Author: D. G. Hart

If It Could Happen to Jerusalem . . .

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Why not to Rome (thoughts after a sermon this past Sunday on Rom 11:27-32)?

Lots of those who — come the nuns (hell) or extraordinary synods (high water) — claim that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Roman Catholic Church never seem to account for what happened to Israel. After all, didn’t God make promise after promise to the Israelites that their chosenness would last forever? Remember what God said to David:

Now, therefore, thus you shall say to my servant David, ‘Thus says the LORD of hosts, I took you from the pasture, from following the sheep, that you should be prince over my people Israel. And I have been with you wherever you went and have cut off all your enemies from before you. And I will make for you a great name, like the name of the great ones of the earth. And I will appoint a place for my people Israel and will plant them, so that they may dwell in their own place and be disturbed no more. And violent men shall afflict them no more, as formerly, from the time that I appointed judges over my people Israel. And I will give you rest from all your enemies. Moreover, the LORD declares to you that the LORD will make you a house. When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son. When he commits iniquity, I will discipline him with the rod of men, with the stripes of the sons of men, but my steadfast love will not depart from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away from before you. And your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me. Your throne shall be established forever.’” (2 Samuel 7:8-16 ESV)

The apostle Paul spent a lot of time trying to account for the inclusion of Gentiles into the promises to Abraham, Moses, and David and one way he wound up doing so was by taking the promises to OT Israel in a spiritual sense. If you were looking for the persistence of outward Israel with the Temple, palace, and king, then you were in for serious disappointment. But if you thought of the promises as guaranteeing a spiritual kingdom and pilgrim people, then you could have an Israel that descended from Abraham and that included those not related by blood as Abraham’s offspring through faith (Gal 3:28-29).

So why would it be wrong to think about Protestantism’s relationship to Western Christianity in a fashion similar to what Paul wrote in Rom 11?

But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, although a wild olive shoot, were grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing root of the olive tree, do not be arrogant toward the branches. If you are, remember it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you. Then you will say, “Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.” That is true. They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand fast through faith. So do not become proud, but fear. For if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you. Note then the kindness and the severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen, but God’s kindness to you, provided you continue in his kindness. Otherwise you too will be cut off. And even they, if they do not continue in their unbelief, will be grafted in, for God has the power to graft them in again. For if you were cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these, the natural branches, be grafted back into their own olive tree.(Romans 11:17-24 ESV)

It is a bit of a stretch, but one could say that Protestants were grafted on to the olive tree of Western Christianity in ways comparable to the inclusion of Gentiles within a faith dominated by Jewish people. And just as the Israelites doubled-down on the formal aspects of their faith, so Roman Catholics insisted (and still do) on papal supremacy and apostolic succession and Vatican Bank Institute for the Works of Religion in ways that compromised a clear articulation of the gospel in the hands of Luther and Bucer. As if God’s people never go wrong, even when the Christian religion wouldn’t exist unless something went wrong in the Old Testament expression of salvation.

So when Paul adds,

As regards the gospel, they are enemies for your sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. For just as you were at one time disobedient to God but now have received mercy because of their disobedience, so they too have now been disobedient in order that by the mercy shown to you they also may now receive mercy. For God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all. (Romans 11:28-32 ESV)

meaning that Christians and Jews were enemies because of the message of the gospel (embraced by the former and reject by the latter), he also suggests a way that Protestants should recognize the debt we owe to Roman Catholicism, the only game in town when it came to Western Christianity for at least a millennium. Protestants should — gulp — love Roman Catholics because they are forefathers in the faith. No Roman Catholicism, no Protestantism.

But with that love comes the recognition that Rome, like Jerusalem, failed.

From DGH on Undervaluing Christ's Obedience Submitted on 2014/12/17 at 10:35 am

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Mark,

So glad you see that Christ’s obedience is of a different character than ours.

We must be careful not to speak flippantly about Christ’s obedience. The nature, quality, and difficulty of what he actually went through in order to save us will always be beyond our abilities to fully grasp in this life; but that does not mean we should not try to understand something of what it meant for him to obey under the most extreme difficulties. Statements, such as “Jesus was under a covenant of works for us,” can become a form of vain repetition if we are not careful. . . . Christ’s obedience for us was no stroll in the park. It was rather agony in the Garden before the greatest indignity on the cross.

