Author: D. G. Hart

Calling Jon Stewart's Bluff

Published on by D. G. Hart45 Comments

I am a Jon Stewart fan even though I only occasionally see clips of the Daily Show. Stewart was Larry Sander’s permanent guest host on the Larry Sanders Show, which earns Stewart high marks in the Hart household, the Sanders Show being a brilliant homage and parody of the late night talk show genre. Stewart also makes a cameo appearance in Wordplay, a witty and charming documentary about the culture of New York Times crossword puzzles’ editors, designers, players, and competition. For these reasons I was heartened to see thanks to my headlines feed at Google Chrome that Stewart had poked fun at Democratic mayors for saying that Chick-Fil-A was unwelcome in their cities. Here is the clip.

Stewart, as you might expect, dishes it out both ways, which is fine since using a sandwich as a form of political identity does not exactly seem what the Greeks had in mind when thinking through representative government. But (spoiler alert!) when he concludes that Chick-Fil-A’s and gay marriage’s products are both good, I demur. For one, has Stewart really considered how healthy a fast-food fried chicken sandwich is? I’m sure that dressings, fat, and steroid drenched chicken breasts make such meals a challenge to good health. For another, how do we know that gay marriage is a positive social arrangement? In fact, one objection to this change in law is that we have no idea what the consequences — positive or negative — of such a change to millenia of legal arrangements and cultural expectations will be. Though we do have some data from social scientists on the benefits of regular marriage.
(For instance, we have enough time to say that the National League is superior to the American League because the former does not use the designated hitter.)

So maybe the way to resolve the kerfuffle over Chick-Fil-A is to be doubly contrarian. Both Chick-Fil-A and gay marriage are unhealthy for America.

Then again, has anyone noticed that homosexuals are among the leading defenders of marriage at a time when marriage is at an all time low in the United States? Could it be that folks who used to thrive on an anti-bourgeois, urban, and culturally and politically radical identity have now embraced a convention associated with white-bread, middle-class, suburban life? Or is gay marriage simply a way of flipping the bird at all those Chick-Fil-A eaters who made family values a political slogan? You want family? You got it.

Escondido Magic

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For all with blogs to read, a wonderful time of unanimity among neo-Cals, 2kers, theonomists, experimental Calvinists, and neo-Turretinis has prevailed. In the presence of a common foe — infallible popes, antiquity without apostles or prophets, and overdetermined historical narratives — Reformed partisans are breaking bread on various blogs, all singing in one Protestant voice.

For such a time as this, readers of Old Life, both friendly and hostile, may be inclined to give ear to an interview that Scott Clark did with the authors of the new history of Westminster Seminary California — W. Robert Godfrey and yours truly (all about me). The book is entitled A New Old School and if readers follow the links I am fairly confident they will find their way to a page where a purchase would be in order.

Let lions lie down with lambs.

Development of Doctrine — Protestant-Style

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Dust-ups trickling down from recent Protestant conversions to Rome have revealed contrasting views of history. The Called To Communion view seems to involve a church in place — bulletins, pews, and all — just after Christ ascended to heaven. According to Bryan Cross:

[The Protestant convert to Rome] finds in the first, second and third (etc.) centuries something with a divine origin and with divine authority. He finds the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church and its magisterial authority in succession from the Apostles and from Christ. He does not merely find an interpretation in which the Church has apostolic succession; he finds this very same Church itself, and he finds it to have divine authority by a succession from the Apostles. In finding the Church he finds an organic entity nearly two thousand years old with a divinely established hierarchy preserving divine authority.

If this is not a Roman Catholic version of Scott Clark’s QIRC I don’t know what is.

In addition to this non-Protestant version of primitivism (could it be that the Called To Communion guys are still affected by the primitivism that many of them knew when Pentecostals or Charismatics?) comes the argument that Protestants believe in ecclesiastical deism. Again, Bryan Cross is instructive (and wordy which is why I have not read the whole post). The logic runs like this. Protestantism came late, not until the sixteenth century. Protestants believed that Rome was a false church and had begun to apostasize about the time that Augustine’s body was buried. This leaves a gap of almost 1,000 years, between the right-thinking early church and the right-thinking Reformation church. In between, allegedly, God withdrew from his saving plan and planet earth was without a witness to (not hope) but Christ — hence, ecclesiastical deism. This is, by the way, the argument that Thomas More used against William Tyndale, a subject of a couple of papers by (all about) me while in grad school.

