Author: D. G. Hart

Development of Loophole?

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While Jason and the Callers continue to lay it on thick with the Protestantism-equals-individualism-and-anarchy-and-Roman-Catholicism-represents-everything-that-is-glorious-and-certain meme, the history of Roman Catholicism continues to yield considerations that render Jason and the Callers virtually gnostic in their quest for a visible church. Today’s stroll into things to which Jason and Callers don’t pay attention is John Henry Cardinal Newman, the Blessed John Henry Newman by the Callers’ reckoning.

It turns out that Newman was not so keen on Pius IX’s efforts to raise the stature and authority of the papacy. He gave the “audacity of the papacy” a whole new meaning. Look, for instance, at his comments on the Syllabus of Errors:

What does the word “Syllabus” mean? A collection; the French translation calls it a “Resumé;”—a Collection of what? I have already said, of propositions,—propositions which the Pope in his various Allocutions, Encyclicals, and like documents, since he has been Pope, has pronounced to be Errors. Who gathered the propositions out of these Papal documents, and put them together in one? We do not know; all we know is that, by the Pope’s command, this Collection of Errors was sent by his Foreign Minister to the Bishops. He, {277} Cardinal Antonelli, sent to them at the same time the Encyclical of December, 1864, which is a document of dogmatic authority. The Cardinal says, in his circular to them, that the Pope ordered him to do so. The Pope thought, he says, that perhaps the Bishops had not seen some of his Allocutions, and other authoritative letters and speeches of past years; in consequence the Pope had had the Errors which, at one time or other he had therein noted, brought together into one, and that for the use of the Bishops.

Such is the Syllabus and its object. There is not a word in it of the Pope’s own writing; there is nothing in it at all but the Erroneous Propositions themselves—that is, except the heading “A Syllabus, containing the principal Errors of our times, which are noted in the Consistorial Allocutions, in the Encyclicals, and in other Apostolical Letters of our most Holy Lord, Pope Pius IX.” There is one other addition—viz., after each Error a reference is given to the Allocution, Encyclical, or other document in which it is proscribed.

The Syllabus, then, is to be received with profound submission, as having been sent by the Pope’s authority to the Bishops of the world. It certainly comes to them with his indirect extrinsic sanction; but intrinsically, and viewed in itself, it is nothing more than a digest of certain Errors made by an anonymous writer. There would be nothing on the face of it, to show that the Pope had ever seen it, page by page, unless the “Imprimatur” implied in the Cardinal’s letter had been an evidence of this. It has no mark or seal put upon it which gives it a direct relation to the Pope. {278} Who is its author? Some select theologian or high official doubtless; can it be Cardinal Antonelli himself? No surely: anyhow it is not the Pope, and I do not see my way to accept it for what it is not. I do not speak as if I had any difficulty in recognizing and condemning the Errors which it catalogues, did the Pope himself bid me; but he has not as yet done so, and he cannot delegate his Magisterium to another. I wish with St. Jerome to “speak with the Successor of the Fisherman and the Disciple of the Cross.” I assent to that which the Pope propounds in faith and morals, but it must be he speaking officially, personally, and immediately, and not any one else, who has a hold over me. The Syllabus is not an official act, because it is not signed, for instance, with “Datum Romæ, Pius P.P. IX.,” or “sub annulo Piscatoris,” or in some other way; it is not a personal, for he does not address his Venerabiles Fratres,” or “Dilecto Filio,” or speak as “Pius Episcopus;” it is not an immediate, for it comes to the Bishops only through the Cardinal Minister of State.

Development of doctrine, indeed, with a splash of Jesuitical casuistry?

I am not competent to know what Newman was up against in England, nor do I know the workings of canon law regarding a Cardinal who dissents from his pope. I don’t have the right paradigm (even if I do have the right chromosomes). But Newman hardly seems like the model of conservative Roman Catholicism, even if he does serve as a model of Roman Catholic reasonableness in the face of the Vatican’s attempt to double-down on its supremacy. In fact, Ian Ker’s biography of Newman gives much more evidence that the Cardinal was hardly the font of conservatism that some contemporary Roman Catholics assert. Just after Vatican I, Newman was figuring out how to reconcile himself to the doctrine of infallibility. According to Ker:

Privately, [Newman] confided to Ambrose St John that he would not know what to say to anxious enquirers if the Pope did in fact take advantage of what was “a precedent and a suggestion to use his power without necessity, when ever he will, when not called on to do so.” He was so concerned, [Newman] admitted, at the danger of an attempt to extend the definition, that “we must hope, for one is obliged to hope it,that the Pope will be driven from Rome, and will not continue the Council, or that there will be another Pope.” (656)

Ker adds that Newman’s hope was that things would get so bad they could not get any worse. In Newman’s own words:

We have come to the climax of tyranny. It is not good for a Pope to live 20 years. It is anomaly and bears no good fruit; he becomes a god, has no one to contract him, does not know facts, and does cruel things without meaning it. For years years past my only consolation personally has been in our Lord’s Presence in the Tabernacle. I turn from the sternness of external authority to Him who can immeasurably compensate trials which after all are not real. . . (659)

Some have tried to explain Newman’s views, though Jason and the Callers are not among them. It does make you wonder if the development of doctrine notion is really a way to explain away aspects of papal teaching that converts find troubling (a version of Protestantism within the Roman Catholic fold). It also raises questions about whether Newman really is a model for Protestant converts to Rome since you don’t find any of Newman’s reservations about the papacy among the Callers. And then we have the matter of Protestant “interpretation” and Roman Catholic “reception” of infallible teaching. If Jason and the Callers followed Newman’s example, they might be questioning the magisterium as much as Cumberland Presbyterians dissent from the Westminster Assembly.

Protestants and Assimilation, Republican Style

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One more thought about republican forms of government and what they require of believers who would be citizens. Analogies between twentieth-century France and the nineteenth-century United States suggest that Americans demanded conformity from “outsiders” in ways comparable to the French more recently. The great complaint about Roman Catholic Irish and German immigrants was that their submissiveness to the papacy (as if), a foreign prince, would make them unworthy and unreliable republican citizens. The United States made similar demands on Mormons who had their own civil authority in the office of the apostle, who at least in the days of Brigham Young was also the governor of the Utah territory. For Utah to gain admission as a state, Mormons needed to abandon polygamy. Republicanism makes its demands.

Conversely, have Protestants had little trouble acquiescing to the republic’s norms? One thinks of the Huguenots, for instance, who assimilated pretty much wherever they went without the slightest whiff of the dissent that characterized their days of resistance in the Old World.

And then one thinks about the tradition of covenanting in Scotland and Ireland, a variety of Reformed Protestantism that earned the reputation for submitting to no one except king Jesus. A. T. Q. Stewart observed in 1977 that the Presbyterian “is happiest when he is being a radical.” He went on:

The austere doctrines of Calvinism, the simplicity of his worship, the democratic government of his Church, the memory of the martyred Covenanters, and the Scottish unwillingness to yield or to dissemble — all these incline him to that difficult and cantankerous disposition which is character of a certain kind of political radicalism.

Of course, the United States did not demand Covenanters to conform to republican norms to be assimilated. Instead, the Covenanters until around 1980 self-selected and opted out of the republic’s political life — no voting, no vows, no running for office, and no service in the military, a form of Reformed Protestant Anabaptism.

But with the exception of the ideals of sixteenth-century Scotland, Protestants came to terms fairly easily with republican government. The reason stems largely from their not having a state or monarch who was their ruler and the chief executive of their faith.

The lesson: most Reformed Protestants are 2K and they don’t even know it.

Christians Assimilated (but compromised?)

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A terrific book review, now a little long in the tooth, of two books on Europe and its immigrant populations is worth pondering for a variety of reasons but it got me thinking specifically about the assimilation of Christians in a secular republic like the United States. Here is a striking passage:

PEOPLE WHO ASK whether better government policies could have made Muslim immigration to Europe less of a debacle tend to look at Britain and France as two ends of a spectrum of approaches. Britain has let immigrants go their own way. It has been multiculturalist, laissez-faire, tolerant of partial allegiances and unintegrated identities. If you are a Sikh policeman, you can wear your turban on duty. In immigration as in other matters, the United Kingdom is unusually disorderly and willing to run the risk that “parallel societies” will form; but it does offer immigrants more self-respect and freedom of religion. France, by contrast, favors the assimilatory pressures of the melting pot. It wants immigrants to embrace a single model of republican citizenship. France’s model may sound condescending and hypocritical, but at its best it can convince a newcomer that the country’s thousand-year-old history belongs to him as much as anyone. It is a fool’s errand to call either the French or the British approach “better.” Each is built out of thousand-year-old habits of political culture. But immigration experts tend to laud whichever of the two has led to riots less recently.