So why did you draw so many analogies between Christ and us before? And did you notice that for all of Christ’s work, he didn’t make it into Hebrews 11’s Hall of Faith?

Sola Christus

Published on by D. G. Hart7 Comments

Mark Shea channels his former Protestant self:

December is the month of Advent and Advent is about not just the First Advent at Christmas but the Second Advent on the Last Day. Accordingly, it confronts us with the reality of Judgment.

Lots of folks wonder how to get ready for the Last Judgment. Everything in your life and mine, as well as in all the rest of the Universe, is moving inexorably toward That Day. Yet when we look at the saints, we find some remarkably unconventional advice. St. Therese of Lisieux, for instance, when asked what she would do if you knew the world was about to end, said, “I would have confidence.”

The question, of course, is “In what would she have confidence?” and the answer was light years from what our culture places its trust in.

After all, consider: When some inspirational Oprah video smears the air with a schmaltzy soundtrack and we are breathily invited to “Believe” what instantly follows that word?

“…in yourself!” Again and again, when our culture talks about “confidence” what it invariably means is “self-confidence”. Our kids are, likewise, constantly taught to “believe in themselves” and “feel good about themselves”.

For Therese, all this self-help prattle was nonsense. For her, the only place for confidence was Jesus Christ. She knew herself as a sinner, so she simply threw herself into his arms like a child knowing that, while she could never get to heaven on her own steam, she could not fail to get there if he carried her.

This sort of Christian trust is (to a person like Therese) simplicity itself. To people like you and me, maybe not so much. We can play games. We can, for instance, tell ourselves “So long as I am doing good things in Department X of my life, God will forgive all the bad stuff I’m doing in Department Y.”

This is the trick that Jesus warns against when he tells us:

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers.’” (Matthew 7:21-23)

So what’s up with all the clutter?

What Would John McWhorter Say?

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For one, he might say that this afternoon’s conversation about race, sponsored by the Gospel Coalition, is not really necessary:

Despite frequent claims that America “doesn’t want to talk about race,” we talk about it 24/7 amidst ringing declamations against racism on all forms. Over the past year’s time, I need only mention Trayvon Martin, Paula Deen, Cliven Bundy, and Donald Sterling. Over the past few years, three of the best-selling and most-discussed nonfiction books have been Isabel Wilkerson’s chronicle of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns, Rebecca Skloot’s book about the harvesting of a black woman’s cancer cells (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks), and Michelle Alexander’s invaluable The New Jim Crow. And let’s not forget recent major release films such as The Help, 12 Years a Slave, and The Butler.

Can we really say that these are signs of a nation in denial about race, racism, and its history? . . .

In exactly what fashion could 317 million people “reckon” or come to certain eternally elusive “terms” with racism? Especially in a way that would satisfy people who see even America’s current atonements as insufficient?

The haziness here recalls doctrine more than proposal. The reality is something less proactive than reactive, not an initiative but a condition—a matter of identity. Four-hundred years of slavery and Jim Crow left us unwhole, and unfortunately susceptible to a baseline sense of existential grievance as a keystone of being black.

The only question is why things would not have come out this way. But, because we are faced with a matter of identity, a sense of self, we have to ask: would the “coming to terms,” once it had happened, be enough?

Imagine: “Okay. The acknowledgment has been expressed. I accept it, and now, finally we can move on.”

I just can’t see it. More likely would be “They better not think they can just say sorry and be done with it.” One imagines the tweets: “400 years and it’s all over with a Conversation? #ItsNotOver.”

So perhaps the real conversation should be about policies about which the Gospel allies have little to say (unless they are moonlighting as think-tank wonks after exegeting Habakkuk by daylight):

The War on Drugs must end, since with its demise, acrimonious and often lethal interactions between the police and young black men would cease as a foundational experience of being black. In schools, few are aware of how magical the effect would be of reading programs that actually work for poor kids, as I have written about here. We must utilize the reality of Obamacare to bring black America into a new relationship with the health-care system. Efforts to coach poor black parents on child care, having results in programs such as the Harlem Children’s Zone, should be taken to scale.

All of those things can happen—and in fact, are happening . . .

