Author: D. G. Hart

"The Stakes Have Never Been Higher"

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Really?

According to ABC News, and its report on the resignation of Bruce Waltke from Reformed Theological Seminary, both sides agree that the stakes are indeed that high. Higher than the Scopes Trial? I was glad that they did not bring up William Jennings Bryan and his difficult testimony before Clarence Darrow’s badgering. But from what I could tell, the stakes this news reporter discovered are completely beside the point.

The way the press usually treats these things, it is a case of intolerance versus open mindedness, or science versus dogma, or a religious group’s retrenchment and inability to cope with modern ideas versus a community of faith that swims along quite elegantly in the waters of modern knowledge. And they can generally find religious scholars like Pete Enns and Randall Balmer who, siding more with the reporters than their fellow believers, will back up this set of contrasts (but who actually should know that there are more than two sides since they are experts on religion and the reporters aren’t).

This set of tensions could apply to the Waltke-RTS situation, but they don’t. The major contention has been the historicity of Adam, not whether he emerged from an evolutionary process. And beyond that, the questions have been largely theological, not scientific: what happens to the doctrine of original sin or federal headship if Adam was simply a mythical figure? And what happens to Paul’s two-Adam construction of covenant theology if one of those Adams is an ethereal character of unknown identity who may have hooked up with the mother of all humanity (that mother being confirmed by geneticists and anthropologists and thus supplying the evidence necessary for the unity of the human race).

So have the stakes ever been higher for federal theology? I’m not so sure. I’d need the help of historical theologians to make that call.

But to the idea that if Christians do not accept the idea of evolution they run the risk of becoming a cult, I wonder if Waltke or his supporter Enns, or ABC’s expert interviewee, Balmer, ever considered what belief in the resurrection of Christ makes the church look like before the scientifically knowledgeable world. Granted, the Genesis account of God’s creation of the parents of the human race may from a scientific perspective be hard to believe. I, frankly, am not sure that the naturalistic accounts of human origins are any easier to understand or believe. Be that as it may, do the Christians advocating evolution – and I am not going to give them too hard a time since one of my favorite theologians (sorry, Gary), Benjamin Warfield was one of them – really think the idea of Christ’s resurrection makes Christians soft, cuddly, and scientifically mainstream?

The stakes have been what they’ve always been. The Bible contains a lot of events and ideas that are hard to believe, whether you are scientific or not (think of all the premoderns who saw and heard Christ and did not believe). If not for the longevity of Christianity in Europe and North America, reporters might actually think that Christianity resembles Mormonism more than it does the Unitarian Church.

But for the record, when a three-time presidential nominee and one of the nation’s leading attorneys square off in courtroom proceedings that are broadcast nationally – which is what happened in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925 – the stakes are pretty high, higher I’d say than the recent unpleasantness between Waltke and RTS. (And those stakes had more to do with majority rule and local government than with reason versus faith — but that’s another story.)

Forensic Friday: Anathema

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CANON XI.-If any one saith, that men are justified, either by the sole imputation of the justice of Christ, or by the sole remission of sins, to the exclusion of the grace and the charity which is poured forth in their hearts by the Holy Ghost, and is inherent in them; or even that the grace, whereby we are justified, is only the favour of God; let him be anathema.

CANON XII.-If any one saith, that justifying faith is nothing else but confidence in the divine mercy which remits sins for Christ’s sake; or, that this confidence alone is that whereby we are justified; let him be anathema.

CANON XIII.-If any one saith, that it is necessary for every one, for the obtaining the remission of sins, that he believe for certain, and without any wavering arising from his own infirmity and disposition, that his sins are forgiven him; let him be anathema.

CANON XIV.-If any one saith, that man is truly absolved from his sins and justified, because that he assuredly believed himself absolved and justified; or, that no one is truly justified but he who believes himself justified; and that, by this faith alone, absolution and justification are effected; let him be anathema. . . .

CANON XXX.-If any one saith, that, after the grace of Justification has been received, to every penitent sinner the guilt is remitted, and the debt of eternal punishment is blotted out in such wise, that there remains not any debt of temporal punishment to be discharged either in this world, or in the next in Purgatory, before the entrance to the kingdom of heaven can be opened (to him); let him be anathema. (Council of Trent, Decree on Justification)

Where's Waldo Wednesday

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[The reformers] went beyond Anselm in distinguishing clearly between active and passive obedience in the mediatorial work of Christ, and in recognizing the former as well as the latter as a part of the atoning work of Christ. The God-man satisfied the demands of the divine justice, not merely by His sufferings and death, but also by obedience to the law in its federal aspect. His atonement consisted not only in making amends for past transgressions, but also in keeping the law as the condition of the covenant of works. As the last Adam He did what the first Adam failed to do.

