Author: D. G. Hart

If Interpreting the Old Testament is Hard, Why Are Inerrantists Any Easier?

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I was surprised to see Pete Enns post recently on fear as a driving motive of theological conflict, mainly because pop-psychology doesn’t fit with his scholarly pose. But the greater surprise is that Enns doesn’t seem to be aware that psychological accounts of conservatives have long been discredited at least in certain scholarly circles (prejudice lives on among the left as much among the right — whether theological or political).

Consequently, it was providential that around the same time that Enns posted about the explanatory powers of fear, Philip Jenkins wrote about the paranoia of liberalism.

First Enns:

I’ve written many times on this blog about how deep fear of loss of control sits behind heated theological conflict (e.g., here). I recently came across psychologist David G. Benner’s comments on fear, and though he is not talking about theological conflict specifically, what he says is certainly applicable to various situations dealing with disagreement over ideas, ideologies, and especially what one thinks of God. (For an earlier post on Benner, see here.)

To be clear, I am not suggesting that theological disagreement is necessarily wrong or to be avoided at all cost. But when conflict is sought out or even created and the divisions that follow are hailed as the will of God, the true indicator of theological purity and spiritual maturity, I continue to believe that deep fear of being theologically wrong, and thus losing control of one’s personal and group narrative, lies at the root.

In case anyone blew past that last paragraph, let me say it again: the simple presence of disagreement is not an indication of fear. Things like anger, belligerence, win-at-all-costs, and control-of-other are.

Now Jenkins:

Richard Hofstadter was a Columbia University historian, whose best-known books were Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) and The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965). The title essay in this latter book originally appeared in Harper’s at the time of the 1964 election. A classic JFK liberal, he used his historical skills to analyze what he saw as the political menaces of his day. He described the beliefs and rhetoric of Barry Goldwater and what he termed the radical Right with about as much balance and intuitive sympathy as an al-Qaeda spokesman expounding US policy in the Middle East. Hofstadter located contemporary Right-wing views in a deep-rooted and ugly tradition of hatred, xenophobia, Nativism, and racism, traceable to colonial times. (He always spoke of the Right: conservatism might in theory be acceptable, but America, in his view, had no “true” conservatives).

Hofstadter saw no point in trying to comprehend Rightism as a system of rational political beliefs. Rather, it was based on paranoid fantasies—delusions of persecution, visions of conspiracy, and messianic dreams of absolute victory in a future that would vindicate all present excesses. Only the word “paranoia” “adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” All these views, ultimately, were grounded in irrational fears, of projections of the troubled self. Drawing on the faddish therapeutic creeds of the time, Hofstadter presented Rightism as a pathological disorder. “Paranoia,” in his usage, was not just a rhetorical label, but a certifiable personality disorder.

For Hofstadter, America’s political choice in 1964 could be summarized readily: we are liberal; you are mentally ill.

The Paranoid Style idea was so attractive because it masqueraded as sober history. The phrase has resurfaced frequently in subsequent years, always in the context of denunciations of conservatism. So clichéd has the theory become that David Greenberg pleaded with fellow-liberals to accept “a moratorium on drive-by references” to Hofstadter’s idea.

Perhaps a similar moratorium on psychological accounts of opponents should be issued and sent to Enns.

More Winning?

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Regular readers should understand by now that 2k has less to do with politics than with the church and her ministry. On that anti-2kers and 2kers agree. But sometimes 2k does arise even among those who are engaged in the business of doing or theorizing about politics. On the political front, then, 2kers may be intrigued to know about a couple of recent items.

