Author: D. G. Hart

The Protestant Novel?

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This post got me thinking about whether Protestantism has produced novelists the way that Roman Catholicism allegedly has. For instance, several months ago Dana Gioia wrote about “the Catholic writer”:

Catholic literature is rarely pious. In ways that sometimes trouble or puzzle both Protestant and secular readers, Catholic writing tends to be comic, rowdy, rude, and even violent. Catholics generally prefer to write about sinners rather than saints. (It is not only that sinners generally make more interesting protagonists. Their failings also more vividly demonstrate humanity’s fallen state.) John Kennedy Toole’s ? A Confederacy of Dunces , for example, presents a huge cast of characters, lost souls or reprobates all, who, pursuing their assorted vices and delusions, hilariously stumble toward grace and provisional redemption. The same dark comic vision pervades the novels of Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Burgess, and Muriel Spark. Ron Hansen’s Atticus begins with the investigation of a murder. Flannery O’Connor’s fiction is full of resentment, violence, and anger. “Good and evil appear to be joined in every culture at the spine,” she observed, and violence is “strangely capable” of returning her characters “to reality and preparing them to accept their moments of grace.” When Mary Karr titled her poetry collection Sinners Welcome , she could have been describing the Catholic literary tradition.

Perhaps the problem is that Protestants are too devout and guard what qualifies as genuinely Christian while non-Protestant Christians are more used to the big tent of mixing and matching. That old irony of Roman Catholics accusing Protestantism of antinomianism when three fingers are pointing back at the accuser.

But what about John Updike? The Wikipedia page on Protestant novelists includes him under Congregationalists along with Jonathan Edwards; I had not realized that Religious Affections was fictional. (I feel better.) But David Lodge thought otherwise:

David Lodge suggested that “If there was ever such a species as the Protestant novelist…Mr. Updike may be its last surviving example.” His preachers, as literary characters, certainly reflect the diversity and complexity of late-twentieth-century mainstream American Protestantism while continuing an American literary tradition of problematic preachers, a lineage extending at least from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Arthur Dimmesdale to Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry to James Baldwin’s John Grimes, to highlight but a few examples. Consider the dueling conceptions of ecclesiology and clerical authority represented in the Lutheran Fritz Kruppenbrach (a Barthian in no uncertain terms who appears in Rabbit, Run) and his foil, the young, personable, and disconcertingly pastoral Jack Eccles (who turns up throughout the Rabbit Tetralogy). Consider Updike’s conflicted lothario Tom Marshfield (whose own relationship to a certain “Ms. Prynne” invokes Dimmesdale and the Scarlet Letter) in A Month of Sundays (1975), or the Presbyterian preacher Clarence Wilmot from In the Beauty of the Lillies (1996), who undergoes a crisis of faith and yet continues to peddle both “the word” and “cosmology” as an encyclopedia salesman. Updike’s preachers are ordained to God’s service, yet continually compelled by the messy, and corporeal, limitations that confront humankind. For an author whose sexually charged narrative communicates a coherent and strident theological vision, one can’t help but find some kindred sympathy between Updike as a wordsmith and his own ministers of “the Word.”

Or maybe the paucity of Protestant novelists is really a vindication of 2k. Protestants intuitively know (but often refuse to admit) that novels don’t need to be Christian, that the question of whether a novel is Christian is actually silly. Some of the worst novels have tried to be redemptive, while some of the best don’t make the slightest reference to religion, let along sin and grace.

Are the New Calvinists Green or On Fire?

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Tim Challies engages in a bit of introspection after the most recent kerfuffle surrounding Mark Driscoll. Challies concedes that a problem for the young sovereigntists was their lack of maturity. They were not mature or settled:

Bear with me as I artificially divide Driscoll’s ministry into three parts: theology (what he said), practice (how he said it) and results (what happened). So many of us had genuine concerns over the second part, but were willing to excuse or downplay them on the basis of the first and third. Yes, he was crude and yes, he sometimes said or did outrageous things, but he never wavered in publicly proclaiming the gospel and both his church and his church-planting movement continued to grow. We were confused. We did not have a clear category for this. We had concerns, but the Lord seemed to be using him. So we recommended his podcasts, or bought his books, even if we had to provide a small caveat each time.