Finally, they also surpassed Anselm in their conception of the manner in which the merits of Christ were passed on to sinners. Anselm’s view of this had a rather external and commercial aspect. Aquinas improved on this by stressing the significance of the mystical union as the means of transferring the blessings of salvation to those who stood in living relationship to Jesus Christ. He failed, however, to give due prominence to the receptive activity of faith. The Reformers shared his opinion respecting the great importance of the mystical union, but in addition directed the attention to that conscious act of man by which he appropriates the righteousness of Christ – the act of faith. They were very careful, however, not to represent faith as the meritorious cause of justification. (Louis Berkhof, The History of Christian Doctrines, pp. 185-86)

Getting over the Puritans, Say Hello to the Huguenots

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I cannot say enough good things about Philip Benedict’s Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (Yale University Press, 2002). Among the reasons for recommending the book, aside from careful scholarship and judicious conclusions, is Benedict’s attention to the variety of Reformed expressions as they took shape in diverse cultural and political contexts. This is what historians do and Benedict does it greatly.

One of the arresting parts of Benedict’s narrative is his account of the French Reformation. Obviously, the politics of France never cooperated with the aims of church reform (as if they did in England). As a result, the Huguenots failed to institutionalize a reformed church in ways that could be sustained in France, or that served as the inspiration for colonial churches in the New World where Calvinism of British descent would dominate the Reformed experience. Even so, his comments about the French Reformed church prior to St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre are music to Reformed confessionalist’s ears:

The achievements of the Reformed by early 1562 were little short of remarkable. Within just a few years, hundreds of congregations had assembled across the kingdom. A set of national church institutions had been defined that would endure for more than a century with only minor modifications. Reformed worship had obtained legal toleration. In a few locales, it had even displaced Catholicism. . . .

. . . [T]he wars of Religion taught the churches to rely on their own resources to survive. At successive national synods, they increasingly marked their distance from the secular authorities. Synodal decrees warned against selecting magistrates to serve as elders, forbade consistories to denounce church members discovered to be guilty of heinous crimes to the secular judges, and declared all consistory proceedings secret, even those in which consistory members were insulted in manners that might be actionable before the secular courts. All this was a far cry from the sort of defense of consistorial authority that Calvin sought and obtained from the Genevan magistracy. The French Reformed churches thus became the enduring model of a network of churches that maintained purity of doctrine, quality control over local clergy, ecclesiastical discipline, and reasonable uniformity of practice with a minimum of reliance on secular authorities. (pp. 144, 148)

Not to mention that the Gallican Confession wasn’t too shabby.

If only the Huguenots were more the model for American Reformed church life than the Puritans.

Ecumenism and Intolerance

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Darryl G. Hart speaks about Machen and the Plan of Organic Union.  This is part four of a series on Machen taught at Calvary OPC in Glenside, PA.

Download the audio

post photo from finizio

Walker Percy on American Protestantism

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The main character, Tom More, writing about his Protestant wife:

Later Ellen experienced a religious conversions. She became disaffected when the Southern and Northern Presbyterians, estranged since the Civil War, reunited after over a hundred years. It was not the reunion she objected to but the liberal theology of the Northern Presbyterians, how, according to her, were more interested in African revolutionaries than the divinity of Christ. She and others pulled out and formed the Independent Northlake Presbyterian Church.

Then she became an Episcopalian.

Then suddenly she joined a Pentecostal sect. She tells me straight out that she has had a personal encounter with Jesus Christ, that where once she was lost and confused, seduced by Satan and the false pleasures of this world, she has now found true happiness with her Lord and Saviour. She has also been baptized in the Holy Spirit. She speaks in tongues.

I do not know what to make of this. I do not know that she has not found Jesus Christ and been born again. Therefore I accept that she believes she has and may in fact have been. I settle for her being back with us and apparently happy and otherwise her old tart, lusty self. She is as lusty a Pentecostal as she was a Southern Presbyterian. She likes as much as ever cooking a hearty breakfast, packing the kids off to school, and making morning love on our Sears Best bed, as we used to.

She loves the Holy Spirit, says little about Jesus.

She is herself a little holy spirit hooked up to a lusty body. In her case spirit has nothing to do with body. Each goes its own way. Even when she was a Presbyterian and I was a Catholic, I remember that she was horrified by the Eucharist: Eating the body of Christ. That’s pagan and barbaric, she said. What she meant and what horrified her was the mixing up of body and spirit, Catholic trafficking in bread, wine, oil, salt, water, body, blood, spit – things. What does the Holy Spirit need with things? Body does body things. Spirit does spirit things.

She’s happy, so I’ll settle for it. But a few things bother me. She attributes her conversion to a TV evangelist to whom she contributed most of her fortune plus a hundred dollars a week to this guy, which we cannot afford, or rather to his Gospel Outreach program for the poor of Latin America. I listened to this reverend once. He’d rather convert a Catholic Hispanic than a Bantu any day of the week. . . .