The first is the candidacy of Ben Sasse for the Republican Senate nomination in Nebraska. Those familiar with Ben from his associations with Modern Reformation may know of his Lutheran-turned-Reformed ecclesiastical background and I can personally vouch for his 2k outlook. Ben served in HHS for the George W. Bush administration and has spent a lot of time recently thinking about health care in the United States. Slate recently interviewed Sasse about the subject (and others). Surprise, no Lordship of Christ or Satanhood of Democrats came up in his answers:

Well, let’s go back. In Medicaid, there’s no demonstrable evidence right now that people with Medicaid have better health outcomes than people who have no insurance. So, just saying, “I empathize and I feel your pain and I want to therefore make the government solve all these problems,” we don’t have evidence that that actually works. So if you want to actually help people, what we need to do is create a society that has a lot more people who are healthfully and steadily and stability in a middle class and believe that there is a growth economy, and that there’s opportunities for their kids and grandkids that are as great as what our grandparents knew, when we felt like America was still on the upswing. America should still be on the upswing, but our optimism should be about the American people, and about the ability of communities and neighborhoods and schools and small businesses to solve these problems. Big government programs haven’t demonstrated that they actually ameliorate these problems that you’re talking about. I mean to you, point about Oregon or West Virginia, more Medicaid signups, you can put more names and more numbers on government programs, but it isn’t clear that that actually benefits them, so I think we need to go back to the drawing board.

I think most Americans believe in a basic social safety net. But if there are 3–5 million hard-to-insure people right now, why are we disrupting the 165 million persons in an employer-sponsored insurance market? As of now we don’t know how many enrollees there are in these programs, but we know that millions of people have been kicked off their plans already because of Obamacare. The president said if you want to keep your plan you can keep it. We know that’s not true and right now we don’t even know that the benefits, in scare quotes, of the new exchange programs are even going to add up to the amount of people that lost their individual market insurance in New Jersey and Florida and Nebraska. So I think that this is hugely disruptive, and trying to solve a problem it’s creating unintended consequences that are creating more problems than its even solving. And it’s at a price tag we can’t afford. There are better solutions.

The other item of note is the new book by Jeff Taylor, who teaches political science at the very Kuyperian Dort College. Here is an excerpt from a review of Politics on a Human Scale: The American Tradition of Decentralism:

Jeff Taylor, the chair of a political science department at a private college in northern Iowa, successfully shifts the focus on federalism from its institutional moorings to the way it was scuttled in the Twentieth Century by party politics gone astray. In this respect, the book is unique. What one learns by thinking about decentralization through the lens of political party evolution is that the rush for electoral advantage in building national coalitions came at the cost of sacrificing a good deal of liberty and sanity. Most critically, the hunger for power and national scale led to a forfeiture of politics on a human scale: the politics of decentralism.

Nowadays, we have 315 million Americans spread across 3.8 million square miles of American territory. Oddly, the higher the population and wider the range of policy preferences, the more intense the push becomes to settle on one brand of economic justice, one approach to health care, one ideological conception of best practices, and one oversized approach to national defense. Lost in this cacophony for centralization are the sober voices who remind that symbolic diversity in the face of considerable constraints upon community autonomy is a hollow pursuit.

If Jeff Taylor’s book was merely a retelling of the benefits of federalism, it would have less value. Political scientists like Thomas R. Dye have already made the case that federalism—rooted in multiple, independent governments with considerable responsibility for the welfare of people within their jurisdictions—protects important political values such as individual liberty, pluralism, party competition, political participation, and the management of conflict (American Federalism: Competition Among Governments, 1990, 175). While Taylor’s book addresses these considerations, it is much more focused on the idea that decentralization helps nourish attitudes, understandings and relationships that are central to real human flourishing.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not claiming that Taylor is 2k. But a word search at Amazon of the book indicates that the words “kingdom” and “Lordship” are absent, which is an indication — in addition to Taylor’s own blogging at Front Porch Republic — that despite his Kuyperian surroundings, he is not running his studies through a neo-Calvinist grid.

