Author: D. G. Hart

Clash of Orthodoxies

Published on by D. G. Hart127 Comments

The recent wailing and gnashing of teeth over the Boy Scouts’ interest in changing its policies about excluding homosexuals reminded me that long before social conservatives considered turning on the Boy Scouts for tolerating gays, confessional Protestants were giving the troops a thumbs down for very different reasons. They had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the civil religion the Scouts wove through their materials and self-identity.

Case in point, the OPC in the 1950s appointed a committee to study whether its congregations might well sponsor Scout’s troops. What these confessional Presbyterians discovered was that the Boy Scouts’ understanding of God was a good bit off from the historic Christian view:

Scouting 1). Holds to a belief in a God. 2). Describes this God as the ruling and leading power in the universe, and the giver of favors and blessings. 3). Maintains that boys must learn to recognize this God, to admit their obligations to him, and to acknowledge gratefully his favors and blessings, if they are to grow into the best of citizens. 4). Requires all Scouts to promise on their honor to do their duty to this God, and feels that in so doing it does no violence to anyone’s religious convictions. 5). Desires to remain strictly non-sectarian in its attitude toward the religious training of the boys. 6). Requires mutual respect of religious convictions among the boys in carrying on Scouting activities. 7). Requires sponsor organizations to attend to the religious life of the boys. 8). Forbids sponsor organizations to force their religious practices on any boy contrary to his faith, because of his membership in a Unit.

Scouting evidently is anxious to insist upon religious training for the boys without telling the boys what religious training they should have. In attempting to do this, it runs into difficulties. To justify religious training it has to speak of a God. But to avoid offence to any religious group it tries to describe God in terms that all will approve. Then it proceeds to require general submission to this God. Since the aim of the movement is to develop the best kind of citizens, it really erects this policy as the ideal for the model citizen.

It might be too much to say that Scouting IS a religion. But it is clear that Scouting HAS a religion. And at the heart of that religion is the acceptance of a God supposedly recognized by Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, and accepted by them all. If this conclusion be correct, then it must be said that Scouting teaches a religion that is distinctly unbiblical and unchristian. A God acceptable to Catholics, Protestants, and Jews does not exist. Those who do not honor the Son do not honor the Father. And the Jews do not honor the Son. (John 5:23, I John 2:23, Luke 10: 16). In requiring the boys to promise to do their duty to a God understood to be acceptable to adherents of these three faiths, the Scout movement seems clearly to require submission to a God that does not exist. This is to teach a form of idolatry.

What the OPC’s report indicates is that social conservatives have a very different understanding from confessional Protestants about when the Scouts went (or may go) wrong. For the former, the issue is mainly about sex, which is not an insignificant consideration but hardly the first sign that the Scouts may not be on the side of the God of the Bible. Confessional Protestants, less hung up over sex (maybe), actually take God-language seriously and inspect an organizations claim’s on behalf of religion. For them, faith is even more important than sex.

In which case, contrary to James Davison Hunter’s argument about the Culture Wars, the “orthodox” party in the United States is actually divided. It is not the case that conservative Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Jews represent an orthodox counterpart to the liberal party in the culture wars. In point of fact, the believers for whom religion matters most, the truly orthodox, take issue with the sham orthodoxy that informs questions about marriage, homosexuality, and the family. Again, sex and families are important. But they are part of the common culture, not matters of religious orthodoxy.

To fail to see this difference is to have confused the politics of the civil kingdom with the politics of the eternal one. Put differently, civil religion is a poor imitation of ecclesiastical religion.

Still Smokin'

Published on by D. G. Hart25 Comments

In an effort to make back issues of the Nicotine Theological Journal available on-line, readers may be interested to see that volume one of the journal glorified newsletter has been added to our page of back issues. (Please beware that the PDF versions will not capture the original layout in WordPerfect.) To tempt readers to take a gander, here is an excerpt from the lead article, “Calvinism, Ethnicity, and Smoke,” from issue number 2.

