Author: D. G. Hart

Keeping it Eschatologically Real

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Some time back I wondered about the lack of support for 2k among Vossians. Recently over at Reformed Forum Jared Oliphint seemed to give some eschatological encouragement to 2kers when he wondered about the possibility of redeeming the stuff of creation:

What about the rest of creation? Is it being redeemed? Did Christ accomplish redemption for the rest of creation when he died and was raised?

For those who believe that all of creation is currently being “redeemed” in the eschatological sense, there’s a very simple test to see whether that is in fact the case. As a friend of mine puts it, you are tasked to find a single atom, molecule, object, anything that has the permanence of the everlasting, eternal new heavens and new earth. Such a thing would be indestructible, and would most likely exhibit characteristics that literally indicate an other-world. That would be quite a find.

Or take the language we sometimes find within evangelical circles of “redeeming the city”, for example. Is this appropriate language given what we know of the biblical use of redemption? That depends. People are redeemed by the Holy Spirit regenerating their hearts, having faith in Christ, repenting of their sins, and receiving Christ and his saving and renovating benefits from his accomplished work in history. Christ did not directly accomplish redemption for buildings, neighborhoods, cities, towns, or any other particular group or entity whatsoever. Christ’s benefits do not apply to a local diner or run-down gym. They do not apply to capitalism, to philosophy, to Wal-Mart, to the Icelandic courts of law, or any other non-human not made in the image of God.

Oliphint backs away from some of the implications of this point, but his assertion is one that should prompt the critics of 2k (it is dispensationalist, it is Lutheran, it is defeatist, it doesn’t lead to rallies in the nation’s capital) to pause and reflect. The powers that redemption and its means opposes are not poor working conditions, undrinkable water, economic inequality, or unimaginative artworks. The powers of this age that Christ continues to subdue are those of Satan and his kingdom.

Luther himself deflates any hope for transformationalism in a sermon from 1544:

For [the devil] seeks at all times to take possession of the Kingdom of God and to become lord of Christendom. He will to be seated and to rule, in the pure and holy Temple of God.

What, then, shall we do to him? This we, and especially those who preach the Word of God, should joyfully consider, that we must hope for no peace here, but should recollect that we are Christ’s warriors, in the field, always equipped and ready, for when one war ends another immediately begins.

For we are called by christ and already enroldled (in Baptism) in the army which shall fight under Christ against the devil. For He is the God who is a Prince of war and a true Duke who leads His regiment in battle, not in heaven above among the holy spirits where there is no need of battle, but here on earth in His Church. Yes (even though He is seated at the right hand of the Father) He is Himself with His warriors leading them against the enemy, whom no human power and weapons can withstand, resisting and restraining him with His Word, which He has given to His men.

If culture warriors (i.e., neo-Calvinists, theonomists, and social conservatives) think that reforming society or teaching a biblical w-w of botany are a part of the kingdom coming, then they have forgotten how powerful the enemy is that they battle and they have lost sight of who is responsible for winning the battle.

D.G. Hart Interviewed on the Regulative Principle of Worship

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Our own Dr. Darryl G. Hart was recently interviewed on Christ the Center regarding the regulative principle of worship. Listen to this interesting discussion touching on evangelicalism and the Reformed tradition.

And the Rocket's Red Glare . . .

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I suppose citizens of the United States enjoy fireworks partly because our National Anthem celebrates bombs bursting in air. (I won’t go to Wikipedia to check.) Last night, the better half and I discovered, much to our surprise, that the window in our guest bedroom provides a terrific vantage from which to watch the City of Hillsdale’s fireworks. We are only a couple blocks from the Fairgrounds, the site from which municipal workers launch those bombs. Earlier in the day (all about us), we enjoyed the City’s Fourth of July parade from the driveway of a good friend and neighbor, though we are still wondering why the parade and fireworks took place on July 3rd.

One additional wonder of this holiday season is why we know so little about Francis Scott Key, the author of The Star Spangled Banner, and another of Baltimore’s accomplished artists. Google Books shows a number of children’s books about Key, his song, and the anthem’s adoption as the nation’s song — it did not happen until 1931 (I wonder what they sang at baseball games when Babe Ruth was a rookie). But for any aspiring (or established) historian out there, the life of Key, who was an prolific poet and hymn writer, his poem about a significant battle during the War of 1812, how this war played in the imagination of the new nation, and the process by which later generations of Americans appropriated Key’s anthem, offers a historical canvass waiting to be filled. It could even work as well as the recent book of our neighbor and good friend.

