Author: D. G. Hart

Church Membership beats W-w

Published on by D. G. Hart2 Comments

Thanks to Ross Douthat who notes that “conservative Protestants who attend services rarely have slightly higher divorce rates than the religiously-unaffiliated, while nominally-Catholic young adults have divorce rates that are slightly lower than the unaffiliated but more than three times (!) as high as the rate for frequent mass-goers.” In other words, think you’re religious matters a lot less than being religious.

Douthat quotes David and Amber Lapp:

Nominally religious young adults are in a vulnerable position: they are religious enough to be pushed into early marriage, for instance, but, lacking the social support mediated by an in-the-flesh religious congregation, they don’t reap the benefits of involvement in a religious community. Instead, religion may become a source of conflict. Like Kayla and Adam, most of the working-class, divorced individuals interviewed in the Middle America Project either reported pressure from religious relatives to marry earlier than they would have liked, or reported conflict because one spouse was not on board with the other spouse’s religious involvement.

… while Kayla and Adam identify as Baptist, it’s not surprising that their religious affiliation did little to protect them from divorce. Their actual church attendance was sporadic, and both expressed ambivalence about conservative religious beliefs, particularly those concerning sex and marriage. “I believe there’s a God. I believe in the Bible. I believe in the beliefs, but I don’t exactly walk every line that you’re supposed to walk,” Kayla says.

Less American Than Thou

Published on by D. G. Hart124 Comments

Thanks go to Tommie Kidd for actually recognizing that confessional Protestantism may be a category distinct from evangelicalism (all about me alert):

The second group are Reformed/confessionalist Christians, often associated with traditional Presbyterian or Reformed denominations such as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. This is the easiest category of the four, because many of these Christians would tell you that they are not evangelicals, even if the media would regard them as such. Some of these folks will tell you that they might be evangelicals, but that the doctrines and confessions of Reformed Christianity are the center of their faith, not the born-again feelings of typical American evangelicals. D.G. Hart is one of the preeminent examples of the Reformed critics of evangelicalism.

But Professor Kidd is not going to abandon evangelicalism. He merely wants to create space between evangelicalism and American nationalism (read exceptionalism):

there are many evangelicals who have reservations about the blending of American national history with their faith. Our faith needs to be focused on Christ, the paleos say, and rooted in the deep, wide tradition of orthodox church history. We do not base our faith, in any sense, on the personal beliefs of Jefferson, Washington, or Adams. Especially when viewed from the perspective of the global church, American civil religion looks peculiar, at best. Yes, Christianity played a major role in the American founding, but that fact does not place the founding at the center of Christianity. The paleos admire many of the founders, but do not wish to read the founders alongside Scripture, as Barton would have us do in his Founders’ Bible.

This concern would be a lot more forceful if Professor Kidd were to identify with a particular communion rather than a generic evangelicalism no matter how paleo (like Oleo?). He may so identify in his personal life, but he like a lot of historians who write in Conference on Faith and History (instead of a Conference on Church History) circles claim to belong to Christianity without actually being restrained by the shape and teaching of a particular church. And this is where Kidd’s description of confessional Protestantism could take a correction. Yes, the doctrines of Reformed Protestantism are important to confessional Presbyterians but that is at least because those doctrines are confessed by a communion and bind its officers and members together (in some way).

The alternative to an ecclesial Protestantism is the very sort of evangelicalism with which Kidd seemingly identifies. And part of the reason why evangelicals since Whitefield have held the visible church in low esteem is because it gets in the way of those cooperative endeavors from orphanages and Sunday school to solving world hunger and forming academic guilds. When the United States broke with Theodosius and disestablished religion, Christians did not give up national churches but they — evangelicals included — turned the nation into a church.