As effective as this argument might seem — and when I was studying More I found it intriguing — it is not very historical, at least in the way that people who regard the past as a distant country, a place not readily grasped, understand history. From a historical perspective, not to mention the way we understand ourselves, truths don’t simply fall out of the sky, pile up in neatly proportioned columns, steps, and arches, and remain intact for time immemorial. Instead, truths evolve (or develop if you don’t like Darwinian associations). This is true of the Bible. Redemptive history shows the unfolding of the gospel across millennia of salvation history, such that the seed of Genesis 3:15 does not blossom until 2 Samuel 7 which does not bear fruit until Luke 24 which then generates the harvest of Acts 2. The notion of development is also evident in our own lives. I am and am not the same person I was when I was 8. I loved my parents and the Phillies then (in that order) and I still love them but in very different ways (especially this season).

So if development is basic to history — to creation for that matter — why would church history be any different? The development that would make sense to a Protestant runs something like this. The church began among the apostles and disciples in Jerusalem and then spread to the center of the ancient church in Asia Minor and eventually to Europe. The Eastern Church remained relatively strong until the rise of Islam. The Western Church picked up the pieces of the Roman Empire and had fewer threats from Islam. Both of these churches, though different in culture and language, did not formally sever ties until the eleventh century. After 1054 Constantinople went into decline, Rome went the opposite way. The papal reforms of the eleventh century improved the authority of Rome. But even during the heyday of the papacy’s vigor — the high middle ages –Rome hardly controlled what was going on in the British Isles or France. Europe had no trains, not postal service, and little political consolidation. Trying to give coherence to Christianity was an impossible proposition until modernity gave us print, the nation-state, and effective transportation.

In these circumstances in the West Protestantism emerged. It was clearly different from the Eastern Church. The West’s understanding of salvation was always forensic — how am I right with God? — compared to the East’s which was more metaphysical — how am I one with God? Protestants were still asking the West’s question but found Rome’s answer insufficient. At the same time, Rome’s answer was hardly codified. It existed in any number of commentaries and summas. But Rome itself did not begin to rationalize or systematize its understanding of the gospel until the Council of Trent. Then Rome rejected the systems and reasons of Protestants with a fairly heavy hand. Then too Rome began to try to generate, through the activities of the Jesuits for starters, greater uniformity among the faithful and their clergy.

This view of Rome’s development is evident (at least to all about me) at a terrific website that includes a list of all the popes’ encyclicals and all the councils of the early and medieval churches. On the one hand, popes did not begin to send letters of counsel to their bishops until the thirteenth century. And then the encyclicals, which often pertained to matters of ordination and church-state relations, were infrequent. Between 1226, the first papal encyclical (or bull), and 1500 fifteen popes issued only twenty-two such communications. In contrast, Pope Benedict XIV (1740-1758) issued 44 encyclicals (and I don’t think he was writing about the First Pretty Good Awakening). It may be a stretch, but the correlation between the papacy’s consolidation of the Western church and the use of encyclicals hardly seems coincidental.

The same goes when it comes to General Councils. Here is the list of councils at Papal Encyclicals Online:

1. The First General Council of Nicaea, 325
2. The First General Council of Constantinople, 381
3. The General Council of Ephesus, 431
4. The General Council of Chalcedon, 451
5. The Second General Council of Constantinople, 553
6. The Third General Council of Constantinople, 680-681
7. The Second General Council of Nicaea, 787
8. The Fourth General Council of Constantinople, 869-70
9. The First General Council of the Lateran, 1123
10. The Second General Council of the Lateran, 1139
11. The Third General Council of the Lateran, 1179
12. The Fourth General Council of the Lateran, 1215
13. The First General Council of Lyons, 1245
14. The Second General Council of Lyons, 1274
15. The General Council of Vienne, 1311-12
16. The General Council of Constance, 1414-18
17. The General Council of Basel-Ferrara-Florence, 1431-45
18. The Fifth General Council of the Lateran, 1512-17
19. The General Council of Trent, 1545-63
20. The First General Council of the Vatican, 1869-70
21. Vatican II – 1962-1965

Notice that in the early era, councils were in the East, suggesting the weight of authority and structure among the Eastern Orthodox. Notice also that Rome does not begin to hold church councils until the twelfth century, the same time that the papacy is emerging as the religious authority in Europe.

