, the Baha’i faith, and various Hindu sects and protestant denominations either teach that alcohol should be avoided entirely or used in moderation (defined in such a way that many Catholics would find fairly extreme). While engaging in interfaith dialogue, the vast majority of thoughtful, virtuous young people I have met from other faiths have been teetotalers (those who abstain from alcohol entirely), while I have witnessed many of my fellow devout Catholics, who are otherwise morally serious, acting foolishly due to their consumption of alcohol. The contrast is cringe-worthy.

Not to be overly low church, but the habit of giving up something (it used to be sin) for forty days a year may not be the best way to live a life of moderation and restraint. At the same time, comments like Christian’s reveal the dark side of the old charge that Protestantism was just a cover for antinomianism. No one can outmoralize a Protestant. Even so, Rome’s version of the gospel is no barrier against taking the law lightly.

The human predicament may be that we love the law when it makes us superior, and we love grace when we are feeling low. Protestants of the good sort know that we are only superior in Christ.

Religious Tests for Having an Opinion

Published on by D. G. Hart29 Comments

This piece reminded me of a thought I have had for a long time. It first came to me when studying neo-Calvinism and the demands of w-w thinking. But it continued to haunt me when dealing with the logician-paradigmatists over at Deduced Into Church. The thought is that Christian “conservatives” insist that philosophy precedes religion, which of course is remarkably ironic since these believers (both Reformed and Roman Catholic) are arguing for the ultimacy of faith. But to do so they use philosophical arguments about incoherence, epistemological foundations, and moral consistency that wind up making human reason, not faith or Scripture or tradition or Christ, the answer to life’s most difficult questions. Mind you, the question, “how am I right with God?” is hardly the same level of difficulty as “how do I know?” or “how do I become virtuous?”

In the post over at Imaginative Conservative, we see once again the effects of philosophical supremacy applied to fellow citizens, in this case libertarians:

Many secular libertarians hold that if there is a divine arbiter who will judge our actions, then one can’t fully enjoy the freedom, say, to consume pornography and illegal drugs, and engage in promiscuous sex. Philosopher Thomas Nagel made the point well when he admitted, “I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”

But the impression that atheism or materialism is an accomplished host for libertarian values is mistaken. Individual rights, freedom and individual responsibility, reason, and moral realism: none of these make much sense if reality is ultimately blind matter in motion, if, as Carl Sagan said, “the cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.” Libertarians may be surprised to learn that these core values—if not the entire repertoire of libertarian ideas—makes far more sense in a theistic milieu. But they need not take my word for it. The history of the West supports this view, as do the arguments of leading materialist intellectuals.

Historically, the very idea of human rights and the related idea of equality emerged over many centuries in a theistic and specifically Christian culture. In the West, major milestones include the Magna Carta (1215), the English Bill of Rights (1689), the Declaration of Independence (1776), and the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights (1791). A specific anthropology emerges from these documents with greater and greater clarity. Human beings are made in the image of God, and as such, should be accorded special rights and dignity manifested in law.

I don’t reject this argument, though I do wonder how conducive it is to Christian orthodoxy (Protestant or Roman Catholic) if the heterodox Christians who primarily conceived of the United States become evidence in support of belief in God. Doesn’t this wind up with a standard of minimal Christian belief rather than one of full-blown orthodoxy? And doesn’t such minimal Christianity wind up turning on fuller expressions of Christianity when they move past belief in God to the Eucharist or limited atonement as sectarian or parochial? In which case, theistic thinking can be just as hostile to serious Christianity as libertarian secularists may be?

But my objection concerns the way this argument may sound to unbelievers, the people with whom we share planet earth this side of the eschaton. If Christians insist that you cannot have ideas about political rights, or civil freedoms, or limited government without prior claims to belief in God, are they not questioning the status of non-believers in the public square? The U.S. Constitution makes no religious test for holding pubic office. State constitutions also now refuse to use religious tests for office holders. So why would Christians want to privilege theistic citizens in public debates while discrediting agnostic or atheistic citizens? Perhaps the better way of expressing that question, since I can see also sorts of ulterior motives for excluding non-Christian citizens from public debate, is why don’t the philosophically inclined Christians sense that their philosophical rigor comes across as another effort to exclude unbelief from the public life?

