Author: D. G. Hart

Kingdom (and weapon) Confusion

Published on by D. G. Hart44 Comments

A fairly common observation (and sometime criticism) is that two-kingdom teaching is simply a reiteration of Anabaptist notions about the separation of church and state. Because 2k is ambivalent if not in denial about the kingdom work supplied by the magistrate, the modern version of two-kingdom theology supposedly stands closer to sixteenth-century Anabaptists (who rejected ecclesiastical establishments) than to the magisterial reformers (who looked to the state to uphold the true religion).

Here is one reason why 2k is not Anabaptist, and it comes from the unlikely source of Alan Jacobs’ Christmas-day reflection on gun control:

I’m a Christian, and as such I am enjoined to pray and hope for the coming reign of the Prince of Peace. Christians might disagree about how and when that Kingdom is going to come about, but we must pray for it and seek it without all our hearts. We should look forward always to the the reign of shalom, as laid out in Isaiah 65. It is not, then, intrinsically desirable that we should be armed; it is, rather, intrinsically desirable that we should all live in the Kingdom of God where no weapons are needed because we live in mutual love and have our needs provided by the Lord.

Maybe that doesn’t even need to be said; maybe nobody really thinks an armed society is ipso facto a better society, even though some folks can sound that way at times. If so, then please just take this post as a reminder that if it is, or becomes, necessary for Americans to be regularly and publicly armed, that’s a sign of the tragic brokenness of a world populated by fallen people.

Aside from the fairly obvious point that Jacobs is blurring lines between society and God’s people with his invocation of “we” in connection with the kingdom of God, he fails to recognize that the peaceable kingdom for which he longs is evident every Lord’s Day when believers gather at the Lord’s Table and only need the spiritual discipline of fencing the table — not guns — for communion. Also troubling is the implicit logic that fewer guns in society is an indication of the arrival of God’s kingdom. (Readers may want to keep in mind that some neo-Calvinists invoke shalom the way Jacobs does as an indication of the arrival of God’s kingdom.) That kind of logic is what leads the hip urbano-Calvinists to regard more artists and chefs and fewer police and soldiers as evidence of the coming kingdom. In fact, the signs of Christ’s kingdom are more ministers, more church members, more congregations (disciplined, of course), and more fruit of the Spirit.

But with careful distinctions between the kingdoms and the sorts of weapons used in each, two-kingdom proponents can see the problems that come with police enforcing the true religion (as Anabaptists did) while rejecting pacifist and non-violent social norms (as the magisterial reformers did). The church doesn’t need guns. It enforces God’s law and proclaims the good news through spiritual means. But until Christ’s return and the ultimate sorting out of the wheat and the tares, society will need guns. Rules for owning, manufacturing, and selling guns will come not from God’s word (which is silent about such matters) but the shifting sands of human reflection.

What New Calvinists Can Learn from Old Calvinism — Failure

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Collin Hansen lists the top-ten theology stories of the year. Number ten is the boom-and-bust cycle of Tim Tebow and Jeremy Lin. Hansen goes on to wonder why Christians follow celebrities and don’t reflect on failure (possibly because the Gospel Coalition is built on fame and ignores the troubles of folks like C. J. Mahaney):

Tebow wasted away on the New York Jets bench behind an inept starter after the Broncos traded him and prospered under the precision passing of Peyton Manning. Lin also left his team when the Knicks declined to mach an offer from the Houston Rockets, where’s he’s played reasonably well. Why would God not want these men to succeed and spread the gospel through a growing platform in the nation’s largest city? How can they testify to Christ in failure and disappointment? Too few have explored these questions with the same fervency that greeted their ascendance to international celebrity.