What was I thinking:

1) it is hard to assimilate people of diverse cultural backgrounds and religious heritages into a peaceful, moderately ordered, and free society. Americans often bemoan the size of the government, the disregard for morality, or the inconsistency of cultural expectations (myself included). But keeping very different groups relatively calm and peaceful is no mean feat (especially if you believe what Reformed Protestants do about human nature).

2) Where does the U.S. fall in this model? In some ways it looks more like its cultural grandparent, Britain. But we also have conformist expectations that resemble the French (which likely owes to our adopting a republican form of government under the influence of Enlightenment political thought).

3) If Christians who complain about the decadence of the U.S. only kvetch and do not riot, is their desire to follow God weaker than Muslims?

4) If Christians want non-Christians to fit in with American norms that stem from Christian convictions, are they doing the same thing as the French even though for religious as opposed to enlightened reasons?

Long Before David Barton, We Had American Presbyterians (to conflate the kingdoms)

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From J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty 1660-1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (1994)

Once the Revolution had been firmly identified as the first crusade of the American civil religion, it became necessary to canonise the zealots who had brought it about. The Founding Fathers, where possible, were turned form political opportunists, propagandists or self-seekers of tepid or heterodox religious belief into the Luthers and Calvins, the Melanchthons and Zwinglis of the Novus ordo seclorum. With some exceptions, like the now-notorious Tom Paine, each became the subject of a secular epiphany. Especially was this true of the unlikely figure of George Washington, a stolid man of limited imagination and still more limited religious faith, but now repeatedly hailed (without irony) as the Moses or the Joshua of a redeemed people. On his election to the Presidency in 1789, the Presbyterian General Assembly presented him with a congratulatory address, professing to draw particular comfort from Washington’s personal piety:

Public virtue is the most certain means of public felicity, and religion is the surest basis of virtue. We therefore esteem it a peculiar happiness to behold in our chief Magistrate, a steady, uniform, avowed friend of the christian religion, who has commended his administration in rational and exalted sentiments of Piety, and who in his private conduct adorns the doctrines of the Gospel of Christ, and on the most public and solumn occasions devoutly acknowledges the government of divine Providence.

Washington’s reply was all they could expect. He championed religious toleration, acknowledged their prayers, and coupled an ecumenical Deity with a lively regard for the value of religion as a social cement:

While I reiterate the possession of my dependence upon Heaven as the source of all public and private blessings; I will observe that the general prevalence of piety, philanthropy, honesty, industry and oeconomy seems in the ordinary course of human affairs are particularly necessary for advancing and confirming the happiness of our country.

By the first centennial, the image of the Revolution as a holy war had expanded within the folk memories of the American sects to the point where the division and ambiguities within those denominations were forgotten. Presbyterians pictured the war as a Presbyterian crusade which sanctified martial heroism, turned the heterodox rhetoric of the Founding Fathers into the idiom of revivalist preaching, traced in the ‘apparent chaos’ of armed rebellions ‘the will of God. . . working toward order and organisation in a constitution depicted in terms reminiscent of the millennium. (389-90)

Peter Lillback got it honestly.

Clark goes on to observe an irony that continues to afflict “conservative” Protestants who do not oppose civil religion as they should, nor are as wary of the broad churchism that almost always traffics with baptisms of civil authority:

. . . this homogenisation of the position of colonial denominations acted to secularise the historical interpretation of the Revolution and to drain the role of the sects of its immense signficance: if most men, regardless of denomination, eventually seemed to have endorsed the Revolution, then the Revolution’s values and causes must by definition have been irrelevant to religious differences.

In other words, confusing the kingdoms brings into the kingdom (the earthly city sacralized) people who are not kingdom people while it empties the church (the foretaste of the heavenly city) of those attributes that make the church unique (and that divide the churches into different communions). It is, in the words of Vernon Dozier, a “big bowl of wrong.”

Roman Catholic 2K (and it's not Stellman)

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A good article, “Eudaimonia in America,” from last month’s issue of First Things by Robert T. Miller (it may not be available for free yet) shows that 2K thinking is even attractive among Roman Catholics. He doesn’t call it 2K. But the intellectual move is the same, namely, not to expect correspondence between the political philosophy of the nation and one’s own theological convictions.