Not to mention that Key’s anthem contains a political theology that few citizens of the United States ever consider. To remind my fellow Americans, here is the complete text of the Star Spangled Banner:

Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
‘Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Freedom's Boomerang

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On the eve of July 4th — here in Hillsdale residents are gearing up for the city’s annual parade — many Americans may give a thought or two to the ideal of political freedom. Roman Catholics in the U.S. have been having more than a couple thoughts of late since they have been observing what the American bishops have called a “Fortnight for Freedom.” According to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops website:

The fourteen days from June 21—the vigil of the Feasts of St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More—to July 4, Independence Day, are dedicated to this “fortnight for freedom”—a great hymn of prayer for our country. Our liturgical calendar celebrates a series of great martyrs who remained faithful in the face of persecution by political power—St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More, St. John the Baptist, SS. Peter and Paul, and the First Martyrs of the Church of Rome. Culminating on Independence Day, this special period of prayer, study, catechesis, and public action will emphasize both our Christian and American heritage of liberty. Dioceses and parishes around the country have scheduled special events that support a great national campaign of teaching and witness for religious liberty.

But now to spoil the fun or complicate the prayers comes a piece at Religion & Politics on the limits of the bishops’ stand for freedom. Jessica Coblentz reports on parts of the American church where skepticism about the bishops’ project are evident:

Catholics for Choice (CFC), a reproductive rights group, has orchestrated the most expansive effort to actively engage the USCCB argument about religious liberty. In a statement, CFC asks the question, “Whose religious freedom are we talking about?” They argue, “No-cost contraception for the average woman, including many Catholic women, can mean following her religious beliefs, following her conscience.” Likewise, parishioners at The Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament parish in Washington D.C. released a public statement criticizing the campaign’s narrow depiction of religious liberty. “We, the faithful, are in danger of becoming pawns,” they stated. “In no way do we feel that our religious freedom is at risk. We find it grotesque to have the call for this ‘Fortnight’ evoke the names of holy martyrs who died resisting tyranny.” Other Catholics, from the editors of Commonweal Magazine to Bishop Stephen Blaire of Stockton, California, have criticized the shortsighted, partisan nature of the USCCB’s charge that the mandate poses a threat to religious freedom.

I for one am not about to instruct Roman Catholics on their understanding of religious liberty. Part of the problem stems from apparently conflicting teachings on religious freedom and liberty of conscience. While Vatican I denounced freedom of conscience, Vatican II took a much more expansive and positive view of human rights and freedoms. One plausible attempt to reconcile this tension is here (though how well the bishops are doing at instructing the faithful on the nooks and crannies of church teaching is another matter). What does make sense is that Rome would never construe freedom of conscience in such a way as to permit sinful acts.

An observation a Protestant onlooker may responsibly make concerns the slipperiness of freedom for Christians in the United States. For almost two centuries Protestants believed that their religion was not simply the best to preserve American freedoms, but also that the nature of religious and civil liberty were virtually indistinguishable when Protestants were the ones holding the reins of liberty. This was, of course, a major source of anti-Catholicism among U.S. Protestants: believers loyal to a foreign prince (the Pope) were incapable of participating in a free republic. But this identification of religious and civil liberty was American Protestantism’s undoing. During the 1960s, when the complaints of African-Americans, women, and war protesters raised genuine questions about the extent of “liberty for all” in the United States, Protestant endorsements of political liberty looked remarkably hollow. In response, the Protestant mainline churches went from the biggest apologists for the United States and the West to one of the nation’s constant critics (they found their “prophetic” voice).

It looks like the Roman Catholic Church, with its appeal to religious freedom, may be experiencing the tension that afflicted Protestants. Granted, the bishops are not part of an informal ecclesiastical establishment the way that mainline Protestants were in the 1950s. Also different is the setting for the bishops’ effort — contested federal policies that potentially hurt and definitely disrupt Roman Catholic agencies.

Still, what is similar is the way that liberty is always contested. The liberties one group wants inevitably involve the loss of another group’s prerogatives. In the United States we used to have a political mechanism for resolving this tension — it was called federalism. What the Roman Catholic Church has to resolve the conflict in its midst over the nature and scope of religious freedom is another matter. Whether Roman Catholic officials have the gumption to quell this debate by appealing to the power of church hierarchy is a matter best left to Roman Catholic speculation. Still, it would be a curious feat to see the church resort to clerical authority in the name of religious freedom and liberty of conscience.