If paleo-evangelicals like Kidd want to disabuse evangelicals of their nationalism, a quick remedy would be to turn denominational or churchly by adopting a higher allegiance to the church (and letting it be tested by submission to ecclesiastical authority) rather than turning a critical eye to the nation. But the problem there for Protestants on both the evangelical “right” and the mainline left is that allegiance to a particular church and its teachings, liturgy, and government looks sectarian — sort of like attachments to states like Michigan or Pennsylvania look backward. The solution to one big, vacuous, and uncritical allegiance (American exceptionalism) is not another big, vacuous, and uncritical allegiance (evangelicalism).

There is Antinomianism and then there is Antinomianism

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Protestants wouldn’t seem to have to worry too much about lacking moral fiber.

Here is how H. L. Mencken perceived moralism in the United States circa 1920:

The man of morals has a certain character, and the man of honour has a quite different character. No one not an idiot fails to differentiate between the two, or to order his intercourse with them upon an assumption of their disparity. What we know in the United States as a Presbyterian is pre-eminently the moral type. Perhaps more than any other man among us he regulates his life, and the lives of all who fall under his influence, upon a purely moral plan. In the main, he gets the principles underlying that plan from the Old Testament; if he is to be described succinctly, it is as one who carries over into modern life, with its superior complexity of sin, the simple and rigid ethical concepts of the ancient Jews. And in particular, he subscribes to their theory that it is virtuous to make things hot for the sinner, by which word he designates any person whose conduct violates the ordinances of God as he himself is aware of them and interprets them. Sin is to the Presbyterian the salient phenomenon of this wobbling and nefarious world, and the pursuit and chastisement of sinners the one avocation that is permanently worth while. . . . Every single human act, he holds, must be either right or wrong – and the overwhelming majority of them are wrong. He knows exactly what these wrong ones are; he recognizes them instantly and infallibly, by a sort of inspired intuitions; and he believes that they should all be punished automatically and with the utmost severity. No one ever heard of a Presbyterian overlooking a fault, or pleading for mercy for the erring. (The American Credo, 51, 52, 53)

Forty years later when a Protestant (Robert McAfee Brown) looked at Roman Catholicism and a Roman Catholic (Gustave Weigel) looked at Protestantism, Weigel’s impression was similar to Mencken’s:

The Reformer’s strong rhetoric against the value of works could be interpreted as a form of antinomianism. “Sin valiantly and believe more valiantly.” Yet all the Reformers were against sin in all its forms and shapes. Calvin’s Geneva was no place for sin or worldliness. Virtue was the strongly enforced law of the city. In the history of Protestantism we do not find antinomianism as a practice except perhaps in some exotic little groups not recognized as genuine by the mass of Protestants. In all Protestant communities it does make a difference whether you behave yourself or don’t. Works are important, very important indeed. Catholic cultures are rarely as strict as communities where a strong calvinism prevails. Strangely enough, Catholicism always is more concerned with the faith of its members than with their works. For the Catholic the loss of faith is the greatest loss. With faith alive, pardon is possible. Where faith is absent, there is no pardon. (An American Dialogue, 177)

Postscript: the observations of Roman Catholics and Protestants in the Brown-Weigel exchange are striking for showing how different the Christian landscape is today in the U.S. On the theme of moralism, Weigel also had this to say:

When the Catholic hears a Protestant sermon he notes a number of things. In most cases the sermon is on a moral theme, and could be heard without much, if any, change in a Catholic church. (135)

Or this:

There is of course a Protestant prudery just as there is a Catholic prudery, but I am not referring to either. It seems to the Catholic that the Protestant is not too worried about birth-control, obscenity in the theatre or in print, and exhibitionism in public. Here the Protestant stands for liberty while the Catholic considers it license. These different attitudes produce friction in the national community. The Protestant thinks the Catholic immoral because he drinks and plays Bingo — and it gives the Protestant satisfaction. The Catholic thinks the Protestant immoral because he will not fight birth-control and it makes the Catholic feel morally superior.