Papacy as Rorschach Test

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Jason and the Callers tell us that Protestantism doesn’t have a magisterium that can settle disputes and end disunity. They fail to mention that Protestantism also lacks ecclesiastical partisans who by interpreting the pope according to their own image function as their own magisterium. Sean Michael Winters thinks “right-of-center writers appeal to those parts of Benedict’s speeches that people like me always loved and which they ignored.” He also says “there really is a deep continuity between Benedict and Francis, but there is virtually no continuity between Benedict as interpreted by U.S.-based Catholic neo-cons and Pope Francis.” How are the faithful to make sense of this? Ask a reporter who covers the Vatican:

In the often heated (and sometimes self-referential) debate surrounding the continuities and discontinuities between Popes Benedict XVI and Francis, people are often so hasty to draw contrasts and point to the differences in style and focus of the two Popes, that they risk creating caricatures out of both figures. A series of artificial clichés end up being attached to Ratzinger’s person, as if his teachings were entirely about the strenuous and tireless defence of non-negotiable values in the public arena.

On his first visit abroad for World Youth Day in Cologne, in the summer of 2005, Benedict XVI chose not to speak about chastity, premarital sex etc. Instead, he concentrated on the beauty of Christianity. He followed a similar approach a year later when he visited Spain, the cradle of “Zapaterian relativism” and the home of same-sex marriage. Benedict XVI met families who had come to the city of Valencia from all corners of the world to testify the beauty of their experiences. On this occasion he chose not to launch any criticisms against the Spanish government, focusing on positive aspects instead.

The courageous and evangelical response Ratzinger gave in 2010, when the Church was right in the thick of the paedophilia scandal is another case in point. Instead of pointing the finger at the Church’s external enemies, he said that the biggest threat comes from inside the Church, from the sin that exists within it. Newspapers that are now pro-Ratzinger did not like this move. Ratzinger’s “penitential Church”, became a slogan used to express a nostalgia and yearning for Ratzinger to adopt stronger public stances.

Then there were the words Ratzinger pronounced on his last trip to Germany (Freiburg) as reigning Pope in 2011.Words which disappeared into a vortex self-interested silence. He talked about a Church “that is satisfied with itself, makes itself at home in this world, that is self-sufficient, adapting to worldly principles.” A Church that tends to lend “greater importance to organization and institutionalization than it does to its calling to be open to God, and to open this world up to its neighbours.” “Free of burdens, and material and political privileges, the Church is able to better devote itself, and in a way that is truly Christian, to the entire world; it can truly be open to the world,” Ratzinger said.

What Does Reformed Modify?

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Hint: the body of Christ we call church.

Kevin DeYoung defends a wide berth for Reformed Protestantism and quotes Herman Bavinck for support:

In particular, Bavinck claims, “From the outset Reformed theology in North America displayed a variety of diverse forms.” He then goes on to mention the arrivals of the Episcopal Church (1607), the Dutch Reformed (1609), the Congregationalists (1620), the Quakers (1680), the Baptists (1639), the Methodists (1735 with Wesley and 1738 with Whitefield), and finally the German churches. “Almost all of these churches and currents in these churches,” Bavinck observes, “were of Calvinistic origin. Of all religious movements in America, Calvinism has been the most vigorous. It is not limited to one church or other, but—in a variety of modifications—constitutes the animating element in Congregational, Baptist, Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, and German Reformed churches, and so forth” (1.201). In other words, not only is Bavinck comfortable using Calvinism has a synonym for Reformed theology (in this instance at least), he also has no problem affirming that Calvinism was not limited to one tradition alone but constituted the “animating element” in a variety of churches. Calvinism, as opposed to Lutheranism, flourished in colonial America as the typical orthodox, Reformational, sola scriptura-sola fide alternative to the various forms of comprised Arminianism and heterodox Socinianism.

The problem with this historically speaking, for starters, is that Lutheranism did precede Calvinism and so you could conceivably attribute all the variety of Calvinism to Lutheranism as the original Protestantism. Granted, the lines of continuity between Reformed Protestantism and the North American colonial churches were stronger than with Lutheranism. But that is much more a function of British Protestantism and what happened to Calvinism (or what didn’t) within the Church of England, the Union of England and Scotland, and the Puritans. British Protestantism turned Calvinism into a proverbial hot house of Calvinisms. This was not the case among the Dutch Calvinists who planted Reformed churches in North America. The colony of New Netherlands actually excluded Quakers and Lutherans, and enjoyed much greater uniformity than the Old World Dutch were capable of enforcing. Remember, the Netherlands, despite Dort, welcomed Descartes, Spinoza, and Anabaptists.