That’s one side of this recurring thought. The other is the great affinity that neo-Calvinism and pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism have in privileging philosophy. Both of those traditions grew up spooked by the French Revolution and carved up the universe between theism and atheism, both fought the Enlightenment with Christian philosophy or w-w, and both left a legacy of antithesis — intellectual, cultural, political. If a gateway drug for Protestant converts to Rome (the anti-revolutionary anti-modern one) exists, it could be neo-Calvinism with its bending the knee to philosophy.

If Only He Had Read the Book All the Way Through

Published on by D. G. Hart16 Comments

Pete Enns introduces his forthcoming book:

If we come to the Bible expecting (as so many do) something like a spiritual owner’s manual complete with handy index, a step-by-step field guide to the life of faith, an absolutely sure answer-book to unlock the mystery of God and the meaning of life, we are setting up an expectation the Bible simply is not designed to handle.

The end product is a fragile, nervous faith. Faith like that produces stress, because it has to be tended and defended with 24/7 vigilance in order to survive—like a sickly baby robin in a shoebox. And even with constant tending, it still may not survive.

Is a life of faith in God truly supposed to be this stressful? Is this what God wants for us? I don’t think so. So let’s stop making it that way by setting the Bible up to be something it’s not prepared to be and then anxiously smoothing over the rough parts to make it fit false expectations. The cost is too high.

I’m all for avoiding the Bible as a how-to manual. Show me Jesus. But that makes the debates about inerrancy all the more poignant.

Enns still hasn’t figured out the stakes of inerrancy. If the Bible is wrong about somethings, it could be wrong about Christ? And if wrong about Christ, my faith is not merely nervous but as Paul says “vain.”

And Pete still hasn’t figured out the Reformed game face; he spent too many years thinking evangelicalism and Reformed Protestantism are the same. Reformed Presbyterians don’t believe in victorious Christian living because we are theo-political refugees during the last stages of a cosmic war.

[10] Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. [11] Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. [12] For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. [13] Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm. [14] Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, [15] and, as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace. [16] In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one; [17] and take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, [18] praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. (Ephesians 6:10-18 ESV)

Six days of work and waiting, one of rest in when we enjoy a foretaste of the rest to come.

Sola Scriptura Has Its Moments

Published on by D. G. Hart31 Comments

Carson Holloway explains why the Roman Catholic Church teaches what it does about marriage and divorce (and in doing so sounds like a Protestant):

It turns out, then, that the Church’s rather rigorous teaching on marriage is based not on the words of some little known celibate old man, but on the words of one very well known and important celibate young man. The teaching is based on the words of Jesus Christ, whom faithful Catholics believe to be God. Perhaps, then, Christians at least, and even all those people who claim to respect Jesus as a moral teacher, could cut the Church some slack and acknowledge that it has good reason to think that it is not just imposing some man-made morality on human beings but in fact preserving what was delivered to her by her divine founder.

And there you have the logic of Protestantism, a form of reasoning that makes sense to most Christians unless they are trying to protect the prerogatives of specific offices. Sometimes the word of God really is a lot more compelling than the word of men (even episcopal ones).

The Change Callers Are Waiting For?

Published on by D. G. Hart29 Comments

The Times reported last week on the “Francis effect“:

One year into his pontificate, Pope Francis remains immensely popular among American Catholics and is widely seen as a force for positive change within the Roman Catholic Church. More than eight-in-ten U.S. Catholics say they have a favorable view of the pontiff, including half who view him very favorably. The percentage of Catholics who view Francis “very favorably” now rivals the number who felt equally positive about Pope John Paul II in the 1980s and 1990s, though Francis’ overall favorability rating remains a few points shy of that of the long-serving Polish pope.

Seven-in-ten U.S. Catholics also now say Francis represents a major change in direction for the church, a sentiment shared by 56% of non-Catholics. And nearly everyone who says Francis represents a major change sees this as a change for the better. . . .

But there are other indications of somewhat more intense religiosity among Catholics. About a quarter of Catholics (26%) say they have become “more excited” about their Catholic faith over the past year (outnumbering the one-in-ten who have become less excited). Four-in-ten Catholics say they have been praying more often in the past 12 months (compared with 8% who say they have been praying less often). And somewhat more Catholics say they have been reading the Bible and other religious texts more frequently (21%) than say they have been doing so less frequently (14%). None of these questions about religious practices were explicitly tied in the survey to Francis’ papacy; the questions dealing with attitudes toward Francis came elsewhere in the questionnaire.

