Author: D. G. Hart

When the PCUSA Was Almost the USA Church

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James Hutson in Church and State in America tells this story:

In 1798 John Adams experienced how inflammatory the exercise of a familiar religious act by a national official could be in a country that had been taught to cultivate and cherish republican jealousy. On March 23 of that year, when the nation was in the midst of a “quasi-war” with France, Adams proclaimed a national day of fasting and humiliation, a practice that American magistrates had followed since the earliest days of the seventeenth century. It so happened that the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church was meeting in Philadelphia when Adams issues his proclamation. Though not a Presbyterian, Adams was branded one by his political opponents and was accused of scheming to rivet a Presbyterian establishment on the nation, the evidence being his fast day proclamation. “A general suspicion prevailed,” he wrote, “that the Presbyterian Church was ambitious and aimed at an establishment as a national church. I was represented as a Presbyterian and at the head of this political and ecclesiastical project.” The result of his fast day proclamation, Adams claimed, was his defeat in the presidential election of 1800.

Hutson gives evidence why Americans should never have suspected that Presbyterians would be the national church. The reason is that their theology was entirely incompatible with one of the major reasons the founders gave for religion being important to a free society. According to Rev. Samuel West, of Massachusetts:

perhaps no one if of greater importance to promote the peace and safety of the community than the doctrine of a future state of reward and punishment; for we shall find that persons are often restrained from gross immoralities by the fear of future miseries, when civil penalties prove insufficient for that purpose. A doctrine of such amazing importance to promote the civil good of society ought to be very strongly impress’d upon the minds of men in order to render it beneficial to society. (111)

Since Presbyterians and Lutherans who trusted Christ no longer feared future punishments, they were immune to such incentives to civic virtue. In fact, Calvinism’s may have been a threat to civil society as republicans conceived it.

There is Separation and then There is Separation

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Over at Matt Tuininga’s blog, the inveterate critic of 2k, Mark Van Der Molen, makes an interesting point. In response to the charge of theocracy that came from his assertion that the state needs to be subject to God’s law, he wrote: “theocracy is the merging of church and state into one power.” In other words, anti-2kers are never guilty of theonomy or theocracy as long as they affirm a separation of church and state.

This is an important admission since many critics of secularism, as anti-2kers are, deride Jefferson’s language of a wall of separation between church and state. Whether it’s a wall dividing church and state, or simply a constitution, the separation of church and state puts anti-2kers in the awkward position of affirming a fundamental point of 2k, namely, the separation of ecclesiastical and civil powers. It is a good thing for them that they do since in Western Christianity only Roman Catholics have taught the unity of church and state.

At the same time, in the United States we have the language of the separation of powers within the federal government. The judicial is separate from the legislative, which is separate from the executive, and so on. But this separation is not really a separation in the way we think about separation of church and state. The reason is that Congress, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court are all part of one government.

And this appears to be the case for critics of 2k who pine for Calvin’s Geneva where the Company of Pastors were an agency of the city’s government. The pastors handled spiritual matters and reserved the right of excommunication, a spiritual capital penalty. But Calvin was an officer of Geneva’s city government since the city council appointed him, paid his salary, and gave him his legal status.

In which case, an affirmation of the separation of church and state doesn’t really get us very far if the church is merely going to be a branch of government.

Lyman Beecher was Prophetic

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Anti-Catholicism is one of the most difficult topics that I teach on the history religion in the United States. Students today, most of whom were born about the time that the Dude was trying to recover his rug (i.e. the first Iraq War), have no understanding or feel for the sort of animus that Protestants in the U.S. once had for Roman Catholics. One of the most important expressions of anti-Catholicism came as late as 1949 when Paul Blanshard wrote American Freedom and Catholic Power, which was not an obscure monograph but a best-seller.