Of Paper Popes and Parasitic Presbyterians

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Perhaps the ruckus over Jason Stellman’s decision has passed but one response by Peter Leithart needs some attention, if only because it highlights a general problem in Reformed and Presbyterian circles. It is the way that Reformed Protestantism sits lightly with folks who are officers in Reformed and Presbyterian communions. Not to pick on anyone in particular, but also not to hide behind vagaries, this problem is not Leithart’s by himself. It is also part of the gift mix that John Frame and Tim Keller have bequeathed to many of their readers and fans.

The problem specifically is one identifying more with the Bible than tradition, relying more on exegesis than the common confession of a Reformed communion, exploring more existing church and intellectual concerns than mining paths trod by saints in the past.

Here is Leithart’s version of this impulse (in the context of Stellman’s decision):

Confessionalists, after all, place a great deal of emphasis on the tradition of Reformed theology, embodied especially in Reformed confessions. Throughout the debates of the past few years, I have presented mainly biblical arguments for my positions, and kept historical concerns subordinate. My opponents have typically been much more interested in testing my views by the Westminster Confession. The touchstone of their theology is a piece of the Reformed tradition as much as, and in some cases more than, Scripture. Confessionalists claim that the Confession provides standard exegesis of Scripture, to which Reformed theologians have to submit. Confessional Reformed theology thus has a natural affinity for Rome that biblicists like me don’t share. Confessionalists want the Confession to be a paper Pope. It’s not surprising that some find the paper Pope inadequate, and go searching for a live one. (If, as some will charge, Scripture is a paper Pope, it’s one whose ring I gladly kiss.)

Behind this Confessionalist elevation of tradition (in practice, over Scripture) is a broader tendency related to what I have critiqued elsewhere as “tragic metaphysics,” the notion that the original and old is necessarily preferable to the derived and the new. In its Trinitarian dogma, Christianity says the opposite: The Son, though He comes from the Father, is equal to the Father in every respect; in fact, there is no pure, unsupplemented origin, because there can be no Father without a Son. It says the opposite too in its eschatology: The golden age is not lost in the unrecoverable past but ahead of us in an eschatological future. Its Trinitarian theology and eschatology give Christian faith an open-endedness that can be unsettling. It’s unnerving to have to seek foundations in a city that is yet to come. (According to Fergus Kerr, this is exactly what Thomas says –Thomas is an “eschatological foundationalist.”)

When I read an argument like this I wonder whether someone like Leithart could just as easily minister in a Free Methodist Church as among Presbyterians. After all, lots of Protestants claim to be biblical and don’t let the past affect what is best for the church today. Or what about the Southern Baptist Convention? Is that set of congregations just as good as the United Reformed Churches? Or could it be that when push comes to shove, a fellow like Leithart really does identify with the Reformed tradition? That something really does differentiate Reformed from other Protestant communions?

I have no idea what Leithart’s response might be to a question about whether to minister as a Presbyterian or Lutheran. But I suspect, even hope, that he would say that Reformed Protestantism is superior in its teaching and practices to other Protestant churches.

If so, it would be a welcome development if he would pay back a little into the Presbyterian heritage fund. I mean, it is one thing to teach and defend the Reformed confessions and another to sit back and let your professional colleagues do it, all the while benefitting from at least some of their labors. It is also one thing to seek unity and discipline in a Reformed communion (through the heavy lifting of service at church assemblies) and allow the efforts of others to provide a cushion for you to do your own work. Furthermore, it is one thing to build on insights of generations of theologians and pastors (after all, Leithart isn’t starting from scratch, not even with his exegesis) and not show some gratitude for what has gone before.

Not everyone has to do the same amount of work or heritage maintenance. But is it too much to ask for everyone to be pulling in the same direction?

It is a free country, of course, and we have Reformed communions that are more or less confessional. So Leithart doesn’t have to do anything to keep up with his teaching, preaching, blogging, and writing. But for the sake of truth in advertising, identifying with his Presbyterian credentials, communicants, and past would certainly be desirable. It would even be responsible.

Postscript: I hesitated to employ “parasitic” in the post’s title but wanted to maintain the alliteration. “Free-riding” is obviously less inflammatory but at least I (always gracious) didn’t use “bloodsucking.”

The Gloating Coalition?