But aside from the history, the question is one of arbitrariness. If John MacArthur can exclude charismatics from being Reformed even though he doesn’t belong to a Reformed church, or if The Gospel Coalition can set up a tent broad enough to include disciplined Southern Baptists and wobbly PCA ministers, Calvinism, like evangelicalism, becomes simply what pleases the excluder/includer. Add to that the reality that conservative Presbyterian and Reformed communions invested great energy and resources to distinguishing themselves from communions, like DeYoung’s, those that are Reformed primarily in name rather than substance, and you begin to see why some Reformed Protestants are eager to give coherence to their wing of Western Christianity. I don’t mean that as a cheap shot. But so far, folks like MacArthur and the Gospel Allies have yet to acknowledge the hard work done by Reformed Christians to defend and maintain the ministry of word and sacrament within disciplined (read Reformed) churches. We had thought the task of reforming the church was arduous and long, but now you hold a conference or set up a blog and — voila — it’s Calvinism.

Dictionaries revise definitions all the time. But users of words and grammarians don’t approve of the revisions. The question comes down to whose pay grade it is to establish Calvinism’s meaning. Celebrity pastors? Parachurch agencies? Or church councils? I’m pretty sure I know how Calvin, Bucer, Knox, and Ursinus would vote. Do they carry as much clout as John Piper? As Bud Dickman is wont to say, “well. . .”

Rome's Advantage over Amsterdam

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As much as Jason and the Callers may think of their crossing the Tiber as the fix to Protestantism’s anarchy, another set of converts finds Rome congenial precisely because it has more resources for transforming culture. This is where the idea that neo-Calvinism is making the world safe for Roman Catholicism has some plausibility. After all, Calvinism only fixes so much. It may get you to 1550 Geneva or 1618 Amsterdam. But what about the problems that Protestantism introduced to Europe by upending Christendom in the West. If you give someone a taste for a Christian society, can they ever be satisfied with the kind of disquiet that Protestantism introduced?

That question explains why Hilaire Belloc thought Protestantism was a heresy and Rome the answer to the West’s problems:

1. It was not a particular movement but a general one, i.e., it did not propound a particular heresy which could be debated and exploded, condemned by the authority of the Church, as had hitherto been every other heresy or heretical movement. Nor did it, after the various heretical propositions had been condemned, set up (as had Mohammedanism or the Albigensian movement) a separate religion over against the old orthodoxy. Rather did it create a certain separate which we still call “Protestantism.” It produced indeed a crop of heresies, but not one heresy_and its characteristic was that all its heresies attained and prolonged a common savour: that which we call “Protestantism” today.

2. Though the immediate fruits of the Reformation decayed, as had those of many other heresies in the past, yet the disruption it had produced remained and the main principle_reaction against a united spiritual authority_so continued in vigour as both to break up our European civilization in the West and to launch at last a general doubt, spreading more and more widely. None of the older heresies did that, for they were each definite. Each had proposed to supplant or to rival the existing Catholic Church; but the Reformation movement proposed rather to dissolve the Catholic Church_and we know what measure success has been attained by that effort! . . .

But let it be noted that this breakdown of the older anti-Catholic thing, the Protestant culture, shows no sign of being followed by an hegemony of the Catholic culture. There is no sign as yet of a reaction towards the domination of Catholic ideas_the full restoration of the Faith by which Europe and all our civilization can alone be saved.

It nearly always happens that when you get rid of one evil you find yourself faced with another hitherto unsuspected; and so it is now with the breakdown of the Protestant hegemony. We are entering a new phase, “The Modern Phase,” as I have called it, in which very different problems face the Eternal Church and a very different enemy will challenge her existence and the salvation of the world which depends upon her.