These attitudes to drinking, gambling, and sex are very conspicuous but somehow they are not too significant. The real difference between the two communities is their distinctive conceptions of virtue. The Protestant esteems the natural virtues while the Catholic makes more of the supernatural virtues. The Protestant thinks highly of truthfulness, sobriety, simplicity, reliability, and industriousness. The Catholic most esteems humility, mortification, penance, chastity, poverty, and abnegation. Both admire charity, but Catholic charity is warmer and more personal, while Protestant charity is more efficient and better organized. . . . The result of the different tempers of moral conception will be Protestant reserve, stiffness and gravity in contrast to the Catholic’s tendency toward spontaneity, Baroque display and even Rabelaisian earthiness. (143-144)

Welcome to Protestant Land

Published on by D. G. Hart45 Comments

William Oddie wonders about the state of Roman Catholicism in ways never conceived by Jason and the Callers:

What exactly is going on, when Bishops and parish priests can so radically differ about the most elementary issues of faith and morals—about teachings which are quite clearly explained in the Catechism of the Catholic Church—and when simultaneously one Cardinal describes such teachings as “crazy” and another simply expounds them as the immemorial teachings of the Church? Does nobody know what the Church believes any more?

Beware Where Anti-Dualism Takes You

Published on by D. G. Hart25 Comments

It is of some interest to see the ties between the heavy hand of BBist transformationalism and the more palatable forms among progressive neo-Calvinists. Pinch hitting for Tim and David, Craig French may stretch to the breaking point the BBs opposition to 2k and its affirmation of the spirituality of the church:

Whatever we do with our bodies is spiritual in nature—we must remove the notion of a violent duality between man’s spirit and his body. Such a violent dualism has the lamentable consequence of many experiencing an excruciating alienation toward their bodies. Since this is rarely addressed head on, the infection becomes gangrenous because identity is divorced from embodiment. Because men refuse to be identified by their bodies, if they retain any notion of heaven, it is devoid of a Man ruling over all the stuff. A heaven devoid of such materiality is an emasculated one, which is the goal of LBGTQ-Z and egalitarianism. An emasculated eternal ideal cannot be reconciled with everlasting hell fire—so we must begin with heaven, otherwise the terrors of hell will burn down to a gentle warmth, until finally, they cease altogether. Hell cannot withstand an emasculated heaven.

[French does find support, though not without qualification, from Jamie Smith. Hey now!]

So what does French make of Jesus’ own words?

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done. Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” (Matthew 16:24-28 ESV)

I know we need to define terms and interpret texts, but if you are going to draw the Manichean line in the sand, don’t you need to worry about where you leave Jesus?

Or even Calvin who writes the following on Jesus’ words?

The word soul is here used in the strictest sense. Christ reminds them that the soul of man was not created merely to enjoy the world for a few days, but to obtain at length its immortality in heaven. What carelessness and what brutal stupidity is this, that men are so strongly attached to the world, and so much occupied with its affairs, as not to consider why they were born, and that God gave them an immortal soul, in order that, when the course of the earthly life was finished, they might live eternally in heaven! And, indeed, it is universally acknowledged, that the soul is of higher value than all the riches and enjoyments of the world; but yet men are so blinded by carnal views, that they knowingly and willfully abandon their souls to destruction. That the world may not fascinate us by its allurements, let us remember the surpassing worth of our soul; for if this be seriously considered, it will easily dispel the vain imaginations of earthly happiness.

I understand if you don’t want to go back to the world-denying form of Protestantism with which the missus and I grew up — some version of fundamentalist, evangelical, dispensationalism. Watching Mad Men should prove that we are not in Levittown any more, Toto (yes, the missus also grew up in a Levittown, not the one in the virtuous commonwealth of Pennsylvania). But do you have to go all in with denying dualism and saying that our bodies are spiritual? Do you really counter the French Revolution’s anti-Christianity — thank you Abe K. — with saying that everything is religious? With that kind of argument I worry that Mr. French may wind up in the Church of Rome the men are ordained, and the women are merely religious.