What this means, for the sake of doctrinal development, is that Protestantism emerged out of and did not necessarily break with what was happening in Western Christianity. During the crisis days of the sixteenth century, humanists and Protestants all agreed that the papacy was an institution that needed serious reform. Protestants also began to offer up interpretations of the Bible that were certainly possible in the Roman church but were forbidden after Trent.

It is an arguable point, but the compatibility of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism in the late middle ages looks plausible if you read the only existing confession of faith approved by one of the general church councils (it is anyway the only one I can find since all the other church councils in the West appear to be devoted to questions of papal authority, schismatic bishops, and uncooperative emperors). Here is the Confession of Faith of Rome in 1215 at the Fourth Lateran Council:

We firmly believe and simply confess that there is only one true God, eternal and immeasurable, almighty, unchangeable, incomprehensible and ineffable, Father, Son and holy Spirit, three persons but one absolutely simple essence, substance or nature {1} . The Father is from none, the Son from the Father alone, and the holy Spirit from both equally, eternally without beginning or end; the Father generating, the Son being born, and the holy Spirit proceeding; consubstantial and coequal, co-omnipotent and coeternal; one principle of all things, creator of all things invisible and visible, spiritual and corporeal; who by his almighty power at the beginning of time created from nothing both spiritual and corporeal creatures, that is to say angelic and earthly, and then created human beings composed as it were of both spirit and body in common. The devil and other demons were created by God naturally good, but they became evil by their own doing. Man, however, sinned at the prompting of the devil.

This holy Trinity, which is undivided according to its common essence but distinct according to the properties of its persons, gave the teaching of salvation to the human race through Moses and the holy prophets and his other servants, according to the most appropriate disposition of the times. Finally the only-begotten Son of God, Jesus Christ, who became incarnate by the action of the whole Trinity in common and was conceived from the ever virgin Mary through the cooperation of the holy Spirit, having become true man, composed of a rational soul and human flesh, one person in two natures, showed more clearly the way of life. Although he is immortal and unable to suffer according to his divinity, he was made capable of suffering and dying according to his humanity. Indeed, having suffered and died on the wood of the cross for the salvation of the human race, he descended to the underworld, rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. He descended in the soul, rose in the flesh, and ascended in both. He will come at the end of time to judge the living and the dead, to render to every person according to his works, both to the reprobate and to the elect. All of them will rise with their own bodies, which they now wear, so as to receive according to their deserts, whether these be good or bad; for the latter perpetual punishment with the devil, for the former eternal glory with Christ.

There is indeed one universal church of the faithful, outside of which nobody at all is saved, in which Jesus Christ is both priest and sacrifice. His body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread and wine having been changed in substance, by God’s power, into his body and blood, so that in order to achieve this mystery of unity we receive from God what he received from us. Nobody can effect this sacrament except a priest who has been properly ordained according to the church’s keys, which Jesus Christ himself gave to the apostles and their successors. But the sacrament of baptism is consecrated in water at the invocation of the undivided Trinity — namely Father, Son and holy Spirit — and brings salvation to both children and adults when it is correctly carried out by anyone in the form laid down by the church. If someone falls into sin after having received baptism, he or she can always be restored through true penitence. For not only virgins and the continent but also married persons find favour with God by right faith and good actions and deserve to attain to eternal blessedness.

Protestant Reformers would have objected to parts of this confession especially in the last paragraph. But it is hard to see how with some Protestant clarifications this might have been a serviceable confession for both Rome and Geneva.

The contention here, then, is that justification came late to debates in the Western Church. Protestants initiated those debates and made proposals. Rome rejected those proposals outright at least at Trent. But prior to Trent Rome had no official position on justification. Protestantism accordingly developed within Roman Catholicism, which developed from relations with churches in the East, which developed from the ministry of Jesus and the apostles in Jerusalem. To say that what we have in Roman Catholicism is what the early church had in the first three centuries is like saying that some angel of God left some gold plates containing the final revelation buried underground somewhere in upstate New York.