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The news of Jerry Sandusky’s conviction for child molestation has some Christians beating their breasts over their faith’s influence on western civilization. Joe Carter, one of TGC’s aggregators, has a quotation from a piece at the Catholic World Reporter that argues Sandusky would not have been found guilty in the ancient worlds of Greece or Rome:

If Sandusky would have lived 2000 years ago, he would not have been found guilty of anything. He would not even have been noticed. His actions would have been entirely unremarkable. There would have been no disgust, no anger. The verdict would have been innocent, and in fact, the notion that he was guilty of anything would have been unintelligible.

Carter jumps on the bandwagon:

For 2,000 years, the influence of Christ has had a profound—yet underestimated—influence on all aspects of Western culture. We often take for granted that without the “salt and light” of Christianity, behaviors that we consider disgusting and taboo would be accepted and commonplace. But what will happen if the influence of Christ and his followers continues to wane?

Discerning which is more remarkable here — the bad taste or the theological blunder — is difficult to say. Why would someone use this occasion to boast about the cultural effects of one’s faith? Why not show a little humility, mixed in with a dose of compassion for both Sandusky’s family, not to mention the victims (and their families), and back away from exploiting this story in the culture wars? Is this really going to persuade anyone on the other side or will it confirm the Religious Right’s reputation for self-congratulatory righteousness (and thus inspiring the faithful)?

At the same time, I thought the gospel was not about punishment for sin but forgiveness from its guilt and penalty. If the Gospel Coalition is going to stand up for the gospel, wouldn’t a fitting perspective here be to suggest that Christ might forgive even a sinner like Jerry Sandusky (if he repents and trusts in Christ)? But that kind of message doesn’t play so well in the culture wars where Christians invariably want more law and less forgiveness. Mind you, this is not a plea for anarchy or libertinism, not even a return to Rome or Athens. It is simply to show that the way of the gospel and the church’s ministry is distinct from the sword of the magistrate and the justice it wields.

This kind of historical credit-taking is downright unbecoming since it seems to attribute to Christianity (in a very whiggish way — how Roman Catholics go whiggy is another matter) all the blessings of modern society. To keep modern historical advances in perspective, a recent piece by Diedre N. McCloskey in The New Republic on happiness may bring these cultural warriors back down to a complicated earth. Here is an important excerpt that suggests Christianity did not give us all the benefits that some would have us think. The Enlightenment deserves a little credit (or blame depending on how you interpret the turn from otherworldliness to worldly preoccupations:

On a long view, understand, it is only recently that we have been guiltlessly obsessed with either pleasure or happiness. In secular traditions, such as the Greek or the Chinese, a pleasuring version of happiness is downplayed, at any rate in high theory, in favor of political or philosophical insight. The ancient Chinese sage Zhuangzi observed of some goldfish in a pond, “See how happy they are!” A companion replied, “How do you know they are happy?” Zhuangzi: “How do you know I don’t know?” In Christianity, for most of its history, the treasure, not pleasure, was to be stored up in heaven, not down here where thieves break in. After all, as a pre-eighteenth-century theologian would put it—or as a modern and mathematical economist would, too—an infinite afterlife was infinitely to be preferred to any finite pleasure attainable in earthly life.

The un-happiness doctrine made it seem pointless to attempt to abolish poverty or slavery or wife-beating. A coin given to the beggar rewarded the giver with a leg-up to heaven, a mitzvah, a hasanaat; but the ancient praise for charity implied no plan to adopt welfare programs or to grant rights of personal liberty or to favor a larger national income. A life of sitting by the West Gate with a bowl to beg was, after all, an infinitesimally small share of one’s life to come. Get used to it: For now and for the rest of your life down here, it’s your place in the great chain of being. Take up your cross, and quit whining. What does it matter how miserable you are in this life if you’ll get pie in the sky when you die? Such fatalism in many religions—“God willing,” we say, “im yirtzeh hashem,” “insh’Allah,” “deo volente”—precluded idle talk of earthly happiness.

Then, in the eighteenth century, our earthly happiness became important to us, in high intellectual fashion. By 1776, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was an unoriginal formulation of what we all, of course, now admitted that we chiefly wanted. John Locke had taught, in 1677, that “the business of men [is] to be happy in this world by the enjoyment of the things of nature subservient to life, health, ease, and pleasure”—though he added piously, “and by the comfortable [that is, comforting] hopes of another life when this is ended.” By 1738, the Comte de Mirabeau wrote to a friend, recommending simply, “[W]hat should be our only goal: happiness.”