That sort of anti-Catholicism still haunted the days of my youth, despite the election in 1960 of the first Roman Catholic as president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. This anti-Catholicism was seriously deficient. It drew its animus not from a defense of the Reformation and the formal (sola Scriptura) and material (justification) principles of Protestantism. Instead, it was rooted in a very anti-2k conflation of Protestantism with liberal society (in the form of republicanism and democracy). Because Roman Catholics were subject to a foreign prince (the pope), and because the Church itself was one of the most feudal and medieval (anti-modern and anti-democractic) of institutions, followers of Rome could not be “good” Americans. They were outsiders and Protestants were insiders. That’s why Protestants had public schools and Roman Catholics needed parochial (in both senses) institutions.

Lyman Beecher put anti-Catholic notions succinctly in his book A Plea for the West where he worried about the influx of Roman Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Germany (at the time a mere trickle compared to what was coming in the 1840s):

If [Roman Catholics] associated with republicans, the power of caste would wear away. If they mingled in our schools, the republican atmosphere would impregnate their minds. If they scattered, unassociated, the attrition of circumstances would wear off their predilections and aversions. If they could read the Bible, and might and did, their darkened intellect would brighten, and their bowed down mind would rise. If they dared to think for themselves, the contrast of protestant independence with their thraldom, would awaken the desire of equal privileges, and put an end to an arbitrary clerical dominion over trembling superstitious minds.

Since 1970 the old Protestant anti-Catholicism has vanished. Some of this owes to the culture wars in which evangelical Protestants have recognized Roman Catholics as some of the surest defenders of traditional morality, especially on matters sexual. Another important factor is that Roman Catholics have “gotten right” with the United States. That is, they have become some of an American way of life’s chief defenders. The process began notably with John Courtney Murray’s book, We Hold These Truths (1960). But it continues and a recent post confirms how American and modern Roman Catholics in the United States have become. Here is what Joseph Pearce has to say:

One of the truths of Christendom which lays the very foundations of freedom is the Christian insistence on the mystical equality of all people in the eyes of God and the insistence on the dignity of the human person that follows logically, inexorably and inescapably from such an insistence. If everyone is equal in the eyes of God, it doesn’t matter if people are black or white, healthy or sick, able-bodied or handicapped, or whether babies are inside the womb or out of it. It doesn’t matter that people are different, in terms of race, age or innate abilities; they are all equal in the eyes of God and, therefore, of necessity, in the eyes of Man also. This is the priceless inheritance of Christendom with which our freedoms are established and maintained. If everyone is equal in the eyes of God and Man, everyone must also be equal in the eyes of the law.

If, however, the equality of man is denied, freedom is imperiled. The belief of Nietzsche, adopted by the Nazis, that humanity consists of übermenschen and untermenschen, the “over-men” and the “under-men”, led to people being treated as subhuman, worthy of extermination and victims of genocide. The progressivist belief of Hegel, adopted by Marx and his legion of disciples, that a rationalist dialectic, mechanistically determined, governs the progress of humanity, led to the deterministic inhumanity of communism and the slaughter of those deemed to be enemies of “progress”. The French Revolution, an earlier incarnation of atheistic progressivism and the progenitor of communism, had led to the invention of the guillotine as the efficient and effective instrument of the Great Terror and its rivers of blood. The gas chamber, the Gulag and the guillotine are the direct consequence of the failure to uphold the Christian concept of human equality and the freedom it enshrines. In our own time, the same failure to accept and uphold human equality has led to babies in the womb being declared subhuman, or untermenschen, without any protection in law from their being killed at the whim of their mothers.

Apart from the connection between freedom and equality, the other aspect of freedom enshrined by Christianity is the freedom of the will and the consequences attached to it. If we are free to act and are not merely slaves to instinct as the materialists claim, we have to accept that we are responsible for our choices and for their consequences.

