Author: D. G. Hart

Forensic Friday: The URCNA's Nine Points

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THE NINE POINTS OF (URCNA) SYNOD (SCHERERVILLE) 2007

Synod affirms that the Scriptures and confessions teach the doctrine of justification by grace alone, through faith alone and that nothing that is taught under the rubric of covenant theology in our churches may contradict this fundamental doctrine. Therefore Synod rejects the errors of those:

1. who deny or modify the teaching that “God created man good and after His own image, that is, in true righteousness and holiness,” able to perform “the commandment of life” as the representative of mankind (HC 6,9; BC 14);

2. who, in any way and for any reason, confuse the “commandment of life” given before the fall with the gospel announced after the fall (BC 14, 17, 18; HC 19, 21, 56, 60);

3. who confuse the ground and instrument of acceptance with God before the fall (obedience to the commandment of life) with the ground (Christ who kept the commandment of life) and instrument (faith in Christ) of acceptance with God after the fall;

4. who deny that Christ earned acceptance with God and that all His merits have been imputed to believers (BC 19, 20, 22, 26; HC 11-19, 21, 36-37, 60, 84; CD 1.7, RE 1.3, RE 11.1);

5. who teach that a person can be historically, conditionally elect, regenerated, savingly united to Christ, justified, and adopted by virtue of participation in the outward administration of the covenant of grace but may lose these benefits through lack of covenantal faithfulness (CD, I, V);

6. who teach that all baptized persons are in the covenant of grace in precisely the same way such that there is no distinction between those who have only an outward relation to the covenant of grace by baptism and those who are united to Christ by grace alone through faith alone (HC 21, 60; BC 29);

7. who teach that Spirit-wrought sanctity, human works, or cooperation with grace is any part either of the ground of our righteousness before God or any part of faith, that is, the “instrument by which we embrace Christ, our righteousness” (BC 22-24; HC 21, 60, 86);

8. who define faith, in the act of justification, as being anything more than “leaning and resting on the sole obedience of Christ crucified” or “a certain knowledge” of and “a hearty trust” in Christ and His obedience and death for the elect (BC 23; HC 21);

9. who teach that there is a separate and final justification grounded partly upon righteousness or sanctity inherent in the Christian (HC 52; BC 37).

Of Choice Meats and Good Cigars

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Our friendly interlocutor, Zrim, took a dose of exception to the recent post here about drinking and smoking with Mike Horton – not with Mark Dever. He makes the plausible point that many Reformed types have graduated from a fundamentalist piety to the full-orbed one of smoking, drinking, and maybe even cussing, as part of the cage-phase of becoming Reformed.

He writes:

I have found it crowded with more or less two types: ascetic legalists and sophomoric libertarians who used to be ascetic legalists. . . . Then there is the liberty camp. Blowing smoke into the faces of their past, these find true piety to be measured by relative consumption. There seems always something to prove to some phantom somewhere in the individual or collective self, real or imagined. The way an adolescent speaks a bit higher on the phone so her parents know she is fraternizing with the neighborhood bad boy, certain libertarians want the details of their consumption known to their phantoms.

As I have admitted, this is a point that all Reformed Protestants who revel in the strong consciences need to consider.

But from the other side of the aisle comes the Reformed tradition itself. One of the more puzzling features of the original Protestant movement was a concern for eating meat – an act that hardly anyone but the most world-and-life view crazed would regard as essentially religious.. In one of the earliest Reformed creeds, Zwingli’s “Sixty-Seven Articles,” we read that the Christian “is free to eat all foods at any time.” This stemmed from the first outbreak of Protestantism in Zurich, eating sausage on Friday, a day on which Roman Catholics fasted by abstaining from meat. And not very long after Zwingli’s creed came the Tetrapolitan Confession which devoted four chapter to eating – or more precisely, to eating in contrast to fasting. One of the chapters was “Of the Choice of Meats.” The chapter on fasting has this:

When, therefore, we saw very evidently that the chief men in the Church beyond the authority of Scripture assumed this authority so to enjoin fasts as to bind men’s consciences, we allowed consciences to be freed from these snares, but by the Scriptures, and especially Paul’s writings, which with singular earnestness removes these rudiments of the world from the necks of Christians. . . . For if St. Paul (than whom no man at any time taught Christ more certainly) maintains that through Christ we have obtained such liberty in external things that he not only allows no creature the right to burden those who believe in Christ, even with those ceremonies and observances which God himself appointed, and wished in their own time to be profitable, but also denounces as having fallen away from Christ, and that Christ is of none effect to those who suffer themselves to be made servant thereto, what verdict do we think should be passed on those commandments which men have devised of themselves, not only without any oracle, but also without any example worthy of being followed, and which, therefore, are unto most not only beggarly and weak, but also hurtful; not elements – i.e., rudiments of holy discipline – but impediments of true godliness? (Ch. VIII)

One possible point to draw from this difficult prose, as sophomoric as it might appear, is that to have a theological journal, the NTJ, dedicated to the chemical found in tobacco is to bear witness to a prominent streak in the Reformed tradition about the importance of proclaiming and demonstrating Christian liberty. If meat on Friday was the way to expose the tyranny of man-made rules and false teaching in the sixteenth-century church, how much more is tobacco today a way to expose the sacred cows of both believers and citizens in the greatest smoke-free nation on God’s green earth?

