Author: D. G. Hart

Why Not Great Friday?

Published on by D. G. Hart49 Comments

I would not normally be thinking about Good Friday or a Easter ham if it were not for a much needed break from teaching over the next few days. The experience of a confessional Presbyterian over the next 72 hours must be like that of some non-Christians — grateful for the time off but not using the time the way pious intended, that is, by going to church or attending to devotional exercises. So I admit it is unbecoming to complain about the church calendar when I benefit (in an earthly way) from it.

I understand that the Reformed churches differed on the place of certain holy days in the corporate life of the church. For instance, the Second Helvetic Confession leaves room for Great Friday:

The Festivals of Christ and the Saints. Moreover, if in Christian liberty the churches religiously celebrate the memory of the Lord’s nativity, circumcision, passion, resurrection, and of his ascension into heaven, and the sending of the Holy Spirit upon his disciples, we approve of it highly. But we do not approve of feasts instituted for men and for saints. Holy days have to do with the first Table of the Law and belong to God alone. (Ch. 24)

In contrast, the Confession of Faith is silent about holy days other than Sunday:

. . . in his Word, by a positive, moral, and perpetual commandment binding all men in all ages, he hath particularly appointed one day in seven, for a Sabbath, to be kept holy unto him: which, from the beginning of the world to the resurrection of Christ, was the last day of the week; and, from the resurrection of Christ, was changed into the first day of the week, which, in Scripture, is called the Lord’s day, and is to be continued to the end of the world, as the Christian Sabbath. (21.7)

However you come down on the Friday before the Lord’s Day associated by some Christians with Easter, I do wonder why we can refer to Awakenings as Great but not the day when Christ bore the guilt of the elect upon the cross. I understand that the goodness of Good Friday may be more than meets the eye. Editors at Slate found three reasons etymologically or historically for calling the day “good,” among them the following:

The third and final theory, the one supported by both the Oxford English Dictionary and every language expert I contacted, is that the name comes from an antiquated meaning of good. “The answer seems pretty clearly to be that it’s from good ‘holy,’ ” responded Jesse Sheidlower, the president of the American Dialect Society, when I put this question to him. Liberman agreed, noting that if you consider the other names for Good Friday—“Sacred Friday” in the Romance languages (Viernes Santo, e.g.), “Passion Friday” in Russian—“the OED’s explanation makes excellent sense.” The OED also notes that there was once Good Wednesday, the Wednesday before Easter, which these days is more commonly known as Holy Wednesday.

Even so, why not great? We do throw around the word “great” a lot. Great Awakenings, Great Depression, Great European Migration, American Greatness. Some readers know my preference for Leo Ribuffo’s reduction of the American Awakenings to Pretty Good, and that is a useful reminder about the way we traffic in greatness and countenance immodesty. But why settle only for good when it comes to the day when some commemorate Christ’s death? Why not elevate the day to Pretty Good Friday?

Calling the Bluff of A2K

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A2K (anti-two kingdom theology) selectively reads history. This is a point made frequently here. This selectivity is evident whenever someone invokes John Calvin or John Winthrop to put 2k down, as if the down-putter really wants to return to a society where adultery is a capital offense. (Could we settle for a misdemeanor?) I understand that A2K thinks that 2kers are also selective historically. We too invoke Calvin on the difference between the temporal and spiritual realms. But that doesn’t mean that we are blind to Geneva’s laws. It is possible to understand a theological point that may not bear political or social fruit at the time someone is making the point.

Now comes Paul Helm to repeat the point about historical selectivity:

Most adherents to the Confession of faith in fact adhere ex animo to a sanitized version, cleansed of references to Presbyterianism as the state religion. This is no small change. No more the Crown Rights of the Redeemer. Ever since the Solemn League and Covenant was rejected in England, this has been the de facto position here, different in the US in the eighteenth century, awaiting the passing into law of the Constitution and its various amendments, one of which concerned the separation of church and state.