If the young and restless would-be Calvinists read much in the history of Calvinism they would know that failure and defeat is par for the course of the church militant (neo-Calvinists’ postmillennial optimism to the contrary). Here is one sober perspective on Calvinist history that suggests if the young and restless read the past less for inspiration and more for understanding, they would have the tools for handling disappointment (they might even get over their celebrity fetish):

For the better part of two hundred years the Corinthian temptation has been to regard Reformed Protestantism’s importance in cultural and political terms. This was a perspective held not only by Reformed believers. Think of Max Weber and his theory about Calvinism and capitalism, or of Alexis de Tocqueville and Calvinism’s contribution to democracy, or of Robert Merton on Calvinism and the rise of modern science. These older arguments do not have the force they once did, but even a couple of years ago at the academic conference in Geneva that marked the five hundredth anniversary of Calvin’s birth, most of the scholarly presentations explored not the sorts of ecclesiastical reforms that characterized Reformed Protestantism but the way that Calvinism shaped the modern world. Such assessments have prompted Reformed believers to think of Calvinism less as a churchly movement than as a religiously-based source for social transformation. Of course, the rise of neo-Calvinism and the inspiring words of Abraham Kuyper have contributed mightily to this estimate of Reformed Protestantism.

But even before Kuyper, the temptation to regard Reformed Protestantism for its political and cultural significance was constant for Presbyterians. How could it not be since the rise of Reformed Protestantism was bound up with European politics. . . . However we estimate the size, scope, and power of the modern nation-state, the reality is that Reformed Protestantism was on the ground floor of the construction of modern Europe and its colonial proliferation, a period that ran from 1600 at least to World War II. No wonder, then, that conservative Reformed believers pine for the days when their faith mattered to the mission of a particular nation. Scottish Presbyterians still long for the days of the National Covenant. Abraham Kuyper endeared himself to Reformed believers by evoking a golden age of Dutch history. Meanwhile, American Presbyterians have their own version of this nostalgia and attempt to construct a Christian founding of the United States even though the very point of the new nation was to bring an end to the pattern of confessionalization that had torn apart Europe (and especially England) during the seventeenth century. . . .

If Reformed Protestantism was chiefly an instance of ecclesiastical reform and renewal, then against that measure the OPC may be a worthy heir to the mantle of Reformed Protestantism, even meriting a celebratory toast. To be sure, the history of the OPC is strewn with believers who still want the church to be more than the church, to be at the forefront of maintaining and promoting social righteousness. But just as important to the OPC’s history has been a growing contentment with the church as simply the church. The word “simply,” of course, understates this sense because the church’s mission is hardly simple or ordinary. But to recognize that the church has a responsibility that no other institution does, and that God has instituted the church uniquely for his redemptive purposes, is the start of a broader sense of restraint and resolve that the OPC, while lacking many of the attributes and features that impress the Corinthian minded, is doing a good and important work no matter how quiet or routine.

What Should We Do about Christmas?

Published on by D. G. Hart27 Comments

If I were a devout Muslim or even a lukewarm agnostic for the past few days, I certainly would have observed oddities that Christians in the U.S. take for granted as normal. I am thinking of the oddity of hearing Dean Martin or Nat King Cole or Johnny Mathis or Tony Bennett crooning lines like “Christ the savior is born” or “Jesus Christ is Lord.” Indeed, one of the mysteries of American popular culture is that so many pop singers have felt compelled to cut a Christmas album (I was especially aware of this yesterday during a meal accompanied by a Christmas song Pandora station that was featured on the family room television screen.) Has any holiday of the monotheistic faiths, the birth of Abraham, the Exodus, the birth of Mohammed, his flight from Mecca to Medina, been the subject of so many songs that in turn become the back drop for shopping and dining for almost an entire month of the year?

Granted, not all of those Christmas or in-the-deep-deep-winter songs have Christ’s claims in view (nor does winter feel very deep so early in the season or in an era of climate change). Yesterday, for instance, was my first encounter with the song “A Marshmallow World,” sung by Dean Martin (what agent ever told Dean that he had a voice?). Here are the lyrics:

It’s a marshmallow world in the winter,
When the snow comes to cover the ground,
It’s the time for play, it’s a whipped cream day,
I wait for it all year round.

Those are marshmallow clouds being friendly,
In the arms of the evergreen trees,
And the sun is red like a pumpkin head,
It’s shining so your nose won’t freeze.

The world is your snowball, see how it grows,
That’s how it goes, whenever it snows,
The world is your snowball just for a song,
Get out and roll it along.