Old School Presbyterians who grew up within or on the edges of American evangelicalism — we write autobiographically — generally came to regard the Christian Reformed Church with awe for her robust expressions of Reformed piety. To be sure, Dutch-American Calvinists were never completely spared the piety of fundamentalism. But it was always a fundamentalism with a difference. While they may have frowned on such worldly amusements as card-playing or the theater or the dance hall, they continued to drink and smoke. “Sin came from the heart, not the environment,” they generally insisted, and they were usually right. So when you walked into the Calvin College coffee shop twenty years ago, it was not coffee that you smelled, but the pervasive scent of burning tobacco. Then there was the habit of the elders of the Wheaton CRC who smoked on the church lawn after Sunday morning worship, conveniently applying a jolt of nicotine to bus loads of stunned evangelical college students who were returning from church and knew next to nothing about Dutch ways, let alone Calvinism.

This brazen dismissal of artificial morality seemed so, well, healthy. For between puffs these elders could readily produce sound and sophisticated theological arguments on Christian liberty, the true nature of Christian virtue, and serving God in all walks of life. Yes, healthy, and more than a bit intimidating. Mark Noll well described the shock of seeing professing Christians smoke for the first time in his life, when he traveled to Calvin College as a Wheaton basketball player for his team’s annual “ritualistic slaughter.”

SUCH NICOTINE-STAINED PIETY, however, rapidly seems to be becoming a thing of the past. Visiting teams no longer suffer the effects of second-hand smoke on their travels to Grand Rapids. Recently the oldest college of the CRC held a “Great Calvin Smoke-Out.” Anti-smoking support groups have been launched, and smoking is now prohibited in all buildings on campus. (Though our spies report that some faculty are quietly practicing civil disobedience in the privacy of their offices.)

The new CRC morality was on graphic display in the January 6, 1997 issue of the Banner. In its “Worldwide” news column, the Banner reported on the combined efforts of the American Cancer Society and the National Jewish Outreach Program to encourage Jews in converting Saturdays into “Smoke-Free Sabbaths.” We are not persuaded that the pleasures of smoking are forbidden on the Lord’s Day. Still we would pause to commend the Banner at least for recognizing the increasingly quaint principle that some things are inappropriate on the Sabbath.

Sometimes the "Bar" Eats You

Published on by D. G. Hart17 Comments

Lest readers think Old Life is a lone voice in evaluating how far Called to Communion’s view of Rome is from the rest of the world, here are a few recent takes on the Church in the light of Benedict’s abdication. First, Ross Douthat:

The collapse in the church’s reputation has coincided with a substantial loss of Catholic influence in American political debates. Whereas eight years ago, a Catholic view of economics and culture represented a center that both parties hoped to claim, today’s Republicans are more likely to channel Ayn Rand than Thomas Aquinas, and a strident social liberalism holds the whip hand in the Democratic Party.

Indeed, between Mitt Romney’s comments about the mooching 47 percent and the White House’s cynical decision to energize its base by picking fights over abortion and contraception, both parties spent 2012 effectively running against Catholic ideas about the common good.

This transformation suggests that we may have reached the end of a distinctive “Catholic moment” (to repurpose a phrase from the late Catholic priest-intellectual Richard John Neuhaus) in American politics, one that began in the 1980s after John Paul’s ascension to the papacy and the migration of many Catholic “Reagan Democrats” into the Republican Party.

This was hardly the first era when Catholic ideas shaped American debates. (New Deal-era liberalism, for instance, owed a major debt to Catholic social thought.) But it was the first era when the Catholic vote was both frequently decisive and genuinely up for grabs, and it was an era when Catholic debates and personalities filled the vacuum left by the decline of the Protestant mainline.

Then Rod Dreher (on Douthat):

. . . there never was a possibility for a Catholic moment in America. Not even American Catholics agree on what it means to be Catholic, and what is required of them as Catholics. From the outside, Catholicism looks unitary, but from the inside, Catholicism (in America, at least) is just about as fragmented as Protestantism. This is why you have the spectacle of Garry Wills denying the sacramental priesthood and the Real Presence, but still presenting himself as a Catholic, and being received by many Catholics as Catholic. Catholicism in this country has lost its distinctives, because many, probably most, actual Catholics have no sense that the faith they profess calls them to accept and to live by a set of theological and moral precepts that they may struggle to accept, but must accept because God revealed them authoritatively through His church.