The Westminster Confession says inter alia regarding the civil magistrate –

….they whom, upon pretence of Christian liberty, shall oppose any lawful power, or the lawful exercise of it, whether it be civil or ecclesiastical, resist the ordinance of God. And for their publishing of such opinions, or maintaining of such practices, as are contrary to the light of nature, or to the known principles of Christianity, whether concerning the faith, worship, or conversation; or to the power of godliness; or such erroneous opinions or practices, as either in their own nature, or in the manner of publishing or maintain them, are destructive the external peace and order which Christ has established in the church; they may lawfully be called to account, and proceeded against by the censures of the church, and by the power of the civil magistrate. (XX.IV)

This went off stage de facto in England in the seventeenth century, when Puritanism failed as a political project, and it failed in America some time later de jure .

The move from intolerance to what was by today’s standards limited tolerance is not a change that was prompted by theological reasoning or doctrinal revision, but it was wholly political, due at least in England to the presence in society of dissenting groups whose vigour and Christian orthodoxy and place in society could not be gainsaid. They were hear to stay.

Such a politically-inspired change had important consequences for Christology. No more are kings regarded as the foster fathers of the church, or queens their nursing mothers. (Isa. 49 22f.) Or rather, such passages have been ‘revisited’. No more is it thought that Christ has established ‘external peace and order….in the church’. No more is state support for the Reformed religion, nor state persecution of others on behalf of Reformed congregations, regarded as support for the one true religion that the state had an exclusive obligation to protect. No more are these things the norm for Confession-believing Presbyterians. Freedom of conscience. Pluralism. Toleration-Calvinism.

These comments are not meant to apply to Covenanter congregations of today. Maybe they are still praying for the fulfilment of Isaiah 49 stricto sensu for their own, and for others. But they do apply, obviously, to others who claim their pedigree by their adherence to letter of the Confession. That’s self-confessedly ‘paleo-Calvinism’ as one Covenanter said to me. And so the question is, is the dominant form, adherence to the purged Confession of Faith, let us call such a position ‘tolerant confessionalism’, a significant change in ‘Calvinism’, the Calvinism of Calvin and of the authors of the Solemn League and Covenant? It could hardly be said not to be.

These changes, both in doctrine and in practice, were not small. They obviously affected the whole ethos of Reformed religion. How much of a deviation from the original outlook was it? Does the abandonment of the early view of establishment compare in seriousness, centrality and the like compared with, say, the abandonment of exclusive psalm-singing, or of the Presbyterian ecclesiology of the early Reformed churches by Congregationalists and Baptists? Since the body of Presbyterians is not governed by a magisterium, who is to say what the answer is? How reads your Calvinometer? Nowadays there cannot be an ‘Old Calvinism’ but only an ‘Older’, not a ‘New’ but a ‘Newer’. No one possesses the copyright of the noun.

This means that we need a new category. In addition to New Calvinism, Neo-Calvinism, Old Calvinism, and Paleo-Calvinism, we need Neo-Paleo-Calvinism.

Old Life is simpler, Occam’s razor and all that.

Zmirak is on a Roll

Published on by D. G. Hart4 Comments

Why stop with one feisty post from a “liberal” Roman Catholic, when another is so handy? In this case, Zmirak speaks truth to Dawson (one of those powerful writers who pines for Christendom):

Dawson warns that the bourgeois spirit is a vampire which must be staked straight through its heart, and he summons as alternatives other spirits he finds more wholesome. Here he is not simply mistaken but deeply perverse, and merits the full force of outrage Jeffrey Tucker expressed in his counterblast. Let me offer choice quotations from Dawson’s essay, bits of broken glass that make him so dangerous to swallow. Dawson claims:

The spirit of the Gospel is eminently that of the “open” type which gives, asking nothing in return, and spends itself for others. It is essentially hostile to the spirit of calculation, the spirit of worldly prudence and above all to the spirit of religious self-seeking and self-satisfaction.