The survey also finds growing numbers who expect that in the near future the Catholic Church will allow priests to get married; 51% think the church will make this change by the year 2050, up 12 percentage points from the days immediately following Francis’ election a year ago. But there has been less change in Catholics’ expectations about other church teachings. Roughly four-in-ten Catholics think that in the coming decades the church either definitely or probably will allow women to become priests, about the same number who held this expectation a year ago. And 56% of Catholics think the church will soon allow Catholics to use birth control, very similar to the 53% who said this last year.

All the more reason not to put hope in princes.

Let My People Go

Published on by D. G. Hart122 Comments

If the Israelis can distinguish between an Arab Christian and an Arab Muslim, why can’t Americans tell the difference between an evangelical and a Reformed Protestant? (Supply your own punchline.)

This thought experiment came to mind when reading this:

An Israeli bill will grant legal distinction between Israel’s Muslim and Christian Arabs for the first time, recognizing Christians as a separate minority. But many Arab Christians don’t want such distinctions.

The controversial bill was approved by a 31-6 vote in its third and final reading in the Knesset Monday. The legislation will also increase employment representation for Christian Arabs in Israel’s government by adding an Israeli Christian Arab to the panel of the Advisory Committee for Equal Opportunity.

This will give the primarily Arab 160,000-person Christian population in Israel its own representative alongside representatives for ultra-orthodox Jews, new immigrants, women, and other religious and social groups, according to the Jerusalem Post.

What’s the problem with such a distinction? Looks like it’s the same problem in the U.S.:

“I believe most Arabs will refuse this decision,” Munther Na’um told CT of the controversial bill passed earlier this week. It distinguishes between Israel’s Muslim and Christian Arab communities for the first time and recognizes Christians as a separate minority.

“It’s meant to separate the whole family [Israeli Arabs] in political decisions,” Na’um said, speaking from his base in the northern Israeli town of Shafr Amr. Palestinians living in Israel are referred to as Israeli Arabs.

“It’s not good for Arabs, whether Christians or Muslims, or the Jews,” he said. Na’um believes that some Israeli politicians are “trying to separate us by religious status and create a political situation from that.”

“It will not be effective,” he added.

The bill was approved by a 31-6 vote in its third and final reading in the Knesset Monday. The legislation will also increase employment representation for Christian Arabs in Israel’s government by adding an Israeli Christian Arab to the panel of the Advisory Committee for Equal Opportunity.

The evangelical leader downplayed the move by Israeli politicians in the Knesset which has angered fellow Arab lawmakers.

“I don’t think this will make much impact because the relations between Christians and Muslims are very close. We have the same traditions, the same culture. It will be difficult to separate us just because we are Christians and they are Muslims,” Na’um said.

In other words, the reason for rejecting differences between Muslims and Christians is political. They are more effective as an ethnic political bloc than they are as separate religious groups.

And that is about as far as this analogy goes because what Christians face in the U.S. in no way compares to the circumstances that Palestinians confront in Israel. But the point is that the aspect of American Protestantism that keeps throwing Reformed Protestants into the same evangelical goo as every other Protestant who is either outside the mainline or ambivalent about the mainline churches’ policies and programs is politics is similar to the one that unifies Arab Christians and Muslims in Israel — not what they believe but a common political foe. Ever since the Religious Right emerged as an electoral force, Reformed Protestants have been more inclined to carve up the national scene according to culture-war categories than confessional teaching. W-w my foot!

That is true except for 2kers, who know that the kingdom of Christ claims higher and different allegiances than the Republic or Tea Party.

Golden Oldie (part two)

Published on by D. G. Hart11 Comments

An excerpt from “‘Reformed’ or ‘Revived’: Why Words Matter”, Modern Reformation (July/August 1998):

Perhaps a better way of showing these differences is to contrast the words “revive” and “reform.” These words connote the same difference already noted between Tennent and the Second Helvetic Confession. The word, “revive,” suggests an effort to recover genuine spiritual existence and vitality in the lives of believers, and to introduce non-believers to the eternal life that comes through Christ. A revival cuts through the forms and “vain repetitions” of established and hypocritical religion and goes to the heart to cause and nurture genuine conversion and real repentance. Not only does revivalism thrive on the desire for authentic religion but its aim is individualistic. To be sure, the more people revived, the better the church may be. But revival stresses individual conversion and personal morality.