Whither Roman Catholic Social Thought

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A few weeks ago I spent a week-long conference with a group of intellectual conservatives (faculty and students). Our topic was American exceptionalism. And since many of the lecturers and conferees were Roman Catholic, we heard a great deal about Roman Catholic Social Thought. A significant piece of the recent reflection by John Paul II and Benedict XVI is the dignity of the human person. Some would even say that this is the truth the church needs to communicate arguably more than any other. (I might place Christ’s death and resurrection ahead of this, but I digress.)

But not all Roman Catholics have jumped on the bandwagon of philosopher popes. Robert Royal has a good piece at the First Things blog about the weaknesses of Roman Catholic Social Thought. He takes issue with a recent talk by Reinhard Marx, archbishop of Munich and Friesing, at Georgetown University. Royal objects both to the leftist construction that Marx (I know, you can’t make this up) and to the uncritical affirmation of human dignity.

. . . there is a danger that the broad language of CST will simply provoke yawns from the secular world. Cardinal Marx, for instance, made much of the fact that Catholics believe in the infinite worth of every human being. He probably intended this to cover human life everywhere from the womb to the nursing home and the various places in between where human life is threatened today. Pope Benedict XVI, too, said recently that every human person is a gift from God, with similar overtones implied.

Nevertheless, the Church and other Christian groups should use this line sparingly and only for specific purposes. Our culture already does a pretty fair job in producing large numbers of people who think they’re God’s gift to the world. Appearing to tell them what they already think about themselves neither attracts them to Christianity nor helps overcome narcissism. Indeed, at Georgetown, some in the audience took precisely this line to as implying that we ought to get away from Catholic moralism, which actually asks something of individuals, and simply show people what a wonderfully rich “alternative”–which is to say an activist, leftist political position–Catholic social teaching supposedly represents.

I wonder if the guys over at Called to Communion ever turn from the early to the current church fathers.

Almost All Old Princeton All the Time

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The new issue of Credo Magazine is out and it is dedicated almost entirely to the bi-centennial of Princeton Theological Seminary. Here’s an excerpt from Christopher Cooper:

While the Princeton theologians did not oppose the possibility of revival and welcomed them on occasion, they believed that it was neither the common, best, nor desirable mode available for the advancement of the Christian religion. Princeton’s Charles Hodge, for instance, pointed out several problems with revival. First, revivals tend to produce pastors and lay people who envision conversion as always sudden and sensible. Such revivalists take it for granted that children grow up unconverted and in need of the drama of a revival experience in order to enter the Christian fold. According to Hodge, such a scheme does not allow for the more regular, scriptural, and desirable method of Christian nurture. Under this system, parents immerse their children in prayers, catechesis, and Christian encouragement, so that they may be quietly, although no less supernaturally, converted without the pomp and circumstance of revival.

Second, Hodge argued that revivals generate an unscriptural form of piety that makes the exercise of strong emotions essential to true religion and worship. Such an opinion produces unstable Christians whose religious stability is gauged by their emotional state. This approach also demeans the ordinary means of grace that are given by God not to foster great emotional highs that are inevitably followed by lows, but to serve as a more constant encouragement to Christian pilgrims.

Hodge pointed out that revivals are, by their very nature, extraordinary occasions and are not meant to be relied upon by pastors and laypersons to whom God has given the task of parental nurture and pastoral ministry. Likewise, pastors today ought not to rely upon revival or the vestiges of revivalism, but would do well to instill within themselves confidence in the ordinary means of pastoral ministry and into their congregants a sense of responsibility for the nurture and edification of their children.

And in case readers are wondering, Old Lifers do make an appearance in this issue.

Pugilist, Hit Thyself

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Anthony Bradley has been dishing it out pretty good of late against Doug Wilson, almost to the point of making Wilson look like Tom Reagan from Miller’s Crossing. Bradley is alarmed by Wilson’s neo-Confederate arguments. He believes Wilson harbors racism because of his defense of slavery. And Bradley is surprised — maybe even aghast — at the traction that Wilson has among the co-allies of the gospel. These musings have led Bradley to wonder about a conspiracy among Christian Reconstructionists to use social and political issues to gain new recruits, especially among the young, restless, and gullible.