Why You Shouldn't Trust Website Rankings Now!

Published on by D. G. Hart41 Comments

The missus and I are struggling to finish Mad Men. We are almost through with Season Six. A couple nights ago I asked if she agreed with my sense that Mad Men is superior to Breaking Bad only because of the atmospherics — 1960s urban American business culture with all the elegance that used to mark the professions. She did. Today, after a few more episodes, I asked if Breaking Bad was superior to Mad Men because it did not manipulate sex and flashbacks to make up for characters without any interest. She agreed again.

I’m on a roll.

But I am almost to the breaking point with Mad Men after Don Draper’s personification of Marlin Brando in Last Tango in Paris. Draper seems even less of a real character than Walter White. His appeal apparently is his sexual performance but since the writers don’t seem to be interested in dialogue (and they can’t show even simulated sex on AMC), we have to assume that Draper has no need for Viagra, penicillin, or words that actually woo his conquests (even though he’s supposed to be quite the wordsmith with his advertising firm’s clients). The only depth we receive for Don or his times are flashbacks to his boyhood — as if growing up for part of his youth in a bordello explains his insatiable desire (as if my fundamentalist parents could not have come up with that story line) — and scenes from broadcast news telecasts about the Vietnam War, Civil Rights movement, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. My peers in radio-tv-film at Temple University could have written a better script.

Meanwhile, the viewing public is clueless:

Rottentomatoes
The Wire 100%
Breaking Bad 99%
Mad Men 97%
Foyle’s War 100%

IMBD
The Wire 9.4
Breaking Bad 9.6
Mad Men 8.7
Foyle’s War 8.4

Amazon
The Wire 4.5
Breaking Bad 5
Mad Men 4.5
Foyle’s War 5

Old Life
The Wire A
Breaking Bad C-
Mad Men F
Foyle’s War A-

Spirituality of the Church Roman Style

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

Pius XI gets it right (for a graph or two anyway):

14. Let Us explain briefly the nature and meaning of this lordship of Christ. It consists, We need scarcely say, in a threefold power which is essential to lordship. This is sufficiently clear from the scriptural testimony already adduced concerning the universal dominion of our Redeemer, and moreover it is a dogma of faith that Jesus Christ was given to man, not only as our Redeemer, but also as a law-giver, to whom obedience is due. Not only do the gospels tell us that he made laws, but they present him to us in the act of making them. Those who keep them show their love for their Divine Master, and he promises that they shall remain in his love. He claimed judicial power as received from his Father, when the Jews accused him of breaking the Sabbath by the miraculous cure of a sick man. “For neither doth the Father judge any man; but hath given all judgment to the Son.” In this power is included the right of rewarding and punishing all men living, for this right is inseparable from that of judging. Executive power, too, belongs to Christ, for all must obey his commands; none may escape them, nor the sanctions he has imposed.

15. This kingdom is spiritual and is concerned with spiritual things. That this is so the above quotations from Scripture amply prove, and Christ by his own action confirms it. On many occasions, when the Jews and even the Apostles wrongly supposed that the Messiah would restore the liberties and the kingdom of Israel, he repelled and denied such a suggestion. When the populace thronged around him in admiration and would have acclaimed him King, he shrank from the honor and sought safety in flight. Before the Roman magistrate he declared that his kingdom was not of this world. The gospels present this kingdom as one which men prepare to enter by penance, and cannot actually enter except by faith and by baptism, which, though an external rite, signifies and produces an interior regeneration. This kingdom is opposed to none other than to that of Satan and to the power of darkness. It demands of its subjects a spirit of detachment from riches and earthly things, and a spirit of gentleness. They must hunger and thirst after justice, and more than this, they must deny themselves and carry the cross.