Do They Really Want What They Want?

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Steven Wedgeworth over at Credenda Agenda has registered a critique of two-kingdom theology that uses David VanDrunen’s new book on natural law and the two kingdoms as the object of critique. Some of the usual federal vision suspects have lined up to promote Wedgeworth’s piece. Rabbi Bret writes:

Wedgeworth also spends time exposing how the Two Kingdoms, as defined by the Magisterial Reformers, covered different realities then the Two Kingdoms of Escondido fame. For the Magisterial Reformers the Two Kingdoms were defined as such that there was a diversity in unity. For Escondido the Two Kingdoms are defined in such a way that there is diversity (Nature realm vs. Redemptive realm) with no unity. (Hence the constant charge of Dualism.)

So you know it must be good.

Wedgeworth has two main complaints – one is that the idea of a spiritual and a temporal kingdom (or Augustine’s two cities) do not correlate with the church and the state. Wedgeworth writes:

It was precisely because the visible church existed in the temporal kingdom that Christian magistrates had a duty to protect and reform them. The princes were not to personally involve their office in crafting doctrine or worship, but they surely were involved in financing, defending, and promoting certain visible churches to the exclusion of others. Since all Christian laypersons were priests, the Reformers saw no problem with allowing princes to function as Christians in their particular vocation and to make use of their superior ordering abilities in the visible church. All of the Reformed confessions are in agreement on this point, as well, and so it seems impossible to remove this feature from the ecclesiology of the Reformation.

What Wedgeworth fails to acknowledge (aside from an inordinate fixation on Calvin as the standard of all things Reformed) is that Zurich and Geneva differed over the respective powers of the city council and church authority. Zurich was much closer to (if not guilty of) an Erastian model, with the magistrates reserving the right of excommunication, while Geneva worked hard to gain for the church the spiritual power of excommunication. In other words, the responsibility of the state to preserve the true religion is much more a legacy of Zurich than of Geneva and the difference is evident in the way that the Geneva Confession (1556) and the Gallican Confession (1559) refuse to attribute ecclesiastical powers to the magistrate the way, say, that the Westminster Divines did when in the original version of their Confession (subsequently altered by American Presbyterians in 1787) gave the magistrate the right to call and preside over synods and councils of the church. Can anyone imagine George Bush or Barack Obama presiding over the General Assembly of the OPC? (For that matter, can anyone imagine why a president would care to preside over a gathering of 160 pastors and elders?) And yet, that was the kind of power that a Zurichian arrangement bequeathed to one side of the Reformed brain.

(By the way, for the record this would make the Federal Visionaries pro-Zurich on political theology but pro-Geneva on the Lord’s Supper. Can you say “dualism”? Sure you can.)

While Wedgeworth’s point that the spiritual and the temporal do not equate to church and state, it’s pretty hard to read Calvin on the two kingdoms and not think that the civil and ecclesiastical polities lined up pretty neatly with the visible church and the visible state.

Therefore, to perceive more clearly how far the mind can proceed in any matter according to the degree of its ability, we must here set forth a distinction: that there is one kind of understanding of earthly things; another of heavenly. I call “earthly things” those which do not pertain to God or his Kingdom, to true justice, or to the blessedness of the future life; but which have their significance and relationship with regard to the present life and are, in a sense, confined within its bounds. I call “heavenly things” the pure knowledge of God, the nature of true righteousness, and the mysteries of the Heavenly Kingdom. The first class includes government, household management, all mechanical skills, and the liberal arts. In the second are the knowledge of God and of his will, and the rule by which we conform our lives to it.

Of the first class the following ought to be said: since man is by nature a social animal, he tends through natural instinct to foster and preserve society. Consequently, we observe that there exist in all men’s minds universal impressions of a certain civic fair dealing and order. Hence no man is to be found who does not understand that every sort of human organization must be regulated by laws, and who does not comprehend the principles of those laws. Hence arises the unvarying consent of all nations and of individual morals with regard to laws. For their seeds have, without teacher or lawgiver, been implanted in all men. (Institutes, II.ii.13)

Since Calvin puts government and household management – and not the church – under earthly things, it looks like the distinction between church (spiritual) and state (temporal) was in Calvin’s mind (and not just VanDrunen’s or Luther’s). Heck, it was even in the minds of the Westminster Divines when they wrote:

Synods and councils are to handle, or conclude nothing, but that which is ecclesiastical: and are not to intermeddle with civil affairs which concern the commonwealth, unless by way of humble petition in cases extraordinary; or, by way of advice, for satisfaction of conscience, if they be thereunto required by the civil magistrate. (WCF 31.5 original)

In other words, even in an Erastian environment with a king or parliament calling the church’s shots, Reformed churchmen were able to distinguish the differences between the civil and the ecclesiastical in ways that leave today’s Christendomians (read: theonomists) tripping.

To see how much the Reformed tradition identified Christ’s kingdom with the church you only need to look at the way that the Reformed catechisms treat the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer or Christ’s kingly office. Here is the Larger Catechism’s rendering of Christ role as kind:

WLC Q. 45. How doth Christ execute the office of a king?
A. Christ executeth the office of a king, in calling out of the world a people to himself, and giving them officers, laws, and censures, by which he visibly governs them; in bestowing saving grace upon his elect, rewarding their obedience, and correcting them for their sins, preserving and supporting them under all their temptations and sufferings, restraining and overcoming all their enemies, and powerfully ordering all things for his own glory, and their good; and also in taking vengeance on the rest, who know not God, and obey not the gospel.