This statement muddles two starkly different issues: The quantitative attitude of the Pharisees toward accumulating religious merits, and the ordinary good sense required in managing any earthly enterprise — from a bakery to a family. No, we are not to see God as a business partner, to whom we pay His “share” while retaining the rest for ourselves. Nor again is He a customer whom we wish to charge what the market will bear. In dealing with almighty God, that attitude (which emerged again in the Christian world with the sale of indulgences) is presumptively absurd. This is true for a simple reason: We are each in a state of infinite debt to God, if only for the fact of our creation and our ongoing existence, which depends from moment to moment upon His sovereign will. We are further indebted to Him for the still greater gift of Redemption, the actual graces we need from day to day, and the grace of final perseverance we pray will see us into heaven.

Not a single one of these things is true in our business relationships, assuming that we are not slaves of either a private master or a totalitarian state—to name just the two most time-tested alternatives to the market economy. We are to cast ourselves at the feet of the throne of Mercy, not presuming to tote up our paltry good deeds against our many sins. Does this mean we should act the same way toward our employers, or toward the State? Does humility before almighty God demand we cultivate servility toward men? Was pre-modern Russia, where the “little father,” the Tsar, owned every stick of furniture in each of his subject’s homes, the model of a true Christian society? Is ours a creed designed to make for cringing slaves, forelock-tugging serfs, and masters who preen and strut with the borrowed authority of God? To that we bourgeois reply: “Don’t tread on me.”

Here is another example, albeit a less absurd one, of Dawson carelessly conflating heaven and earth:

In the same way the ethos of the Gospels is sharply opposed to the economic view of life and the economic virtues. It teaches men to live from day to day without taking thought for their material needs. “For a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of things which he possesses.” It even condemns the prudent forethought of the rich man who plans for the future: “Thou fool, this night do they require thy soul of thee, and whose shall those things be which thou hast provided?”

News flash: Christians are not called to husband and steward their resources wisely, to plan for their retirements or their children’s education—nor even, it would seem, for their nutrition. (The Catholic economist Amintore Fanfani actually asserted precisely this in his too-widely read treatise Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism, wherein he praised fathers for disinheriting their children and leaving them destitute.) If this were true, it would make nonsense of Pope Leo XIII’s ferocious defense in Rerum Novarum of the sanctity of property rights—which on Dawson’s reading become the occasion of mortal sin. Indeed, Dawson dances perilously close to the heresy of the Spiritual Franciscans, who sought to impose on all clergy and finally on all laity the evangelical counsel of Poverty. They ought to have been consistent and preached universal celibacy, which solves all social problems in 70 short years.

Here Dawson takes Our Lord’s warning against taking spiritual comfort in worldly accumulation — against thinking, like Job’s comforters, that earthly wealth implies beatitude — and turns it into a literalistic demand that we all live like animals, with no more thought for the morrow than monkeys or mayflies. Only a handful even of religious orders have adopted such an attitude and refused to raise funds or keep financial reserves, relying on whatever wealth was thrown over the transom. (The Theatines were one of these rare orders. Perhaps the Conventual Franciscans and the Jesuits were too infected with the bourgeois spirit.) But Dawson demands this Providentialism of fathers of large families. He would no doubt have approved of my drunken grandfather, who fathered 11 children, only 5 of whom lived past age 5. Old Whatshisname lived quite untouched by the bourgeois taint.

As a noble alternative to the squalor of the suburbs, Dawson holds up “the Baroque culture of Spain… an uneconomic culture which spent its capital lavishly, recklessly and splendidly”. How, I might ask, was that capital acquired? In Spain’s case, massive shipments of gold and silver were taken by force in unjust wars of conquest—which conquistadors covered over with a fig-leaf in the following splendid way: The soldiers would order their chaplain to present the New World pagans they met with a copy of the Gospels, then demand (in Castilian, of course) that the pagans do reverence to it and submit to the King of Spain. When the puzzled Indians refused, perhaps even smote the Gospels to the ground, the Spaniards would attack and enslave them—then cart their gold home to Spain, to use it “lavishly, recklessly and splendidly.” Of course, the massive importation of currency—which men of that era mistook for wealth—accomplished nothing in the long run except to inflate the prices in Spain and ruin the bourgeois who were still left behind after the unjust expulsion of the Jews. This economic vandalism guaranteed the dominance of viciously anti-Catholic, slave-trading England. Catholic France was more friendly to business, so Dawson duly condemns it.