But then he falls back into the things-go-better-with-Christ meme:

20. If the kingdom of Christ, then, receives, as it should, all nations under its way, there seems no reason why we should despair of seeing that peace which the King of Peace came to bring on earth – he who came to reconcile all things, who came not to be ministered unto but to minister, who, though Lord of all, gave himself to us as a model of humility, and with his principal law united the precept of charity; who said also: “My yoke is sweet and my burden light.” Oh, what happiness would be Ours if all men, individuals, families, and nations, would but let themselves be governed by Christ! “Then at length,” to use the words addressed by our predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, twenty-five years ago to the bishops of the Universal Church, “then at length will many evils be cured; then will the law regain its former authority; peace with all its blessings be restored. Men will sheathe their swords and lay down their arms when all freely acknowledge and obey the authority of Christ, and every tongue confesses that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father.”

21. That these blessings may be abundant and lasting in Christian society, it is necessary that the kingship of our Savior should be as widely as possible recognized and understood, and to the end nothing would serve better than the institution of a special feast in honor of the Kingship of Christ. For people are instructed in the truths of faith, and brought to appreciate the inner joys of religion far more effectually by the annual celebration of our sacred mysteries than by any official pronouncement of the teaching of the Church. Such pronouncements usually reach only a few and the more learned among the faithful; feasts reach them all; the former speak but once, the latter speak every year – in fact, forever. The church’s teaching affects the mind primarily; her feasts affect both mind and heart, and have a salutary effect upon the whole of man’s nature. Man is composed of body and soul, and he needs these external festivities so that the sacred rites, in all their beauty and variety, may stimulate him to drink more deeply of the fountain of God’s teaching, that he may make it a part of himself, and use it with profit for his spiritual life.

If we applied these parts of the encyclical to the current work of reforming the Vatican Bank, I mean, the Institute on Religious Works, we might recognize the truth of graphs 14 and 15 and see the holes in 20 and 21. In a recent interview with John Allen, George Cardinal Pell admitted that the techniques of modern bureaucratic structures administered by lay people (even secular lay people) may do a better job of overseeing a financial institution than church officers:

Cynics say they’ve seen previous waves of supposed financial reform in the Vatican come and go, and nothing much ever changes. What makes this different?

Nobody in living memory has seen anything like this before. What’s so new are the structural reforms. We’ve now got different focuses of authority and checks and balances. We’re also injecting some of the top financial people from around the world into the leadership of these different agencies, and they won’t stay on these boards if the businesses aren’t run properly.

We’ve never seen such an injection of lay leadership into the senior ranks of the Church as we’re seeing now with finances. That’s extremely healthy, because it’s an area in which we clerics don’t necessarily have any expertise.

Going forward, you won’t be able to change the system back to what it was before simply by changing one person. A whole network of institutions is being set up, with more to come.

The lesson may be, then, that Christ’s spiritual rule is different from his secular rule and that the church operates differently from society. Only Constantine echoing David makes us think Christians hold the key to running the world (and look how well Israel and the Holy Roman Empire turned out).

For Whom Do You Root?

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. . . when you’re country is out of the World Cup championship? In point of fact, I don’t really care about what the Europeans call football, though I do get a kick of comparing the footballers’ flopping to the antics of the World Wrestling Federation. And this is surely an indication of American provincialism. We are not only the greatest nation on God’s green earth but we are also the world’s superpower trapped in the body of a colonist society.

But who cares about American rooting interests? What about the pope and former pope?

Football-mad Pope Francis “might” watch the World Cup final on Sunday between his native Argentina and Germany but is unlikely to do so alongside his German predecessor Benedict XVI, contrary to media speculation, the Vatican said.

“He might want to watch the final,” Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said of Francis, formerly the archbishop of Buenos Aires Jorge Bergoglio – a fan and card-carrying member of the San Lorenzo de Almagro club since childhood.