In other words, the Reformers, whether influenced by Zurich or Geneva, were jealous to preserve the spiritual rule of Christ from being confused with the rule of the state, and to locate the spiritual rule of Christ with officers of his visible church.

Wedgeworth’s other objection to VanDrunen’s book is the distinction between Christ’s mediatorial (i.e. redemptive) and his creational rule. Wedgeworth believes this sets up an impossible scenario of a divided self where a Christian is “guided by his cultural spirit and imagination at certain moments of his life and by his religious spirit and imagination at others.” Why this is so hard to imagine I do not know. After all the Christian father who is also an elder treats his son differently when appearing before the session or when addressing him in the home, just as a Christian gynecologist treats a naked woman differently depending on whether he’s married to her and he’s her physician. Christians make distinctions of office and vocation all the time. If we can imagine doing it, why not someone who is more adept at juggling human affairs and diverse responsibilities than we are – namely, Jesus Christ.

But not to be missed is that if Wedgeworth wants to collapse the mediatorial and creational rules into one power, he is guilty of Roman Catholicism. At least, that was how David McKay explained it when expounding Samuel Rutherford’s account of church-state relations. McKay writes:

. . . Rutherford does maintain that Christian magistrates have a duty to promote the well-being of the church. He also insists, however, that “the Magistrate as a Magistrate is not the Deputie of Jesus Christ as Mediator,” a view that he goes on to describe as “the heart and soule of Popery.”(McKay, “From Popery to Principle: Covenanters and the Kingship of Christ,” in The Faith Once Delivered, p. 136)

Later in this essay, McKay also quotes George Gillespie to the following effect: Christ has all power “by the eternal generation, ad by the declaration of him to be the Son of God with power, when he was raised from the dead, Rom. 1:14.” According to McKay, Gillespie agrees that Christ has power to subdue the enemies of his church, but “as Mediator he is only the church’s King, Head, and Governor, and hath no other kingdom” (p. 139).

So while the Federal Visionaries and neo-Calvinists keep figuring out ways to redeem all of life – with the aim, I guess, of putting Christians in charge of everything so believers can be the ones calling synods and councils – they should remember first that the magisterial reformation started with the magistrate, not the church. Zwingli, Bucer, Calvin, Ursinus served at the good pleasure of the state; they did not call a church council and send petitions to the magistrates to adopt pro-Protestant policies. And if Federal Visionaries want the same circumstances today as those that informed the Reformation, they better start working on getting Doug Wilson or Neil Plantinga to run for office – preferably with a little more clout than the district superintendent of public recreation.

Or they could simply follow Calvin’s advice and remember that the effects of salvation are first, foremost, and ultimately, not cultural, political, legal, medicinal, or agricultural but spiritual. As Calvin put it at the beginning of his discussion of the magistrate, the problem with Federal Visionaries and neo-Calvinists is their addiction to the Judaic Folly:

But whoever knows how to distinguish between body and soul, between this present fleeting life and that future eternal life, will without difficulty know that Christ’s spiritual Kingdom and the civil jurisdiction are things completely distinct. Since, then, it is a Jewish vanity to seek and enclose Christ’s Kingdom within the elements of this world, let us rather ponder that what Scripture clearly teaches is a spiritual fruit, which we gather from Christ’s grace. . . (Institutes, IV.xx.1)

Where's Waldo Wednesday: Too Much of a Good Thing?

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. . . In the fifth place, is it wise to use the language which is often used in the present day about the doctrine of “Christ in us”? I doubt it. Is not this doctrine often exalted to a position which it does not occupy in Scripture? I am afraid that it is. That the true believer is one with Christ and Christ in him, no careful reader of the New Testament will think of denying for a moment. There is, no doubt, a mystical union between Christ and the believer. With Him we died, with Him we were buried, with Him we rose again, with Him we sit in heavenly places. We have five plain texts where we are distinctly taught that Christ is “in us.” ( Romans 8:10; Galatians 2:20; 4:19; Ephesians 3:17; Colossians 3:11.) But we must be careful that we understand what we mean by the expression. That “Christ dwells in our hearts by faith,” and carries on His inward work by His Spirit, is clear and plain. But if we mean to say that beside, and over, and above this there is some mysterious indwelling of Christ in a believer, we must be careful what we are about. Unless we take care, we shall find ourselves ignoring the work of the Holy Spirit. We shall be forgetting that in the Divine economy of man’s salvation election is the special work of God the Father – atonement, mediation, and intercession, the special work of God the Son – and sanctification, the special work of God the Holy Spirit. We shall be forgetting that our Lord said, when He went away, that He would send us another Comforter, who should “abide with us” forever, and, as it were, take His Place. ( John 14:16.) In short, under the idea that we are honoring Christ, we shall find that we are dishonoring His special and peculiar gift – the Holy Spirit. Christ, no doubt, as God, is everywhere – in our hearts, in heaven, in the place where two or three are meet together in His name. But we really must remember that Christ, as our risen Head and High Priest, is specially at God’s right hand interceding for us until He comes the second time: and that Christ carries on His work in the hearts of His people by the special work of His Spirit, whom He promised to send when He left the world. ( John 15:26.) A comparison of the ninth and tenth verses of the eighth chapter of Romans seems to me to show this plainly. It convinces me that “Christ in us” means Christ in us “by His Spirit.” Above all, the words of St. John are most distinct and express: “Hereby we know that He abides in us by the Spirit which He has given us.” ( 1 John 3:24.)