What is remarkable about this argument is that it is precisely the one that Protestants used to use against Roman Catholics. In other words, especially prior to Vatican II, Rome’s hierarchy was especially skeptical about republican institutions and for good reason given how the French Revolution played out for the Church in France. But now Rome seems to be fully on board with those very institutions that Protestants embraced to justify themselves to the wider world. Winthrop’s city on a hill morphed into Wilson’s war to make the world safe for democracy.

What is also important to notice is that just as Protestants had to adapt (and liberalize) their faith to underwrite the U.S. project by giving up Calvinism’s notions about divine sovereignty and human sinfulness (think Finney and Fosdick), so Roman Catholics like Pearce (anyway) have forgotten that Thomas Aquinas was a predestinarian who believed that the human soul was incapable on its own of free will. In other words, the United States first assimilated Protestants to Americanism and now it appears that it is also working its wonders with Roman Catholicism.

The only immunity appears to be two-kingdom theology. It allows you to defend republican (or sacral monarchical) ways in one realm, and divine sovereignty in the other. No muss, no fuss (if only).

By This Logic God Would Not Have Given Us the Bible

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Tim Challies tries (via the Aquila Report) to guide us into thinking the right thoughts about C. J. Mahaney and Sovereign Grace Ministries:

Obviously the situation carries far-reaching implications for Mahaney and forSGM. But there are implications for you and me as well. The Bible is clear that a distinguishing characteristic of Christians is to be our love for one another. John 13:35 says it plainly: “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Love for other Christians is the great test of our commitment to Christ and our likeness to him. This love is put to the test in a unique way in the midst of trouble and disagreement.

This situation is unfolding before a watching world that loves nothing more than to see Christians in disunity, accusing one another, fighting one another, making a mockery of the gospel that brings peace. You and I are responsible to do well here, to be above reproach in our thoughts, words and actions. We are responsible to be marked by love whether evaluating a difficult situation or taking appropriate action. We can make the gospel look great or we can make it look insignificant.

Not to say that Challies’ point is without merit. But I’m not sure you want to impose standards more rigorous than what God applied to the history and materials included in Scripture. I mean, if the apostle Paul followed this advice, we wouldn’t have any of his epistles, would we?

Too Long to Tweet

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Scott Clark has also picked up the discussion about conservative Presbyterian influence. In what may amount to the comment of the day, he replied with the following:

Influence is mediated and the the media have fragmented. There was a time when one of us might have snuck into a position of influence, when the media were more centralized and controlled by a few elites (yes, I think that much of the mainstream political media is controlled by a relatively small number of elites but we’re talking religion and theology here) but those days are mostly behind us.

The SBC is something like 16 million people. The entire NAPARC world is 1/2 million at most. Even if we add the sidelines we still don’t get to a million people. Even if the real SBC constituency is only 6 million, as some say, we’re still only a tiny percentage. There are (or were when I last looked) 60 million American evangelicals, most of whom operate with Anabaptist assumptions. They don’t even know we exist and they aren’t looking for us.

I suppose that you and I assess the state of the NAPARC world rather differently. The 2K argument is really about Christ and culture and I think the C and c argument is a pressing issue facing the URCNA right now. For a variety of historical reasons some of our congregations are not outward looking, not because they are taken up with intramural theological fights, but because they make assumptions that are deeply rooted in various cultures and those assumptions are not subject to criticism. The 2K argument, which has been a sometimes ugly affair, is a symbol of a deeper problem.

You seem dismissive of the matter of intinction but I think it’s a significant issue because, like the 2K argument, it signals a more profound problem. If people can simply withdraw the cup from the laity largely on a pragmatic basis, what else can churches do? What are the limits of ecclesiastical authority? What are the limits of pragmatism? Who authorized sessions to remove the cup from the laity? Don’t those sessions realize the cost of recovering the cup for the laity in the Reformation? Do they care? Is the supper a means of grace or the way to close a sale? I worry about those sorts of things and so I’m happy to see people in the PCA pushing back against the practice of intinction.