One may say this is a good thing, this Protestantization of Catholicism, or one may decry it as a bad thing. But I don’t see how one can credibly say that it doesn’t exist. Catholicism, understood on its own terms, is radically opposed to American culture, and to the essence of modernity. Catholicism, as understood by most American Catholics, is not. There’s the problem with the Catholic moment, and why it was never going to happen. Of course, the behavior of the bishops in the abuse crisis didn’t help, but ultimately it was beside the point.

Yet, Called to Communion, ever paradigmatic, continues with ‘s’all good, infallible even.

Blame It On the Reformation (Part 5): Channeling Schaeffer

Published on by D. G. Hart13 Comments

In his chapter on economics and the “goods life,” Brad Gregory has a kvetch-fest about free markets and consumerism (that echoes Francis Schaeffer on Aquinas):

The earlier and more fundamental change was the disembedding of economics from the ethics of late medieval Christianity’s institutionalized worldview, in conjunction with the disruptions of the Reformation era. What needs explanation is how Western European Christians, whose leaders in the Reformation era condemned avarice across confessional lines, themselves created modern capitalism and consumption practices antithetical to biblical teachings even as confessionalization was creating better informed, more self-conscious Reformed Protestants, Lutherans and Catholics. Conflating prosperity with providence and opting for acquisitiveness as the lesser of two evils until greed was rechristened as benign self-interest, modern Christians have in effect been engaged in a centuries-long attempt to prove Jesus wrong. “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.” Yes we can. Or so most participants in world history’s most insatiably consumerist society, the United States, continue implicitly to claim through their actions, considering the number of self-identified American Christians in the early twenty-first century who seem bent on acquiring ever more and better stuff, including those who espouse the “prosperity Gospel” within American religious hyperpluralism. Tocqueville’s summary description of Americans in the early 1830s has proven a prophetic understatement: “people want to do as well as possible in this world without giving up their chances in the next.” (288)

To his credit, Gregory does not exempt the Roman Catholic Church from the guilt of avarice. He observes that the Renaissance papacy was not too bullish on self-denial.

. . . the popes and cardinals at the papal court, along with wealthy bishops in their respective dioceses — who, already long before the Avignonese popes and their courtiers intensified all these trends in the fourteenth century, so often sought to augment their incomes through simony, pluralism, and a deep participation in the monetized economy through the purchase of luxurious material things and the borrowing of large sums of money. (253)

At the same time, he credits the papacy with an effective rejoinder to modern acquisitiveness, the Church’s social teaching:

They reiterated the claim that the natural world is God’s creation, intended by God for the flourishing of all human beings; repeated that economics and the market are not independent of morality; reasserted that the right to private property is not absolute, but is rather subordinate to the common good; restated that unrestrained acquisitiveness does not serve but rather impedes genuine human flourishing and eternal salvation; confirmed the biblical view that the pursuit of affluence above love for God and service to others is idolatry; argued that minimizing workers’ wages in order to maximize profits is exploitative and immoral; and insisted that the poor and marginalized, as a matter of justice, have a moral claim on the more affluent to share with and care for them. (296)

What is missing from this social teaching and from Gregory’s account is where human beings, who are supposed to be dead in trespasses and sins, are supposed to summon up the reservoirs of virtue to carry out such social teaching. His summary does mention eternal salvation on the plus side and idolatry on the down side, but where is grace and how do fallen people become good apart from the supernatural work of the Spirit? Not even the best of the church’s sacramental system and all of that papal charism could prevent popes from padding their accounts, nor did the theology of the medieval church prevent the hierarchy from raising revenues through the sale of grace — as in indulgences.

If the Reformation contributed to modern acquisitiveness, at least it supplies a good explanation for why people are selfish and want to acquire lots of cheap stuff. It is called depravity. The Reformers also knew that the only genuine remedy and the only way for people to lead a selfless life is through the operation of the Holy Spirit. If we want the redeemed and lost to live virtuously, we need to redefine this notion of human flourishing, call it some kind of moral subsistence, and double-down on efforts to beef up the authorities — parents, teachers, pastors, neighbors — who create expectations that restrain human viciousness.

In the meantime, Gregory’s history needs to avoid the kind of sermonizing that follows from an assumed theology, or he needs to write his own version of How Shall We Then Live?