McWhorter might also remind Jemar Tisby when he brings up the subject of the microagressions of racism that today’s slights are of a different order from what Civil Rights advocates experienced:

To be a concerned black person, many have internalized, requires harboring a feeling that something large-scale is just out of our reach; that we exist as a people eternally unfulfilled; that a shoe has yet to drop. Our identities, so battered by 350 years of brutality and dismissal, feel incomplete. We seek a true sense of nobility, and we find it in the ironically comforting status of the underdog.

Make no mistake—we must protest where it is called for. I reject the “black bourgeoisie” argument that we must quietly wait things out while keeping our chinny-chins up. But today it’s increasingly difficult to characterize black America’s problems as a matter of a single problem or cause, in the way that desegregation was. The efforts that today’s problems require can’t create an identity as easily. One seeks something larger, something that, crucially for us with our history, heals. Hence the idea of something as large-scale as an ever-elusive, overarching conversation America somehow “never” has. The concept has an operatic sense of catharsis in it. It’s even true that some Americans think race plays less of a role in black people’s fate than it does. None of this, however, belies the fact that what is being proposed is a kind of stage-managing of social change that no human group has ever sought—and which, I submit, black America needn’t seek, either.

I suspect that civil rights leaders before, roughly, 1966 would be perplexed by today’s calls for a conversation about race, especially one that imagines all Americans taking and passing some kind of national history test on institutional racism, past and present. The old heroes fought against segregation and discrimination because it was impossible for any but a few black people to get ahead otherwise. But Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, and the others did not seek a perfect society. Today, we seem to be doing just that: we cannot be whole as long as nonblack Americans are going about with their summer snacks, unmindful of our past. But are human societies ever so exquisitely mindful? Could they be?

I wish the Gospel allies had invited McWhorter to the discussion but I doubt he would have accepted.

The Unintended Outcomes of Obedience

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H. L. Mencken was surrounded by Obedience Boys and Girls while he was growing up. His name for them was Puritan. Their example to him was not one of emulation but a self-righteousness that bred revulsion:

The service that [Anthony Comstock] performed, in his grandiose way, was no more than a magnification of humble Y.M.C.A. secretaries, evangelical clergymen, and other such lowly fauna. It is their function in the world to ruin their ideas by believing in them and living them. Striving sincerely to be patterns to the young, they suffer the ironical fate of becoming horrible examples. I remember very well, how, as a boy of ten, I was articled to the Y.M.C.A.: the aim was to improve my taste for respectability and so curb my apparently natural flair for the art and mystery of the highwayman. But a few months of contact with the official representatives of that great organization filled me with a vast loathing, not only for the men themselves, but also for all the ideas they stood for. Thus, at the age of eleven, I abandoned Christian Endeavor forevermore, and have been an antinomian ever since, contumacious to holy men and resigned to Hell. Old Anthony, I believe, accomplished much the same thing that the Y.M.C.A. achieved with me, but on an immeasurably larger scale. He did more than any other man to ruin Puritanism in the United States. When he began his long and brilliant career of unwitting sabotage, the essential principles of comstockery were believed in by practically every reputable American. Half a century later, when he went upon the shelf, comstockery enjoyed a degree of public esteem, at least in the big cities, half way between that enjoyed by phrenology and that enjoyed by homosexuality. It was, at best, laughable. It was, at worst, revolting. (“Souvenirs of a Book Reviewer,” Prejudices: Sixth Series)

Of course, the take away is not to throw in the towel and join Mencken’s antinomian team. It is rather to consider what happens when you tout sanctity in such a public and implicitly self-sanctimonious way. Perhaps the path of sanctification lies less in calling attention to yourself as an advocate of it and than in living a quiet and peaceful life.

Redefining Declension So Numbers Ascend

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When you are having trouble with lack of resolve and dwindling numbers among the communicants (and clergy), you find a different paradigm that allows you to turn defeat into victory. For instance, David Robertson reported on efforts within the Church of Scotland to advance Christianity and extend membership:

Rev John Chalmers, Moderator of the Church of Scotland, is a good spokesman for the Church of Scotland. He is personable, warm and says some interesting things. In that vein, in the next edition of Life and Work he has made what has been termed as a ‘radical New Year’s message’. He wants the church to find 100,000 new members in the next decade. What can we say to that? Fantastic. 10,000 new Christians per year in Scotland would be a tremendous boost to us all. How encouraging for the whole Church if the Church of Scotland was to do that. I long and pray for that and I would rejoice if it came through the Church of Scotland. It won’t be easy. This year Church of Scotland membership fell below 400,00 for the first time and seems to be in free-fall. To reverse the 20,000 members per year deficit and turn it into a surplus of 10,000 would be enough of a miracle to cause even the most cynical secularist to doubt!