Catholics have become a remnant of a remnant. Louisiana, however, is more Christian than ever, not Catholic Christian, but Texas Christian. Even most Cajuns have been converted first by Texas oil bucks, then by Texas evangelists. The shrimp fleet, mostly born again, that is, for the third time, is no longer blessed and sprinkled by a priest.

Why don’t I like these new Christians better? They’re sober, dependable, industrious, helpful. They praise God frequently, call you brother, and punctuate ordinary conversation with exclamations like Glory! Praise God! Hallelujah!. I’ve nothing against them, but they give me the creeps. (The Thanatos Syndrome, pp. 353-45)

Has President Obama Been Reading the Baylys?

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Sometime ago, to ridicule two-kingdom theology even more, the Baylys ran a post on whether the resurrection has any public policy implications. Apparently, Obama took the bait and issued remarks at the White House Easter prayer breakfast that outlined the implications of the resurrection for civil society. (By the way, how do you spot the difference between a religious and a political prayer meeting? Depends on whether they are serving eggs.)

Obama said (thanks to Touchstone):

I can’t shed light on centuries of scriptural interpretation or bring any new understandings to those of you who reflect on Easter’s meaning each and every year and each and every day. But what I can do is tell you what draws me to this holy day and what lesson I take from Christ’s sacrifice and what inspires me about the story of the resurrection.

For even after the passage of 2,000 years, we can still picture the moment in our mind’s eye. The young man from Nazareth marched through Jerusalem; object of scorn and derision and abuse and torture by an empire. The agony of crucifixion amid the cries of thieves. The discovery, just three days later, that would forever alter our world — that the Son of Man was not to be found in His tomb and that Jesus Christ had risen.

We are awed by the grace He showed even to those who would have killed Him. We are thankful for the sacrifice He gave for the sins of humanity. And we glory in the promise of redemption in the resurrection.

And such a promise is one of life’s great blessings, because, as I am continually learning, we are, each of us, imperfect. Each of us errs — by accident or by design. Each of us falls short of how we ought to live. And selfishness and pride are vices that afflict us all.

It’s not easy to purge these afflictions, to achieve redemption. But as Christians, we believe that redemption can be delivered — by faith in Jesus Christ. And the possibility of redemption can make straight the crookedness of a character; make whole the incompleteness of a soul. Redemption makes life, however fleeting here on Earth, resound with eternal hope.

Of all the stories passed down through the gospels, this one in particular speaks to me during this season. And I think of hanging — watching Christ hang from the cross, enduring the final seconds of His passion. He summoned what remained of His strength to utter a few last words before He breathed His last breath.

“Father,” He said, “into your hands I commit my spirit.” Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. These words were spoken by our Lord and Savior, but they can just as truly be spoken by every one of us here today. Their meaning can just as truly be lived out by all of God’s children.

So, on this day, let us commit our spirit to the pursuit of a life that is true, to act justly and to love mercy and walk humbly with the Lord. And when we falter, as we will, let redemption — through commitment and through perseverance and through faith — be our abiding hope and fervent prayer.

To borrow a line from Tonto, who is this “we” and “us” to whom President Obama refers? Does it include Jews, Buddhists, and non-Christians, does it merge Mormons into generic Christianity, and does it speak for Roman Catholics and Protestants? This is the sort of universalism in which civil religion always traffics if Christianity is going to serve a religiously plural society.

And what of the theology behind these remarks. As much as I like the priority of the forensic, when Obama says that redemption makes for virtuous character, for the president grace simply seems to be the door prize for contestants who don’t live up to be good and decent folks. People rightly faulted President Bush for trivializing Christianity when he used it in public speeches. Obama may be more eloquent but he is just as guilty of taking something that is sublime and holy and reducing it to having us all get along. Getting a long is a good thing. Christianity is profounder than that.

And yet, if Obama were on the right side of gay marriage and abortion, I suspect readers of the Baylys would be happy to see such policy implications of the resurrection.

Forensic Friday: Murray on the Gospel

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“Him who knew no sin he made to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor 5:21). This clearly points us to the vicarious sin bearing of Christ as that which brought the reconciliation into being. This forensic character of the reconciliation is also borne out in verse 19 where “not reckoning to them their trespasses” is related to the reconciling of the world as the explantion of that in which the reconciliation consists or as that consequence in which it issues. In either case, reconciliation has its affinities with the non-imputation of trespases rather than with any subjective operation.