Here is how Miller describes the problem that afflicts many conservatives (Tim and David Bayly take note):

America is under attack in the pages of First Things. In a recent article Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen tells us that America is founded on a philosophy of “unsustainable liberalism.” Implicit in the ideas of the American founding, he argues, are certain mistaken philosophical premises about individual choice and man’s separation from nature. Moreover, these mistakes are not merely intellectual because, as their logical consequences play out over time, the inexorable results are severe and pervasive social pathologies: a corrupt political order, a collapsing economy, and a degraded and degrading culture. Indeed, in Deneen’s account, pornography, sexual promiscuity, abortion, divorce, violent video games, cheating in academia, and Wall Street frauds all stem from the faulty political philosophy of the American founding.

Miller goes on to disagree with these observations about the U.S. but is especially critical of efforts to link the U.S.’s moral decay to an inadequate philosophical base (or w-w):

Liberal political philosophies are incompatible with the eudaimonism of the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition. Does that mean that eudaimonists cannot support the American political system? I share Deneen and MacIntyre’s Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical commitments, but I am also deeply loyal to the American political tradition. The reason is that there is a great gap between politics and moral philosophy. Thinking that a certain set of political arrangements is the best way to organize a particular society in particular historical circumstances is a prudential judgment, and in supporting America’s liberal political system I do not thereby commit myself to a liberal political philosophy.

This point is obscured by the fact that liberal political institutions are naturally and commonly justified on the basis of liberal political philosophies, such as a theory of natural rights as in Locke, or a theory of personal autonomy inspired by Kant, or a theory of justice as in Rawls. People who support liberal political systems on such bases are philosophical liberals. But we can also view a liberal political order as embodying not grand philosophical principles, but reasonable, pragmatic, political compromises worked out among individuals who disagree sharply on matters of morality in order to allow such people to live together in peace and to pursue their various, often incompatible, goals.

In other words, while living on planet earth, we need to live on planet earth, not in our minds or the eschaton. Or, this is a matter of prudence, not of intellectual or theological certitude. Miller explains:

The pragmatic liberal thus makes a political calculation: The cost of prohibiting some appalling speech is the risk that the government will someday use the power it thus acquires to suppress other speech that the pragmatic liberal wants to protect. People like Deneen and me, who are in a religious minority now at odds with many of the norms of the larger, increasingly secular society, should reflect carefully before advocating an expansion of government power, for we are some of the people whose speech could easily be found disgusting and worthless. For pragmatic liberals, therefore, the decision in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants is sound not because people have a moral right to play disgusting video games (they don’t), but because the danger of censorship is too great to allow the government the power to restrict speech merely because, in the government’s view, the speech is disgusting and worthless.

An Aristotelian-Thomistic eudaimonist can thus be a pragmatic liberal in contemporary America. There is a deeper point here, however, and it is that, although the philosophical liberal must reject as immoral any form of government other than liberal democracy, the Aristotelian-Thomist can be much more flexible. Leaving aside some extreme systems that would substantially prevent a person from attaining his final end (e.g., a Shari’a theocracy or a Nazi or communist dictatorship), an Aristotelian-Thomist should conclude that, in the right circumstances, almost any form of government may be the best available. Hence, St. Paul urged respect for the Roman emperor, who was an absolute autocrat;St. Wenceslaus was a feudal overlord; and St. Thomas More served Henry VIII, who was a constitutional monarch.

The same goes for the confessional Lutheran or Reformed Protestant. Feel the ecumenical love.

Did God Rest In One Day?

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Volume four of the Nicotine Theological Journal is now available at the back issues page. Here is a whiff, from the April number:

. . . [Morton] Smith’s study of John Murray is an example of how sabbatarian-creation logic fails. Murray understood as well as anyone the importance of creation for Sabbath-keeping: “The weekly sabbath is based on divine example,” he wrote in Principles of Conduct. “The divine mode of procedure in creation determines one of the basic cycles by which human life here on earth is regulated, namely, the weekly cycle.”

LET US CONCEDE, FOR argument’s sake, that Smith is right about Murray, and that the Scotsman “seem[ed] to have held to the 24-hour creation days.” (Smith acknowledges that this is not “expressly stated” in Murray.) So the world was created in 144 hours, according to Murray. Then what happened? “And he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he made.” But how long was the seventh day? Murray is very clear that that day was not twenty four hours. Here is more from Principles of Conduct: “In the realm of God’s activity in creating the heavens and the earth there were six days of creative activity and one day of rest. There is the strongest presumption in favor of the interpretation that this seventh day is not one that terminated at a certain point in history, but that the whole period of time subsequent to the end of the sixth day is the Sabbath rest alluded to in Genesis 2:2.”