One Size Doesn't Fit All Christians

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More archived issues of the Nicotine Theological Journal have been uploaded to the Back Issues page. One of those (April 1998) includes a piece entitled “Sectarians All.” (Again, beware the anomalies included in transferring from WordPerfect to PDF.) Herewith an excerpt:

SUPPOSE A HISTORY PROFESSOR at an evangelical liberal arts college were teaching a course on American church history. His course did not follow the world religions approach but instead covered the religious traditions most numerous and most influential in America (though those are not synonymous) and so slanted the course to Protestants, Catholics and Jews. For the final exam the professor asked students to describe the teaching and practice of the average observant Catholic before Vatican II. If a student answered the question by ignoring Roman Catholic worship (the Mass), customs (fish on Fridays) , institutions (parochial schools), and teaching on justification, but answered instead with a description of an Irish immigrant in Boston who bucked the repressive pedagogy of local nuns, complained about never understanding the Mass, then went to Boston University, joined InterVarsity, attended Park Street Church, and read his Protestant Bible daily during his “quiet time,” should the professor give the student a passing grade? Such an answer would not be surprising given the historic anti-Catholic bias among Anglo-American Protestants. But wouldn’t the professor be delinquent in his duties as a professor of history to approve such an answer? In other words, is it possible for a Protestant to hold that a Catholic is “good” even if he believes his practices idolatrous?

LET’S TAKE ANOTHER EXAMPLE. This one from real life. J.I. Packer was one of the original Protestant signers of “Evangelicals and Catholics Together,” the first statement (1994) that called for a joint mission of Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants in a limited number of endeavors. In an article he wrote explaining his decision (Christianity Today, Dec. 12, 1994), Packer applied the very language of “good Catholic” to those with whom Protestants ought to cooperate. Now Packer does not spell out exactly what such a good Catholic looks like. But the reasons he gives for not being able to become a Roman Catholic are helpful. For instance, Rome has a “flawed” understanding of the church, its sacramental theology “cuts across” the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith, the “Mary cult,” the doctrine of purgatory, and the “disbursing” of indulgences all “damp down” biblical teaching about assurance of salvation. What is more, papal claims to infallibility make the “self-correction” of the church impossible. So the communion of Rome is still “unacceptable” to Packer. But the Catholics who are willing to sign a declaration with Packer, despite his reservations and objections, are “good” Catholics. These Catholics most likely are ones who do not observe the faith in ways that Packer deems flawed or, at least, are not strict about them. Ironically, then, Packer’s assessment of Catholicism should fail to earn an A-grade on an undergraduate American church history final exam but is supposed to be persuasive to evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics as the first step in ecumenicity.

WHY DOESN’T SUCH AN understanding of Roman Catholicism earn the strong rebukes of condescension and paternalism? Isn’t Packer saying, in effect, that a good Catholic is one who has given up distinctively Catholic teachings and practice? What is more, why isn’t Packer criticized for harboring the kind of anti-Catholic sentiments that used to inform America’s progressive reformers who desired the assimilation of all immigrants to the United States into WASP culture? Liberal Protestants have a long history of including Roman Catholics at their gatherings and institutions who resemble themselves, that is, believers who have given up the more particular aspects of their tradition in order to fit in to American Protestant norms. That kind of treatment used to be called “illiberal” by Roman Catholics, such as when John Gilmary Shea in the 1880s accused the Puritan tradition of being “narrow-minded, tyrannical, and intolerant” of those who “refused to submit to their ruling.” But now, thanks to the wonders of modern ecumenism, Roman Catholics who are not concerned about Rome’s historic teachings and practices are considered “good.”

When Allies Impersonate the Axis

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I was surfing around the Internet last weekend, hoping to find a paper by a certain academic theologian, when I came across The Gospel Coalition’s Resources page, which includes a gargantuan list of sermonizers. Much to my surprise I found that I am one of the listed preachers at TGC. @#$%#^&%@!!!