In saying all this, I hope no one will misunderstand me. I do not say that the expression, “Christ in us” is unscriptural. But I do say that I see great danger of giving extravagant and unscriptural importance to the idea contained in the expression; and I do fear that many use it now-adays without exactly knowing what they mean, and unwittingly, perhaps, dishonor the mighty work of the Holy Spirit. If any reader think that I am needlessly scrupulous about the point, I recommend to their notice a curious book by Samuel Rutherford (author of the well-known letters), called “The Spiritual Antichrist.” They will see there that two centuries ago the wildest heresies arose out of an extravagant teaching of this very doctrine of the “indwelling of Christ” in believers. They will find that Saltmarsh, and Dell, and Towne, and other false teachers, against whom good Samuel Rutherford contended, began with strange notions of “Christ in us,” and then proceeded to build on the doctrine antinomianism, and fanaticism of the worst description and vilest tendency. They maintained that the separate, personal life of the believer was so completely gone, that it was Christ living in him who repented, and believed, and acted! The root of this huge error was a forced and unscriptural interpretation of such texts as “I live: yet not I, but Christ lives in me.” (Galatians 2:20.) And the natural result of it was that many of the unhappy followers of this school came to the comfortable conclusion that believers were not responsible, whatever they might do! Believers, forsooth, were dead and buried; and only Christ lived in them, and undertook everything for them! The ultimate consequence was, that some thought they might sit still in a carnal security, their personal accountableness being entirely gone, and might commit any kind of sin without fear! Let us never forget that truth, distorted and exaggerated, can become the mother of the most dangerous heresies. When we speak of “Christ being in us,” let us take care to explain what we mean. I fear some neglect this in the present day. (From the Introduction to Holiness, by J. C. Ryle; tip of the hat to our southern correspondent)

The Corporate Gullibility of the Church

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Call it harmonic divergence, but I couldn’t help but read the transcript Tim Keller’s remarks on “gospel ecosystems” in the light of J. Gresham Machen’s remarks about the corporate responsibility of the church. I happened to be teaching on the latter during adult Sunday school and reading the former after a holy day feast and the evening service. Maybe reading Keller and Machen in such close proximity is unfair to both men, but odd combinations like this regularly come with the turf of contemporary conservative Presbyterianism in the United States.

For those uninitiated, Keller’s notion of a gospel eco-system is an infelicitous (because it presumes scientific status just like Charles Finney’s New Measures) way of describing the sort of church planting efforts in which Redeemer Presbyterian Church is engaged (yes, by now it should go without saying) in New York City. According to Keller:

. . . an ecosystem is a dynamic balanced set of forces and energies that grow each other. Now the question I want to talk to you about today, is how do you start a gospel movement in your city, or how can you see a gospel movement develop in your city? . . . .

A gospel movement is this: a gospel movement happens in a city when across churches, across multiple denominations and networks, and beyond any one key leader or any one command center, or any one denomination, you actually have the body of Christ in the city geometrically growing, not just reconfiguring. The vast majority of what we consider, you know, “good things happening in that city,” is a reconfiguration of the body of Christ, not an actual growth of the body of Christ against the overall population. When the body of Christ is growing from 1% to 5% to 10% of the population, because its growing faster than the population, its actually growing.

Machen’s notion of corporate witness of the church refers to the obligations that everyone within a communion (especially one with presbyterian connections) has for anyone, like Keller or Machen, who preaches on the basis of the communion’s approval. He wrote:

The corporate witness-bearing of the Presbyterian church is carried on especially through the pulpit. Under Presbyterian law, no man can permanently occupy a pulpit of the church without the church’s endorsement; the preacher therefore speaks not only for himself, but for the church. That does not mean that the church seeks to impose any beliefs upon any man simply on the ground that they are beliefs of the church; it does not mean that there is the slightest interference with the right of private judgment. But it means that if a man is to speak in a Presbyterian pulpit, and obtain the endorsement which is involved in that position, he must be in agreement with the message for which the propagation of which the church, in accordance with its constitution, plainly exists.

The obvious implication for Keller’s gospel ecosystem is that all members of the PCA (along with those in churches that have fraternal relations with the PCA) are responsible for Keller’s ideas and practice. Of course, if his scheme is desirable and faithful, then everyone in the PCA gets to bask in the positive contribution of Redeemer New York. At the same, if Keller’s proposal is undesirable and unfaithful, then for starters members of the PCA have an obligation to walk Keller away from the ledge of this flawed measures.

Several reasons exist for questioning Keller’s idea of gospel ecosystem. At the level of Reformed theology and church polity, Keller’s notion of participating with non-Reformed churches in a church planting effort runs directly up against the problem of Calvinists cooperating with Arminians in evangelism and discipleship. It also conflicts with any notion of jure divino Presbyterianism, that is the idea that presbyterian polity is revealed in Scripture as the way to govern the church and oversee its ministry of word and sacrament. Nor is it entirely clear how Keller’s form of cooperation squares with the rules governing the PCA’s fraternal relations.