It’s a yum-yummy world made for sweethearts,
Take a walk with your favourite girl,
It’s a sugar date, what if spring is late,
In winter, it’s a marshmallow world.

The world is your snowball, see how it grows,
That’s how it goes, whenever it snows,
The world is your snowball just for a song,
Get out and roll it along.

It’s a yum-yummy world made for sweethearts,
Take a walk with your favourite girl,
It’s a sugar date, what if spring is late,
In winter, it’s a marshmallow world,
In winter, it’s a marshmallow world,
In winter, it’s a marshmallow world.

Of course, the season is littered with any number of “seasonal” songs, sung apparently by pop stars whose agents and recording companies tell them that a holiday album will sell and enhance their hold on the singer’s adoring public. But many of these albums include the Christmas standards, “Silent Night,” and “O Holy Night,” which then introduce some rather vigorous theological claims about the baby Jesus and what he was born to do.

Which raises the question about whether Christmas stands as evidence of successful transformation of culture by American Christians or is it a sign to anti-transformationalists of just how thin the project of transformation inevitably becomes. If I were a “let’s keep Christ in Christmas” guy, I might take encouragement from hearing Johnny Mathis singing “Silent Night,” that is, if I could stomach that insipid melody (bah humbug yourself!). But I could also imagine a devout neo-Calvinist insisting that stars like Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra cheapen the meaning of “Silent Night”‘s lyrics by singing them without meaning what they sing, or only intending to make a profit.

Either way, Christmas stands as testimony to how much Americans take a certain variety and practice of Christianity for granted. That nonchalance may be good for shop keepers and manufacturers who depend on December purchases to have a good fiscal year. But it appears to be lousy for considering the deeper significance of Bethlehem babe’s purchasing power.

The Lens of Scripture

Published on by D. G. Hart649 Comments

I continue to be befuddled by the neo-Calvinist claim that Scripture speaks to all of life (of course, in general terms, never in specifics). A discussion has ensued over at Matt Tuininga’s blog that is better than a previous one at Dr. K’s shop. Still, in both cases, some claim that it is natural and ordinary for Calvinists to claim that we view all of life and everything in the world through the lens of Scripture.

So to test this I turned to the Kuyper Reader that James Bratt edited around the time of the centennial celebration of the Stone Lectures. In an essay against uniformity (political, cultural, and religious), which I like very much and that resonates with a localist strain of American conservatism, Kuyper writes this:

. . . do I need to argue the point that all such striving for a false uniformity, the leveling principle of modern life, the demand for one people and one language, run counter to the ordinances of God? You well know the divine word, full of holy energy, that Scripture opposes to that striving: “Else nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them” [Gen. 11:6b]. That all life should multiply “after its kind,” after its own, unique, given character is the royal law of creation which applies to more than seed-bearing herbs. That everyone who has been born from above will someday receive from the Lord a white tablet on which will be written a new name that no one knows except the one who receive it [Rev. 2:17]: what else is this but a most forceful protest against all the conformity into which the world tends to pressure us? (“Uniformity: The Curse of Modern Life,” 34)

So there we have the Bible as the lens through which Kuyper regards the problem of cultural uniformity. Though it needs to be said that Kuyper’s writing is not rife with biblical citations, nor are his invocations of Scripture, like this one, the most compelling exegetically. So I am not sure that Kuyper exemplifies what Kuyperians claim — that Christians need to look at the world through the lens of Scripture. Self-consciousness, epistemologicial or psychological, might call for a Christian to be careful about attributing his opinions to the revealed words of God.

But then Kuyper goes on in a different part of this essay/speech to state some notions that surely most modern day neo-Calvinists (especially those without Dutch surnames) living in North American would not support (even though I again laud Kuyper’s Dutch chauvinism as a way of resisting globalism and universalism):

Hold the Dutch national character in honor. Drive out our national sins but still love our national ways. Be true to your nature as Hollanders, ladies and gentlemen! Remove from your midst the spineless tendency to bestow extravagant accolades on everything that comes from abroad, and in your appraisals give preference to the things that are made at home. Uphold Holland’s fame in learning foreign languages but let there be no language you would rather speak, and especially write, than that splendid, rich mother tongue in which alone Dutch people can express what a Dutch heart feels. Do no just feed your mind with what has been thought and sung abroad but drink of the vital stream of Holland’s life also from your own poets. Daughters of the Netherlands, do not make yourselves ridiculous by being old-fashioned but also have the good taste and modesty never to present yourselves in a foreign outfit conceived in the capital of France by Dutchmen who no longer understand the honor and dignity of being a Dutchman . . . .