In retrospect, I see this as a mark of immaturity in the New Calvinism, in what in that day was called the Young, Restless, Reformed. It was the young and the restless that allowed us to be so easily impressed. To large degree, we propelled Driscoll to fame through our admiration—even if it was hesitant admiration.

But Challies contradicts this very conclusion when he throws — unintentionally — the old young sovereigntists under the bus with the immature. First John Piper shows some lack of years:

In 2006 Driscoll was more formally introduced to the New Calvinism with his inclusion in the Desiring God National Conference and even then he was a controversial figure. When Piper invited him again in 2008 he recorded a short video to explain why he had extended the invitation. These words stand out: “I love Mark Driscoll’s theology.” While Piper did not deny the concerns, he loved Driscoll’s theology and loved what the Lord was doing through him.

Then D. A. Carson also shows the weakness of youth (from an earlier post):

Last weekend I had the privilege of spending a fair bit of time with D.A. Carson and he said something about Driscoll that I found interesting and meaningful. Because he has said this to others, I don’t think I’m violating any kind of trust in mentioning it. There is no doubt that people have had difficulty knowing what to do with Driscoll and knowing how to think about him. But Carson said he finds it helpful to look not just at where Driscoll is, but at the trajectory he is on. I took that to mean that if we look at where he has come from and then plot a course by where he is now, we’ll see that he is growing and maturing as a Christian and that he is continually emphasizing better and more biblical theology. We are all works in progress. This is not to say that we should hope that Mark Driscoll grows up to become John MacArthur or R.C. Sproul. Rather, it simply means that it is sometimes wise to look at the wider picture.

When we look to that wider picture we see that Driscoll clearly believes in and teaches the gospel.

So perhaps the problem is not age or maturity. Could it be that Challies continues to share with Driscoll an understanding of the church and the Christian ministry that provides room for the sorts of celebrity, technology, mass crowds, and enthusiasm upon which the young sovereigntists thrive?

After all, the young sovereigntists have not found the Old Calvinists very attractive. The charge of mean or argumentative has been a fairly read one to discount the kind of Reformed Christianity from which folks like Challies and the Gospel Allies want to create some distance. This is why it is curious now to learn that the young and old sovereigntists were willing to overlook Driscoll’s failings for the sake of his theology.

Well, if you could do that for Acts 29, why not for the OPC or the URC or the PCA in its non-TKNY iterations? What’s so bad about the theology of the Reformed churches? What’s wrong with baptizing infants and ministering within the bounds of an ecclesiastical assembly? What’s wrong with singing Psalms? What’s wrong with seeing hedonism and spirituality as antithetical? Nothing that would have raised real questions about Driscoll or C. J. Mahoney or James Macdonald a long time ago.

Inerrancy's Big God

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Pete Enns thinks that inerrantists harbor a view of God that is too small:

Perhaps the root theological misgiving for me is that inerrancy prescribes biblical interpretation too narrowly because it prescribes God too narrowly.

The premise all inerrantists hold to on some level—albeit in varying degrees—is that an inerrant Bible is the only kind of book that, logically, God would be able to produce, the only means by which a truth-telling God would communicate.

As I see it, the rhythmic, recurring, generational tensions over inerrancy within evangelicalism are fueled by the distance between this a priori theological expectation about God and how his book should behave, and the persistently non-cooperative details of biblical interpretation.

On the contrary, the inerrantists with whom he studied had a pretty big view of God:

God hath all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of himself; and is alone in and unto himself all-sufficient, not standing in need of any creatures which he hath made, nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting his own glory in, by, unto, and upon them. He is the alone fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things; and hath most sovereign dominion over them, to do by them, for them, or upon them whatsoever himself pleaseth. In his sight all things are open and manifest, his knowledge is infinite, infallible, and independent upon the creature, so as nothing is to him contingent, or uncertain. He is most holy in all his counsels, in all his works, and in all his commands. To him is due from angels and men, and every other creature, whatsoever worship, service, or obedience he is pleased to require of them. (Confession of Faith 2.2)

From that view followed an understanding of the Bible that made it significant — God’s most direct revelation — but by no means encompassed the deity:

Although the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men unexcusable; yet are they not sufficient to give that knowledge of God, and of his will, which is necessary unto salvation. Therefore it pleased the Lord, at sundry times, and in divers manners, to reveal himself, and to declare that his will unto his church; and afterwards, for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the church against the corruption of the flesh, and the malice of Satan and of the world, to commit the same wholly unto writing: which maketh the Holy Scripture to be most necessary; those former ways of God’s revealing his will unto his people being now ceased. (Confession of Faith 1.1)

I’ve always wondered whether Pete had to create an abstract inerrantist in order to make his own view plausible. Now I wonder if the difference goes deeper and whether Pete needs to put his cards on the table about how big or small God is. After all, an inerrant Bible tends to restrain those who attempt to decipher divine ways. Without inerrancy, human interpreters can think themselves pretty big.