It’s been about 20 years since I first encountered this stuff but I think the combination America’s secularism, masculinity crisis, growing socialistic public policy, and the like, have opened the door for Christian Reconstruction to avail itself to new generation of young Calvinists but not through the front door–“Christian Reconstruction,” “Theonomy,” and the like–but through the back door of apologetics, the family, masculinity, big government, and so on.

Bradley even speculates on a connection between Christian Reconstruction and Roman Catholicism in that both groups use social teaching to gain converts.

What makes Bradley’s criticisms of Wilson, Christian Reconstruction, and the Young Restless crowd odd is that Bradley himself follows the political script that those he criticizes use. Bradley is generally a fan of neo-Calvinism. I have also heard him appeal to the language of cultural transformation in his interview at Christ the Center.

In which case, the problem with Wilson, slavery, the Confederacy and Christian Reconstruction may not be the actual forms these efforts to Christianize the social order take. The problem may be any attempt to read a social order out of Scripture. For instance, it would be interesting to know what Bradley thinks of his fellow Manhattanite, Tim Keller’s programs of word and deed ministry. Or for that matter, what does Bradley do with the use to which the creators of apartheid put neo-Calvinism? Does the gospel have a social program that Wilson, for example, misses or distorts? Or does the gospel have almost nothing to say about a social order?

Either way, it might be helpful to Wilson’s bruised ego to see Bradley acknowledge both men’s common debt to Kuyper.

And for what it’s worth, part of the appeal of the Confederacy, at least among political conservatives as opposed to the Religious Right, is that the South did stand for an understanding of the United States that was closer than Lincoln’s or the Progressive’s to the Constitution. The phrase, states’ rights, generally receives smirks from those who assume it represents a defense of slavery or worse, racism. But the Constitution itself was not particularly clear on how to sort out the relative powers of the states and the federal government, which was a large factor in the sectional crisis. But if folks want to dismiss states’ rights as simply the cant of “Crackers” who wanted to keep African-Americans in place, they should consider the good that states’ rights might serve today when applied to gay marriage and abortion. That may explain some of the appeal of the Confederacy, though I don’t presume to speak for Doug Wilson.

Machen Day 2012

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Social conditions in the apostolic age were exceedingly bad. There were favoured classes, living in vicious luxury, and great hordes of the poor and the down-trodden. There was especially the great institution of slavery, impairing the dignity of free labour, permeating all nations and all peoples, and producing a thousand miseries. Under such conditions the Church might have been expected to come forward with a social programme. Certainly there were great evils to be righted; many institutions of the ancient world were out of accord with fundamental principles of the gospel. As a matter of fact, however, Christianity seemed to exhibit a remarkable patience in its attitude toward the evil institutions of the time. It made no loud demands for social equality; it indulged in no denunciations of slavery; it apparently assumed the continuance of the distinction between rich and poor.

The explanation is to be found partly, no doubt, in the circumstances of the early Christians. “Not many wise after the flesh, not many might, not many noble” were called. Those humble men and women were excused from instituting an social revolution simply because they did not have the power. The acquiescence by the apostolic Church, therefore, in certain imperfect social institutions does not necessarily excuse similar acquiescence today. The Church has now, in the providence of God, become rich and powerful; and with additional power comes additional responsibility.

There is, however, a far deeper reason for the moderate attitude which the apostolic Church assumed toward existing institutions. The fundamental fact is that the Church refrained from a definite programme of social reform simply because she had something far better; she postponed the improvement of earthly conditions in order to offer eternal life. The improvement of conditions upon this earth is in the providence of God a long and painful process; while it was proceeding souls would have been lost; the first duty of the Church was obviously to offer to everyone, man or woman, rich or poor, bond or free, the inestimable gift of salvation. If a man has communion with the living God, all else can wait.