But while these concerns are part and parcel of an oldlife church-and-life view, Keller’s talk raises additional questions about the wisdom of those who apparently think the New York City pastor is the guy who hung the moon on contemporary Reformed ministry. His argument fails at any number of points and raises the possibility that those who find his arguments compelling have the same kind of critical skills as those who insist upon a young earth (despite the speed of light and the age of planets) or who believe in a Christian America (while still holding to liberty and justice for Jews, Mormons, and unbelievers). For when you look even in a cursory manner at Keller’s idea and supporting reflections, you wonder why the PCA would take the idea of developing gospel eco-systems sufficiently seriously to include them in a strategic plan and potentially devote human and financial resources to it.

1) Why would anyone heed a pastor with ideas about urban life if they were at all familiar with the history of cities, schools of urban planning, and the politics and economics that drive modern American urban centers? At the same time, why should anyone take my complaining about Keller’s lack of expertise on urban life seriously since I am also without street cred as an urban theorist? This is a fair question but skeptics of me would then need to be skeptical about Keller’s claims to read the tea leaves of urban life.
I would feel a whole lot better about Keller’s assertions about cities if he referred to names I do know about, like Jane Jacobs who singlehandedly saved neighborhoods in New York City from awful urban design, or Howard Kunstler who has argued repeatedly and voraciously against the suburbanization of the United States, or fellows at the Manhattan Institute who regularly comment on all sorts of aspects of New York’s public policies and institutions.

I’d feel even more comfortable if I thought that Keller had once rented and viewed the entire HBO series, The Wire, which may be bleak but offers a remarkably realistic assessment of the factors at play in modern American cities, circumstances that pose real barriers to church planting for starters and ultimately to urban redemption (if the salvation of non-human realities were possible).

2) Why use the metaphor of ecosystem when the Bible already provides an organic and less lethal metaphor? According to Keller, an ecosystem is “where you have a set of forces that sustain each other, interact with each other, stimulate each other. So organism A eats organism B, and it’s a good thing for organism C, because if organism B’s numbers weren’t tamped down, organism C wouldn’t exist because organism B eats C. And, organism A eats C, which means, if there wasn’t enough organism C there wouldn’t be any organisms A, but because they are all eating each other, because they are all, you might say, in a sense sustaining each other, you’ve got an ecosystem.” He glides pretty effortlessly from this organism-eat-organism world into a vision of churches in a city where they are cooperating to plant churches and gain new converts, and usher in a world of Protestant harmony. Keller prefers ecosystem to a denominational pattern where Christians simply circulate among different denominations depending on the stage of their spiritual life.

But an ecosystem would actually call for Presbyterians to eat Pentecostals who would eat Baptists who in turn would eat Lutherans, with these different denominational groups living with the others simply as necessary food for existence.

A better organic model, of course, is the body of Christ. I guess it would be less attractive than ecosystem because it might mean that Presbyterians are the brain and Pentecostals are the soul. But at least a body would be less Darwinian.

2a) How can an ecosystem be a movement? An ecosystem is a biological concept, a movement is a sociological category, and yet Keller has no trouble using the imagery of ecosystem as the basis for a movement. Maybe I am bound too much by academic categories, but I think church planters would have much more to learn from sociologists than from biologists when it comes to the place of congregations in a city. At the same time, I am not persuaded that describing Christianity as a movement is all that valuable. Movements, sociologically speaking, connote people who come together for certain political or economic ends. To speak of a Christian movement raises the specter – look out! – of the Religious Right.

3) Is New York City really comparable to a prison? I know many Americans would answer yes given the city’s reputation for worldliness and economic elitism. But when Keller speaks of a “city tipping point” and uses the experience of Prison Fellowship as an example, I’m not sure he thought through the potential problem:

what Chuck Colsen says, that there’s a, that when more than 10% of the population of a prison get involved in Christian ministries, get converted or get involved Christian ministries, he says that before that 10% place, obviously people’s lives are being changed, but you don’t seen much different in this prison, the prison doesn’t look any different than any other prison. But when you get to a certain spot where, there’s maybe 10%, its not a science, its not wooden, but there’s a spot at which the whole prison begins to change. The relationships between the guards and the prisoners begins to change, the culture of the prison begins to change, and even the look of the prison begins to change. And we also know it’s the same thing with neighborhoods, by the way.

Actually, I think sociologists and political scientists might be in a better position than a man who is working on sermons all week to say with certainty what happens in neighborhoods when populations change. But how will New Yorkers feel when they hear that a neighborhood in their city is like a prison population before ten percent of its residents become a Christian? The answer is probably the way they would feel if they ever talked to my fundamentalist parents about the desirability of living in the city.

3a) Will New York become like Wheaton, Illinois if Keller is succeeds?

The reason for asking is that Wheaton is actually a city – it really is a city according Illinois’ calculations – with a population of roughly 56,000. The city also has 63 churches, which ranks as one of the highest level of churches per capita in any American city. That sounds like Wheaton might qualify as a gospel ecosystem.