Why Sex and Candor Don't Mix

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H. L. Mencken weighs in:

In the relations between the sexes all beauty is founded upon romance, all romance is founded upon mystery, and all mystery is founded upon ignorance, or, failing that, upon the deliberate denial of the known truth. To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anaesthesia—to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess. But how can this condition of mind survive the deadly matter-of-factness which sex hygiene and the new science of eugenics impose? How can a woman continue to believe in the honor, courage and loving tenderness of a man after she has learned, perhaps by affidavit, that his haemoglobin count is 117%, that he is free from sugar and albumen, that his blood pressure is 112/79 and that his Wassermann reaction is negative? . . . Moreover, all this new-fangled “frankness” tends to dam up, at least for civilized adults, one of the principal well-springs of art, to wit, impropriety. What is neither hidden nor forbidden is seldom very charming. If women, continuing their present tendency to its logical goal, end by going stark naked, there will be no more poets and painters, but only dermatologists and photographers. . . . (“A Loss to Romance,” Prejudices: First Series, 118-119)

If You Want Ecumenism, Go to War

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The various reactions to developments in Iraq from Protestant officers have me wondering when we Presbyterians ever established fraternal relations with the churches of Eastern Orthodoxy. David Miller, the moderator of Scotland’s Free Church has written a letter to the UK parliament in which he links the Free Church to the Assyrian, Armenian, and Greek Orthodox communions of Iraq:

The plight of persecuted Christians and other minorities in Iraq and Syria – chiefly in regions controlled by the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) – is a matter of grave concern to the Christian community and to all decent human beings.

Likewise, Rick Phillips has prayed:

Our Father in heaven, the sovereign and almighty God, the faithful covenant-keeper and Savior, we plead to you on behalf of our suffering fellow believers in Iraq. Cast your eye upon them and have mercy to uphold and defend your flock. Overthrow the evil of their persecutors and strengthen the faith of those suffering tribulation for the name of Jesus.

To his credit, Joe Carter is calling for caution about the conclusions Christians in the West draw from the situation in the Middle East. Whenever church officials — pastors or popes — speak about current events, the spirituality-of-the-church jaws in me tighten. What do these people know about the situation over there beyond what they see from journalists? Talk about being above your pay grade.

But the odd aspect of this outpouring of legitimate concern for a genuinely tragic set of circumstances in Iraq is the way that Presbyterians lose their ecclesial wits and identify as Christians those whom they used to evangelize. Let’s not forget, for instance, that the southern Presbyterian (Old School no less), John B. Adger went in the 1830s to modern day Turkey to evangelize among the Armenian Orthodox. Also keep in mind that the character of Clarence Ussher, the doctor who tried to protect the Armenians of Van from the Turks during the Armenian genocide was there as part of the Presbyterian missionary effort to Eastern Orthodox Christians.

In full disclosure mode — all the talk about sex has me going — I will admit that I have prayed for persecuted Christians. But the ones I have had in mind most of the time are those believers in Eritrea with whom the OPC has a long and special relationship. (Aren’t I special?) Does that mean that prayers for those suffering at the hands of the ISIS are inappropriate or even wrong? No. But do we need to refer to them as fellow Christians? Does this somehow give us victim status in the culture wars back here in the greatest nation on God’s green earth? (And by the way, would they recognize us as fellow Christians?)

Such solidarity among professed Christians is however a further confirmation of the Old Life axiom that war and church union go hand in hand. War healed every single split in American Presbyterianism except for the start-ups of the OPC and PCA. In 1758 in the middle of the French and Indian War Old Side and New Side Presbyterians put aside differences in part to pull together behind those recent Presbyterian settlers close to the front on the frontier. In 1869, enthusiastic over a war to preserve the union, Old School and New School Presbyterians reunited to show at least in part that they were committed to the same ideals that animated the United States. And just after World War I, mainline Protestants proposed a church union that would have created a single Protestant Church of America (comparable to the ecumenism that fueled the formation of the United Church of Canada 1925).