My (All about Me) Only Comfort

Published on by D. G. Hart4 Comments

Any real Reformed Protestant would know that 2013 marks the 450th anniversary of the Heidelberg Catechism. The Heidelberg Conference on Reformed Theology, sponsored in part by the Selbständige Evangelisch-Reformierte Kirche Heidelberg, will be held in Heidelberg from July 18 to July 20, with a worship service on the following Lord’s Day. The speakers include a variety of international scholars and pastors.

In addition to the conference, the conference organizers, Jon D. Payne and Sebastian Heck, have edited a volume of essays on the Catechism, A Faith Worth Teaching: The Heidelberg Catechism’s Enduring Heritage. Here is an excerpt from my chapter:

Ever since English colonial powers took control of the North American region to the north of Chesapeake Bay and turned New Netherland into New York, the Heidelberg Catechism has taken a back seat to the Westminster Assembly=s Shorter Catechism. As members of the Church of England, the eventual governors of New York were not particularly zealous about a catechism that had originated during the tumultuous war of the 1640s and that had failed to unify the English churches or Parliament. But once the English gained the upper hand over the Dutch in North American colonial developments, that victory sealed the fortunes for the catechism that was the primary teaching device and doctrinal standard for German- and Dutch-speaking Protestants. From the late seventeenth century on, the most influential and numerous churches in North America would be of English descent. This meant that in the New World and, later, the United States, Westminster=s Shorter Catechism would enjoy greater popularity than Heidelberg, and that the latter would be restricted to immigrants and settlers of Dutch and German descent.

This implicit ethno-confessional rivalry between Heidelberg and Westminster was not intentional but it was inevitable thanks to the United States’ debt — despite political independence — to the people, language, and churches of the United Kingdom. Estimates of each catechism from respected leaders in the United States= Reformed and Presbyterian churches illustrate that Heidelberg has always took a back seat to the Shorter Catechism among Reformed Protestants in the United States.

I won’t be speaking, but I wish I could go. It’s a wonderful city, a great cause, and an impressive line-up.

Whose Political Party, Which Church Faction

Published on by D. G. Hart20 Comments

Confessional Protestants complain often about the way that partisan politics has driven the wedge between evangelicals and mainliners more than doctrinal or liturgical matters. That is why two-kingdom theology has some appeal. It prevents concerns for social-well being, which are legitimate, from undermining the identity and mission of the church (“let the church be the church”). The same problem of partisan politics driving church politics seems to afflict Roman Catholicism in the United States according to this (but not this):

Surveying the Catholic Church in the U.S. today, there is no doubt that the church is polarized over doctrinal and other ecclesial issues. What is particularly dismaying about this polarization, though, is how easily it has coalesced with political partisanship. In recent elections, the Catholic vote has closely tracked with the national vote, meaning there is no identifiable “Catholic vote.” In 2011, a survey by Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture and the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate showed that only sixteen percent of U.S. Catholics were even aware of the bishops’ Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship voting guide, and only three percent had read it. Of those who were aware of it, three quarters said that it had no influence on their vote in the 2010 elections, and a similar percentage of those who were not aware of it claimed that even if they had been, it would not have mattered. Clearly Catholic identity is not having a significant influence on politics. In fact, it seems rather that political identity has more influence on church life. We saw this with the protest of President Obama’s appearance at Notre Dame in 2009, followed by that of House Speaker John Boehner at the Catholic University of America in 2011. Earlier this year nearly 90 faculty wrote a letter of protest when Paul Ryan visited Georgetown University because of his budgetary priorities, whereas only nine could be mustered to protest the selection of Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius as the commencement speaker, despite her radical views on abortion, not to mention her role in denying funding to the U.S. bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services and in the contraceptive mandate controversy. Catholics pick and choose elements of Catholic social teaching that fit their partisan agenda, leaving the rest to “prudential judgment.”