“Our only goal.” To see how strange such a remark is, consider whether it could have been uttered by a leader of opinion in 1538. Martin Luther? Michelangelo? Charles V? No. They sought heavenly, artistic, or political glory—not something so domestic as happiness. Yet, in the late seventeenth century, even Anglican priests commenced preaching that God wanted us to be happy as much as holy. They called it “eudaemonism.” Anglicans and, astonishingly, some New England Congregationalists turned against the old, harsh, Augustinian-Calvinist line. We are not, declared the eudaemonists, mere sinners in the hands of an angry God, worms unworthy of grace. We are God’s beloved creatures, his pets.

The eudaemonistic turn was a Very Good Thing, resulting in fresh projects to better our stay here on Earth, some of them remarkably successful. Democracy was one, since, if you followed the fashion for universal happiness, it became impossible to go on insisting that what really mattered was the pleasure of the Duke or the Lord Bishop. Enlightened despots of the era claimed to seek the good of all, which paradoxically gave the populace the idea that maybe they themselves could do it.

Parallel with the stirrings of democracy and its accompanying welfarism, advocating for hospitals and free public education, was a new bourgeois dignity and liberty. Starting in Holland and England, and in the North American colonies of the English, the paired bourgeois revaluations combined to cause modern enrichment. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835 that “all the English colonies [in North America] at the time of their birth … seemed destined to present the development of … the bourgeois and democratic liberty of which the history of the world did not yet offer a complete model.” Or again about the first industrial nation: “Looking at the turn given to the human spirit in England by political life; seeing the Englishman … inspired by the sense that he can do anything. … I am in no hurry to inquire whether nature has scooped out ports for him, and given him coal and iron.”

2K Dodges a Bullet (and the Baylys Get 2K Religion?!?)

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So far, so good. 2K is potentially responsible for Protestant conversions to Rome, but not for this week’s Supreme Court decisions. Rabbi Bret and the Baylys have yet to charge 2K with the logic behind the Court’s rulings on immigration or Obamacare.

In fact — mirabile dictu — the Baylys themselves resort to 2k argumentation to explain why their blogging about politics is not the same as teaching God’s word:

One other matter: someone commented saying I should not waste or abuse my pastoral authority by writing about this Supreme Court ruling because it’s not a matter of the Gospel nor something all Christians living under Scripture must agree on. True. I never said or implied otherwise. There are many things on this blog that are a matter of faithfulness to Scripture. This SCOTUS decision is a political matter and the authority I cited was the U.S. Constitution. So if you disagree with me on this and think Chief Justice Roberts is not craven, but brilliant, God bless you. I hope all Baylyblog readers realize that there are many posts that are not sermons or Biblical exhortations, but thoughts “out of our minds.”

If this is not an instance of 2k, it is at least an argument for current health insurance arrangements because clearly the Baylys are back on their meds.

Psychological Disorder or Simply Bad Manners?

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Here is a plea to Kevin C. Rhoades, bishop of the Roman Catholic parish of Ft. Wayne/South Bend: call off Christian Smith! Please!!

Apparently, Smith is so caught up in his conversion to Rome that he has failed to join his fellow communicants in their Fortnight for Freedom. As many may know, Smith has not only joined the Roman Catholic Church, but the distinguished sociologist of American religion has also written two books that justify his move. One takes on the problems of sola scriptura, the other explains how evangelicals can become Roman Catholic. Why those books were not enough is a mystery. But here we are, smack dab in the Freedom Fortnight, and Smith has posted through Pete Enns a piece about the narcissism of conservative Presbyterians:

But for present purposes, what the narcissism of small differences very powerfully explains, I think, is the prevailing tendency among conservative Reformed and Presbyterian Christians in the U.S. to spend so much time, energy, and attention arguing over and policing and prosecuting what in reality are relatively minor—sometimes absolutely obscure—matters of doctrine.

It is not just that they were traumatized by losing Princeton to the liberals and so always feel on edge. Those who sustain the entertainments of doctrinal and biblical legalisms are also in fact so darn similar to each other, and that theological and organizational proximity makes what are often really only very small differences seem life shaking.

If you look at the fine print of this piece you will find no examples of such mountain-out-of-mole-hill making. (But even uninformed readers might connect the dots to Enns, Westminster, and the controversy over inerrancy a few years ago.)

I do not doubt that conservative Presbyterians do this, though whether we need to invoke Freud is another matter. As John Muether pointed out in a comment to Smith’s post:

This is what Neuhaus called the law of theological propinquity — one reserves most strident criticism for those closest, in part as an effort at boundary maintenance. It seems to apply to sociological theory as much as reformed doctrine.