The word, “reform,” however, suggests a restructuring of a specific order. A reform’s purpose is to take an existing organization or body and making it conform to a correct or true standard and norm. So while revivals aim at generating or deepening spiritual life in individuals, reformations strive to impart a more faithful shape to the visible church in its corporate life, in doctrine, worship, and government. For example, individuals sitting through the Mass may be Reformed in their understanding of the Lord’s Supper, but the liturgy presently violating their conscience hardly is.

Though these meanings of “revive” and “reform” don’t come from Webster’s dictionary, they are implicit in the arguments used to defend both revivalism and reformation. If a revival occurs, its defenders argue that spiritual life has been imparted, in other words, that the spirit of God is at work. This was not only true in the eighteenth century but is still so today. Tennent, for instance, not only thought that ministers who supported Whitefield’s revivals were regenerate — after all, he assumed that Whitefield’s opponents were dangerous because unconverted. But Tennent also presumed that the revivals of his day were a work of God. More recently, Iain Murray has followed a similar logic. Though he has not gone so far as Tennent in questioning the regeneration of individual ministers, Murray is convinced that the First Great Awakening was a work of God. Though he believes revivals are occasions where God blesses the ordinary means of grace in an extraordinary way, Murray is not reluctant in concluding that the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century was the result of the work of the Spirit. Murray’s conclusion should not be surprising. Since Calvinists believe that only God can give spiritual life to the unregenerate, a revival ipso facto has to be a work of God. But that begs the epistemological question of whether we can know for sure where and when God’s Spirit is active.

The interpretive stakes are not quite so high, however, when it comes to telling whether reformation has taken place. The marks of the church, according to the Reformers, are one very important way to discern where the gospel is. Unlike revivalism which encourages the evaluation of things that are invisible, namely, the human soul, the Reformation promoted the search for phenomena that can be observed by the human senses. In the words of the Belgic Confession, Article 29, “The marks by which the true church is known are these: if the pure doctrine of the gospel is preached therein; if she maintains the pure administration of the sacraments as instituted by Christ; if church discipline is exercised in punishing of sin; in short, if all things are managed according to the pure Word of God.” In other words, to look for Reformation is to evaluate visible or external forms. But to look for revival is to make judgments about things invisible and internal.

So the “reformed” and the “revived” make two different kinds of determination when they look for Reformation and revival. Proponents of revival make claims that should be reserved for God, that is, whether a soul has truly come to new life in Christ. To be sure, the “revived” look for evidence in visible and external things such as profession and deed. But to say that a revival occurred is to determine that God did actually regenerate a remarkable number of souls. The Parable of the Sower suggests the need for less certainty in making such a determination. The “reformed,” however, do not pretend to look into the state of souls or make judgments about God’s intervention into human history. Yes, they do use the language of “true” and “false” churches, which are forms of evaluation that connote eternal significance. Still, they make no claims about the spiritual state of individuals. And in the context of sixteenth-century Europe one did not need to be a believer to spot a Reformed church. A professing Roman Catholic would see an extraordinarily different liturgy in a Protestant church and know that this congregation had been “reformed.” The difference, of course, would be that the Protestant would call such visible changes “true,” while the Catholic believer would regard them as “false.”

The lesson taught by the differences implicit in the words, “reformed” and “revived,” is not simply that we should be careful about claiming to know things we can’t. It is also that our assessment of Christian expressions and practice will always be limited to forms. We cannot see into the human heart and therefore must judge whether the words and deeds of an individual believer’s life are credible, and whether the liturgy, teaching, and government of a congregation are reformed according to the Word. In other words, we are limited to the world of appearances and our conclusions should always reflect a caution befitting the limits of our knowledge. For this reason, professing believers who cherish the Reformed Faith might want to delete the words, “revival,” “revived,” and “revive,” from their vocabulary. If you are Reformed you should know that detecting the pulse of spiritual life in a convert or the hand of God in human history is work that only God, who surpasses human understanding, can do.