War is hell. Do we need to forget our theology to affirm that?

Ann Coulter Is Not Sexy But She May Have a Point

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The right’s answer to Bill Maher, the lovely, the talented, Ann Coulter seems to have touched a nerve with her post about Dr. Kent Brantly, the physician who contracted Ebola in Liberia and is now (after being evacuated) receiving treatment in Atlanta.

Ann thinks the $2 million spent on the Dr.’s medically air-tight flight will wind up hurting Samaritan’s Purse, the Christian charity that sent him, more than any good Brantly might have done in Africa. That seems fairly commonsensical. The missions committee of my communion needs to live within its budget. Its officers can’t simply flash an OPC Mastercard when a special opportunity arises or when the Spirit is supposed to have moved. For Presbyterians, everything must be decent and in order, which means within budget. I don’t know what Samaritan’s Purse’s reserves are like, but $2 million, if that is the correct figure, does sound like it could put a dent into good-doing in other parts of the world.

But Collin Garbarino believes the example of Jesus may teach a different lesson about Brantly’s situation:

Christianity has always been a little topsy-turvy. The mightiest king in the universe was born in a lowly stable. The second person of the Godhead “emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant.” “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.” He had “no place to lay his head,” and he surrounded himself with a rag-tag group of fishermen and tax collectors. Jesus could stand as a righteous judge, but he allowed himself to die a sinner’s death. Through sacrifice God saved his people. Through death death is conquered. What’s more foolish than dying in order to live? Christ calls his people to do just that. Take up your cross and follow him.

The thing is, Jesus was born in the stable precisely because his parents didn’t have lots of cash to afford anything better. So doesn’t the humble birth of Jesus in some way back up Ann’s point? Doing good doesn’t allow you to escape creditors. And if Garbarino had gone to Satan’s temptation of Jesus, imagine the conundrum in which he would have found himself. For Jesus could have done a lot more good for planet earth (from one perspective) had yielded to the temptation to bow down to Satan and rule over all the earth’s kingdoms.

But Ann’s post went beyond finances to the motives of missionaries like Brantly — how this became a debate about missions when Samaritan’s Purse is a relief agency is an odd twist.

Of course, if Brantly had evangelized in New York City or Los Angeles, The New York Times would get upset and accuse him of anti-Semitism, until he swore — as the pope did — that you don’t have to be a Christian to go to heaven. Evangelize in Liberia, and the Times’ Nicholas Kristof will be totally impressed.

Which explains why American Christians go on “mission trips” to disease-ridden cesspools. They’re tired of fighting the culture war in the U.S., tired of being called homophobes, racists, sexists and bigots. So they slink off to Third World countries, away from American culture to do good works, forgetting that the first rule of life on a riverbank is that any good that one attempts downstream is quickly overtaken by what happens upstream.

America is the most consequential nation on Earth, and in desperate need of God at the moment. If America falls, it will be a thousand years of darkness for the entire planet.

Ann has drunk a little too deeply at the font of American exceptionalism, but Al Mohler is not happy with Coulter’s raising questions about missionaries motives:

These two missionaries and all the others who have gone as authentic missionaries in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ have not been driven by a mere humanitarian impulse. They have not just gone to help those who are victims and patients. They have gone because they believe that every single human being on the planet is an individual made in God’s image. And they also believe that every single individual on the planet is a sinner in desperate need of salvation. They believe that every single human being on the planet, whether in West Africa or in the advanced Western nations including the US, are in great need of the gospel of Jesus Christ–and that what hangs in the balance is not just the outbreak of a contagion or the future of health but indeed the eternal realities of heaven and hell.

For Mohler, humanitarianism isn’t good enough. A missionary’s motives must be spiritual. They must be pure.