When Jason and the Callers can summon up this kind of criticism of and honesty about their tradition, I’ll take their call.

What Talking to Bryan Cross Feels Like

Published on by D. G. Hart81 Comments

John Zmirak (apparently no relation to Zrim) has frustrations remarkably similar to mine. Liberal Roman Catholics and Protestants together:

Q: Do you think that Vatican II taught heresy when it said that the use of coercion by the state in matters of religion is a violation of natural law—you know, like sodomy or (even worse) contraception?

A: Vatican II was a merely pastoral council, which must be interpreted in the light of sacred tradition, not in a hermeneutic of discontinuity.

Q: Are you saying that the state’s right to torture and execute Protestants is an infallible truth of faith or morals, which the bishops of the Church and Pope Paul VI somehow failed to recognize when they issued Dignitatis Humanae? So the Society of St. Pius X is right, and Pope Benedict XVI was defending heresy when he refused to accept them back into communion unless they acknowledged this point?

A: Dignitatis Humanae is a profoundly ambiguous document. It is hard to tell what it means, if it means anything at all. Remember that it states that the Council maintains the traditional teaching about the “duties of societies” toward the true religion.

Q: Are you a totalitarian? You know, along the lines of Benito Mussolini, who proclaimed, “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”?

A: Of course not. Mussolini was an anti-clerical, whose father was a Freemason.

Q: You do realize that only totalitarians equate “society” and “state.” The classical definition of society includes the family and all sorts of other voluntary associations—including the Church, but also clubs, fraternities, labor unions, and the whole rich fabric of what political scientists call “civil society.” When the Council Fathers wrote that “society” owed allegiance to the truth, they were stating a simple fact—that everyone ought to acknowledge the kingship of Christ. They were not saying that people who didn’t fulfill this duty deserved to be tortured until they confessed, then burned at the stake and put into prison. Since in the same document the bishops of the Church, with papal approval, said that using state coercion to override people’s consciences violated the natural law—again, like adultery or perjury—isn’t it disrespectful of a universal council of the Church to assume that their statement was meaningless, or self-contradictory, or some piece of public relations that the Church would later stuff into the memory hole?

A: You are engaged in a neo-Catholic apologetic for the Americanist Catholicism of the 1950s which no longer exists, and which led directly to abortion on demand, homosexual “marriage,” and the radical imbalance of wealth in America that denies proper compensation to those who teach the liberal arts.

Q: Who would you call the authoritative interpreter of the Council—the popes who presided over it and those who came after it, and the Catechism they published? Or a network of bloggers?

A: Perhaps we serve the role of the faithful laity, which also preserved the Church from Arianism in the time of St. Athanasius.

Q: Did a Church council ever teach Arianism?

A: No.

Q: Was the only opponent of Arianism a band of schismatically consecrated bishops and illicitly ordained priests?

A: There’s a first time for everything.

Q: What confuses me is the fact that you point to the American vision of freedom as the greatest danger to the Church, when in fact the Church’s enemies are throwing that vision of freedom onto the trash heap, in order to hasten the persecution of the Church—and the Church’s friends are citing such freedom in the Church’s defense.

A: The American notion of freedom is profoundly corrupt, and lies at the heart of all the evils we face today.

Q: Is there an alternative political theory out there that anyone, anyone at all outside of infinitesimal Catholic circles, finds attractive, that would protect the Church’s liberty?

A: That is beside the point.

Q: Hasn’t the Church historically taken whatever is true in the secular world, used it as a common ground by which to approach the unbelievers, and tried to baptize and elevate it—rather than tear it all down and start from scratch in a barren wasteland. Wasn’t Augustine a patriotic Roman citizen? Or did he endorse the barbarian invasions in some text that you have uncovered from secret archives?