The Moderator is fed up with statistics (otherwise known as facts) that highlight decline, so he wants to change that. He asserts that the “truth about the number of people who belong to our faith communities is quite different”. Indeed it is, but not in the way he suggests. However it is worth quoting him more extensively: “The real challenge is to redefine membership in a way that allows us to include women and men, young and old who do not fit the post-Second World War model of membership with which we are so familiar. That pattern does not resonate with the vast majority of those who are 50 and younger and who will never buy into the kind of church that sits so comfortably with me and my way of expressing my Christian faith.

“It might pain me to say it, but it’s time for a radical change and I don’t mean a change of hymns, or a visually-aided sermon or a new time of day for traditional forms of worship. I mean something much more far reaching than that.”

He said: “I want us to explore how people might be able to belong to the Church of Scotland rooted in reality, which can interact with them in the context of an online community, but also be there for them when they need real human contact.”

Rev Chalmers thinks that because 1.7 million Scots in the 2011 census associated themselves with the Church of Scotland its an opportunity to bring them into the membership of the church. That’s why he wants to ‘redefine’ membership so that those who are not currently members can be counted as such. Social media, Facebook and twitter could be used to help this process. He was supported in this by former Moderator, Rev Albert Bogle, who stated, “there are a huge number out there who need to be nurtured and strengthened in their faith.”

It may not have the same ecclesial standing as a moderator of a European national church, but the challenge thrown down by Roman Catholic sociologists to the work of Christian Smith on the religious convictions and practices of U.S. adolescents reveals a similar use of ecclesiastical beer goggles (the statistics, like homely gals, are easier on the eyes after a couple pints) to make the best of a difficult situation:

Our studies show that pre-Vatican II Catholics learned a compliance-oriented approach that emphasized the teaching authority of the clergy, demanded strict adherence to all official church teachings, and often relied on fear and guilt to produce record-high levels of conformity.

Then, as a result of changes in American society and changes in the Catholic church, everything changed. Pre-Vatican II Catholics’ best efforts to pass their compliance-centered understanding of the faith on to their children were often mitigated by the cultural revolution of the 1960s and the implementation of Vatican II, both of which fostered a more personal approach to religion.

The three most recent generations learned a more conscience-centered approach that emphasizes Catholics’ responsibility for their own faith, including their responsibility to inform their own consciences, and to follow them as much as possible, even if this involves disagreement with church teachings. . . .

Members of these younger generations are not just “cafeteria Catholics” who “pick and choose” whatever parts of the faith they like. They continue to embrace core doctrinal teachings such as the divinity of Christ and his real presence in the sacraments; love of neighbor; and concern for the poor. But they are more selective in their religious practices, and are more likely to disagree with teachings that they consider unimportant, optional, coercive or wrong — especially those related to sexual and reproductive issues. . . .

Smith’s team draws a very different set of conclusions. What we call a shift from one approach to another, Smith and his colleagues call a story of “decline and loss.” Where we see adaptation to changing circumstances, they see the erosion of Catholicism. They tend to see departures from the compliance model of the 1940s and ’50s as a downward spiraling of the church. This is especially true in their interpretations of young Catholics’ low rates of Mass attendance.

According to Smith and his colleagues, “compared both to official Catholic norms of faithfulness and to other types of Christian teens in the United States [especially young Mormons and young evangelical Protestants], contemporary U.S. Catholic teens are faring rather badly,” “show up as fairly weak” and reflect “the relative religious laxity of their parents.”

Then there are the Callers who represent a logic all of their own.

Episcopacy Envy

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Bishops are easier to control and follow, which is the consolation to us Presbyterians who sometimes give into the temptation to wish for a church with more visibility and influence. But if you read the articles in First Things about the Ukranian and Russian churches, you understand that presbyters are much harder to master (just ask James VI) than bishops and so have their own influence even if it comes without visibility:

. . . from a Russian Orthodox point of view, all the other large churches in Ukraine have violated church unity. At best, their existence is tragic; at worst, schismatic. The creation of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in the sixteenth century took Orthodox believers away from Moscow and subjected them to Rome. The Ukrainian Autocephalous Church came into being only because the Bolsheviks wanted to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church by dividing it and therefore destroying it from within. The Kyivan Patriarchate exploited Ukrainian nationalism, and therefore anti-Russian sentiment, in order to break from Moscow.

