Author: D. G. Hart

Having Your Christendom and Enjoying Personal Freedoms Too

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Maybe not.

Here’s the thing. You cannot have the Europe of the Holy Roman Empire without the papacy. And what goes with this is that you can’t have the Christian Europe that we associate with Christendom and not also include historical events like the Crusades and the ghettoization of Jews. The Christendom model did not improve greatly under Protestant hands. Calvin had his bout with Servetus, the Puritans (even far away from Christendom) with Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. The monotheism of Christianity and the idea that freedom of conscience applied only to rightly formed consciences (consciences that knew the truth) did not co-exist well with modern notions of freedom of religion, the press, academic freedom, or free speech.

And yet, Christians who worry about secular societies continue to laud Christendom.

. . . religious liberals often condemn Christian conservatives for supposedly clinging to Christendom by defending traditional morals in society or civil religion. Some on the Religious left deride the whole project of “Christendom” as an egregious compromise of true Christianity dating back to Constantine. For them, Christendom means centuries of theocracy, conquest, empire, slavery and hypocrisy.

Christendom indeed has included nearly all the faults alleged, but it did not invent any of them. Theocracy, conquest, empire, slavery and hypocrisy have been intrinsic to nearly all human history. What the critics forget is that Christendom also refined the social conscience and capacity for reform to challenge its own moral failures. Christendom developed human rights and legal equality, social tolerance, constitutional democracy, free enterprise, technology, modern science and medicine, new levels of arts and literature, and refined notions of charity.

This is cherry-picking of a particularly glaring kind.

Granted, the modern West owes much of its political and intellectual resources to medieval Europe. Just consult any of the books by Francis Oakley. But this kind of sweeping Christendom’s problems under the rug of “look at all we did for you” is foolhardy. It is especially so when coming from a Protestant whose ancestors bear much of the blame for upending Christendom, that unified Christian society for which so many anti-secularists long, and who are hardly part of the “we” of Christendom.

The Roman Catholic nature of Christendom becomes especially difficult for neo-Protestants when claims like this follow:

Religious liberals need to reconsider their hostility to Christendom, remembering that the original Social Gospel, with its thirst for justice, was unabashedly Christendom-centered. And religious conservatives, without reducing their passion for needed moral reforms, should be mindful of their blessings and position of unrealized strength.

This is a highly ironic rendering of the Social Gospel since those Progressive Protestants were among the most anti-Catholic Americans. They ranked Roman Catholicism as problems needing to be eliminated in Christian America, right along side socialism, atheism, and Mormonism. The Social Gospelers were do-gooders to be sure, but their “vision” of the United States did not include full acceptance of non-Protestants. (And not to be missed is that by putting the social in Social Gospel, the Social Gospelers also fudged the gospel, a point that reinforces a reading of the Reformation as a recovery of the gospel from a church that put a Christian society above the word of God.) “Letting goods and kindred go,” one of the famous lines from “A Mighty Fortress,” had as much to do with leaving behind Christendom as it did with suffering persecution for the faith.

In other words, defenders of Christendom cannot have their cake and eat it. Christendom, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic, was premised on the suppression (either formal or informal) of false beliefs. It was not liberal or tolerant as moderns have come to understand those terms. For defenders of Christendom to act as if a Christian society is the harbinger of modern freedoms and no threat to unbelievers or other faiths is one of the greater examples of binging and purging.

And They Thought the PCA Was Divided

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You are not going to find much on the contemporary Roman Catholic Church in Jason and the Callers’ rifling through the early church fathers. Maybe for good reason since Pope Francis has apparently opened the old fault lines of Vatican II within the U.S. hierarchy (at least):

The election of Pope Francis in March heralded a season of surprises for the Catholic church, but perhaps none so unexpected — and unsettling for conservatives — as the re-emergence of the late Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin as a model for the American Catholic future.

While there is no indication that Francis knows the writings of Bernardin, who died in 1996, many say the pope’s remarks repeatedly evoke Bernardin’s signature teachings on the “consistent ethic of life” — the view that church doctrine champions the poor and vulnerable from womb to tomb — and on finding “common ground” to heal divisions in the church.