R.J. Snell, a recent convert, echoes Belloc on Rome’s cultural potentialities while sounding very different from Jason and the Callers on dogma and papal infallibility:

. . . Lumen Fidei is making no claim of empty pietism but rather an acutely prescient observation when stating that “once the flame of faith dies out, all other lights begin to dim,” for the light of faith provides an illuminating source of “every aspect of human existence,” and thus is integral and non-reductive in its knowledge. Such a light, the encyclical continues, given our sinful state, “cannot come from ourselves but … must come from God.” Further, this light does not merely sweep us out of our troubles and into some serene realm of transcendence, but transforms us by God’s love, giving us “fresh vision, new eyes to see”—faith allows us, again, and also here and now, to begin the recovery of thought, memory, imagination, and freedom.

The faith is about far more than social recovery and advance, for in the end faith gives us an encounter and union with the living God, but faith never provides less than the possibility of social recovery. While God gives us Himself, and this is ultimate, it was not below Christ to heal the lame, teach the unknowing, and work as a carpenter; just as Christ engages us in our natural and temporal concerns, so too does faith, this Humanism of the Cross, bring new vision and light to the spiritual impoverishment surrounding us. . . .

The Church exists not for itself but for others. We exist for evangelization, for the health and welfare of souls. But persons are not souls only, they are, in the words of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, a unity of soul and body so profound that “neither the spiritualism that despises the body not the materials that considers the spirit a mere manifestation of the material do justice … to the unity of the human being.” As such, we exist for others as complete and integral persons—for an integral humanism.

But just as 2kers question neo-Calvinists on cultural transformation, so they ask Rome’s apologists whether the point of Christ’s death was to save Western Civilization. Of course, apologists might think that question too blunt, and that the relationship between Christ and culture requires nuance. It may, but the kind of sensibility that led Christ to say that his kingdom was not of this world or Paul to say that the unseen things are really the permanent things, not philosophy or the arts, were also responsible for figures like Thomas Aquinas writing that:

Some truths about God exceed all the ability of the human reason. Such is the truth that God is trinune. But there are some truths which the natural reason also is able to reach. Such are that God exists, that He is one, and the like.

In other words, not everyone is cut out for a liberal arts education with a major in one of the humanities and you don’t need a B.A. to be a Christian to trust the triune God. Plumbers and farmers understand more truth, if they trust Christ, than the smartest of philosophers. That is, at least, one way of reading Aquinas on faith and reason.

This gap between Christ and culture is also behind the fourth stanza of Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress”:

That word above all earthly powers, no thanks to them, abideth;
The Spirit and the gifts are ours through Him Who with us sideth:
Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also;
The body they may kill: God’s truth abideth still,
His kingdom is forever.

In the world of otherworldly Christianity, a believer goes straight to the head of the class, and gets to by-pass Philosophy 101 and Intro to the Classics, simply by faith (or baptism as Rome understands it).

And yet, neo-Calvinists, who have the memo on the eternal and the temporal, have yet to reflect on it. That may owe to Abraham Kuyper’s own refusal to unhitch Christ and culture and his concomitant demand for integralism:

Hence, as a central phenomenon in the development of humanity, Calvinism is not only entitled to an honorable position by the side of Paganistic, Islamistic and Romanistic forms, since like these it represents a peculiar principle dominating the whole of life, but it also meets every required condition for the advancement of human development to a higher stage. And yet this would remain a bare possibility without any corresponding reality, if history did not testify that Calvinism has actually caused the stream of human life to flow in another channel, and has ennobled the social life of the nations. . .