Yet the solution to this problem is not a more forceful statement that Catholic social teaching crosses partisan boundaries, or greater efforts to implement a more complete public policy agenda. This is because the root of the problem is the focus on the state as the primary locus of Christian witness. For two generations, the U.S. Catholic Church, including its bishops and leading intellectuals, have focused the church’s social energies on transforming the state, and I believe we are seeing signs of the impending failure of this approach. Despite his exaggerations, George Weigel has described the rise and fall of what he calls the “Bernardin Machine,” his term for the progressive American church of the 1970s to 1990s whose signature accomplishments were the two pastoral letters The Challenge of Peace and Economic Justice for All, and which Weigel believes was embodied in the person of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. This is the church of Bryan Hehir and David Hollenbach, as well as the other social ethicists Michael Baxter has criticized for adopting a form of public discourse accommodated to the state. This progressive church largely failed, unable to fundamentally transform American political life and leaving behind an under-catechized church whose institutions, such as universities and hospitals, were in many cases largely indistinguishable from their secular counterparts. The progressive church has since ceded ground to a more conservative church, one set to restore the Catholic Church’s identity, in its institutions and social role. Cardinal Francis George declared liberal Catholicism an “exhausted project,” and proposed “simply Catholicism,” which, although avowedly neither liberal nor conservative, has certainly shown a conservative face, given its ecclesial preoccupations and political leanings.

If the folks at CTC think the situation is any better for conservative Roman Catholics in the United States, they should think again:

With its focus on Catholic identity, this new conservative Catholicism might have been expected to embody a more robust form of communal witness, but this has not proven to be the case. Although the causes are probably many, one has to be that the leading intellectual advocates of conservative American Catholicism are captive to the same state-dominated logic as the progressives. Both Weigel, and, despite his philosophical brilliance, Robert George, explain the reasonableness of the natural law in terms of its public accessibility. These conservatives differ from the progressives in affirming that the natural law can lead us to definite conclusions on controverted issues, such as abortion and homosexuality, but the claims about the natural law itself remain the same. “Catholic identity” becomes identified with adherence to natural law teachings with generally conservative political implications. As Peter Steinfels notes, although Weigel contrasts the supposed cultural accommodation of the progressive church with the “intense focus” on Catholic identity of the conservative church, he mentions no major initiatives concerning Catholic institutions, catechetics, or liturgy as evidence of this shift, jumping immediately to the realm of public policy. Again, the measure of the Church’s social witness is its influence on the state. Weigel sees this new church as being ascendant, but we are already seeing the beginnings of its collapse. Bishops in the mold idealized by Weigel, such as Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston and Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua of Philadelphia, have played a major role in discrediting the moral authority of the church through the sexual abuse scandal, despite Weigel’s attempts to blame the scandal on the progressives. This past summer the bishops attempted to convince Catholics that the erosion of conscience rights represented by the contraceptive mandate is a profound threat to the Church, but have no comparable plan to combat the much graver threat that Catholics do not want to freely exercise their religion in the way taught by the bishops, or in many cases at all.

This estimate of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States should not lead to gloating. It should make all believers — Protestants, Roman Catholics, Jews (Muslims likely already know this) — understand what happens to religious convictions when employed to better, transform, or even Christianize the modern social order. What happens is that the United States Americanizes the religious order. The other lesson is that Protestants tempted to look to Rome to solve Protestantism’s many ills are only going to find the same version of what has afflicted evangelicals and mainline Protestants since John Witherspoon signed the Declaration of Independence.

Where Do Unbelievers Go for a Trial?

Published on by D. G. Hart148 Comments

One of the other themes of the Twenty-Seven Propositions describing two-kingdom theology is the notion that the Bible is binding on all people:

7. Scripture is not given as a common moral standard that provides ethical imperatives to all people regardless of their religious standing.

The Reformed confessions testify that the moral imperatives of Scripture are binding on all men everywhere.

This does make the world safe for theonomy and for theocracy, since another common assertion of 2k critics is that special revelation must interpret general revelation, which implies that only those whose souls have been regenerated by the Holy Spirit may interpret general revelation, because only those with the eyes of faith can interpret Scripture aright, the necessary lens for interpreting the light of nature.

Aside from the covenantal implications of Scripture which make havoc of this critique of 2k, Scripture itself confounds this criticism. For if Paul were writing to the Corinthians with this anti-2k outlook, he could never write the following:

When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, then, matters pertaining to this life! So if you have such cases, why do you lay them before those who have no standing in the church? I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to settle a dispute between the brothers, but brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers? To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded? But you yourselves wrong and defraud—even your own brothers! Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? (1 Corinthians 6:1-9 ESV)

Notice that this is an imperative that according to the anti-2k outlook applies to all people (even though Paul is writing directly to the saints at Corinth). If Paul believed that Scripture was given for believers and unbelievers alike, then his admonition here would be to tell unbelievers to take their cases to ecclesiastical courts. And if unbelievers take their cases to those who rule outside the church, they are guilty of sinning. Talk about being damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

But Calvin doesn’t fall for this folly.