Ironically, the re-emergence of Bernardin — a man who was admired by a young Chicago organizer named Barack Obama — is exposing the very rifts he sought to bridge, especially among conservatives who thought his broad view of Catholicism was buried with him in Mount Carmel Cemetery outside Chicago.

Francis, for example, repeatedly stresses economic justice and care for the poor as priorities for Catholics, and he warned that the church has become “obsessed” with a few issues, such as abortion, contraception and homosexuality, and needs a “new balance.”

The new pope has also sought to steer the hierarchy away from conservative politics and toward a broad-based view of Catholicism “that is not just top-down but also horizontal” — focused on dialogue in the church and with the wider world.

“Please do not let up, as you fill our cups with hope as well as knowledge.”

“The point that (Bernardin’s) consistent ethic makes is exactly the same point that Pope Francis is making — let’s look at the whole picture and not just focus almost exclusively on three or so issues,” said Archbishop Michael Sheehan of Santa Fe, N.M., who had been close friends with Bernardin since the 1970s.

“I certainly think that if Cardinal Bernardin were alive he would be very pleased with what Pope Francis is saying and doing,” echoed Archbishop Joseph Fiorenza, retired archbishop of Galveston-Houston, whose 1998-2001 term as president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was seen as one of the last in the mold of Bernardin. . . .

Several other bishops, church officials and observers agreed. But if those assessments are manna to Catholics hungry for a new direction in the church, they are anathema to conservatives who believe Bernardin epitomized everything that was wrong with the U.S. church before Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI pushed the hierarchy to the right.

“The Bernardin Era is over and the Bernardin Machine is no more,” the conservative writer George Weigel wrote in the journal First Things in a 2011 essay that trumpeted the end of a time “in which a liberal consensus dominated both the internal life of the Church and the Church’s address to public policy.”

The fact that Weigel and others would still be driving a stake through the heart of Bernardin’s legacy — as Peter Steinfels put it in a rejoinder in Commonweal magazine — 15 years after his death is a testimony to the stature Bernardin once had, and the angst he can still inspire.

In fact, a generation ago, Bernardin was viewed as the quintessential American churchman — a longtime president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and then its resident wise man, coaxing the hierarchy into approving landmark documents on war and poverty that shaped the public debate on faith in America.

Yet the “John Paul II bishops” who came to power in the 1980s and beyond saw Bernardin’s style and views as too accommodating and too reluctant to mount the barricades on behalf of a more assertive Catholic identity marked by a few hallmark issues rather than a spectrum of teachings.

So just when Jason and the Callers thought they had escaped the unsatisfying clutches of Protestantism, they entered a communion riven by the same kind of divisions that characterized the modernist-fundamentalist controversy. One side wants the church to continue to adapt to the modern world (as Vatican II taught) and the other, like neo-conservatives mugged by the reality of liberal change, wants to put the brakes on adaptation by stressing fundamental markers of Christian identity. Both sides are a long way from early church fathers in which Jason and the Callers have buried their heads.

But Aren't Piper and Grudem Making the World Safe for "Bad" Charismatics?

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Tim Challies writes:

There is a challenge here for myself as a Reformed, North American believer: I have a very narrow view of the Christian world—a too-narrow view. MacArthur made it clear that he did not host this conference in order to critique the Wayne Grudems and John Pipers of the world; if these men were representative charismatics, Strange Fire would have been a non-event or, at the least, a very different event. He hosted the event because there are hundreds of millions of people around the world who make the fraudulent practice of fraudulent gifts the heart of their expression of the Christian faith.

[He didn’t write, thanks Nate] But even if you don’t make “the fraudulent practice of fraudulent gifts” the heart of your Christian faith, even if “the fraudulent practice of fraudulent gifts” is only a side dish in your Christian walk, do you ever want “the fraudulent practice of fraudulent gifts” to be part of your Christian practice? Or do you want to let Christian leaders who do not reject “the fraudulent practice of fraudulent gifts” to go uncriticized?