The experience of persecution under communism has taught the Moscow Patriarchate to value visible unity at almost any price. After the death of Patriarch Tikhon in 1925, Metropolitan Sergi (Stragorodski) illegitimately assumed patriarchal powers. The man who should have succeeded Tikhon, Metropolitan Kirill (Smirnov), was outraged by Sergi’s willingness to subject the Church to a godless state in a futile effort to save the Church as a public institution. In protest, Kirill denied the validity of the Eucharist celebrated by Sergi and his supporters. Another Tikhon loyalist, Metropolitan Agafangel (Preobrazhenski), ordered his priests to disobey mandates of Sergi that violated Christian conscience. Sergi responded by denouncing both men, thereby encouraging the secret police to arrest them, send them into exile, and subject them to physical and psychological torture.

Nevertheless, neither Kirill nor Agafangel broke the unity of the Church or organized a movement to remove Sergi from office. Moreover, Kirill later repented of breaking Eucharistic fellowship. In short, Kirill and Agafangel expressed their opposition within the bounds of what they understood to be the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. Today, the Russian Orthodox Church has canonized not Sergi, but rather Kirill and Agafangel. The message is clear: The Church must remain one, and divisions only weaken it and the people and nation whom it serves.
To the other Ukrainian churches, the question of church unity looks different. The Kyivan Patriarchate and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church argue that Orthodox believers have always been allowed to organize themselves along national lines. An autocephalous Ukrainian Church does not violate church unity; on the contrary, the autocephalous Orthodox churches cultivate an intensive fellowship among themselves.

From this perspective, the Moscow Patriarchate is not interested in saving Ukrainians from a nationalistic agenda, but rather is seeking to subject them to Russian imperialistic pretensions. An independent Ukrainian Orthodoxy can help the Ukrainian people reclaim their unique language and national traditions over and against a Russia that has often tried to eliminate Ukrainian identity or reduce it to a variety of Russian identity (as when Russians commonly assert that “the Ukrainian language is just a Russian village dialect”). For this kind of nationalistic Orthodoxy, to be Ukrainian means not to be Russian.

When you have only one person to control, as opposed to a committee (read assembly), making deals and peddling influence for national purposes becomes much easier. The one exception to this is a bishop with a universal, as opposed to a geographically defined, jurisdiction. And this is what makes the papacy different from other bishops — sort of. The pope is not defined by any nation — consider the opposition that the Vatican exhibited during events leading up to Italian unification. That doesn’t mean the pope was entirely independent of political authority or place. The Bishop of Rome needed various European monarchs to make that long trek over the Alps to put things right in Rome — such as ridding the city of the Lombards and restore the pope to his position. The papacy has also been bound up with the West (and one of the draws for converts to Rome is Roman Catholicism’s identification with the civilization of Western Europe). It’s not as if when we think of Roman Catholicism Vancouver or Seoul immediately come to mind.

Michael Sean Winters recently described in the context of Bishop Cupich’s recent installation in Chicago how, aside from politics, technology contributed to the centralization of papacy’s authority (and what Pope Francis may be doing to change that):

In contemplating the +Cupich appointment and what it might mean, I am reminded of an earlier predecessor, Cardinal Samuel Stritch. In the 1950s, at a dinner with Fr. John Courtney Murray, S.J., Murray was explaining the stance taken by the late Cardinal James Gibbons on the issue of church-state relations. In the 1950s, you will recall, Murray’s theories on the subject were under a cloud at the Holy Office. Cardinal Stritch listened to Murray and then opined, “Well, of course, none of us can go as far as Cardinal Gibbons went.” Murray, in a letter to his friends Msgr. John Tracy Ellis, said he wanted to blurt out, “Why not?” +Gibbons had been the preeminent American churchman for half a century, starting with his appointment to Baltimore in 1877, until his death in 1921. It was during that time that the Romanization of the American hierarchy began in earnest, with the appointment of William Henry O’Connell to Portland, Maine in 1901 and to Boston as coadjutor archbishop in 1906. By the time +Stritch and Murray were dining together, long gone were the days when priests in a vacant diocese and bishops within the province submitted their ternas to Rome for episcopal appointments.