May the illustrious history of your ancestors be more to you than a monument to the past; let it be for you the current of national life that you feel pulsating in your own veins. Yes, just let us be who we are: Hollanders! — in every circle and sector of life. Though our flag no longer dominates the seven seas, still we shall regain the rightful influence by which the legacy entrusted to our people may be made a blessing for all humanity. Let the Dutch people, standing on the blood-soaked soil of our fathers, rise again from its grave. . . .

Would that God gave us such a national will — but then a will anchored in his will. While every nation is subject to the deep truth that it strikes itself from the roster of nations by devaluing its piety, this applies all the more to the national existence of the Netherlands which owes its origin to a religious movement. . . . Without religion there can be no patriotism; where religion is most intense, there the love of country and people is most robust: so history teaches us on every page. (42-43)

Kuyper’s appeal to Dutch hearts, Dutch minds, and even Dutch fashions seems curious from a fellow known for putting the anti in antithesis. If Hollanders have a Dutch heart or mind simply by virtue of growing up on the “blood-soaked soil” of the Netherlands (sorry Dutch-North Americans of the 1.5 generation and beyond), then what happens to the idea that Christian Hollanders by virtue of regeneration share more in common with Protestant Canadians who hail from France? Where are Brazilian Calvinists supposed to go for dress fashions?

But aside from this hiccup in Kuyper’s mental digestion, where exactly is the method of viewing the world through the lens of Scripture? Sure, Kuyper was fallible and made mistakes (as we all do). But would not a biblical perspective on patriotism call for important qualifications to such nationalism? To be clear, what is wrong with this excerpt in (all about me) my estimate is not Kuyper’s reveling in Dutch culture and history — even exceptionalism. A person’s attachment to his people, country, and land is basic to being human — that is, part of the created order. It is not essential, however, to being redeemed. What is wrong, then, is thinking that such an argument is the product of a Christian w-w, in other words, the result of some form of epistemological self-consciousness. I could imagine any number of Dutch patriots, not members of a Reformed church, seconding Kuyper’s call for loyalty to Dutch traditions. I cannot imagine that Kuyper’s logic would appeal to someone who regarded the speaker not as a fellow-Dutchman but as a fellow believer.

From Renegades to Virtuosos

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In the same issue of First Things, R. R. Reno comments on a new book on Urs von Balthasr (Karen Kirby, Balthasar: A [Very] Critical Introduction, Eerdmans). Reno mentions that some Roman Catholic theologians worry that Balthasar was too “dependent on modern German philosophy,” or that he played “fast and loose with the authoritative tradition of the church.” Reno concedes the point:

Balthasar was by any reckoning a unique figure in twentieth-century Catholicism. For good and for ill, he was a free agent. He left the Jesuits and struck out on his own, forming a community in Basel and founding his own publishing house. He had no academic appointment, no graduate students, and no religious superiors other than the spiritual authority he accorded to Adrienne von Speyr.

That sort of independence got Martin Luther in a lot of trouble (and gets blamed for the downfall of Christendom and the destruction of Europe’s “sacred canopy”.) But now, such creativity and independence inspire marvel. Reno writes that Balthasar “exemplifies an exploratory, virtuoso style of theology. It’s a style characteristic of the heroic generation that prepared the way for the lasting achievements of Vatican II.” But it is also “unstable, and hard to reproduce”:

Balthasar and his peers were unique, creative figures who resist summary and resist integration in the earlier theological traditions of the Church. The result is a feeling of discontinuity in theology, and this often in spite of explicit efforts to the contrary.