Since Challies appears to be a friend of Grudem and Piper (hence along with MacArthur his granting them an exemption), perhaps he can spend some of his personal capital and straighten them out of the work of the Holy Spirit.

A Communion In Search of a Call

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Perhaps Jason and the Callers should devote more time to their new fellow believers:

Archbishop Müller’s concise and clear re-statement of the theological foundations of Christian marriage offers a vision of permanent, fruitful and faithful love between a husband and wife, who are a sign for all of human history of the creative fire of Trinitarian love. It also offers a vision of Christ’s unstinting care for his Church — and thus a preparation for eternal life with God.

“Sacramental marriage is a testimony to the power of grace, which changes man and prepares the whole Church for the holy city, the new Jerusalem — the Church, which is prepared, ‘as a bride adorned for her husband,’” observed Archbishop Müller, gently but firmly. “By adapting to the spirit of the age, a weary prophet seeks his own salvation, but not the salvation of the world in Jesus Christ.”

However, his elucidation of Church teaching was accompanied by a frank acknowledgement that many cradle Catholics who participate in a Church wedding know little of sacramental theology and have been formed instead by modern notions of marital love as a human contract that necessarily requires an escape hatch.

The CDF prefect suggested that this state of affairs increases the likelihood that marriages blessed by the Church may not be valid, and that reality might influence judgments made by Church marriage tribunals.

Could the reason for this ignorance be a catechism that is too long? Or could it be that sacramentalism gets in the way of didacticism? Either way, Jason and the Callers have their work cut out for them.

Vatican Sporting Scene

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While Jason is knee-deep in Eucharist studies and Bryan is trying to wrap his mind around Vatican II, officials in Rome are engaged in various competitions. First, a story about cricket as the new evangelism:

The Holy See has plans to finally beat the Church of England at its own game: not in a theological debate, but on the cricket field. The Vatican has a new cricket club that aims to encourage dialogue between cultures, as well as growing virtue among the athletes, both on and off the field.

“The idea was if we start a cricket club, cricket being so popular in the whole of the East, especially in the Indian subcontinent, we could start a dialogue through cricket,” said Father Theodore Mascarenas.
Father Mascarenas is a member of the Pontifical Council for Culture, overseeing the departments for Asia, Africa and Ushuaia (capital city of Tierra del Fuego, Argentina). He is also the new chairman for the Vatican cricket team, called St. Peter’s Cricket Club.

St. Peter’s Cricket Club currently has several different objectives. The first is to organize a tournament among the various colleges in Rome, which, according to a survey done earlier this year, will be able to count on roughly 300 players and supporters from the city.

Eventually, the club hopes to challenge the Church of England to a match and aims in the future to play teams from Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist educational institutions in order to fortify relationships and dialogue with various cultural communities.

Of course, no one would really see much of a contest in theological debates with the Anglicans. What is of interest is the emerging debate between Pope Francis and Archbishop Gerhard Muller, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith:

Given that Pope Francis has himself spoken of the need to take a new look at the situation of divorced and remarried, and has convened a Synod of Bishops for 2014 to discuss this and other issues, it’s legitimate to wonder where the church is really headed: substantial change or another dead-end debate.

The archbishop makes several important points:

— He underlines that, in his view, this is not simply a pastoral question but a doctrinal issue that involves the church’s theological understanding of the sacrament of marriage. He states categorically that the Orthodox practice of allowing second or third marriages under certain circumstances “cannot be reconciled with God’s will” – which is interesting, considering that Pope Francis himself has referred to the Orthodox practice without explicitly repudiating or endorsing it.

— Muller pointedly rejects the argument that the individual conscience can be the final arbiter on whether a divorced and civilly remarried Catholic can receive Communion. Again, there seems to be a contrast in tone with Pope Francis’ own recent remarks on the duty to follow one’s conscience.

— In what appears to be a remarkably direct response to Pope Francis’ call for “mercy” as the framework for dealing with divorced and remarried Catholics, Archbishop Muller says that “an objectively false appeal to mercy also runs the risk of trivializing the image of God, by implying that God cannot do other than forgive.”