From these citations we are forced to conclude that for Murray a literal six-plus-one creation sequence was unnecessary for the establishment of a literal six-plus-one Sabbath-keeping sequence. However symbolic God’s days were, Murray saw that creation was still revealed in such a way as to establish the weekly Sabbath as a creation ordinance. So the logic of Sabbath-creationism collapses. And if the seventh day is not literal, why do the first six days have to be?

Although Smith’s essay claims to survey American Presbyterian thought on creation, including the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, it is largely focused on recent PCA debates, and he neglects OPC reflection on the matter except to speculate on the views of Murray and Cornelius Van Til. This is unfortunate because he omits the 1968 resolution of the OPC’s Presbytery of Southern California (comprised of Murray’s and Van Til’s students), which we believe has not been surpassed as a summary of the biblical and confessional teaching on creation. We republish those eight affirmations in hopes that they will gain a greater reading:

1. The one true and living God existed alone in eternity, and beside Him there was no matter, energy, space or time.

2. The one true and living God, according to His Sovereign decree, determined to create, or make of nothing, the world and all things therein, whether visible or invisible.

3. God performed His creative work in six days. (We recognize different interpretations of the word “day” and do not feel that one interpretation is to be insisted upon to the exclusion of others.)

4. That no part of the universe nor any creature in it came into being by chance or by any power other than that of the Sovereign God.

5. That God created man, male and female, after His own image, and as God’s image bearer man possesses an immortal soul. Thus man is distinct from all other earthly creatures even though his body is composed of the elements of his environment.

6. That when God created man, it was God’s inbreathing that constituted man a living creature, and thus God did not impress His image upon some pre-existing living creature.

7. That the entire human family has descended from the first human pair, and, with the one exception of Christ, this descent has been by ordinary generation.

8. That man, when created by God, was holy. Then God entered into a covenant of works with the one man Adam. In the covenant Adam represented his posterity, and thus when he violated the requirement, all mankind, descending from him by ordinary generation, sinned in him and fell with him into an estate of sin.

CONTEMPORARY CRITICS OF these affirmations might charge them with sanctioning a “poetic” creation account. If so, it bears noting that, contrary to the slippery-slope fears of the Sabbath-creationists, neither Murray’s eternal Sabbath nor the presbytery’s interpretive openness have cultivated in the OPC, thirty years later, a “poetic Sabbath,” that is, observable decline in Sabbath-keeping. The lesson to be drawn, it seems, is this: if Sabbath-breaking is the ultimate concern of the watchdogs from Taylors, South Carolina, they had better look for causes elsewhere than in one’s interpretation of the days of Genesis one and two.

William Hayward Wilson

Should a Christian Be Worried about Riding a Bus Driven by a Non-Christian?

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In roughly two weeks the missus and I will be returning to Turkey with students and faculty from the College. We spend a lot of time on a bus in order to go from Istanbul, down to Ephesus, out to Urfa, and back through the center of the country to Ankara and back to Istanbul — about 3,500 miles in all. I am packing lots of books.

Our driver in all likelihood will not be a Christian since Turkey’s Christian population is miniscule. But if he is the driver we had a year ago, he will be very good. From negotiating millenia old back streets in Istanbul or construction clogged avenues in Izmir, to remaining on the road while winding over and through the cliffs to Antalya or finding rest stops for his periodic smokes, this driver could drive a tour bus through the proverbial eye of a needle.

Justin Taylor’s recent post on Christian bus driving prompted these memories of Turkey. He asks a series of questions that generally adopt a 2k outlook. But Taylor can’t take the plunge and opts to play in the neo-Calvinist/pietist wading pool:

1) Does the Bible teach how to be a bus driver? No

2) Does the Bible teach how to be a Christian bus driver?

Of course. The Bible teaches that as Christians we should function within our God-ordained vocations (i.e., legitimate callings) (1) from biblical foundations, (2) with biblical motives, (3) according to biblical standards, and (4) aiming at biblical goals. These are the necessary and sufficient conditions for Christian virtue.