How do you disagree with that, except that most Christians if they are honest know that their motives are mixed (which is why it is so hard to follow the Obedience Boys). Even if I am performing a good work with the intention of being good, aren’t I really guilty of denying the sinfulness that clings to me as a child (though redeemed) of Adam? We are not perfectionists. And this is what makes a show like The Wire so valuable. I put my finger on this last night while watching Brotherhood, a series that comes as close to the feel and sensibility of The Wire without being a mere imitation. In both series we watch characters who are both ambitious (read selfish) and loving. Their ambition takes them to places they should not go — whether they play for the legal or illegal team. At the same time, they belong to families and neighborhoods and that membership sometimes motivates them to use their selfishness in selfless ways. The characters are a mix of vice and virtue.

Well, some might ask, are these shows about Christians? Aren’t Christians different or supposed to be? Well, Brotherhood features an Irish-American family for which the Roman Catholic Church is more than merely a backdrop. But even on Protestant grounds, I’m not sure that the Christian experience is decidedly different from the way these shows present the human experience. We are a mix of holy and wicked. What may make Christians different from the non-Christians of these series (and the real world) — to play by the confessional Presbyterian rule book — is that the latter don’t have holy motives but merely exhibit civic virtue. As the Confession explains — always steering us away from the temptation to invoke “human flourishing”:

Works done by unregenerate men, although for the matter of them they may be things which God commands; and of good use both to themselves and others: yet, because they proceed not from an heart purified by faith; nor are done in a right manner, according to the Word; nor to a right end, the glory of God, they are therefore sinful, and cannot please God, or make a man meet to receive grace from God: and yet, their neglect of them is more sinful and displeasing unto God. (16.7)

But it is also important to remember that the Confession says our good works “are defiled, and mixed with so much weakness and imperfection, that they cannot endure the severity of God’s judgment.” Perhaps this is granting more charity to Ann Coulter than she deserves, but her reservations about Dr. Brantly and other evangelical “missionaries” may be closer to the way that Christians should question themselves (and their good works) than the kind of blanket endorsement that Al apparently renders.

Evangelicals Are So Sexy

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(Thanks to Alice Kinnon from Whit Stillman’s Last Days of Disco)

I cannot recommend sufficiently highly the interview that Ken Myers did sometime back with Robbie George about his book on marriage. The missus and I listened to it (again for me) over the weekend and I started to wonder what kind of instruction the family values evangelicals were giving about marriage low those many years ago when they took the familial high ground only now to have lured gays and lesbians up to the same summit. I further wondered whether guys like James Dobson were interested in the function of marriage or was family life (and the sex that went with it) a means toward personal fulfillment. If Jesus could be turned into my boyfriend, could marriage become one long date (with consummation at the end)?

In an older Protestant view of marriage, we don’t see much acknowledgement of the pleasures of sex:

Marriage was ordained for the mutual help of husband and wife, for the increase of mankind with legitimate issue, and of the church with an holy seed; and for preventing of uncleanness. (Confession of Faith, 24.2)

The divines may have been worried in their private lives about whether their wives were fulfilled in the bedroom, but they didn’t try to find biblical justification for the delights of love making. Instead, they kept to the point and looked as sex’s function. No fun here. Sex is duty ( turn-on for workaholics?).

This echoes the way Roman Catholics have also thought about marriage and sex (and accounts perhaps for Robbie George’s insights). For instance, I recently came across this discussion of sexual pleasure which appealed to Thomas Aquinas:

Hence it should be noted that the conjugal act is sometimes meritorious and without any mortal or venial sin, as when it is directed to the good of procreation and education of a child for the worship of God; for then it is an act of religion; or when it is performed for the sake of rendering the debt, it is an act of justice. But every virtuous act is meritorious, if it is performed with charity. But sometimes it is accompanied with venial sin, namely, when one is excited to the matrimonial act by concupiscence, which nevertheless stays within the limits of the marriage, namely, that he is content with his wife only. But sometimes it is performed with mortal sin, as when concupiscence is carried beyond the limits of the marriage; for example, when the husband approaches the wife with the idea that he would just as gladly or more gladly approach another woman. In the first way, therefore, the act of marriage requires no concession; in the second way it obtains a concession, inasmuch as someone consenting to concupiscence toward the wife is not guilty of mortal sin; in the third way there is absolutely no concession.

Minus the stuff on mortal and venial sin, Aquinas’ point strikes me as sensible to any man who has tried to figure out the difference between his legitimate and illegitimate sexual desires.