Looks to this Protestant like a double standard. Or it could simply be discontinuity between Rome’s willingness to discipline wayward theologians (from the Middle Ages to the Cold War) when during the 1960s development of doctrine turned fairly arbitrary, with continuity and discontinuity doing their best impersonation of each other.

Speaking of Missions

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It looks like the United States is (as it always has been) a mission field. In the December issue of First Things, R. R. Reno comments on what he calls the “new secular moral majority.”

In a 1957 government survey, only 3 percent of respondents checked the “none” box. Now they’re a fifth of all Americans. From one in thirty-three to one in five, and the number is likely to grow. . . . And it’s making a difference in culture and politics. The unchurched exhibit a remarkably united front when it comes to controversial moral issues.

But Reno wonders if the rise of “nones” represents something new:

Even in the 1950s (and, for that matter, in the 1900s), a fairly substantial number of Americans were either believers or unchurched. True, the sensibilities of a mostly Protestant Christianity shaped them, and for the most part they thought of themselves as Methodists or Baptists or Presbyterians or just “Christians,” but they were functionally secular in many ways.

For Reno this means that churched in America are “battle-tested.” We’ve been here before and perhaps the secularists will not really “inherit the earth.”

But I wonder what it says about the churches and their members that they may be willing to live with a stand-off between the churched and “nones,” with the latter having a slight upper hand because they reproduce and even like children. During this whole period, from the 1880s to the present, Protestants (and post-Vatican II Roman Catholics) have tried to win the culture through politics rather than evangelism and discipleship. Discipleship seems especially pertinent for keeping people who once thought themselves churched within the church. From the Social Gospel, through the Cold War, to the Religious Right, politics was supposed to save the nation. Not.

Could it be that religiously-inspired politics have actually done more to hurt the name of Christ and to push Americans away from churches than the offense of the cross itself? And what would happen if instead of spending so much time on political activism and the culture wars, Christians in the United States actually tried to explain to their neighbors the enormity of sin (Christians’ included), the hope of forgiveness in Christ, and the importance of word and sacraments for finding ongoing comfort amid human suffering and weakness? It might not mean a decrease in the number of “nones” since the wind blows where it will. But it sure seems like a better strategy than invoking biblical norms for people who don’t believe the Bible.

Reformed Missions, Neo, Restless, and Paleo

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Weeks have lapsed since John Starke engaged in a bit of cherry picking by claiming that modern young and restless missionary and evangelistic efforts are as old as old Calvinism itself.

Calvin and Geneva sent missionaries not only to France but also to Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, and the free Imperial city-states in the Rhineland. We even know of two missionaries sent from Geneva in 1557 to Brazil. “Missions was not a ‘section’ of his systematic theology,” Keith Coleman says, “it was central to what he was trying to accomplish in his ministry.”

Church planting and missions aren’t a byproduct of the young Reformed resurgence of the last decade but something embedded in the Reformation’s God-centered commitment to advancing the gospel.

Without wanting to add to stereotypes about Calvinism and missions — the old canard that predestination gives no incentive for evangelism, as if justification gives no reason for good works — Starke exhibits and anachronistic turn of thought that could use correction. (It goes with another anachronism he has circulated, namely, that the sort of networks seventeenth-century British dissenting Calvinists constructed are similar to the Gospel Coalition.) The simple point is that sixteenth-century church planting was not the same as modern foreign missions or evangelistic efforts. In fact, the modern missions movement among Protestants did not begin until the late eighteenth century with institutions like the London Missions Society (founded roughly in 1795). What Calvin and other reformers were doing was trying to reform existing churches in Europe. Switching a parish or town from Roman Catholic to Protestant might qualify as missions or evangelism in one sense. But the notion of taking the gospel to a people or society that had never heard about Christ was not something that European Protestants began to undertake institutionally until almost 250 years after Calvin’s death.

Even here, when Europeans and those of European descent began to conduct what we know today as foreign missions, they did so through parachurch agencies (which are like the Gospel Coalition). In fact, Reformed state churches were slow to sponsor foreign missionaries, partly because they were still trying to complete the task of home missions. The Church of Scotland did not send Alexander Duff to India, considered to be the first Presbyterian missionary, until 1829, partly because the Kirk was still trying to plant churches in the Highlands.