I suspect that even in Roman Catholic circles, if Smith looked hard enough, he might find such forms of boundary maintenance, like those distinguishing Opus Dei from Call to Action. In fact, the United States is thriving on differences that might look to Turks or Japanese like small differences. Do Republicans and Democrats really differ on the economy and national defense? Do Irish-Americans really look at the world differently from Swedish-Americans?

So why would Smith go out of his way to reduce the convictions of his former friends, communicants, and family members to psychological malfunctioning? One explanation might be narcissism itself. Smith is so caught up with his own pilgrimage that he needs to justify it. As his own definition of narcissism attests:

It is narcissistic because it is driven by a quest, very real even if unacknowledged, to feed the importance of one’s own identity even at the expense of others and the church.

This is not meant to be merely an echo response. Smith’s books deserve more comment than this post, and his arguments will receive scrutiny in the forthcoming book that Muether and I are writing. What is meant here is that a smart guy like Smith should have enough intelligence to consider his own posture in these debates, not to mention the manners of an assured convert who doesn’t need to wear his faith on his sleeve and make others feel uncomfortable. Could it be that Smith is still suffering from the evangelical piety he used to defend?

From PCRT to Ligonier to Gospel Coalition

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Anthony Bradley’s memories of coming into Reformed Protestant circles during the 1980s has been making the rounds and includes a question about why Baptists dominate contemporary discussions of Calvinism. Back in the day, according to Bradley, James Montgomery Boice, Sinclair Ferguson, and R.C. Sproul dominated discussions of Reformed theology.

They are all Presbyterians. In those days “Calvinism”/”Reformed” and Presbyterian were synonyms. Something happened, however. The Presbyterians lost their voice some would say and I’m not sure how to explain how that happened. Somehow “Reformed” today (2012) is more associated with Baptists (or Baptistic folks) D.A. Carson, John Piper, and Mark Driscoll.

As someone who regularly attended the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology at Tenth Presbyterian Church and who benefited from lectures and sermons by Boice, Sproul, John Gerstner, and Roger Nicole, I too have sometimes reflected on the change of ecclesiastical landscape over the last twenty-five years. Back around 1980 Reformed Protestantism in the United States looked to be the most formidable expression of Christianity and was even drawing converts from Rome. In addition to PCRT, the editors of Reformed Journal assembled a remarkable collection of academics and pastors to write thoughtfully about church life, politics, and the arts. Contributors included Rich Mouw, George Marsden, Mark Noll, Nick Wolterstorff, Ronald Wells and others. Not too long into the 1980s, however, Calvinists lost their swagger and mojo, and Roman Catholicism, thanks to the appeal of John Paul II, became the alternative for thoughtful and socially active “conservative” Christians.

Some could explain the change as simply a function of age and even death. Gerstner and Boice are no longer with us, and folks like Sproul are fast approaching retirement. Another factor is that the Reformed consensus of the early 1980s that appeared to be drawing conservative Presbyterians and Reformed Protestants together had fallen apart by 1990. The OPC found a way to avoid J&R with the PCA and in the process recovered something of its older polemical edge. The PCA became a refuge for disaffected Orthodox Presbyterians of a New Life persuasion. The CRC debated and finally gave its blessing to women’s ordination. As the OPC hardened, the PCA softened, and the CRC amended, Reformed Protestantism fractured.

Meanwhile, Ligonier became the national successor to the PCRT’s regional presence. And the process of building a national constituency led to the inclusion of speakers who would not have been considered either Reformed of Calvinistic, such as John Piper and John MacArthur. At the same time, while Ligonier expanded what it meant to be Reformed, the Alliance of Confessional Evangelicals — a body formed by Boice — broke up with Mike Horton’s version of confessionalism going one way and the Alliance’s going another. Neither ACE nor White Horse Media, however, could keep up with local/national ministries of Piper and Desiring God, Driscoll and Acts 29, or Tim Keller and the Redeemer phenomenon. When the Gospel Coalition came together it did on a national scale what Boice had done on a much smaller (and pre-internet) scale with PCRT. What is more, it received buy in from national celebrity academics and pastors in ways that Ligonier could not, dominated as it was by one speaker and author.