Do Jason and the Callers have an opinion about any of this? Would any of this matter to their projection of Rome as savior from error? Perhaps they are playing a different game.

Why the "Calvinist" Resurgence is Troubling

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Mark Dever has tried to account for the prominence recently of Calvinism among Baptists and independents. Coming in at #6 out of 10 influences is the Presbyterian Church in America:

Born out of theological controversy in 1973, this denomination’s official doctrinal standard is a revision of the Westminster Confession of Faith—a document “so associated with the history of Calvinism,” Dever suggests, “it could almost be said to define it in the English-speaking world.”

“By the late 1990s,” he recalls, you could virtually assume the “most seriously Bible-preaching and evangelistic congregations near major university campuses would not be Bible churches or Baptist churches, but PCA congregations.” From the success of various seminaries to the influence of Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) on campuses to Tim Keller’s ministry in New York City, it’s clear the “organizing and growth” of the PCA has been a major contributing factor to the Reformed resurgence.

Not to be too disrespectful of a communion of like faith and practice, but if I were looking for theological chutzpah in the last quarter of the twentieth-century, I would not be turning to the PCA precisely because of Keller. In fact, since 1986 when Joining and Receiving failed, the PCA has broadened and become flabby, while the OPC has become lean (many thought it was always mean). Does this mean that Dever should have mentioned the OPC? Of course, not. We are small, marginal, and can’t make it in NYC the way Keller has. (Whether the PCA has actually made it in NYC is another question.)

But this account of the PCA and Keller suggests that the new “Calvinists” don’t really get Reformed Protestantism. Inside confessional Presbyterian circles folks are worried about the PCA and wonder why folks like Keller don’t spend some of their considerable capital on trying to help the denomination recover its Reformed faith and practice. (Oh, that’s right, Keller has.) Imagine a Southern Baptist minister or seminary professor mixing it up with Episcopalians or United Methodists and you might have a parallel with Keller’s unwillingness to play within the confines of Presbyterian polity and Reformed teaching.

But if CG’s comment about Baptists needing to venture out on their own and lose their wanna-be-Presbyterian outlook is correct, then perhaps Dever’s estimate of the PCA is just one more version of Baptists, who are only a guhzillion times bigger than Presbyterians, turning their heads to follow a tall Presbyterian blonde. Why they don’t find Lutherans that attractive is a mystery, though it may be an indication of Baptist provincialism. Imagine what the young and restless would look like if they were reading Luther instead of Piper channeling Edwards. Then again, Luther’s theology of the cross might require having to give up Billy Graham.

Who Me (all about Stellman)?

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Jason Stellman feels singled out by Peter Leithart’s post about the “tragedy” of conversion. Leithart wrote:

Apart from all the detailed historical arguments, this quest makes an assumption about the nature of time, an assumption that I have labeled “tragic.” It’s the assumption that the old is always purer and better, and that if we want to regain life and health we need to go back to the beginning.

Jason responds:

I would be curious to hear Leithart actually cite a convert who made a statement that betrayed an assumption like “old is always purer and better.” My guess is that the reason he makes no such appeal is that few, if any, of us have actually said something like that. I certainly didn’t.

Right, officer, I wasn’t “breaking the speed limit,” I was actually going 85 miles per hour. If Jason can’t find himself in all of those tendentious posts and comments about the early church fathers (still no mention of an early church pope, mind you), then he still has a strong dose of Calvary Chapel literalism in him. In other words, if he doesn’t think he gains traction in debates by citing the early church — the very church Christ founded, I’ve heard — then he should stick to Balthasar and de Lubac.

To add insult to injury, Stellman lauds the development of doctrine as precisely the vehicle which makes Rome the “conversion-destination” of choice:

I mean, if there’s an ancient expression of Christianity that refuses to grow up or adapt to the times, it’s certainly not the Catholic Church (I’ll leave you to figure out who it might be [*cough-EO-cough*]).

I’ll believe Stellman believes in development of doctrine when he wires his affirmation of high papalism to historic and contemporary efforts to make Rome more conciliar. So far, I have not seen his communion or its members wean themselves away from a version of papal supremacy that went hand in hand with opposition to Italian nationalism, religious freedom, and the separation of church and state.