Accordingly, the apostolic Church promised men not silver and gold, the improvement of earthly conditions, but an abundant entrance into heaven. It is this spiritual and heavenly character of Christianity which makes the Christian offer universal. A gospel which promises merely an improvement of the world is dependent upon worldly conditions. If Christianity is merely a happy and successful life in this world, then a man may be deprived of it by disease, or ill fortune, or unjust suspicion, or death. As a matter of fact, Christianity is a life in communion with God, and that can be maintained in poverty and in plenty, in slavery and in freedom, in life and in death. The Christina offer is extended to everyone, and every earthly condition, no matter how degrading or how painful, can be used in the service of God. (The New Testament: An Introduction to Its Literature and History, 368-69)

Muslims Have Their Scarves, Christians Their Sandwiches

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Political religion takes different forms. For political Islam, a women wearing a head scarf is a symbol of devotion and of defiance against western secularism. For American Christians, it looks like eating a chicken sandwich is a signal of a citizen’s belief, morality, and politics.

All of a sudden, biting into a fried chicken sandwich has become a political statement.

Chick-fil-A, the fast-food chain known for putting faith ahead of profits by closing on Sundays, is standing firm in its opposition to gay marriage after touching off a furor earlier this month.

Gay rights groups have called for a boycott, the Jim Henson Co. pulled its Muppet toys from kids’ meals, and politicians in Boston and Chicago told the chain it is not welcome there.

Across the Bible Belt, where most of the 1,600 restaurants are situated, Christian conservatives have thrown their support behind the Atlanta-based company, promising to buy chicken sandwiches and waffle fries next week on “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day.”

The rest of the news story is here.

As theatrical as the controversy over Chick-fil-A may be (and the company may actually do well from the adverse publicity which is still publicity), one point stands out, though by now it may be a little stale. According to this news story, the mayors of Boston and Chicago have said that Chick-fil-A is unwelcome in those cities. According to Rahm Emanuel, “Chick-fil-A values are not Chicago values.” The mayor likely said this thinking that he was taking a courageous stand for diversity and tolerance. But he was also expressing great intolerance in the name of diversity and tolerance.

That may be the intellectual hobgoblin that haunts everyone living in a liberal democracy, though usually only libertarians see that tolerance means toleration even for groups or persons whose views are nutty or objectionable. But it is odd that bright people like Emanuel don’t see that they are erecting a form of intellectual orthodoxy that is just as inflexible as anything the Religious Right might construct.

What Emanuel also fails to see is truth that Thomas Jefferson recognized as basic to living in a free republic. The president’s line about the irrelevance of religion would seem to apply here: “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Does Chick-fil-A actually hurt Emanuel or other residents of Chicago just because the owner objects to gay marriage? Ideas are supposed to be freely held in America, as long as they don’t hurt others. (Hurt feelings don’t count since we all face people, ideas, and acts in the United States that don’t empower and affirm us.) Since Chick-fil-A provides a service that many use, and creates jobs that produce tax-payers, why does Emanuel actually care about Dan Cathy’s ideas?

Yes, liberals can be hypocritical. But so are conservatives. What’s surprising is that liberals can be as dumb as (they think) their political opposition.

Postscript: Matthew Lee Anderson makes a good point when he distinguishes “tolerant” (i.e., liberal) from “intolerant” (i.e. Religious Right) consumer boycotts. The latter objects to specific products, the former to ideas. So it’s not the chicken sandwich that offends, but the ideas of the guy who makes it. Perfectionism lives.

Next Time You're Tempted to Blame Escondido

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Since Jeremy Tate (from Called to Communion) decided to pop up here and offer guidance to we Protestants on Rome’s views of sainthood, I decided to take a wee peek at his posts. And I ran across a fairly amazing one. It may give the blame-Escondido-firsters pause. Tate’s post is about images of Jesus and he notes that both Tim Keller and John Frame were not exactly ardent defenders of Reformed Protestant interpretations of the second commandment:

It would be an understatement to say I was incredibly excited to see Dr. Keller preach in person. Even to this day, I have the highest respect for the man. As I walked into the Redeemer service, however, I was shocked by the church bulletin I was handed. A gory painting of Jesus, dead on the cross, covered the entire front cover of the bulletin. Having been schooled by “truly reformed” folk in the Deep South I could hardly believe my eyes. The leading church in my denomination was openly violating the Second Commandment! I was so disturbed I could hardly listen to a word of the sermon.