A: There is no call for sarcasm. The situation was different then. The Roman state endorsed the use of authority in defense of the Good, but merely had an imperfect vision of the Good. The American system has no notion of the Good at all. It is inherently nihilistic, and ought to collapse. Once it is gone, we can figure out what to construct in its place.

Q: Isn’t the classical liberal notion of freedom an outgrowth of the elevated Christian notion of the person, and the deep moral significance of his freedom and his conscience? Those seem to me like good things that the Romans knew nothing about. Was Pope John Paul II merely deluded when he praised those things in Memory and Identity? Was he being disingenuous when he apologized, on behalf of the Church, for the times that Catholics had violated those goods?

A: None of those statements by Pope John Paul II were infallible.

To Bryan’s credit, he is not so Americanist. But he is like this catechumen, thanks to the wonders of logic, elusive. Some call it hair-splitting, others Jesuitical.

(Thanks to our southern correspondent for the image.)

At Least Jesus Gets A Week

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You don’t even give up politics for Lent?

I’m not feeling politics right now.

We’ve got wars and rumors of wars over a large swath of the world. Pro life people are battling killer legislation in Colorado and corporate raiders are raiding the public treasury everywhere and in every way they can. There are runaway bishops to write about, as well as a stand up bishops who are trying to fight the fight.

We’ve got cowards, brave people and martyrs.

There is no end to the politics I could write about.

But I’m not feeling it.

What I am feeling is a deep, aching hunger for the balm of Gilead, the peace that passes all understanding, the comfort of the everlasting arms.

It’s Holy Week, and I want Jesus. . . .

Politics is one of our pitiful attempts to transcend our fallen state. But, given our fallen state, politics always becomes corrupted by our venalities and cowardices. I’ve written about the cowardly acts of men in high places quite a bit these past two weeks. The truth is, I have more than a passing acquaintance with the weaknesses of princes.

But nothing I have known can touch the combination of cowardice and cold-blooded corruption that led to the final sacrifice of the last Passover Lamb.

We need to bow down before the cross this week. It is, as Scripture says, the Lord’s Passover. It is the door opening on the way out. The cross is the price of our sins. It is the Lord’s ultimate Passover by which we are saved from the absolute and final death that we deserve.

If you become a confesssional Protestant and you get Jesus fifty-two weeks a year.

Anachronistic Calvinism

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James Bratt may think that historians of Calvinism need to explore the ways that this form of Protestantism interacted with or even shaped the forces of modernity, but scholars who study early modern Europe have moved on from the Calvinist exceptionalism that goes with neo-Calvinism:

. . . the essential historical importance of the story told here does not lie in its connections to metannaratives of modernization; it lies in its centrality for understanding that now-bygone era when confessional principles and attachments becamee structural elements of European society. The stance of recent historians who have approached the subject with a sense of anthropological otherness unquestionably appears more appropriate than that of whose who continue to insist on its links to that quicksilver concept of modernity. The particular variant of the broader Reformation call for evangelical renewal that insisted on purging from worship all rites without explicit biblical sanction and on eliminating from eucharistic doctrine all possible confusion between created matter and a God who is spirit first gained official sanction within a small, distinctive corner of the Continent nestled on the periphery of its largest states. From there, the polysemous message of its early prophets was able to go forth and crystallize dissatisfaction with the Roman church across much of the Continent, in some areas by virtue of its capacity to offer ordinary Christians motivation and models for forming alternatives to the established church, in others by virtue of its ability to convince rulers and their key theological advisers of its fidelity to Holy Writ. The consequences shook many states to their foundations. The establishment of Reformed churches in defiance of the authorities, the resistance of Reformed believers to state-sponsored ecclesiastical innovations they viewed as infringements against the purity of God’s ordinances, and the fear of a Catholic plot to roll back the advances of the Reformation: each precipitated some of the bitterest conflicts of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even when the religious transformations associated with the movement’s spread did not occasion full-scale civil war, the alteration of the traditional form of worship — occasionally as many as three or four times within a few decades — placed the local clergy before a series of difficult decisions of conscience that led many to resign their posts. For ordinary believers in virtually every generation, the decision of whether or not to join a Reformed church, to embrace a specific contested point of Reformed doctrine, or to refuse to abandon one when ordered by the authorities to do so could be a literally life-changing decision, casting individuals upon the paths of exile or assuring them of access to positions of power and respectability. The story of the establishment and defense of Europe’s various Reformed churches is fundamental to the history of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed, 543-44)