But if you go to the heady days of the 1970s, just ahead of the curve of the family values promoting Religious Right, you find lots of material not just from Marabel Morgan but from Tim and Beverly Lahaye (who helped give Kuyperian w-wism a footing among evangelicals via Franscis Schaeffer) on the best ways for man and woman to — ahem — “have it all.” Steven P. Miller observes this outpouring of evangelical writing about sex in his recent book (hide the children if not the women):

The husband-wife authorial team — an arrangement common to the genre — offered a vision of sexuality that, if quite traditional when compared to the “key parties” of 1970s lore, was hardly a paean to Victorian mores. . . . they specifically attacked the “old Victorian nonsense that a ‘nice lady doesn’t act as if she enjoys sex'” To the contrary, the authors maintained an abiding concern with female orgasm. In the modern era, they argued, most wives either expected to — or should expect to — receive vaginal or clitorial stimulation from their husbands, who needed the know-how necessary to satisfy such new, but fair standards.

Of Morgan Miller writes:

Morgan and her fans suggested numerous creative strategies for greeting their hardworking husbands. Possibilities for a six o’clock surprise included “pink baby-doll pajamas” and “the no-bra look.” “What about it girls?” Morgan asked her readers. “Are you in a marriage rut? Would your husband pick you up for his mistress?” One critic quipped, “A man married to a Total Woman wouldn’t know whether he’d be coming home after work to Lolita or Bathsheba.” . . . The Total Woman was much more candid about sexual intimacy, however, even as it diluted kinkiness with Christian humor. One Southern Baptist woman, Morgan wrote, “welcomed her husband home in black mesh stockings, high heels, and an apron. That’s all. He took one look and shouted, ‘Praise the Lord?'” (The Age of Evangelicalism: America’s Born-Again Years, 23, 24)

All of which makes me think that if Protestants are going to restore some measure of sanity and restraint about sex and its consequences, we may have to listen less to Carl or Tim than to older generations of repressed Christians who must have had some kind of sex life since they procreated but knew better than to write about it.

Spooked by Monarchy

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A curious wrinkle in the differences between Presbyterians and Reformed Protestants is the way the former talk about Christ as king. Both teach about the mediatorial offices of Christ as prophet, priest, and king. But when it comes to church order, Presbyterians refer to Christ as king of the church while Reformed speak of Christ as head of the church.

Here’s a sampling of different church orders:

Christian Reformed Church

The Christian Reformed Church, confessing its complete subjection to the Word of God and the Reformed creeds as a true interpretation of this Word, acknowledging Christ as the only head of his church, and desiring to honor the apostolic injunction that in the churches “everything should be done in a fitting and orderly way” (1 Cor. 14:40), regulates its ecclesiastical organization and activities in the following articles.

Orthodox Presbyterian Church

There is therefore but one King and Head of the church, the only Mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ, who rules in his church by his Word and Spirit. His mediatorial office includes all the offices in his church. It belongs to his majesty from his throne of glory not only to rule his church directly but also to use the ministry of men in ruling and teaching his church through his Word and Spirit, thus exercising through men his own authority and enforcing his own laws. The authority of all such ministerial office rests upon his appointment, who has ordained government in his church, revealed its nature to us in his Word, and promised his presence in the midst of his church as this government is exercised in his name.

Presbyterian Church of Canada

When satisfactory answers have been given the candidate for ordination kneels, and the presiding minister offers prayer, during which, by the laying on of the hands of the ministers of Word and Sacraments, the candidate is solemnly set apart to the Office of the Holy Ministry, and commended for guidance and success therein to the grace of God. The presiding minister then gives him/her the right hand of fellowship, saying: “In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the only King and Head of the Church, and by the authority of the Presbytery of {name of court}, I invite you to take part of this ministry with us, induct you to the pastoral charge of this congregation and admit you to all the rights and privileges thereto pertaining, subject to the regulations concerning retirement.” The other members of presbytery also give the right hand of fellowship.