But a Vatican source said he “excluded categorically” the prospect of pope emeritus Benedict XVI, an academic theologian with a penchant for classical piano, sitting down in front of his television set to watch the face-off.

“It’s really not his thing, he is not a fan. It would be like inflicting an infinite penitence on him at the age of 87,” the source said, adding: “He has never been able to watch a football match from beginning to end in his life”.

It’s an arresting image, to think of Francis and Ratzinger sitting down with some chips, salsa, and adult beverages (okay, maybe bread, cheese, olives and wine) to watch the Argentina-Germany final. Who gets the remote? Is the pope Christ’s vicar?

But why would Francis or Ratzinger care about Argentina or Germany because they both reside in the country of Vatican City, a separate sovereignty with its own bank, prison, police, and postal system? If papal power matters, Francis and Ratzinger should be rooting for the Vatican’s Cricket team.

Whom Are You Going to Believe?

Published on by D. G. Hart29 Comments

Is Christianity a religion of salvation?

Christianity is a salvation religion, and it offers to save us from is sin. According to the Christian story, God became incarnate in Jesus Christ, and then suffered and died on the cross, to save us from our sins. The premise upon which all this is grounded is, of course, that we humans are sinners — very serious sinners.

However, what if we are not sinners? Then it would follow that we don’t need salvation from sin. And if we are sinners but don’t feel that we are sinners, then we won’t feel the need of salvation. So Christianity will make no sense to us.

By and large we modern men and women do not feel that we are sinners, at least not in any serious sense. Oh, we admit that we are not perfect. Any one of us can draw up a list of our imperfections: we sometimes eat or drink a little too much; we often exercise too little; we don’t read enough good books; we commit little acts of impoliteness from time to time; and so on. But no really big sins — certainly no sins that are great enough for the Creator and Sustainer of the universe to become man and suffer and die in order to atone for our great wickedness.

We admit that some humans truly are very wicked — Hitler, Stalin, Osama bin Laden, Charles Manson, and a few others. But they are very untypical of humanity. The rest of us, normal human beings, are utterly horrified by the crimes of Hitler and company. This is proof — isn’t it? — that we ourselves are not very wicked. So we don’t need salvation from sin. And we don’t need a religion that offers this salvation. No wonder Catholicism is in decline.

So how can Christianity build on religions that are wrong about salvation?

. . . if we say that Islam is wrong about everything we are saying that it is wrong to affirm that there is one God, the God of Abraham, holy, righteous, merciful and compassionate. We are saying it is false that the prophets of the Old Testament are prophets; that prayer, fasting and almsgiving are pious works blessed by God; that Jesus was a prophet; that Mary is to be honored and venerated. For Muslims say all these things and all these things are true, as far as they go. The Church, instead of making foolish denunciations of all things Muslim instead does what St. Thomas describes: She recognizes that grace builds on nature and so takes what is good and true in any culture (even one as depraved as our own culture of warlike abortion-loving polymorphous perversity and greed) and begins proclaiming the gospel there. So, as I say, the Church affirms what can be affirmed in common with any religious tradition. One need not pretend we agree on all things in order to agree on the things we agree about. But we should listen to CCC 841 and not denounce the Church or call (as some readers did) for banning the Catechism when she challenges our muddy thinking. Our task is to learn from Her.

Do non-Christians need to be saved?

It’s a joke, I tell him. My friends think it is you want to convert me.
He smiles again and replies: “Proselytism is solemn nonsense, it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us. Sometimes after a meeting I want to arrange another one because new ideas are born and I discover new needs. This is important: to get to know people, listen, expand the circle of ideas. The world is crisscrossed by roads that come closer together and move apart, but the important thing is that they lead towards the Good.”

Your Holiness, is there is a single vision of the Good? And who decides what it is?
“Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is Good.”

Your Holiness, you wrote that in your letter to me. The conscience is autonomous, you said, and everyone must obey his conscience. I think that’s one of the most courageous steps taken by a Pope.
“And I repeat it here. Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.”