In other words, Reformed Protestantism didn’t begin as a w-w but as an effort to reform church, doctrine, and liturgy. No one was willing to go to the stake in order to integrate faith and learning, or to practice slaughtering animals and selling the meat Christianly.

Benedict continues modestly:

If the fatal flaw of theories crediting Calvinism with distinctive consequences for economic behavior or political development (me: think Kuyper) is that they exaggerate the spillover effects of religious doctrine outside the religious domain, the great shortcoming of the recent emphasis on the parallel consequences of the Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic Reformations is that it downplays each faith’s distinctiveness within the domain of culture and religious life. For all of the undoubted similarities between the various confessions and for all of the porosity of confessional boundaries to the motifs and practices of the new devotion of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it made a difference in peoples’s life experience whether they were raised as Lutherans, Reformed, or Catholics. It made a difference as well where and when within each tradition they were raised, for none were monolithic or static. Each confession had its own set of styles of devotion. Each had its own doctrinal and psychological points of friction.

In other words, can you believe it, Calvinism was a religion. Getting from there to Kuyper’s lectures is another matter altogether but the way history generally works is that what comes first sets the standards for what comes after. The other way around is anachronistic — or worse — Whiggish.

Taking Every Inch But Not The Lord's Day Captive

Published on by D. G. Hart73 Comments

We do know that Walter doesn’t roll on Shomer Shabbos. We should have also known that if Bubba Watson won at Augusta, the Allies — like clock work — would be all over it. Opportunities to root, root, root for the home team shall not be passed up, even if unbelievers may find the self-congratulations a sign of insecurity. (Somehow negative readings never occur to cheerleaders.)

Even so, the explanation for the significance of Watson’s victory is hard to believe:

Why It Matters: Christians have always been involved in professional sports, so why is the faith of superstars like Watson suddenly worthy of the public’s attention? Because athletes like Watson show that it’s still possible for athletes to be open and unapologetic about their willingness to share the Gospel. Also, Watson may be one of the best in his sport but he understands the importance of keeping his priorities in order, winsomely admitting that their life’s callings are secondary to serving the Creator who has called them. To a culture that is both obsessed and disillusioned with fame and fortune, this centered perspective provides a refreshingly countercultural witness.

Wouldn’t not playing golf on Sunday be a truly counter-cultural witness? Such a decision is not that hard to imagine since Eric Liddell became the subject of a successful motion picture. The problem, of course, is that not playing on Sunday in golf means no victory, and no chance for Christians to preen. At least Liddell could run on another day. Even so, if the Allies are truly interested in being counter-cultural (and not merely complimenting themselves for being so), they might consider whether a victory at the Masters is the best vindication of Christian faithfulness.

If You Think The Next World Is Going Look Like This One

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Consider what Paul does to the reasonable expectations of Jewish believers who thought that politics, culture, and family mattered:

Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not listen to the law? 22 For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman. 23 But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through promise. 24 Now this may be interpreted allegorically: these women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery; she is Hagar. 25 Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia; she corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. 26 But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother. 27 For it is written,

“Rejoice, O barren one who does not bear;
break forth and cry aloud, you who are not in labor!
For the children of the desolate one will be more
than those of the one who has a husband.”

28 Now you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise. 29 But just as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so also it is now. 30 But what does the Scripture say? “Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall not inherit with the son of the free woman.” 31 So, brothers, we are not children of the slave but of the free woman. (Galatians 4)

Seems like a fair warning to the transformers who look for continuity between this world and the one to come.