Faith working through love—before God and for our neighbor—is essential for virtuous action in our various vocations (1 Corinthians 13; Luke 10:27; Gal. 5:6, etc.). All things are to be done for God’s glory in accordance with his revealed will (1 Cor. 10:31). We are to work heartily unto God, not man, knowing that ultimately we are serving Christ before we serve our boss or our customer (Col. 3:23-24). We work in imitation of our creative, working God, and we work from a position of divine acceptance and not for a position of justification before him.

Well, if you rephrase the question, you could leave off “bus driver” and the answer would still apply (or you could insert YOUR VOCATION here). So the answer here is really a non-answer since it has nothing directly or overtly to do with driving a bus.

3) Is being a non-Christian bus driver inherently sinful?

[More pietism]

It depends on what we mean here.

The vocation itself is a legitimate calling, sanctioned by God.

But one’s spiritual condition is not irrelevant in God’s evaluation of the proper way to fulfill a vocation. The Bible teaches that “without faith it is impossible to please [God]” (Heb. 11:6) and that “whatever does not proceed from faith is sin” (Rom. 14:23); therefore, any vocational pursuit devoid of genuine Christian faith is ultimately marked by sin and is finally displeasing to God. (The Westminster Confession of Faith 16.7 is helpful on this.) Their work is used by God but not fully pleasing to God.

But God is not a passenger on the bus. I am. And I don’t care for the sake of transportation (as opposed to for the sake of eternity) whether the driver is Christian or Muslim. Is he able to deliver me and the rest of the passengers safely to our destination. Can he do so while conserving fuel (for the sake of the environment)? And can he drive in a way that protects the bus owner’s property (for the sake of the economy)? Can he drive in a way that is free from stress (for the sake of his family)?

4) Can a non-Christian be a good bus driver? Yes, by “common grace” (of course).

5) Is a Christian necessarily a better bus drive than a non-Christian?

No. Christians are justified (uncondemned because of being clothed in the righteousness of Christ) but indwelling, entangling sin still remains. That means that before glorification Christians will never have pure goals, motives, or standards. A non-Christian may achieve a higher degree of competency in his or her vocation than a Christian—though this should not be the case. Sometimes this is a result of the non-Christian’s idolatry (achieving skills and competency at the expense of God and family and friendship and service); at other times a non-Christian will simply have more natural gifting from God for a particular vocation (e.g., a bus driver with better eyesight, superior reflexes, driving skills, experience, etc.)

Again, the skills are different from the piety, so why try to make devotion correspond to ability?

6) Is there a distinctively Christian way to think about the particulars of each vocation?

Yes, I believe that there is. My sense is that the more intellectual and aesthetically oriented the vocation, the more work has already been done on a distinctively Christian approach. This is, in my part, because the contrast will be more wide-ranging and apparent and because the Bible seems to have more to say directly about these areas. I’m thinking, for example, of areas like philosophy, education, and politics. (For some examples, see Alvin Plantinga’s “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” or the books in the Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition series.) The same would be true for aesthetics, as in music, fine arts, and design. It can be more difficult to see in areas oriented toward manual labor. But there is still much work that can be done in these areas. One of the problems is that intellectuals and philosophers are more inclined to know and study areas they are more interested in, and therefore other vocations become neglected in terms of analysis.

Great, so we need bus drivers to theorize about bus driving and write books, complete with study guides. Wouldn’t it be better to have a country music singer write songs and croon about the challenges of bus driving?

If we simply break this down by three parties — God, the bus driver, and (all about) me, the passenger, we can say that being a Christian bus driver only matters to the driver (ultimately). Bus driving has nothing to do with the driver’s standing before God. God ordains bus driving, and it is part of his providential care for creation to provide good (and sometimes bad) bus drivers. But the eternal status of a saint has nothing to do with whether or not he drives a bus.

I as a passenger, as noted above, don’t care (for the sake of the trip) whether the bus driver is a Christian. And if he is self-consciously so, it could make the journey unnecessarily awkward.

But I can imagine these questions matter to a bus driver who is a Christian. Should he or she (sorry Tim and David) try to honor God and love neighbors through his or her vocation? Sure. But it’s no one else’s business. So why do we need to have everyone else talking about it?

It strikes me that this question is on the order of this: there a way of driving a bus that yields an electoral victory in 2016 for Hilary Clinton? I suppose there may be. But who wonders about such things? Bill?

Deadline Extended!!