The reasons for taking offense are several. First, I am a four-office fellow, which means that as a rule I don’t preach. And TGC, confused as the allies are liturgically and ecclesiologically, has take the liberty of listing talks and interviews as sermons. Heck, I objected when John Frame likened preaching to a “dramatic” “liturgical” skit. I think we have a case of bait-and-switch.

Second, I am not a member of TGC and have not supported its programs. I believe I have been fairly candid and steady about that opposition. So in the name promoting the programs and aims of TGC, you would think their web masters would not want to list one of their critics as a “resource.”

It reminds me of Ron Wells old line about evangelicalism: I’d give up my membership if I knew where to send in my card. In the crazy world of parachurch evangelicalism, no cards, no membership, just right.

What if Christianity Itself is Secular?

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Then we wouldn’t have difficult answers like this. We wouldn’t hear that the next pope needs to make secularism the centerpiece of his agenda, and we wouldn’t fault Islam for failing to distinguish between religious and secular authority. Instead, we would fault Christians for similarly failing to own up to the secular nature of the period between the advents of Christ, also known as saeculum (or age), when the old kingdom of God’s people is no longer the political arrangement and the new Jerusalem has yet to come, the one where Christians are pilgrims and strangers, and where the don’t identify the kingdom of grace with the monarch’s kingdom.

Why doesn’t anyone read not C.S. but Bernard Lewis?

Secularism in the modern political meaning – the idea that religion and political authority, church and state are different, and can or should be separated – is, in a profound sense, Christian. Its origins may be traced in the teaching of Christ, confirmed by the experience of the first Christians; its later development was shaped and, in a sense, imposed by the subsequent history of Christendom. The persecutions endured by the early church made it clear that a separation between the two was possible; the persecutions inflicted by later churches persuaded many Christians that such a separation was necessary.

The older religions of mankind were all related to – were in a sense a part of – authority, whether of the tribe, the city, or the king. The cult provided a visible symbol of group identity and loyalty; the faith provided sanction for the ruler and his laws. Something of this pre-Christian function of religion survives, or reappears, in Christendom, where from time to time priests exercised temporal power, and kings claimed divine right even over the church. But these were aberrations from Christian norms, seen and reciprocally denounced as such by royal and clerical spokesmen. The authoritative Christian text on these matters is the famous passage in Matthew 22:21, in which Christ is quoted as saying, “render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” Commentators have differed as to the precise meaning and intention of this phrase, but for most of Christian history it has been understood as authorizing the separate coexistence of two authorities, the one charged with matters of religion, the other with what we would nowadays call politics.

In this, the practice of Christianity was in marked contrast with both its precursors and its competitors. In imperial Rome Caesar was God, reasserting a doctrine that goes back to the god-kings of remote antiquity. Among the Jews, for whose beliefs Josephus coined the term “theocracy,” God was Caesar. For the Muslims, too, God was the supreme sovereign, and the caliph was his vice-gerent, “his shadow on earth.” Only in Christendom did God and Caesar coexist in the state, albeit with considerable development, variety, and sometimes conflict in the relations between them. (What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, 2002, 96-97)

The Value of Keller's Stock

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Bill Evans’ piece on the decline of conservative Reformed Protestantism has been making the rounds and it raises an important question about the better and worse times in church history. He starts by noting that conservative Presbyterians are not as influential as they once were:

A while back my friend Anthony Bradley posted an insightful and provocative blog piece asking why the popular influence of conservative Presbyterians prominent a few decades back (e.g., Jim Boice, R. C. Sproul, Sinclair Ferguson, and John Frame) seems to have waned in comparison to Baptists of a broadly Reformed soteriological persuasion. I posted an extended comment at the time, and thought I would expand on it here.