The centralization of ecclesiastical authority in Rome was not driven exclusively by ideological ultramonstanism. It was also a function of emerging technologies. With the telegraph, then the telephone, then the fax and now the internet, the sayings and doings of popes reached people worldwide. No longer did Rome issue a papal bull in Latin, which was sent to the bishops of the world who would then translate the text into the vernacular and issue their own pastoral letter to their clergy, who would, in turn, apply the teaching in the pulpit and the confessional. There were layers of pastoral application that vanished in the course of the twentieth century. By 1968, when Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae, the New York Times had the headline “Pope Bans Pill” before any bishop anywhere had a chance to read the encyclical and make some sense of it. I am not sure we, as a Church, have adapted to that kind of difference in how the teachings of the Church are communicated or received.

This centralization has been a decidedly mixed blessing. On the one hand, the Catholic Church stands alone among the world’s religions in having a central focus of our identity and mission. On the other hand, Roman minutanti may not always know the local situation of the various churches as well as the pastors on the ground. And, many, though not all, bishops seem emasculated, which is different from being obedient, more like branch managers of Vatican Inc than bishops in their own right. +Cupich is many things, but emasculated is not one of them.

Now, for the first time in a long time, we have a pope who seems committed to some degree of decentralization of authority away from Rome. So, in thinking about the impact of +Cupich’s tenure, perhaps we should not be looking to the +Bernardin years but to the +Gibbons years. Will he become a model for a new kind of bishop, one who is not always looking over his shoulder to make sure the CDF isn’t listening? Will leadership in the USCCB have a different character, and different outcomes, as the body increasingly becomes the focus for any devolved authority from Roman curial congregations? If, as Pope Francis clearly wants, bishops are now being encouraged to speak frankly, even to disagree in public, will +Cupich be the kind of national leader who can keep the bishops unified even while they search for consensus? The smart money says he will.

And what goes for political authorities also applies to journalists. Imagine a religion reporter needing to find out what the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America thinks about immigration reform. First, the Assembly doesn’t exist beyond its stated times of meeting and, second, with the exception of David Robertson, moderator of the Free Church of Scotland who gives Pope Francis a run for his money in comments to the press about various and sundry temporal affairs, a moderator of an assembly also ceases to hold office once the commissioners vote to adjourn. If you want to know the mind of the Presbyterian Church on matters other than its doctrinal statements, rules for worship, and form of government (all available on-line and hardly pertinent for thinking about, say, fracking), imagine trying to round up the neighborhood cats for a game of kickball.

Of course, the temptation for us real biblical overseers looking on at the world of episcopacy is to become jealous over the attention that rulers and reporters give to bishops. At the same time, the consolation is having a job that let’s you do what you really think to be important without always having to position yourself before the public or negotiate with rulers. After all, it is one thing to be a favorite professor of the college president. But with that favoritism comes a lot of potential scrutiny and back room conversations that no amount of wining and dining can make pleasant.

Evangelicals to Blame

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Stephen Prothero explains partly why discourse about religion in the United States is so poor (and charged):

The religious right argues that religious literacy goes away in the early 1960s because of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court bans devotional Bible reading and prayer in public schools in 1962 and 1963, which critics argue essentially exiles God from public schools so that they are now religion-free zones. Now, children grow up not only without a reverence for God, but also without an understanding of the Bible and Christianity. The argument I make about religious literacy is that the story actually begins a century earlier. The villains are not secular people in the Supreme Court but actually religious people. It is caused by the Second Great Awakening and the replacement of Puritanism by Evangelicalism as the dominant religious impulse in the country. Before the Second Great Awakening, there was always this conversation among Christians between the head and the heart, trying to get a religion that was both intellectually sound and emotionally resonant. But with the Second Great Awakening comes this new form of religion that really prioritizes feeling and emphasizes loving Jesus rather than knowing what Jesus had to say. This is when religious literacy starts to go away. It doesn’t really matter much what Christianity teaches, what matters is how it feels to be in a relationship with Jesus. Simultaneously, as you have that shift from knowing the doctrine of your tradition to feeling intensely about God, there is a shift toward morality where the focus of the tradition becomes making the society more Protestant by using voluntary associations to get rid of slavery, to make the schools better, to improve prisons. In order to do that, it is important for people to downplay denominational differences. You don’t really want to bring up the distinctions between Methodists and Lutherans because you want both denominations to work together to get the Bible printed and distributed or to do the work of the American Tract Society. So that also pushed people away from conversations about doctrine. As the theology side of religion starts to go away, our collective memory starts to atrophy. That really happens over the course of the nineteenth century.