. . . if any one has a controversy with a brother, it ought to be decided before godly judges, and that it ought not to be before those that are ungodly. If the reason is asked, I have already said, that it is because disgrace is brought upon the gospel, and the name of Christ is held up as it were to the scoffings of the ungodly. For the ungodly, at the instigation of Satan, are always eagerly on the watch for opportunities of finding occasion of calumny against the doctrine of godliness. Now believers, when they make them parties in their disputes, seem as though they did on set purpose furnish them with a handle for reviling. A second reason may be added — that we treat our brethren disdainfully, when we of our own accord subject them to the decisions of unbelievers.

In other words, Calvin, who ministered in a town very much unlike Corinth, where the rulers of Geneva were members of the church, still recognizes that these words Paul apply to Genevan Christians, that is, that they should not look for justice with fellow Christians but should bear each other’s burdens patiently and endure slights and offenses.

I acknowledge, then, that a Christian man is altogether prohibited from revenge, so that he must not exercise it, either by himself, or by means of the magistrate, nor even desire it. If, therefore, a Christian man wishes to prosecute his rights at law, so as not to offend God, he must, above all things, take heed that he does not bring into court any desire of revenge, any corrupt affection of the mind, or anger, or, in fine, any other poison. In this matter love will be the best regulator.

This is moral instruction, in other words, that applies to Christians not to unbelievers. Christians are capable, by the work of the Spirit, of not seeking revenge. Paul concedes that unbelievers are not.

What is also interesting to observe is that Calvin does not believe that Paul is invalidating the rule of ungodly magistrates, as if it were wrong to take certain civil matters to the courts, or as if the ungodliness of rulers invalidates their rule:

Paul does not here condemn those who from necessity have a cause before unbelieving judges, as when a person is summoned to a court; but those who, of their own accord, bring their brethren into this situation, and harass them, as it were, through means of unbelievers, while it is in their power to employ another remedy. It is wrong, therefore, to institute of one’s own accord a law-suit against brethren before unbelieving judges. If, on the other hand, you are summoned to a court, there is no harm in appearing there and maintaining your cause.

Calvin also goes on to distinguish in ways that would send neo-Calvinists, in the worlds of Ralph Kramden, “bang, zoom, to the moon” between the public matters before magistrates and private matters of Christians.

We must always keep in view what causes he is treating of; for public trials are beyond our province, and ought not to be transferred to our disposal; but as to private matters it is allowable to determine without the cognizance of the magistrate. As, then, we do not detract in any degree from the authority of the magistrate by having recourse to arbitration, it is not without good reason that the Apostle enjoins it upon Christians to refrain from resorting to profane, that is, unbelieving judges.

So if anti-2kers want to argue that biblical morality applies to all human beings, they may want to take up their case with the apostle Paul. Or they could reconceive their claims with the same scrupulosity they apply to 2k advocates.

Five Burroughs (obsolete variation of borough), Eight Kingdoms

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

To what kingdom does New York City belong? Cutting through the redemptive historical hooey surrounding certain claims made on behalf of Manhattan Island, may we speak of New York City as a kingdom? Hardly. Even Michael Bloomberg’s efforts to restrict Big Gulps is not going to make him a divine right monarch. So, when thinking about two kingdom theology is it possible even to apply the word “kingdom” to civil polities that are not ruled by monarchs?

This may seem a tad precious, but it is a question that the recent posting of Twenty-Seven propositions about two-kingdom theology invites. Matt Tuininga has already reacted and not so favorably (which may show how fruitless it is to interact with folks who are more intent on finding contradictions or tensions than they seem to be in actually promoting the kingdom of God). Here are several of the assertions that caught my eye (bold is supposedly the 2k view):

22. The family is part of the common kingdom.

The institution of the family is formed by God and is to be directed to the glory of God. It is agreed that it is an institution shared by unbelievers, but unbelievers misdirect or suppress the direction the institution should take.