Grow up? Indeed.

First Baptists, Now Reformed Charismatics?

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Not if John MacArthur has anything to say about it. I read at various blogs that the California pastor recently sponsored a conference, Strange Fire, in which he and other speakers took aim at charismatics. MacArthur affirms, so I’m told, cessationism.

For the life of me I don’t understand why Protestants outside churches that confess a Reformed confession want to be known as Reformed or Calvinist. (Actually, I have a hunch but that is a topic for another time). Lutherans do not seem to have this problem. Baptists don’t want to be Lutheran. Baptists, in fact, are often suspicious of Lutherans on sacramental grounds. Charismatics also do not seem to want to be Lutheran. Perhaps Lutheranism doesn’t offer the full-throated version of divine sovereignty that Calvinism does. Either way, one of the attractions of Lutheranism for (all about) me is that you don’t have to share the road with enthusiasts.

Yet as one blogger puts it, MacArthur has a problem not just with Reformed Protestants but charismatics:

John MacArthur may go down in church history as one of the most confused pastors ever to step into a pulpit. His steroidal cognitive dissonance constantly results in insufferable hypocrisy.

For certain I thought he could not outdo himself in this regard, but he has. After writing Charismatic Chaos in 1992, he partnered with Charismatic CJ Mahaney for eight years in the Resolved conferences sponsored by his church, Grace Community in Sun Valley, California. One year after the last Resolved conference, MacArthur is hosting the 2013 Strange Fire conference that is fustigating Charismatic doctrine in no uncertain terms. The hypocrisy of it all is staggering.

MacArthur also seems to have a problem with the mysticism promoted by Charismatic theology, but yet is a close confidant of John Piper who not only has Charismatic leanings himself, but led the 2012 Passion conference in the mystic practice of Lectio Divina.

In other words, the issue of “Reformed” charismatics raises a host of problems not just for mainstream evangelical institutions like the National Association of Evangelicals and Christianity Today which has skirted issues of cessationism, but also for more explicitly Calvinistic sectors like The Gospel Coalition. After all, C. J. Mahaney was a charter member of TGC’s council and TGC council members have had apparently few problems with his charimatic views of the Holy Spirit and Christian devotion.

So far, only Thabiti Anyabwile and Kevin DeYoung have weighed in but both seem to be reluctant to name names. The latter makes the point that the Westminster Confession comes down on the side of cessationism.

That would be a vote for putting charismatics outside the Reformed camp, since belonging to a church that confesses a Reformed confession is what puts you in. But that logic also works for “Reformed” Baptists since they don’t belong to a church that confesses a Reformed confession. As worthwhile as the London Baptist confession of faith may be, it is not — as some allege — basically the Westminster Confession. In fact, Baptists could not affirm the Westminster Confession and admirably enough wrote their own confession, one that follows in outline parts of Westminster, but it is hardly the same.

What we need, then, is a better term for these Protestants who neither baptize babies nor affirm covenant theology. Here is what I propose: for charismatics, let’s call them Divine Right Pentecostals since they want to stress the sovereignty of God. And for Baptists, let’s simply use Baptist since they continue to insist on believers baptism. I don’t know what Reformed has to do with either since these charismatics and Baptists can likely affirm as much of the Augsburg Confession as they can of Westminster.

2K Threatens Defenders of Christendom the Way Christianity Threatened the Roman Empire

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Doing a little reading on the motives for Roman authorities to persecute the early church, I was struck by parallels to contemporary criticisms of 2k from the likes of neo-Calvinists, theonomists, or those who pine for Christendom or Christian America. According to Robert Wilken:

Traditional Roman religion emphasized the utilitas (usefulness) of religious belief for the well-being of the commonwealth, the res publica. Hence, it has been easy, especially for a civilization nurtured on the “personal” religion of Christianity, to assume that the Romans did not actually believe in the gods, but rather deemed belief in the gods merely advantageous to the life of society and to the state. . . .