And it continues in the twentieth.

A New Calvinist becomes a Regular Calvinist

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Danny Hide Hyde may not detect sufficient earnestness, but Todd Pruitt makes clear the limitations of New Calvinist awakenings among the Babdists (which is a big world but for every Southern Baptist Seminary there are three Furmans, four Baylors and six Wake Forests):

As I reflect on the past year as a Presbyterian several things emerge for me as sources of regular gratitude.

1. The Westminster Confession of Faith
The Westminster Confession of Faith is one of the most helpful and beautiful theological documents outside of Scripture. As a friend of mine once said regarding confessions of faith: “They need to have a lot of words.” Indeed. Many churches have built a sort of unity around a common set of “core values” or a mission statement. And while those things can be helpful, they are no substitute for a comprehensive and clear confession of faith. For the body of Christ, unity based on shared values, while good, is no substitute for unity based upon doctrinal convictions.

Likewise a unity based on the merest sort of Christian confession is not robust enough to navigate the confusing waters of contemporary evangelicalism. In the 1960’s and 70’s there was perhaps an evangelical center. That center was anchored to men like John Stott and Francis Schaeffer. This has changed of course. Once men like Brian McLaren and Rob Bell were tolerated within evangelicalism’s big tent the foundations of the once unified center could no longer bear the weight of its own contradictions.

Certainly there are many contributing factors, but the idea of a mere Christianity in today’s evangelicalism is, I believe, not possible. We need, and beyond that, ought to desire, a confession that carefully guards the church from being carried off by every wind of doctrine. For the denomination to which I belong the Westminster Confession of Faith is that confession. If you are a Baptist then perhaps you ought to investigate the London Baptist Confession.

2. The Book of Church Order
The Book of Church Order (BCO) is used by the PCA as a guide for governance and polity. It is a thick three ring blue binder. Some of my friends who attended a Presbyterian seminary refer to it as the “big blue sleeping pill.” It is true that the BCO does not always offer the most compelling reading experience. However, for this man raised in an autonomous church tradition, the BCO has been a welcome source of clarity and security. No more entering elder meetings with fear and trembling not know what will be done or said. No more making things up on the fly. No more trying to navigate issues of discipline without properly constituted church courts. No more ordaining nice but manifestly unqualified men for church office.

Also, the BCO makes things blessedly less efficient than a CEO model of church leadership. And while that will frustrate the entrepreneurial pastor, it is a source of protection for the church (and the pastor!). It means that there are clearly defined ways of running meetings, exercising discipline, administering the sacraments, ordaining and calling pastors, installing elders, running meetings of the session and congregation, ordering congregational worship, etc.

Does the BCO protect against every conceivable contingency? Is it a guarantee that nothing will go wrong? Of course not. Do things go wrong in Presbyterian churches? Of course! But I am convinced that the Book of Church order is the best game in town for properly, wisely, and biblically ordering the church.

This is of course what they said — they being the Old Side and Old School Presbyterians who always had to try to convince the enthusiasts (Gilbert Tennent) and moralizers (Lyman Beecher) that just because they thought they had the Holy Ghost (feathers and all) or the Decalogue, the rules of being a Reformed church were still in place. Maybe after two years, that penny will drop for Pastor Pruitt.

If Priests Created the Secular . . .

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

So reasons Peter Leithart:

Our secular age can be sustained only if the secular has been carefully distinguished from the sacred, and only if the boundary between the two is vigorously, not to say violently, guarded.

But boundary-drawing between the sacred and profane is the work of a priest. It is the sacred act par excellence (cf. among many many texts from many religions, Leviticus 10:10).

So our secular age depends on a sacred gesture.

Which means that our secular age isn’t ultimately a secular age at all. Its secularity is a ruse, a trick of priests.

At least the Enlightenment was right about one thing: You can’t trust priests.

Is discomfort with the secular-sacred distinction the affliction of the shaman?