Is the Church doing that?
“Yes, that is the purpose of our mission: to identify the material and immaterial needs of the people and try to meet them as we can. Do you know what agape is?”

Do people not notice the irony of Protestants feeling the need to convert to Roman Catholicism and then defending teaching that weakens the imperative to convert? Perhaps only Jason and the Callers‘ lessons in logic can lead us through this intellectual wicket.

The Evangelical Presbyterian W-w

Published on by D. G. Hart46 Comments

Okay, remember this is a blog and most of the posts here are merely thinking out loud. And if all of us revealed all of our thoughts, we would likely surprise — even shock — many of those who know us.

So here is today’s conundrum: why is it that John Frame is almost as popular as Tim Keller? I say almost because TKNY obviously rocks. Yes, I concede a degree of envy. Any human, aside from Bryan Cross, would. Keller may not have the looks and charisma of a Billy Graham (neither does Frame nor — all about me — do I), but from his perch in NYC, the cosmopolitan capital of the world (for New Yorkers anyway, I’m not sure that Londoners or Romans or Istanbulus agree), and with his steady stream of books on the front shelves of national book chains and his easy access to religion journalists who don’t want to travel to Wheaton or Waco to report on evangelicalism, Keller is remarkably useful.

But what about John Frame? He has not (nor have I) been on any of the major conference circuits (Ligonier, T4G, TGC, ACE), he is not (nor am I) an exceptionally riveting speaker, and he has not (nor have I) broken through to the secular trade book market. Plus, for the last 30 years or so, he has labored in remarkably out of the way places (so have I) — the d’oh!s of Escondido and Oviedo. And yet, he continues to be the leading systematic theologian among evangelical Presbyterians. World magazine’s recent recognition of Frame’s Systematic Theology offers support for this conclusion.

Could it be that Frame’s appeal stems from his biblical literalism and devotional pietism? According to Paul Helm, these are the chief attributes of Frame’s body of work:

What motivates Frame’s theological work? I’d say, besides what has already been mentioned, a hermeneutic. The Bible, particularly the Bible’s language about God, is to be interpreted literally wherever possible. The genre of literal description is to prevail unless there s a very strong reason to disallow it. As Kevin Vanhoozer might say, the spirit of Carl Henry lives in KJV’s old teacher, John Frame. So wherever possible what God is said to be in Scripture, God literally is.

This hermeneutic is in evidence in Frame’s attitude to change in God, and to his various perspectives in time and in space, as we saw in our earlier piece on Frame’s outlook. ‘When he is present in our world of time, he looks at his creation from within and shares the perspectives of his creatures’. (570 ) ‘God engages in a conversation with man, as an actor in history. The author of history has written himself into the play as the lead character, and he interacts with other characters, doing what they do.’ (571) It would not be surprising if Frame has imbibed some of the modern outlook of the Christian religion as consisting in personal interaction between God and his creatures, despite holding that if one rejects libertarianism then the strongest argument for God being in time vanishes.

As already noted, another strong theme in Frame’s systematic theology is his concern that theology should be readily applied in the life of the believer. This is understood as having an everyday relationship with God as he interacts with his people. Such an interactive God must change, he thinks. It is important for obvious reasons that theology should be user-friendly, though it should not be forgotten that, say, Stephen Charnock’s Existence and Attributes of God contains numerous ‘applications’ in the Puritan style. Charnock’s theology is by no means purely cerebral. And – while we are on the topic – the nature of the worship of God will clearly be affected by the worshippers understanding of God. Worshipping a God who is at our shoulder is likely to be different from worshipping one who is simply ‘Our Father in heaven’. But that’s another topic.

As insightful as the post is, I do disagree with Helm’s opening that Frame “generally does not present his views polemically.” That may be true for his systematic theology, but once a warrior child it’s hard to avoid the combat.