The answer to Bradley’s question then seems to be that in order to achieve national prominence, Calvinism needed to go off the Presbyterian and Reformed reservation and include groups that were much bigger and speakers more celebrated than Presbyterians could muster. Recent posts at the Coalition underscore the breadth that contemporary Calvinism represents thanks to the move from local to national settings. According to Collin Hansen, the Young & Restless phenomenon is a “critique movement”:

Calvinism has thrived, then, as a fire engine sounding the alarm and bearing water to put out the flames consuming American evangelicalism. We’re not surprised by the bad numbers. In fact, even inside some of the biggest churches in America, we’ve seen the limits of any strategy that fails to account for our God-given need for transcendence, transformation, and tradition. Numbers are a lagging indicator of unhealth. Even during the megachurch boom of the 1980s and 1990s, all was not well with the evangelical soul.

Some could only wish that the critique extended even to members of the Coalition, that it might fault Driscoll’s new measures (and clairvoyance) or Keller’s failure to be a traditional Presbyterian.

But when the definition of Calvinism includes Wesleyanism, what kind of critique might you expect? John Starke’s recent exchange with Fred Sanders, a Wesleyan who teaches at BIOLA and who quotes Calvin, reinforces the point about the breadth that afflicts the new Calvinism of the non-Reformed variety. Here is Starke’s introduction:

I’ve been reading Fred Sanders’s blog for a long time, and when his book, The Deep Things of God, came out, I was eager to read it. He’s a good writer, he loves and quotes the Puritans, he’s a reasonable thinker, and he knows how to do careful exegesis.

He’s also a Wesleyan.

I don’t mean to declare that so menacingly. But the first time I learned Sanders—associate professor at the Torrey Honors Institute of Biola University—was a Wesleyan, I was a bit surprised. It’s not that Wesleyans and Arminians can’t be careful interpreters and reasonable thinkers—I just don’t often resonate with their writings and conclusions quite the way I do with Sanders’.

And so, I had to know: For a guy who loves, quotes, and depends upon Calvin and Calvinists, why isn’t Fred Sanders a Calvinist? We corresponded, and he explained the one thing he wished Calvinists would stop accusing Wesleyans of doing and why Wesleyanism is only the opposite of Calvinism in a very small thought-world.

Will Fred Sanders make an appearance at a Gospel Coalition conference and receive a “Calvinistic” benediction? Odder things have happened in the world of contemporary Calvinism.

Regeneration, Intelligence, and Philosophy

Published on by D. G. Hart512 Comments

May we have a little clarity on the nature of regeneration, puh-leeze? Sorry to pick on the neo-Calvinists again, but a common construction of regeneration among those who stress the antithesis is to attribute to the supernatural work of the Spirit the intellectual genius of believers. This interpretation is strongest among the neo-Calvinists who are philosophically inclined. Because they can unearth the epistemological roots of an idea or argument, and because they operate in what at times seems like a Manichean universe divided between the knowers (of Christ) and the ignorant, these neo-Calvinist philosophers believe they hold the keys to discerning the work of the Spirit. Regeneration removes the noetic effects of the fall and now allows Christians to interpret reality correctly, and even see the philosophical basis for all things.

Never mind that the arguments for Christian schools contradict this understanding of regeneration. If regeneration does produce a new w-w, then why is education necessary? Shouldn’t the regenerate already have the tools, by virtue of the illuminating power of the Spirit, to understand all things correctly? But if covenant children and the w-w challenged need to appropriate the value added material that comes from the w-w cognoscenti, then is the Spirit’s work in regeneration really responsible for a new outlook on the world? Or could it be that a w-w is much more the product of human instruction about the fundamental truths of epistemology and metaphysics, or Christian teachers who give a faith-based reading of the arts and sciences?

Another wrinkle here, by the way, is the folly that apparently afflicts believers not only about the world but also about the faith. Remember that Paul call the Galatians and Corinthians foolish even while considering these folks to be saints, that is, people who had experienced the work of the Spirit in regeneration. Also, consider that a w-w does very little justice to catechesis. In fact, in communions where w-w has expanded, catechesis has generally declined. At the same time, regeneration is no solution to the hard work of memorizing a three-figure set of doctrinal answers. It takes time, discipline, and memory.