. . . only by Calvinism the psalm of liberty found its way from the troubled conscience to the lips; that Calvinism has captured and guaranteed to us our constitutional civil rights; and that simultaneously with this there went out from Western Europe that mighty movement which promoted the revival of science and art, opened new avenues to commerce and trade, beautified domestic and social life, exalted the middle classes to positions of honor, caused philanthropy to abound, and more than all this, elevated, purified, and ennobled moral life by puritanic seriousness ; and then judge for yourselves whether it will do to banish any longer this God-given Calvinism to the archives of history, and whether it is so much of a dream to conceive that Calvinism has yet a blessing to bring and a bright hope to unveil for the future. (Lectures on Calvinism, 38-40)

At the end of the nineteenth century, Calvinism’s fortunes may have looked a lot brighter than Rome’s did. The Roman Church was under a virtual lock down from the Vatican amid encyclicals against Americanism and Modernism and church dogma about papal supremacy and infallibility. But that is no longer the case. Not only can Rome boast five U.S. Supreme Court justices, but the texts of Western civilization chalk up more Roman Catholic believers than Protestant saints (and they ARE saints). In another hundred years, the tables may turn again. But Protestantism will never be able to claim that it shaped the West as much as an older version of Western Christianity did.

So if Protestants want to compete in the Christian olympics, perhaps they should forget the events of Great Books and Christian political theology and put their talent and resources into soteriology, worship, and church government. Even if they don’t bring home the gold, they can take comfort from knowing the streets of paradise are paved with it.

How John MacArthur Might Sound if He Were a Reformed Protestant

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Tim Challies enables (thanks to Aquila Report):

I don’t think, however, that this issue is unclear in Scripture. The fact that Christians disagree on what the Bible teaches does not mean that there is a lack of clarity in Scripture, but rather in Christians. The Word of God is our authoritative rule for faith and practice—meaning that it is perfectly sufficient for teaching sound doctrine and governing right living. Certainly, an orthodox pneumatology sacramental theology fits under that umbrella.

On the one hand, I would agree that this is a second-level doctrinal issue—meaning that someone can be either a Baptist continuationist or a Reformed Protestant cessationist and still be a genuine follower of Jesus Christ. I have always maintained that position, and I reiterated that point several times during the conference. I have good friends who consider themselves continuationists Baptists, and I am confident that these men are fellow brothers in Christ. But that doesn’t excuse the seriousness of the error. In fact, I would appeal to my Baptist continuationist brethren to reconsider their views in light of what Scripture teaches.

On the other hand, I am firmly convinced that this secondary issue has the very real potential to taint a person’s understanding of the gospel itself. In such cases, it becomes a primary issue. For example, Baptist charismatic theology does corrupt the gospel when it expresses itself in the form of the prosperitya free-will gospel. Moreover, the global Baptist charismatic movement happily shelters other erroneous heretical movements—such as Southern Baptists Catholic Charismatics and American Baptists Oneness Pentecostals. Taken together, the number of Baptists charismatics who hold to a false form of the gospel (whether it is a gospel of revivalism and free will health and wealth or the Openness of God in some form a gospel of works righteousness) number in the hundreds of millions, which means they actually represent the majority of the global Baptist charismatic movement. That is why we took such a strong stand both at the conference and in the book.

Winning

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I will back away from Charlie Sheen-like delusions before putting Paul Helm in the 2k camp — he is a philosopher, after all. But he does raise precisely the sort of common-sensical observations that have for a long time been missing from all the chatter about transformation and w-w:

In the dust raised by the current renewed appreciation of the Reformed doctrine of the two kingdoms, through the work of David Van Drunen and others, it is sometimes asked, in adopting the doctrine of the two kingdoms, what becomes of the divine cultural mandate? In the hands of Abraham Kuyper and the neo-Calvinists, this mandate has become the work of the kingdom, as distinct from the church, and part of the Christian’s endeavour to transform society by promoting Christian this and that: Christian education, politics, art, literature, care for the environment, and so on. This has become a familiar theme, some being sanguine about the prospects of such transformation, stressing the place that such endeavours have as an expression of God’s ‘common grace’, others from the same stable stressing the ‘antithesis’ between Christian cultural endeavours and those of the secular world. These attitudes have no more than the status of private opinions, the relevant attitudes and actions being neither commanded by the word of God as a part of Christian worship or conduct, nor required by the state.