(d) This accomplished work of reconciliation is the message committed to the messengers of the gospel (ver. 19). It constitutes the content of the message. But the mesage is that which is declared to be a fact. Conversion, it ought to be remembered, is not the gospel. It is the demand of the gospel message and the proper response to it. Any transformation which occurs in us is the effect in us of that which is proclaimed to have been accomplished by God. The change in our hearts and minds presupposes the reconciliation. (Murray, Redemption: Accomplished and Applied, p. 41)

If Only Kuyperians Were As Reasonable as Godfrey

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Over at Confessional Outhouse, RubeRad (what’s up with those names?) has a quotation from Bob Godfrey’s address at the Westminster California conference on Christ and culture. Here it is:

As is often true in the history of the church, we [Kuyperians and 2K-ers] may not all perfectly agree what the Bible says, but I think we’re all agreed with the principle…The Bible is authoritative in everything that it says, about everything that it talks about. But I think we are also all agreed that the Bible, while authoritative in everything that it talks about, is not exhaustive in everything it talks about. The Bible tells us some things about history, but it doesn’t tell us everything about history. I believe it tell us some things about geology, but I don’t think it tells us everything about geology. I would suggest that it’s really only in three areas that we can say … it also speaks comprehensively, or completely, or exhaustively; we as Reformed Christians are committed to the proposition that that everything we need to know about doctrine and salvation is told to us completely in the Bible. … Secondly, we would say that the Bible is exhaustive in what it teaches us about worship. … And thirdly, the Bible tells us all we need to know about the Church and its government. … But I think we can probably agree as well, whatever our approach to Christ and culture, that the Bible does not speak exhaustively about politics. It says a lot of things about politics, it says a lot of things that are relevant to politics, but I don’t think any of us would want to argue that the Bible tells us absolutely everything we need to know about politics. Does the Bible even indisputably teach us whether we ought to have a democracy, or an aristocracy, or a monarchy? John Calvin says it doesn’t. … I don’t think anybody … would want to argue that every aspect of a platform proposed for a civil election could be derived from the Bible; I don’t think anyone would argue that. … So the Bible is authoritative in all that it says, but it doesn’t say everything about anything except salvation, worship, and church government.

I for one do not know a single advocate of two kingdom theology who would not affirm this. And the good thing about this statement is that it keeps first things first — doctrine, worship, and polity — while allowing for differences on other matters because the Bible itself does not pin down those other areas of human endeavor.

What is odd about RubeRad’s post is that he follows up Godfrey’s quotation with one from John Frame, that RubeRad regards as compatible:

Christians sometimes say that Scripture is sufficient for religion, or preaching, or theology, but not for auto repairs, plumbing, animal husbandry, dentistry, and so forth. And of course many argue that it is not sufficient for science, philosophy, or even ethics. That is to miss an important point. Certainly Scripture contains more specific information relevant to theology than to dentistry. But sufficiency in the present context is not sufficiency of specific information but sufficiency of divine words. Scripture contains divine words sufficient for all of life. It has all the divine words that the plumber needs, and all the divine words that the theologian needs. So it is just as sufficient for plumbing as it is for theology. And in that sense it is sufficient for science and ethics as well.

This strikes me as the typical Frame theological method of taking an inch and turning it into a mile. So people will agree with the idea that divine words are sufficient, some divine words apply to plumbing, and — voila — the Bible becomes as sufficient for plumbing as for theology. Hello!??! Do plumbers really need to study the Bible to plumb the way that theologians do to understand God and his revelation? As Fred Willard’s character in Waiting for Guffman said, “I don’t think sooooo.”

Either way, if more Reformed folks would follow Godfrey’s counsel than Frame’s logic, we might actually find that two-kingdom theology is not radical and that Kuyperian rhetoric is often bloated. Can we get a little reason around here?

On the Road to Duality

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This is not the right path. But to introduce the concept to 24/7 Christians it may be a place to begin.

The new book is called Christian -Atheist, by some megachurch pastor somewhere. The email from Christianity Today plugging the book asked, “Are you living a dual existence?” My answer, “why, yes I am.” In fact, hyphenation is exactly what the life of exile requires – we live here but this is not our home. The advertisement adds, “If you profess a belief in God, but live as though He doesn’t exist, you may be more divided than you think. Read The Christian Atheist and join author Craig Groeschel as he looks to resolve a conflict that affects the lives of countless Christians.”

I do think I’ll pass.

But it is an interesting thought experiment whether the way I ride the subway, cross the street, teach at a secular university, root for the Phillies, or read John Updike differs from non-Christians performing those same tasks in any sort of visible way. At least, it does differ on the common days of the week since my Christian self avoids teaching, rooting, and reading Updike on the Lord’s Day. Crossing the street and riding the subway may actually be works of necessity to participate in worship.

So even if the dichotomy is wrongheaded – Christian-Atheist – the idea of hyphenation is one that needs to be cultivated, as in Christian-Americans, Christian-Phillies fans, and Christian-historians. We have a lot of divided loyalties out there 24/6, and negotiating them is the task of that wonderful Protestant doctrine of vocation.

(By the way, why doesn’t the Christian side of this guy shave?)