In seminary, however, I came to reconsider what the Bible actually teaches about images. My reason for re-examining the issue had nothing to do with Catholic influences, but rather the teaching of an RTS Professor, John Frame. In Frame’s massive book, The Doctrine of the Christian Life, he takes exception to the historic rejection of images of Christ by Reformed Churches. He makes the argument that having no images of Jesus can lead to practical “Docetism,” the ancient church heresy which claimed Jesus had no physical body. Frame concludes his argument by writing, “So I know of no reason to forbid pictures of Jesus… And there are positive reasons to use pictures of Jesus in the church’s pedagogy.”

Tate concludes with a charitable reading of Keller and Frame:

Here we have two men, both of whom are among the most influential leaders in the Presbyterian Church in America, rejecting the traditional Reformed understanding of 2nd Commandment. These men have not rejected the historic understanding of this commandment in order to stir up trouble in their denomination. Instead, they believe that Christians are actually being deprived of something when images are forbidden. Frame specifically references and affirms the 2nd Council of Nicaea in 787, which affirmed the beneficial use of images in places of worship. These men have been bold in standing against the majority opinion in their denomination in order to affirm what the Catholic Church has always believed. Images are good. Gazing at a crucifix has the effect of freeing us from our habitual skepticism as we see the concreteness of our Savior.

Everyone makes decisions for a variety of reasons, including those who leave Protestantism for Rome. But the reasons for leaving Protestantism are harder to find when know that justification, sola Scriptura, the regulative principle, and Presbyterian ecclesiology matter to being a Reformed Protestant. If you are looking for reasons to denounce the theological scholars who teach and write in Escondido, defending the hallmarks of Reformed Protestantism would not be one of them.

What is Special about Neo-Calvinism?

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One of the things you hear from neo-Calvinist critics of 2k is that a view that strongly distinguishes between the church and civil magistrate, or between Christ’s redemptive and creational offices, or between religion and culture (as 2k does) winds up limiting faith or piety to one day out of seven. Or it denies the Lordship of Christ over all areas of life. The breakthrough of neo-Calvinism, apparently, is to overcome the dualism of fundamentalism or pietism and show how Christianity pervades all things.

And yet, this insight is hardly the sole possession of neo-Calvinists. In fact, you see it come in all shapes and sizes from believers who want to see Christianity have a wider scope of influence. Even Michelle Obama,editors at Sojourners, and missional Christians agree with neo-Calvinists (thanks to John Fea):

Last week, the First Lady spoke to the quadrennial General Conference of the African American Methodist Episcopal Church. While the speech was a get-out-the-vote plug, it also shed an interesting light on both her personal faith and the theological tradition of the nation’s oldest independent, predominantly African-American congregations.

In reading the First Lady’s speech, I was intrigued to see a strong emphasis on some concepts I often associate with “missional” churches.

Within the church world, especially among those who are planting them, the term missional has become ubiquitous. It critiques existing church models that focus on creating programs, services, and marketing campaigns intended to draw people to the church instead of encouraging members to go out and serve—to be on “mission.”

Here’s a good example of the type of thing my pastor says all the time when he talks about being missional from the mouth of the First Lady:

“Our faith journey isn’t just about showing up on Sunday for a good sermon and good music and a good meal. It’s about what we do Monday through Saturday as well — especially in those quiet moments, when the spotlight’s not on us, and we’re making those daily choices about how to live our lives.”

One of the signs of a missional church is a de-emphasis on the Sunday-morning worship service put on by professionals. Instead of focusing on a 60-90 minute performance in which most people are passive attendees, increased time and attention are given to the active work believers are doing to further the mission of the church throughout the week. Some churches have abandoned what would be thought of as traditional services all together.

Mind you, Mrs. Obama and this writer at Sojourners don’t have the philosophical apparatus to support this view. Still, how fundamental an insight is neo-Calvinism’s cultural engagement when so many other Christians pursue cultural engagement in such similar language?

If Dr. K. is now receptive to taking a less antagonistic attitude toward 2k, if he believes that radical (as opposed to representative) neo-Calvinists need to hear important criticisms from 2kers, then perhaps he can point the way by showing where so many of the 24/7 Christians go wrong. I have a suggestion: start with Scripture and the confessions of the Reformed churches; second, leave the activism to believers’ consciences and vocations; and finally, resist all efforts to turn cultural engagement into a program or even a paradigm.