There are at least two big issues in play—the Baptistic Reformed success as driven by institutions (e.g., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the Founders’ Movement) and gifted individuals (e.g., Don Carson, Al Mohler, Mark Dever, Mark Driscoll) on the one hand, and the apparent Presbyterian decline on the other. As a Presbyterian I’m not particularly well equipped to comment on the first, but I think I have something to offer about the second.

Of course, the Presbyterian and Reformed tradition has been declining as a percentage of the American population since the nineteenth century. But statistics available in resources like ARDA and the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches indicate that some of the NAPARC denominations are plateaued or in decline. This is worrisome, and the reasons are doubtless complex, having to do with social as well as theological factors. Below are five general observations from the “for what it’s worth department.”

Matt Tuininga agrees and disagrees:

Evans describes the commitment of many Presbyterians to an increasingly rigid, or fundamentalist understanding of the authority of Scripture. He also worries about an exaggerated confidence in the ability of confessions to productively shape (or leverage?) Scriptural interpretation. When our obsession is with preserving our own micro-traditions, pale imitations of a once great theological and ecclesiastical stream, the temptation is overwhelming to manipulate Scripture for our own purposes, ignoring the difference between the Word and human interpretation of that Word. When we have an exaggerated understanding of the exhaustive significance of 16th and 17th century confessions designed with 16th and 17th century problems in mind, our theology, preaching, and church life quickly become more like artifacts in a museum than like the faithful witness of Christ’s church in 21st century America.

No doubt things are not quite as bleak as this blog post might suggest. And neither Evans nor I are suggesting that Reformed believers abandon the authority of Scripture or vigorous allegiance to our confessions. The problem is not with historic Reformed theology at all, per se. But what Evans seems to be suggesting, and if so, I agree with him, is that the church needs to reexamine whether a tragic preoccupation with tradition and with the forms, practices, and controversies of the past is actually undermining the authority of Scripture, the role for which our confessions were historically intended, and our faithful witness in the present. One thing seems clear. In terms of size, influence, and prospects, the Reformed tradition is, and has been for quite some time, in serious decline. We have a lot of soul-searching to do.

One item worth highlighting, as the title of the post indicates, is that despite the amazing popularity of TKNY in conservative Presbyterian circles, Tim Keller cannot make up for the presence that the likes of Jim Boice and R. C. Sproul projected and still project. It could be that associations with The Gospel Coalition so water down Keller’s Presbyterian identity that his influence from deep within one of the largest, most media-saturated, and wealthiest cities in the history of redemption cannot make up for the sheer doctrinal firepower of the old regulars at the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology.

The bigger aspect here, though, is how to assess the relative strength of Reformed Protestantism, whether thirty years ago, three hundred years ago, or today. The present is always the hardest to assess. What lasts is seldom known now. (It looks like the Harlem Shake has surpassed Gangnam Style. What a shame.) So making projections about the health of Reformed Protestantism based on contemporary observations is inadvisable.

When it comes to thirty years ago, it is possible to argue as I did in Between the Times that at least one conservative Presbyterian communion is doing better than it was. But the study of church history should always breed sobriety rather than enthusiasm. This is not because the history of Christianity is one long story of decline. It is instead because in the case of Reformed Protestant history, the Reformed churches have always faced an uphill battle. In fact, when the churches were at their most influential (the Free Church of Scotland, the Reformed Church of the Netherlands [GKN], or even the PCUSA), they were generally the most mixed they ever were. It is the nature of any organization, even spiritual ones, that when they become large, they also become fat.

In which case, it is interesting to notice that when they were turning heads thirty years ago, Boice and Sproul were still ministers in the mainline (not conservative) Presbyterian Church, which was hardly the strongest platform from which to lead a recovery of Reformed teaching and ministry.

I myself am not sure where conservative Presbyterianism is headed. I do hold to the view that the healthiest path for conservative Presbyterianism is not celebrity speakers and theologians but churches where worship is lean, teaching confessional, and government procedural. Slow and steady many not win the race. But in the eternal life race, finishing is pretty good.