To add ‘cultural transformation’ to Christ’s command to his first disciples to go into all the world and preach the gospel, would (in Calvin’s view) jeopardise Christian liberty, and no doubt we could add that it would be to privilege the educated middle-class Christians over their blue-collar fellow believers. A command, or a kind of culturally-correct pressure on Christians to transform society, could amount to a new law, and if it came to that it would infringe the spirituality of the church and the liberty of Christians.

But one might think of such ambitions as a matter of Christian liberty within society. If someone thinks that what they paint is ‘Christian painting’, then fine. There ought to be nothing to stop them painting in this vein, whatever they take Christian painting to be. Like choosing to paint the new baby’s bedroom pink. Neither kind of painting is commanded or forbidden so neither the colour of the baby’s bedroom nor the painting of a ‘Christian’ still life is a God-given requirement of Christian discipleship. Each may be done to the glory of God. As may sweeping a room. (I Cor. 10.31)

Christendom without Christmas?

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One of the remarks that Doug Wilson made in his lectures last weekend concerned a defense of Christmas trees in the local town square. The superiority of print to sound recordings is that you can find a statement much quicker with your eyes than your ears. So I was too lazy to go back and listen for the remark. But the interweb is a remarkable device and I found the following:

The Anti-Christian Liberties Union (ACLU) knows that getting Christmas trees off public property is well worth fighting for. This is why we as Christians have to learn that saying “merry Christmas” is an act of insurrection. How do we define our lives? More than this, how do we define our lives as a people? Far from retreating into a minimalist celebration, or no celebration at all, we as Christians must take far greater advantage of the opportunity we have in all of this. Now the Lord Jesus is on His throne. And His government will continue to increase. But He works through instruments, and one of His central instruments for establishing His kingdom on earth is the faith of His people. Why is it that Christians shopping at WalMart are being reminded over the loudspeakers that “He comes to make His blessings flow, far as the curse is found.” Why are they telling us this? It’s our religion. Why don’t we believe it? But if you believe it, then say merry Christmas to somebody.

But the stakes of Christmas are even higher:

To be fair, we ought not to be too hard on the secularists for their ongoing war against Christmas. Because Christmas started it.

When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, there were no doubt people in the surrounding neighborhoods who drank too much, or who quarreled with their wives, or who sometimes shaved the edges of their business dealings. And Jesus came for that sort of thing, no doubt. His authority is exhaustive, and so no sin, however petty, is outside the reach of that cleansing authority. He came to make His blessings flow, far as the curse is found. He doesn’t overlook the little things.

But He doesn’t miss the great things either. It is interesting to note where the initial conflict was. Jesus had Herod’s attention right away. The first clash was a political one, right out in the public square. The very first battle was what sort of display was going to be allowed on the county courthouse steps. And that issue was important enough, crucial enough, that Herod was willing to shed blood over it.

So when Doug Wilson comes into his Christendom with Peter Leithart as his Constantine and James Jordan as Leithart’s Eusebius, will they make room for Reformed Protestants who don’t celebrate Christmas or don’t buy Christmas trees? (But we surely do take the holidays granted by civil and private authorities, thank you, very much.) I mean, judging by the behavior of Old School Presbyterians and secular libertarians, one might think they are on the same side of the culture wars — opposed to public religiosity. Of course, Old Schoolers object to the kind of religion that passes for public consumption, and secularists object to the kind of public that includes religion (whether orthodox or adapted). But can Wilson see the difference between those objections? More important, can he admit that his mere Christendom will be as difficult for orthodox Protestants as it will be for Jews, secularists, and Roman Catholics?

Who Said Calvinism Was Fair?

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Great. Would be Calvinists get Mark Driscoll. Meanwhile, Lutherans get Nadia.

Nadia Bolz-Weber bounds into the University United Methodist Church sanctuary like a superhero from Planet Alternative Christian. Her 6-foot-1 frame is plastered with tattoos, her arms are sculpted by competitive weightlifting and, to show it all off, this pastor is wearing a tight tank top and jeans. . . .