Still, the point that folks like Starke need to consider is that prior to 1800 (roughly) European Christians were exceedingly ambivalent about indigenous peoples outside Europe. When Christianity traveled to new worlds, it did so as part of the baggage that either European colonists or immigrants packed on their way to places like North America, South Africa, and Australia. In colonial settings, settlers established churches for Europeans. Only later, as these communities became stable and as Europeans sought some kind of harmony with indigenous peoples did the work of planting of indigenous churches begin. And for the most part, only in the twentieth century did these indigenous churches, formerly dependent on European patrons (both ecclesiastical and colonial), establish their independence and become truly native.

That is likely an overstatement — “truly native” — since European Christianity, either through colonialism or migration, has been responsible for spreading Christianity around the world. Even when missionaries of the newly founded missionary societies, like the London Missionary Society, traveled with the intention of evangelizing non-Europeans, they did so with the blessings of and conveniences afforded by colonial governments and projects. It is virtually impossible to think of a case where Christian missionaries simply dropped into an indigenous setting and began to preach the gospel (how could they unless they spoke in tongues?). Even in Uganda among the Karamoja, where the Orthodox Presbyterian Church has a vigorous mission station, Presbyterians are dependent on the sort of penetration of Ugandan society that Europeans started under colonial auspices. Well before the OPC showed up in Uganda, other European churches had conducted mission works that acquainted natives in some way with the idea and nature of having churches. And these missionary efforts only came to Africa, whether church or parachurch, because of the remarkable (both good and bad) hegemony of Europeans around the world starting at the end of the fifteenth century.

But this dependence on cultural patterns established by former Christians is not all that different from the experience of the first church planters. The apostle Paul rarely preached to people who had no acquaintance with the God of Israel or his followers. When he did preach to the Greeks at Mars Hill, who seem to have had little awareness of Judaism, they snickered. Otherwise, Paul went to local synagogues and used the Christian groups in various cities as the basis from which to evangelism and plant churches.

All of this is to say, if Starke wants to make the point that predestination is not a barrier to evangelism, great. But generally only the Roger Olsons of the world would make such an argument (and to do so they would have to ignore the weekly proclamation of the word in churches of Calvinist persuasion). If Starke wants to claim for Protestant missions continuity between Geneva and Wheaton (the headquarters of Crossway Books and therefore of the Gospel Coalition), he should leave the task of history to licensed professionals.

When the World is Breaking Bad

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Mrs. Hart and I finally had the chance to watch Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and generally enjoyed it, though as is the case with most spy flicks, you don’t pay enough attention the first time through to figure out the villain (and once you know the villain in a second viewing the mystery that energizes a spy flick is gone). What continues to intrigue (all about) me about the genre of espionage movies is how indifferent Americans (and Europeans?) appear are to be to the morality of spying.

Most spy flicks take place in the context of the Cold War and presume that the United States (or the UK) is in a moral and political contest with the Soviets and the evils of Communism. Even if agents lie, kidnap, kill, and steal, agents of the CIA and MI6 are on the side of good, and the preservation of liberty and the American way requires intentionally breaking eggs. Broken shells and wasted yokes are the price of doing business.

Parenthetically, one of the curious features of debates over the Obama Administration’s handling of incident at the embassy in Libya is to see folks who grew up distrusting the CIA and calling cops “pigs” now having to rely on those very same intelligence agents to justify their decisions, actions, and authority. Boomers once envisioned a world where intelligence would be unnecessary and its immoral associations eliminated. A funny thing happened on the way to running a superpower — the realization that espionage and intelligence gathering are par for the superpower course. In which case, when it comes to international affairs, Obama depends upon secretive and duplicitous spies as much as tricky Richard Nixon and Slick Bill Clinton.