If so, does Keller’s vision for New York City involve turning the Big Apple into a Mid-western city of middle class and evangelical Protestant sensibilities? That would not be the worst thing. Having spent four years in the evangelical Jerusalem, I can vouch for Wheaton’s charms. At the same time, my preference is for the grit, grime, crime, and headaches of a big city because with those circumstances come the arts, universities, cultural experimentation, major league sports, and hustle and bustle.

In which case, would New York City have the hipness that makes Redeemer NYC attractive to Gen Xers in the PCA if it hosted a gospel ecosystem? Or would New York become as white-bred as a community like Wheaton, with its stability, standards, and restraint? I am not sure, though, how you hold on to urban chic while being evangelically earnest is a mystery. Maybe New York would turn into Omaha or Minneapolis. Then, would Redeemer NYC be cutting edge?

These questions do not exhaust my problems with Keller’s talk. Granted, it was only a talk and not an academic paper. But if the PCA is going to adopt the language of gospel ecosystem in its plan for missions, should Presbyterian Church in Americans ask for the fine print and supporting studies? Wouldn’t even common sense say that what works in New York City won’t fly in St. Louis or Atlanta? So if members of the PCA won’t fulfill the responsibilities that come with the corporate witness of the church, are they prepared to bear the burend of corporate gullibility?

Yet, if the PCA follows Keller, it won’t be the first time that Presbyterians have put evangelism ahead of theology and polity. New Siders did that in Keller’s region a long time ago when they believed that Presbyterian doctrines and church government had little to do with the Great Commission. So it wouldn’t be the first time in church history that a church — especially in New York City — was Presbyterian in name only. But if these guys are the smartest ones in NAPARC, they should be able to see through the holes in Keller’s strategy.

When Tranformationalisms Collide

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Our friendly but misguided theonomic sparring partner, Rabbi Bret, is a delegate to the Christian Reformed Church’s Synod. Let that sink in.

Amazing!

True to his voluble ways, Bret is peppering his blog with updates on the affairs of Synod. Having spent four years in the CRC and seen how Reformed-world-and-life-viewism of a left-leaning sort transformed that once vigorous church into a communion that ordained women, sponsored contemporary worship, and shied away from TULIP, I was wondering when Bret’s views on women, American politics, and the Christian magistracy would catch up with him in the progressive CRC. Now we know. It is not going so well.

Here is part of Bret’s post from Day 1 of Synod.

Question

Is our goal to be a Christian nation?

Answer – No, Our Kingdom is not of this world.”

Bret

Observation – Then if our goal is to not be a Christian nation therefore all that is left is a goal that our nation would be non-Christian, right?

Answer – “No.”

Bret

Huh?

Now this is coming from people whose motto is …. “Transforming lives and communities worldwide.”

So, we are for “Transforming lives and communities worldwide,” but we are against the goal of a nation being transformed from non-Christian to Christian?

Now, some contended, “Well, we only want to speak as the Church to these issues.” I quite understand that but it should still be the goal of every Christian that the Gospel would have such impact among his countrymen that the nation itself could be rightly considered Christian.

I then asked … “If our goal is to be a Christian nation then what is that Christian nation modeled on except Ancient Israel? What other theocracy do we model a Christian nation on if not the theocracy of ancient Israel?:

Answer,

The laws of Old Testament Israel are not for today.

I also learned that the metaphors of salt and light are soft metaphors that indicate that we should not be to belligerent in our contending for Christ. I thought … “you know … I’m not to sure how soft and non-belligerent darkness considers light to be when the light is beating the stuffing out of darkness’s attempt to smother everything.

I guess soft people discover soft metaphors.

I can certainly sympathize with Bret’s confusion about the CRC’s understanding of transformationalism. It is the classic difference between soft and hard theonomy. Both want a Christian society/nation/culture, but go to different parts of the Bible (or mind, as in worldview) for it.

Today comes word that Bret has been misquoted in different Michigan newspapers’ coverage of Synod. However accurate those reports or Bret’s denials may be, one thing is clear: Bret will not be silent. (Not to be missed is that the CRC is doing its best impersonation of the U.S. Senate by debating global warming and illegal immigration.)

I am all for Bret’s causing a little commotion at Synod. As much as I benefitted from the CRC during our sojourn, I am also saddened that worldviewism cost the church its heritage of Reformed confessionalism.

At the same time, I’m not all that bothered to see Bret struggling with his left-leaning communion. If he had bothered to heed the teaching of his two-kingdom targets at Westminster California, many of whom had experience opposing the liberal drift of the CRC, he would have known where transformationalism leads.

Forensic Friday: Calvin on Osiander

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Osiander objects that is would be insulting to God and contrary to this nature that he should justify those who actually remain wicked. Yet we must bear in mind what I have already said, that the grace of justification is not separated from regeneration, although they are things distinct. But because it is very well known by experience that the traces of sin always remain in the righteous, their justification must be very different from reformation into newness of life (cf.. Rom. 6:4). For God so begins this second point in his elect, and progresses in it gradually, and sometimes slowly, throughout life, that they are always liable to the judgment of death before his tribunal. But he does not justify in part but liberally, so that they may appear in heaven as if endowed with the purity of Christ. No portion of righteousness sets our consciences at peace until it has been determined that we are pleasing to God, because we are entirely righteous before him. From this it follows that the doctrine of justification is perverted and utterly overthrown when doubt is thrust into men’s minds, when the assurance of salvation is shaken and the free and fearless calling upon God suffers hindrance – nay, when peace and tranquility with spiritual joy are not established. Thence Paul argues from contraries that the inheritance does not come from the law (Gal. 3:18), for this way “faith would be nullified” (Rom. 4:14, cf. Vg.). For faith totters if it pays attention to works, since no one, even of the most holy, will find there anything on which to rely. (Institutes, III.xi.11)

Looks like Calvin also teaches the priority of justification (i.e. first grace) to sanctification (i.e., “second”). And for that matter, if union is drawing attention to good works because it is always calling attention to the simultaneity of legal and moral benefits, why would you want to emphasize the importance or controlling perspective of union on soteriology? In other words, Calvin sure seems to be saying that justification needs to be the controlling paradigm for understanding salvation. Otherwise, faith totters.