In her body and her theology, Bolz-Weber represents a new, muscular form of liberal Christianity, one that merges the passion and life-changing fervor of evangelicalism with the commitment to inclusiveness and social justice of mainline Protestantism. She’s a tatted-up, foul-mouthed champion to people sick of being belittled as not Christian enough for the right or too Jesus-y for the left.

Is the Roman Catholic equivalent Stephen Colbert? Or Garry Wills?

Matters about which a Reformed church Does Not Worry

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This:

During the John Paul and Benedict years, one byproduct of the emphasis on Catholic identity under those popes was the emergence of a caste of self-appointed guardians of loyalty who ran around “outing” bishops, parishes, schools, hospitals and so on that they felt were insufficiently Catholic. Critics derisively dubbed them the “orthodoxy police,” concluding that in at least some cases, this was mean-spirited and reflected an untoward lust for judgment.

One wonders if we’re witnessing the emergence under Francis of an equal-and-opposite form of the same impulse, which we might term the “enlightenment police” — people taking it upon themselves to pronounce whether someone is sufficiently humble, collaborative, forward-thinking, etc., to claim consistency with the direction being set by the new pope.

For a certain kind of liberal Catholic, the temptation to engage in such finger-pointing is probably especially strong. These are folks who felt the sting of charges of not “thinking with the church” for the last 35 years and who delight in the sense that the shoe is now on the other foot.

One good rule of thumb, however, is that the best person to judge whether a given figure or group is consistent with Francis’ vision is, well, Francis. His most ardent supporters might do well to resist the tug of setting themselves up as his Mutaween (the religious police in some Islamic societies), especially given that the spiritual cornerstone of his papacy is the importance of mercy.

On the other side of the equation, there are several constituencies in the church feeling angst over aspects of the new pope’s direction, including:

Some pro-life Catholics, who worry that his inclination to dial down the volume on abortion, gay marriage and contraception risks unilateral disarmament in the culture wars;

Doctrinal purists, who think his shoot-from-the-hip style courts confusion on church teaching;

Liturgical traditionalists, who don’t see him fostering the same reverence for the church’s worship they associate with Benedict XVI;

Political conservatives, who fear that his emphasis on the social Gospel could shade off into an uncritical embrace of the agenda of the secular left;
Church personnel, especially in the Vatican, who are weary of hearing the new boss take potshots at them because they don’t see themselves as careerists or lepers infected with the trappings of a royal court.

For these folks, “playing church” occasionally may mean directly criticizing the pope. More often, however, it takes the form of accusing the media, in tandem with certain voices inside the church, of misrepresenting his message. One can already spot a new rhetorical trope, patrolling the borders between the “real Francis” and the “mythical Francis” of the popular imagination.

Or this:

Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, says his Twitter message paying homage to hard-partying rocker Lou Reed was meant to praise his music, not his drug-influenced lifestyle.

Ravasi, an Italian cardinal and the head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, reacted to Reed’s death Monday with a tweet made up of some of the lyrics from “Perfect Day,” Reed’s 1972 cult classic. Given Reed’s provocative lifestyle, the tweet shocked many Vatican watchers.

But Ravasi made it clear — with a tweet six hours later — that he did not condone drug references in the song, or Reed’s lifestyle. That tweet warned, “Don’t fool yourselves,” before closing with another quote from the song (translated into Italian): “You’re going to reap just what you sow.”

Ravasi and Reed were nearly the same age, born seven months apart in 1942.

Ravasi, who was considered a leading candidate to become pope in the March conclave that selected Pope Francis, is no stranger to pop music-related controversy. In January, he expressed admiration for the music of another controversial rocker: Amy Winehouse, who died 18 months earlier from alcohol poisoning.

Then again, Rome and liberal (read mainline) Reformed churches bear a resemblance that Jason and the Callers never seem to notice.