As I say, most Americans (aside from the pacifists) are immune to the moral compromises involved in living in a superpower. Our global hegemony depends in some way on a lot of craftiness and worse. Whether our security requires it is another matter. (Do we need to fear Mexico or Canada?) No politicized preacher of the Religious Right or neo-Calvinist persuasion I know has taken on the military-industrial complex or the ethics of agencies like the CIA. And yet, w-w advocates would have us think that the great instances of defective thinking and spiritual decline in the United States are policies and laws regulating human sexual desires. In point of fact, the United States likely lost her innocence well before the sexual revolution, that is, she lost it at least when she decided to wage an international war against the spread of Communism. Europeans like the Brits have never seemed to be as troubled by the ethical compromises involved in ruling and protecting a nation’s global footprint. Americans, by contrast, prefer thinking of their nation as one innocent of European decadence and intrigue. That preference may be a condition for demonizing those who break some of the Ten Commandments and not other parts of God’s law.

But on the upside, the new character in Breaking Bad (formerly Larry Sanders’s agent) is welcome a welcome development even if the series continues to depend on Dooms Day scenarios like divorce, girlfriends’ deaths, RV battery failures in the desert, suicide turtles, and airline crashes. Those extraordinary moments of Walt’s and Hank’s life make me think experimental Calvinists would prefer Breaking Bad more than confessional Protestants since the latter know the value of the ordinary and routine over excitement and glitz.

Muether on Warfield

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Our esteemed colleague, John R. Muether recently joined the panel of Christ the Center to discuss the life and ministry of B.B. Warfield. John is currently working on a short book on Warfield. As you wait expectantly for what is sure to be an excellent read, listen to the interview at Reformed Forum.

Blame It On the Reformation (Part 3): When Disruption Started

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Another feature of the Reformation that harmed the West, according to Brad Gregory in The Unintended Reformation, is the state’s increasing power, including the authority to regulate religious life.

Historians frequently regard the Reformation as a natural extension of secular authorities’ increasing control of the church in the fifteenth century. Such a view distorts more than it discloses, because the doctrinal disagreements introduced by the Reformation radically altered the nature of the long-standing jurisdictional conflicts between ecclesiastical and secular rulers.(146)

What that long-standing relationship was, however, is another question, one settled by Francis Oakley in his book, The Mortgage of the Past. He describes the conflict between pope and emperor during the Investiture Controversy this way:

Historically speaking, “there is really nothing unusual,” Brian Tierney has rightly argued, “in one rule aspiring to exercise supreme spiritual and temporal power. That . . . is a normal pattern of human government.” What was unusual instead about the European Middle Ages “was not that certain emperors and popes aspired to a theocratic role but that such ambitions were never wholly fulfilled.” The governmental dualism that sponsored this novel state of affairs was doubtless the cause of an immense amount of wasteful and destructive conflict. But it was conflict that marked the birth pangs of something new in the history of humankind: a society in which what we now call the state was gradually stripped of its age-old religious aura and in which its overriding claims on the loyalties were balanced and curtailed by those advanced persistently by a rival authority. That rival authority [the papacy], in turn, in no less significant a fashion, found its own imperial ambitions thwarted reciprocally by the competing power of emperors and kings. A society that was distinguished, therefore, by a deeply rooted institutional dualism and racked by the internal instability resulting there from. [40-41]

In other words, well before the Reformation came along to introduce doctrinal pluralism and instigated appeals to magistrates to prevent other magistrates in league with Rome from taking off the heads of Protestants, the medieval church, thanks to the ambitious claims of the papacy, introduced something new. This division between the secular and sacred was, as Oakley says, new in the history of the planet (except for Jesus’ own words about rendering to Caesar and to God). It also created an instability and rivalry in European governing institutions that predated the Reformation.

Another way of putting this is that from the perspective of the Eastern church circa 800, medieval Rome did to the unity and comprehensiveness of Constantinople what Gregory asserts about Protestantism. Not only did the Western church break with the East in 1054 to divide an earlier version of Christendom. But soon after that division came papal claims to supremacy during the Investiture Controversy that unsettled the existing political order in Europe and that further prevented a restoration of the older and historic Christendom.

In which case, Gregory’s decision to start his narrative with medieval Europe is arbitrary. If you start five hundred years earlier, Rome is the one guilty of setting into motion modernity, its pluralism, and its hegemonic nation-states.