23. The Christian is a dual citizen, as a citizen of both the spiritual kingdom and a citizen of the common kingdom.

It is agreeable that we share and interact with unbelievers but the term “kingdom” could confuse if such activities are thought in spatial terms as some “realm” governed by some different king or different ethic.

24. The unbeliever is a citizen only of the common kingdom.

This is generally agreeable, but with same caveat as #23 on the definition of “kingdom.”

25. The Christian lives under a dual ethic, namely, the natural law-justice ethic governing life in the common kingdom and the grace-mercy ethic governing life in the spiritual kingdom.

The Reformed confessions and scripture testify we live under a unified Biblical Christian ethic, not a dual- antithetical ethic that depends on which “kingdom” we are operating in. Thus, for example, the Christian family is not guided solely by an ethic of lex talionis justice, but also an ethic of mercy and forgiveness.

26. The common kingdom pertains to temporal, earthly, provisional matters, not matters of ultimate and spiritual importance. It includes matters of politics, law, and cultural life more generally.

The Reformed confessions do not exclude the kingdom of God as being manifest in these earthly matters of law, politics, and cultural life more generally.

27. The spiritual kingdom pertains to things that are of ultimate and spiritual importance. Insofar as this spiritual kingdom has earthly existence, it is found in the church and not in the state or other temporal institutions.

See comment on #26.

One thing that is highly dubious about these propositions and responses is the language of “the Reformed confessions do or do not” assert this or that. In point of fact, the Reformed confessions say little about kingdoms. When they do they apply the language of kingdom almost exclusively to spiritual realities. The civil magistrate has nothing to do with actually promoting or extending these spiritual realities because the magistrate’s rule (obviously the Westminster Divines and Guido de Bres were hardly fans of monarchs) only extended to outward not to internal or spiritual realities.

For instance, the Belgic Confession uses the word kingdom only one and it does so in Art. 36 by invoking the “kingdom of Jesus Christ.” The magistrate may “promote” the kingdom of Christ but does not establish it, something only God can do, and something to which the word, sacraments, and prayer are means and the magistrate may not minister.

In the Westminster Standards, we see eight uses of the word kingdom (“heaven” 8.5, 23.3, 30.2; “Lord Jesus Christ” 25.2; “God” WLC 53; “Satan” WLC 191, WSC 102; “power” WLC 191; “kingdom” simply WLC 196, WSC 107; “grace” WSC 102; “glory” WSC 102). The only time the word occurs close to the work of the magistrate is in Chapter 23 where the confession says explicitly that the magistrate may not assume the use of the keys of the kingdom of heaven.

The attempt then by critics of 2k to assert that the kingdom of Christ, or of heaven, or of grace, or of glory may be identified with the kingdoms or boroughs of this world is to confound the kingdom theology that undergirds the Reformed churches in their understanding of the church and its ministry. It is also why the critics of 2k are at odds with John Calvin who wrote at the beginning of his discussion of civil governments the following:

. . . before entering on the subject itself, it is necessary to attend to the distinction which we formerly laid down (Book 3 Chap. 19 sec. 16, et supra, Chap. 10), lest, as often happens to many, we imprudently confound these two things, the nature of which is altogether different. For some, on hearing that liberty is promised in the gospel, a liberty which acknowledges no king and no magistrate among men, but looks to Christ alone, think that they can receive no benefit from their liberty so long as they see any power placed over them. Accordingly, they think that nothing will be safe until the whole world is changed into a new form, when there will be neither courts, nor laws, nor magistrates, nor anything of the kind to interfere, as they suppose, with their liberty. But he who knows to distinguish between the body and the soul, between the present fleeting life and that which is future and eternal, will have no difficulty in understanding that the spiritual kingdom of Christ and civil government are things very widely separated. Seeing, therefore, it is a Jewish vanity to seek and include the kingdom of Christ under the elements of this world, let us, considering, as Scripture clearly teaches, that the blessings which we derive from Christ are spiritual, remember to confine the liberty which is promised and offered to us in him within its proper limits. For why is it that the very same apostle who bids us “stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not again entangled with the yoke of bondage” (Gal. 5:1), in another passage forbids slaves to be solicitous about their state (1 Cor. 7:21), unless it be that spiritual liberty is perfectly compatible with civil servitude? In this sense the following passages are to be understood: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female” (Gal. 3:28). Again, “There is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all and in all” (Col. 3:11). It is thus intimated, that it matters not what your condition is among men, nor under what laws you live, since in them the kingdom of Christ does not at all consist. (Institutes IV.20.1)