So what we need is clarity about the noetic effects of regeneration. And we also need to distinguish among those effects, the native intelligence of persons that comes providentially from genes, family environments, and temperament, and academic proficiency in a particular area of human investigation. Clarity may start with a reminder about the nature of the spiritual illumination in regeneration. According to the Shorter Catechism:

Effectual calling is the work of God’s Spirit, whereby, convincing us of our sin and misery, enlightening our minds in the knowledge of Christ, and renewing our wills, he doth persuade and enable us to embrace Jesus Christ, freely offered to us in the gospel. (WSC 31)

. . . when God carries out this good pleasure in his chosen ones, or works true conversion in them, he not only sees to it that the gospel is proclaimed to them outwardly, and enlightens their minds powerfully by the Holy Spirit so that they may rightly understand and discern the things of the Spirit of God, but, by the effective operation of the same regenerating Spirit, he also penetrates into the inmost being of man, opens the closed heart, softens the hard heart, and circumcises the heart that is uncircumcised. He infuses new qualities into the will, making the dead will alive, the evil one good, the unwilling one willing, and the stubborn one compliant; he activates and strengthens the will so that, like a good tree, it may be enabled to produce the fruits of good deeds. (Dort III/IV, 11)

What sure seems clear to me is that regeneration has a narrow effect — it allows a person who had no interest in Christ to understand his need and to trust the work of Christ. It is a kind of knowledge, but it is not even necessarily knowledge of well-formulated doctrine. At the same time, regeneration does nothing to take someone from a low to a high IQ. Nor does regeneration place someone all of a sudden as a graduate of a Masters-level curriculum in western philosophy. Regeneration removes the noetic effects of sin. It does not change the brain or a person’s mastery of a body of thought.

At the same time, neo-Calvinists enraptured by western philosophy may want to remember what Calvin and Kuyper, Mr. Paleo- and Mr. Neo-Calvinist, had to say about the learning of pagans.

If we regard the Spirit of God as the sole fountain of truth, we shall neither reject the truth itself, nor despise it wherever it shall appear, unless we wish to dishonor the Spirit of God. For by holding the gifts of the Spirit in slight esteem, we contemn and reproach the Spirit himself. What then? Shall we deny that the truth shone upon the ancient jurists who established civic order and discipline with such great equity? Shall we say that the philosophers were blind in their fine observation and artful description of nature? Shall we say that those men were devoid of understanding who conceived the art of disputation and taught us to speak reasonably? Shall we say that they are insane who developed medicine, devoting their labor to our benefit? What shall we say of the mathematical sciences? Shall we consider them the ravings of madmen? No, we cannot read the writings of the ancients on these subjects without great admiration. We marvel at them because we are compelled to recognize how preeminent they are. But shall we count anything praiseworthy or noble without recognizing at the same time that it comes from God? Let us be ashamed of such ingratitude, into which not even the pagan poets fell, for they confessed that the gods had invented philosophy, laws, and all useful arts. Those men whom Scripture [I Cor. 2:14] calls “natural men” were, indeed, sharp and penetrating in their investigation of inferior things. Let us, accordingly, learn by their example how many gifts the Lord left to human nature even after it was despoiled of its true good. (Institutes II.2.15)

. . . the unbelieving world excels in many things. Precious treasures have come down to us from the old heathen civilization. In Plato you find pages which you devour. Cicero fascinates you and bears you along by his noble tone and stirs up in you holy sentiments. And if you consider your own surroundings, that which is reported to you, and that which you derive from the studies and literary productions of professed infidels, how much more there is which attracts you, with which you sympathize and which you admire. It is not exclusively the spark of genius or the splendor of talent which excites your pleasure in the words and actions of unbelievers, but it is often their beauty of character, their zeal, their devotion, their love, their candor, their faithfulness and their sense of honesty. Yea, we may not pass it over in silence, not infrequently you entertain the desire that certain believers might have more of the attractiveness, and who among us has not himself been put to the blush occasionally by being confronted with what is called the “virtues of the heathen”? (Lectures on Calvinism, 121ff)

What is important is that Calvin does attribute to the Spirit the knowledge that pagans possess. Truth, wisdom, and intelligence do not exist independent from God. At the same time, the wisdom of pagans is spiritual work that does not include regeneration. It is in effect another iteration of the doubleness that 2K tries to maintain. In the same way that Christ rules the work of redemption differently from the order of his creation, so too the Spirit works upon the minds of people differently, with the illumination of regeneration providing a knowledge distinct from understanding politics, the liberal arts, or even neo-Calvinists’ beloved philosophy.

So once again, neo-Calvinism’s failure to follow Kuyper and figure out how to affirm a common realm that exists somewhere between the holy and the profane bites them in their argumentative backsides. Without that common realm, believers — whether fundamentalist or neo-Calvinist — will try to baptize everything and turn all truth and wisdom into the blessings of redemption and special grace.