In the cities of the Roman Empire, religion was inextricably intertwined with social and political life. Piety toward the gods was thought to insure the well-being of the city, to promote a spirit of kinship and mutual responsibility, to bind together the citizenry. “In all probability,” wrote Cicero, “disappearance of piety toward the gods will entail the disappearance of loyalty and social union among men as well, and of justice itself, the queen of all the virtues.” In the most profound sense, then, impiety toward the gods disrupted society, and when piety disappears, said Cicero, “life soon becomes a welter of disorder and confusion.”

By the standards of the individual and personal religion familiar to most Westerners, it is difficult for us to appreciate the social and public character of Roman religion. But “separation of the concept of piety into a familiar and a cultic half is clearly a product of modern sensibilities; in antiquity piety formed a unity.” For the Romans, religion sustained the life of the state. The new Christian superstition undermined it.

Isn’t that what 2kers regularly hear from their critics, that 2k relegates Christianity to the private and personal sphere when Christianity really should be part of the social order, a mechanism for protecting the well-being of society? But that is precisely what Christianity’s critics saw in Christianity. Which suggests that anti-2kers are using pagan categories for evaluating 2k, not ones that the first Christians new.

Wilken concludes:

By the beginning of the fourth century Christianity was a large and influential social and religious force within Roman society, no longer a tiny, unknown foreign sect. Yet from the perspective of Roman officials Christians remained a people apart. They contributed little to the public life of society, and by their devotion to their own deity, Jesus of Nazareth, they undermined the religious foundations of the cities in which they lived.

Again, that sounds a lot like what 2kers hear from their critics. We don’t speak up in the public square. Our faith is irrelevant. Our understanding of Christianity undermines the cause of Christ in the United States (and elsewhere).

If I were a critic of 2k, I’m not sure I’d want to be on the side of an argument that Roman emperors and officials used to persecute and execute Christians.

From Sunday School to Reality TV

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I have not been following the story, but Matt Pitt, a youth pastor in Alabama, who started a church called Basement, is in jail for resisting arrest (and before that, impersonating a police officer — anyone willing to jail him for impersonating a minister?) and he has generated a large following from Alabama’s young faithful. You can read about this here.

But what I found striking was this commentary:

When Willow Creek introduced the seeker-sensitive model in the 1970s, the Basement could not have been what it had in mind. The Basement is the ultimate example of seeker-driven services targeted at a very particular audience with an emphasis on the commercialization and commodification of religious practices. As a youth ministry run by a younger preacher, the Basement may signal the next step in the megachurch, seeker-sensitive movement. Combined with new reality TV programs and internet ministries . . ., popular religion is adopting more secular tools to reach larger audiences—and it’s working. Perhaps a better signifier would be plastic religion (rather than seeker-sensitive) for what’s going on at the Basement. In Chidester’s Authentic Fakes, he describes plastic religion as a commodified and flexible, a way to think about popular culture that is “biodegradable” and “shape shifting.” The Basement is unabashedly plastic while also claiming authenticity, which is a cunning way to reconcile the conflict inherent in its MTV/tent revival meetings. Drawing on the televangelist trends described by Bowler in Blessed, with emotional pleas that “ebb and flow” throughout the meeting, Pitt’s ministry takes the appeal one step further and amps up the revival atmosphere with smoke, lights, loud music, hip videos, and a liturgical call and answer that sounds more like a club chant.

If Bill Hybels, who started out as a youth pastor himself and forged a megachurch that would cater to those youth once they became suburbanites, could not have envisioned the Basement, it was only because he was limited to the programming of the three networks and various UHF channels available to U.S. television viewers in the 1960s. But youth culture has always forged a separate religious Christian identity, going all the way back to Jonathan Edwards and Gilbert Tennent, whose revivals drew followers precisely from the adolescent demographic. Sunday School was just another endeavor that isolated a group of Christians (or not) defined by age and tried to cultivate a Christian identity distinct from existing congregations and communions.

This is one case where I am no splitter. Lumping Tennent, Sunday school, Bill Hybels, and Matt Pitt makes perfect sense.