I understand that Calvin’s Geneva is not the United States of America and that the civil magistrates there enforced some laws congenial to critics of 2k. But those are the same magistrates that executed heretics and forbade Roman Catholics from worshiping within the city. I doubt they would have allowed Mormon congregations or Jewish synagogues either. Which is to say, for the zillionth time, the critics of 2k have no coherent understanding either of the theology that prompted an pastor employed by the state from identifying the kingdom of Christ with the urban polity of Geneva or the political arrangement for which they long. (Ironically, the Netherlands in the hey day of the Synod of Dort was a republic where folks like Descartes and Spinoza could hold their views freely and that also was a home to arguably the largest population of Anabaptists in Europe.) If they want the magistrate to enforce all of God’s law, they will receive a lot more than they bargain for.

Then again, if all they want is to criticize 2k, have at it. It’s a free country that allows grousing about the magistrate (instead of honoring the emperor as Paul and Peter teach). It’s even a free church where their views of the kingdom of grace, falling as they do outside the confessions’ precise discussion of the kingdoms, do not get them in trouble. We will continue to forebear with them even if they are not as charitable.

Two Kingdoms, Five Burroughs (obsolete variation of borough)

Published on by D. G. Hart11 Comments

From a real East Coast correspondent came this story about Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn taking modesty into their own hands, better their own furrowed brows:

The Brooklyn shopkeeper was already home for the night when her phone rang: a man who said he was from a neighborhood “modesty committee” was concerned that the mannequins in her store’s window, used to display women’s clothing, might inadvertently arouse passing men and boys.

In many neighborhoods, a store owner might shrug off such a call. But on Lee Avenue, the commercial spine of Hasidic Williamsburg, the warning carried an implied threat — comply with community standards or be shunned. It is a potent threat in a neighborhood where shadowy, sometimes self-appointed modesty squads use social and economic leverage to enforce conformity.

The owner wrestled with the request for a day or two, but decided to follow it. “We can sell it without mannequins, so we might as well do what the public wants,” the owner told the manager, who asked not to be identified because of fear of reprisals for talking.

In the close-knit world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, community members know the modesty rules as well as Wall Street bankers who show up for work in a Brooks Brothers suit. Women wear long skirts and long-sleeved, high-necked blouses on the street; men do not wear Bermuda shorts in summer. Schools prescribe the color and thickness of girls’ stockings.

The rules are spoken and unspoken, enforced by social pressure but also, in ways that some find increasingly disturbing, by the modesty committees. Their power is evident in the fact that of the half dozen women’s clothing stores along Lee Avenue, only one features mannequins, and those are relatively shapeless, fully clothed torsos.

On the one hand, it is another indication of the way that ancient faiths adapt or don’t adapt to the diversity and freedoms of modern society, right there with Muslims advocating sharia law and theonomists supporting the Old Testament. On the other hand, it is also a case of a religious community exercising the freedom of association, which includes defining who is in and practicing the faith, and who isn’t.

Not sure what more to say.

The State of Rome in the U.S.

Published on by D. G. Hart66 Comments

John Fea thinks this exchange between Stephen Coulbert Colbert and Garry Wills exhibits on Wills’ side a low church evangelical outlook. When I watched it, it sounded more like Luther. When do evangelicals ever invoke Augustine against transubstantiation — “to think we consume and eliminate the body of Christ”? No mention here of a conversion experience or sola Scriptura (though Wills does seem to know the Bible better than Coulbert Colbert who opened a can of worms when invoking Hebrews on Melchizedek).

What is worth noting is that both of these men grew up in the Roman Catholic church, still identify with Rome, and could not be more at odds on the very matters of faith that make Roman Catholicism Roman Catholic.

Update: and here is a Lutheran video, approved, recommended, and circulated by Fr. Z, that supports what the interview with Wills reveals.