Ideas Have Consequences for Genes

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The following was originally intended to appear in the next issue of the Nicotine Theological Journal. But when my father died on April 28th, the timing for tributes changed. Since today is the birthday of Ellen Marie Hart (nee Jones), it seems a fitting day on which to run it.

Within thirty-six hours of my mother’s death on March 26th, 2010, I was responsible for teaching a lesson in Sunday school on J. Gresham Machen. Since this was the second of a thirteen-week series, I needed to cover his upbringing, education, and church background. This meant that I was going to be talking about Machen’s relationship to his mother, Mary Gresham Machen, aka Minnie. In turn this involved talking about her background as a native of Macon, Georgia, her father’s business and political activities, the townhouse of the Greshams, now a four-star Bed and Breakfast – the 1842 Inn – that still features photographs of young J. Gresham Machen attired in a dress (the custom of the day), and Minnie’s own literary pursuits; she wrote The Bible in Browning and was published by MacMillan – the same company that published her son’s Christianity and Liberalism two decades later.

As I prepared and taught I became aware of a major problem in my own existence, namely, that I know more about Machen’s mother and family than I actually do about mine. This reality became all the more glaring on the day of my mother’s burial when one of her sisters and one sister-in-law traveled to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, from Green County, North Carolina for the service. I had not seen these aunts for almost four decades. They seemed to revel in catching my brother, wife and me up on family news. And through it all they let us know, not in a didactic way, but simply as part of the ordinary quality of their lives, that all of my mother’s siblings had remained in North Carolina, reared their families there, and that most of their grandchildren were still in the Tar Heel state. Not only was I jealous of this side of my humanity – after all I am as much a Jones as a Hart. But the Jones and the Crawfords and the Murphys and the Sullivans and the Pridgeons – the other families with whom they had bonded in marriage – were practically the embodiment of the localism, agrarianism, and family ways that I have come to admire and be haunted by in the writings of Wendell Berry.

One of the most pressing questions I have had about my mother which bears directly on my growing up in the suburbs of Philadelphia rather than in the land of Jesse Helmes, is why she decided after graduating from high school in 1941 to move to Washington, D.C. and work first as a telephone operator and then for the federal government in the accounting office. It made no sense that a woman, the oldest of ten children, would leave a farm and nine young siblings to work in the “big” city. Since she was a born-again Christian, it made even less sense, given the fears that evangelicals generally have of cities, combined with the unwritten code governing a young single woman’s opportunities. My aunts, however, made some sense of the move by explaining that mother had moved to Washington with her oldest sister, and that they lived with one of their future aunts. So it was not a career move but a family connection that brought my mother to the nation’s capital during wartime.

But that move was decisive for her and me because she met a man in a Marine’s dress-blue uniform at a Baptist church (Mark Dever’s, by the way) and fell in love. That man, my father, hailed from southeastern Pennsylvania and after he served in the Pacific and then attended college at Bob Jones University, thanks to the G.I. Bill, they bypassed North Carolina on the way to “go” in Levittown, Pennsylvania, the armpit of Bucks County and the horror of post-war suburban development. But much like my Jones relatives in the South, my parents didn’t know any better. They hadn’t read Jane Jacobs or Howard Kunstler or Wendell Berry or Russell Kirk. They simply did the best they could to rear a family. For the Harts that meant finding affordable housing near a good church and close to kin; for the Jones that meant rearing families and supporting them in the opportunities provided by ditch digging, tobacco farming, auto sales, and real estate brokering.

Unlike my kinfolk, I am a deracinated academic who knows how to find literature on family ties or who devoted a good portion of his life to the life and writings of one man and became so enamored of those ideas that he found out more about Machen than about either of his grandfathers, Robert Jones or Clyde Hart. I suspect that this is a problem that afflicts many aspiring intellectuals – the lure of some author or thinker from the past whose writing has changed their outlook on the big questions. In turn object of intellectual desire directs and guides the student more than the pupil’s own parents and family. Ideas do have consequences. They help to define our understanding of ourselves, and our situations, and become the motive for action. They even tempt us to discount the influence of parents and the legacy of families.

In my own case, I continue to regard Baltimore as more of a home than either Levittown or Greenville, North Carolina. Part of that owes to spending six years there while in graduate school. But a good chunk of it also stems from the subject of my studies during that time – Machen, whose family residence was four blocks from our first apartment, not to mention the reading and writing I did on H. L. Mencken, the bard of Baltimore whose home was only two blocks away from our grad school dwelling. Some of us eggheads get so caught up in a historical figure’s life that we actually place ourselves in their narrative. Meanwhile, the real story to which we belong lies strewn across the informal conversations and fading memories of aging aunts, uncles, cousins, and grand parents.