Why Not Lutheranism?

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In my ongoing effort to monitor the way that Calvinism has captured the imagination of Americans, the following:

Now here in America, we live in the Land of Calvinist culture and Calvinism—being a particularly potent form of heresy—has mutated into its opposite with peculiarly potent force. It retains its joylessness and icy fear that someone, somewhere, is having a good time as it turns everything fun into an exercise in moralism, even when it kills off God and replaces him with social do-goodism. So instead of preachments on observing the Sabbath, we get homilies on having a green vacation. My favorite of these was on NPR a decade or so ago, in which the canon law for obtaining carbon credit indulgences while vacationing was laid out in Talmudic granular detail along with this final buzz-killing caveat: “But can we ever really justify taking vacation at all so long as there is ecological damage happening anywhere in the world?” Love that.

Likewise, the Calvinist missionary impulse and the Calvinist work ethic continue unabated in our culture long after the Calvinist belief in God is dead. Only now the mission is to export hedonistic democratic capitalism with an entirely different Madonna as our icon, preaching an unholy trinity of Mammon, Moloch, and Venus to the world.

Chesterton once remarked that in America we have a feast to celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims and in England they should have a feast to celebrate their departure. As the English were to discover under Cromwell, Calvinism is famously on the lookout for impurity and tends to seize on those sacrificial victims (such as Charles I) upon whom scorn can be heaped as the group periodically purges itself of shame by means of a scapegoat.

Is it okay to scapegoat Calvinism if its adherents are already guilty of scapegoating? Sort of like being intolerant of intolerance?

This is not Your Father's Dallas Seminary

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Another example of how conservatism does not come easily to evangelicals (even fundamentalists):

Because Protestants do not celebrate saints’ days, we miss out on learning about many great women in Christian history. One such example is Hilda, Abbess of Whitby, the 7th-century woman celebrated every November 17. She led a large community of men and women studying for God’s service, five of whom went on to become bishops. She brought the gospel to ordinary people, but kings and scholars also sought her counsel. A missionary, teacher, and educator, she led an abbey that became one of the great religious centers of North Eastern England.

Few writings by and about such women have survived from centuries prior to the printing press. Yet some do remain, including The City of Ladies by 14th-century author Christine de Pizan (c. 1365–1430). Later came defenses of women from one of Quakerism’s founders, Margaret Fell Fox (1614–1702); Tory pamphleteer, Mary Astell (1668–1731); abolitionist Hannah More (1745–1833); and the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797). Most of these writers acted out of a Christian impulse with the relatively unified objective of elevating women to their rightful place.

In the 18th century, the first Great Awakening brought a return to the earliest centuries’ involvement of lay people. Women’s involvement in missions sometimes included preaching, and on the frontier, Christian women experienced increased levels of autonomy. By the 19th century the pro-woman consciousness had a label: “the woman movement,” now called first-wave feminism. Male and female Bible-believers gathered at the Seneca Falls Convention, where the group drafted a declaration addressing the role of women in society.

In the half-century that followed, many believers joined the push for women’s suffrage, and dozens of foreign mission societies sent out women missionaries. The editor of The Message and Deaconess Advocate, Lucy Rider Meyer defended their role in her 1895 defense, saying, “In deaconess ranks to-day may be found physicians, editors, stenographers, teachers, nurses, book-keepers, superintendents of hospitals and orphanages… A bit of history shows that the ‘new woman’ is not an invention of the last decade but that, in the character of Hilda, Abbess of Whitby.”

This “new woman” is not an invention of second-wave feminism either. Betty Friedan did not start the “woman movement;” Christians did. Motivated by the belief that men and women were made in God’s image to “rule the earth” together, these pro-woman, pro-justice believers sought to right wrongs for those who had less social influence.

Who is this author? Does she teach at New Brunswick Theological Seminary? She is Sandra Glahn (PhD, University of Texas at Dallas), professor at Dallas Theological Seminary where she specializes in the topics of gender and women’s issues.