Church of Scotland

This Church as part of the Universal Church wherein the Lord Jesus Christ has appointed a government in the hands of Church office-bearers, receives from Him, its Divine King and Head, and From Him alone, the right and power subject to no civil authority to legislate, and to adjudicate finally, in all matters of doctrine, worship, government, and discipline in the Church, including the right to determine all questions concerning membership and office in the Church, the constitution and membership of its Courts, and the mode of election of its office-bearers, and to define the boundaries of the spheres of labour of its ministers and other office-bearers. Recognition by civil authority of the separate and independent government and jurisdiction of this Church in matters spiritual, in whatever manner such recognition be expressed, does not in any way affect the character of this government and jurisdiction as derived from the Divine Head of the Church alone or give to the civil authority any right of interference with the proceedings or judgments of the Church within the sphere of its spiritual government and jurisdiction.

Protestant Church of the Netherlands

So that one office shall not lord it over another, one office-bearer over another, or one congregation over another, but so that all things shall be aimed at obedience to Christ the Head of the Church, the leadership in the church is entrusted to ecclesial assemblies.

Church of England

Her Majesty the Queen is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and she also has a unique and special relationship with the Church of Scotland, which is a Free Church. In the Church of England she appoints archbishops, bishops and deans of cathedrals on the advice of the Prime Minister. The two archbishops and 24 senior bishops sit in the House of Lords, making a major contribution to Parliament’s work.

The Church of England is episcopally led (there are 108 bishops) and synodically governed. The General Synod is elected from the laity and clergy of each diocese and meets in London or York at least twice annually to consider legislation for the good of the Church.

My historical hunch about this difference is that when Henry VIII declared himself — how convenient — the head of the church of England and when Puritans and Presbyterians objected to a temporal monarch as head of the church, those antagonistic Calvinists conceived of Christ as king in order to rival the English (and later British) monarchy. The Dutch Reformed, however, were initially opposed to the King of Spain but that led to the formation politically of a republic that had few ambitions about national or imperial unity. That republic lasted until the French under Napoleon began to force their pastry on the rest of Europe. And so the Dutch Reformed had no reason to posit Christ as king of the church.

I have yet to formulate hunch about what this means for Presbyterians and politics in North America. I do wonder what the insistence on Christ’s mediatorial kingship over all nations — think Covenanters — does to Presbyterians relative comfort with republican forms of government. If you think of Christ as king over all political entities, does that make you less partial to republics, democracies, and deliberative bodies? Republics are, after all, not the norm but the exception in political history. And if you obsess about monarchy because Christ is the uber-monarch, then maybe you are even less inclined to buy into republics like the United States and the problems that attend them because you pine for the days when the British monarch was in covenant with Christ the king.

What World War I Did to U.s.

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

H. L. Mencken had his moments:

The old theory of a federation of free and autonomous states has broken down by its own weight, and we are moved toward centralization by forces that have long been powerful and are now quite irresistible. So with the old theory of national isolation: it, too, has fallen to pieces. The United States can no longer hope to lead a separate life in the world, undisturbed by the pressure of foreign aspirations. We came out of the war to find ourselves hemmed in by hostilities that no longer troubled to conceal themselves, and if they are not as close and menacing today as those that have hemmed in Germany for centuries they are none the less plainly there and plainly growing. Roosevelt, by whatever route of reflection or intuition, arrived at a sense of these facts at a time when it was still somewhat scandalous to state them, and it was the capital effort of his life to reconcile them, in some dark way or other, to the prevailing platitudes, and so get them heeded. To-day no one seriously maintains, as all Americans once maintained, that the states can go on existing together as independent commonwealths, each with its own laws, its own legal theory and its own view of the common constitutional bond. And to-day no one seriously maintains, as all Americans once maintained, that the nation may safely potter on without adequate means of defense. However unpleasant it may be to contemplate, the fact is plain that the American people, during the next century, will have to fight to maintain their place in the sun. (“Roosevelt: An Autopsy” 1920)

Sounds about right.

Like Whom Does this Sound?

Published on by D. G. Hart12 Comments

. . . it would be valuable to articulate anew the transforming love and mercy of God, which does not stop at forgiving past guilt but transforms the person from within, so that he or she may live in freedom from vice and sin. That God’s grace not only forgives but heals and elevates its recipient is a classic mark of [Christian] teaching. . . . This good news about grace and mercy is a dimension of the full truth about marriage. When the Gospel is proclaimed with love and hope, its truth has the power to bring the hearer to encounter Jesus himself, and thus to be changed by his grace. The truth that Christ teaches—including the truth about human sexuality—liberates the sinner and provides, by grace, a way out, a path of hope.