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The OPC Summer Institute is still looking for qualified young men from seminary and college who are considering the vocation of ministry in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. The new deadline is May 15, 2013. For two days (June 18-20, 2013) in the delightful setting of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, church officers will lead participants in readings and discussions of topics of particular relevance to ministry in the OPC. These include: the distinguishing characteristics of Reformed Protestantism; the nature and value of confessional churches, the importance of the means of grace, the pilgrim character of the Christian life, and the work and proper expectations for a pastor (in either an organized congregation or mission work).

If you are interested in attending or know of someone who may be, consult this application form for the email address of the Institute’s director or simply respond to this post.

The First Law of 2K Dynamics

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The more committed you are to a high view of the church (teaching, worship, and government), the less concerned you are about political causes and cultural transformation.

This law came back to me after reading a post that commended an article by John Frame, who was yet again singling out Mike Horton. At one point, Frame writes:

[Horton] brings up the distinction between the church and civil society. But one can surely acknowledge such a distinction without disavowing attempts of the former to influence the latter. So far as I know, nobody in this discussion thinks that the state should administer sacraments, or, again, that the church should lead Christians into armed warfare. So to bring up these issues is to make a straw man argument.2. Horton asks whether the kingdom of God is a culture, created by man, or God’s sovereign action? Certainly the latter. Again, I know of no evangelical who thinks otherwise. Does this distinction mean that we should take a passive stance, waiting for God to deal with social evils, rather than seeking to alleviate them by our own resources? Scripture never draws this sort of conclusion. The sovereignty of God never excludes human responsibility in this way.

Frame’s objections to Horton — no one is actually denying the distinction between the church and the wider culture — actually put Frame in the hot seat. The reason is that he is well on the record for having worship services that are fully accessible to people who aren’t in the church. In which case, the anti-2k critics are not as firm in their distinctions between the church and the world as Frame thinks. For 2k’s critics, the goal is a Christianized culture, maybe not as moral as the church, but more so than what you get in a secular arrangement. And for these same critics, the church domesticates its distinct teachings and practices to be open to a wider part of the community. The relationship appears to be that as the church lifts the boat of culture, the church also lowers itself several notches below (in this case) Reformed ideals.

2Kers, on the other hand, have no trouble separating the church’s standards from those of the culture. The two are distinct. When the lines blur, you get New School Presbyterianism — nationalistic, revivalistic and evangelistic, and moralistic. When they don’t, you get the kingdom of heaven, the means of grace, and the gospel.

LOL

Published on by D. G. Hart649 Comments

Tim and David Bayly fault 2kers for not conducting a meaningful debate. They say that folks like moi (all about me) only heckle. Conversation is a waste of time. I guess they think that they can argue with me the way they argue with women. They are gender confused. As if someone could possibly debate this:

R2K men are intellectuals first and Christians second. Yeah, yeah; not all of them. As Ortega y Gasset said, “All true thinking begins with exageration.” Which is to say the entire world since the Enlightenment has been built around exagerations called “hypotheses” and I’ll be hanged if I’m going to let them rob us of the privilege of using them ourselves. But back to the point…

R2K men are Sorbonnists for whom the thought of applying Scripture and God’s Moral Law to all of life brings on fear and trembling and sickness unto death. And so it’s the height of irony that they are forced to throw the greatest intellectual of Reformed church history to the dogs, John Calvin himself.

How do you respond to “so, do you still hate the Baylys”?

And then our good friend Erik goes over there to try to clarify a few points and maybe even honor the ninth commandment — you know the part from the Shorter Catechism about protecting a person’s name. And he receives the Bayly Bro kiss off:

[NOTE FROM TIM BAYLY: Dear Erik, I told you that your refusal to honor our request concerning your posting multiple comments in quick succession on the same theme, many of which were taunting, if continued, would lead to us removing your commenting privileges. You refused to change your behavior, insulting us in the process. Reluctantly, then, we forbade you to comment again.

But here you are commenting again. We have barred three R2K men from commenting because of their refusal to abide by objective rules. What does it take to get you men to honor authority?

So I write this to make others aware that Erik Charter has been barred from commenting on Baylyblog, he knows he’s been barred, he’s been informed by private e-mail which he acknowledged receiving, and he goes ahead and comments anyhow.]

So the Baylys don’t really want debate. They believe in freedom for only those with their views. Reminds you of Stalin and the Communist Party.

The irony, as I say, is that these guys actually think Geneva of 1555 would be their kind of place. In fact, their slander against officers of the church would put them in the slammer. Only in Amerika!

Oh, you gotta love this novos ordo seclorum.