One way to try to justify this identity confusion is to portray myself as the victim of declining family ties. Whatever the legitimate reasons my parents may have had for moving to Levittown, they did not choose a place that would sustain links to kin (for starters). Again, they were not in the habit of considering pedestrian-friendly streets, interconnected street grid networks, mixed-use zoning, increased density, or “green” transportation when looking for a place to live. They had experienced a depression and a war. Having survived Iwo Jima my father had freedom to buy a home where he darned well (humanly speaking) wanted. He and mother didn’t need some guilt-ridden baby boomer historian of a son to come along and claim his rights as a victim of poor parental housing choices and the accompanying industrial military complex.

That said, as soon as I saw the city I knew I wanted to get out of Levittown as fast as I could because it had none of the interest or energy that people living together in one relatively self-sustaining polity had. And once that switch flicked on, gone were circumstances that would sustain identification at least with the Harts, not to mention the Jones.

Then again, maybe my loss of roots stems from my mother’s own decision to leave the farm in Green County where her grandmother Jones (nee Crawford) was born and move to Washington. Is it too tidy to think that she passed on to me through her egg the appeal of urban life and the dislocation that cities yield? After all, when she moved to D.C. her life would not be the same as her siblings. (The one sister who moved with her married a soldier from North Carolina, thus making easier a return to her native state.)

And what of my mother’s temperament and interests that might have predicted my interest in Machen? Mother’s disposition was toward stubbornness and contrariness, attributes that many have attributed to the Presbyterian “bad boy of Baltimore.” Mother was also militant about the Christian faith in modest ways that resemble Machen. At the same time, she was generous to a fault, something that she also shared with Machen. As difficult as my relationship could be with her – she was the bad cop always telling me to cut my hair, wear a tie to church, and hang around more with Christian friends while my dad was the good cop (except for the execution of corporal punishment, a decidedly male activity), always telling my mother to relax and not be overbearing – she was always sending me back to college stocked with food, clean clothes, and a couple of extra ten dollar bills shoved in my coat pocket.

Of course, it is a stretch of cosmopolitan proportions to attribute my intellectual interests to my genetic inheritance. Too easy is it to let myself off the hook for following ideas more than family. But from the perspective of providence, the gap between ideas and genes is not terribly great. If God could take a privileged, smart, and indecisive son of an urbane and hospitable southern lady from Baltimore and turn him into one of the giants of American Presbyterianism, he can also take the shy, sports-absorbed and sometimes bookish son of a southern exile in the Philadelphia suburbs and turn his life around through studying the kid from Baltimore.

God works in mysterious ways, his wonders and horrors to perform.

P.S. Mother’s birthday is actually June 15th. Having been in Maine for an OPC affair, the sense of the heavenlies caused me to lose track of time on planet earth.

Where's Waldo Wednesday

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It is often said that union is key to connecting justification and sanctification, the forensic and the renovative. In that light, Calvin’s discussion of the motivation for good works is surprising for the way that he counts union one among several other biblical grounds for sanctification.

[Philosophers], while they wish particularly to exhort us to virtue, announce merely that we should live in accordance with nature. But Scripture draws its exhortation from the true fountain. It not only enjoins us to refer our life to God, its author, to whom it is bound; but after it has taught that we have degenerated from the true origin and condition of our creation, it also adds that Christ, through whom we return into favor with God, has been set before us as an example, whose pattern we ought to express in our life. . . .

Then the Scripture finds occasion for exhortation in all the benefits of God that it lists for us, and in the individual parts of our salvation. Ever since God revealed himself faith to us, we must prove our ungratefulness to him if we did not in turn show ourselves his sons [Mal. 1:6; Eph 5:1; I John 3:1]. Ever since Christ cleansed us with the washing of his blood, and imparted this cleansing through baptism, it would be unfitting to befoul ourselves with new pollutions (Eph. 5:26; Heb. 10:10; I Cor. 6:11; I Peter 1:15, 19]. Ever since he engrafted us into his body, we must take especial care not to disfigure ourselves, who are his members, with any spot or blemish [Eph. 5:23-33; I Cor. 6:15; John 15: 3-6]. Ever since Christ himself, who is our Head, ascended into heaven, it behooves us, having laid aside love of earthly things, wholeheartedly to aspire heavenward (Col 3:1ff]. Ever since the Holy Spirit dedicates us as temples to God, we must take care that God’s glory shine through us, and must not commit anything to defile ourselves with the filthiness of sin [I Cor. 3:16; 6:19; II Cor. 6:16]. Ever since both our souls and bodies were destined for heavenly incorruption and an unfading crown [I Peter 5:4], we ought to strive manfully to keep them pure and uncorrupted until the Day of the Lord [I Thess. 5:23; cf. Phil 1:10]. These, I say, are the most auspicious foundations upon which to establish one’s life. One would look in vain for the like of these among the philosophers, who, in their commendation of virtue, never rise above the natural dignity of man. (Calvin, The Institutes, III.vi. 3)

The Basis on Which Machen Fought: The Bible

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Darryl Hart discusses more about early 20th century liberalism and Machen’s fight for the history of Scripture and the importance of the doctrine contained therein.

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