Author: D. G. Hart

How Evangelicals Can Prove their Environmentalist Convictions

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This past Sunday my wife and I visited a Baptist church in a seaside town that fifty years ago would have been the worship option for our both sets of parents when vacationing. The half-hour of singing during the first half of the service, punctuated by insights from the pianist-minister-of-music, was not surprising. This liturgical practice of unceasing song is now standard almost everywhere that Protestants do not use a prayer book even though Pentecostals were the first to introduce the period of praise songs as the way to enter into God’s presence (the invocation used to take care of that).

What was surprising, though, was that this form of service – a half-hour of song, followed by a half-hour sermon – could transpire without an order of service in the bulletin. The songs appeared on the screen above the baptistry, the singers and musicians in the front found the right music, and when the singing was finished the pastor assumed his place behind the pulpit. It seemed to transpire in an orderly way. But what happened to a prayer of praise, one of confession, one of thanksgiving? Or what about different readings from parts of Scripture? What about the dialogue between God and his people? This seemed to be one monologue (song) followed by another (sermon). The only part of the service that remained unchanged from our youth was the Lord’s Supper that concluded the service. It was a memorial of Christ’s death.

As I struggled to think about the words on the screen during the first half of the service – I could not sing because the tunes are difficult, unfamiliar and only the musicians up front had music (so much for the priesthood of all believers) – I began to wonder how this congregation would do if the power went out. Well, they would not be able to sing because the projector would not work, the microphones would also be off, and some of the instruments would no longer function. Plus, the pastor would have to do without that nifty microphone headset that made it look like he was wearing braces. Still, the sun was bright enough to let us use the hymnals, especially if the sexton would have opened the shades that darkened the room sufficiently for the projector to do its work.

This led me to think that if evangelicals really are becoming green and owning their environmental responsibilities, then perhaps such statements as “An Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation” should include as one of its policy proposals the banning of all Praise & Worship worship. This would mean saving all the electricity that is used to support the praise bands, the singers, and the projectors and computers. The proposal should also call for worship music that uses only hymnals and pianos.

Of course, trees need to be felled to produce hymn books and to make parts of pianos. In which case, evangelicals might consider that the form of worship with the smallest carbon footprint is exclusive psalm-singing unaccompanied by musical instruments. Yes, the psalter still requires the demolition of trees. But unlike most hymnals that weigh in with close to 700 hymns, the psalter only has 150 songs, and so requires less paper. And without the need of a piano, organ, electric guitar, or synthesizer, psalm-singing further reduces the consumption of fossil fuels.

So if evangelicals are truly serious about the environment, one way to look for it is with a return to the worship of Geneva. Who knew Calvin was such a sensitive and trendy guy?

Family and Sabbath

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Darryl G. Hart and Camden Bucey converse about family and Sabbath through the writings of Wendell Berry.

Download the audio

Books by Wendell Berry

Praying in Public

Published on by D. G. Hart36 Comments

Since I grew up in a home where the mother passed out tracts with tips and even with fares for turnpike tolls, I will be forever scarred by an evangelical piety that was always in the “car sales” mode, always looking to make the deal. (For a particularly empathetic treatment of this piety – as well as way too many ehff bombs for those with sensitive consciences, see The Big Kahuna.) Part of my mother and father’s piety included prayer before every meal, not only at home but also in the restaurant or diner. Oh, the embarrassment for a pubescent boy when the waitress brought the house salad to the table while dad was prayerfully thanking God for his provision. For that reason it became a source of comfort to learn while doing dissertation research that Machen was no fan of praying in public, say in a restaurant before a meal with commissioners to General Assembly. During my time in the Christian Reformed Church I also welcomed the practice among Dutch-American Calvinists that you did not need to say grace if a meal lacked potatoes or used no utensils. This meant a meal of just burgers at McDonald’s could be consumed without an audible prayer. Add fries to the order and you had to pray out loud.

The point of these memories is to introduce a question for readers of Oldlife: what do you do when you are invited to dinner at the home of non-Christians? Do you bow your head and pray silently before eating? Do you pray with your spouse and/or family by the curb before entering the house or apartment? Or do you simply go with the flow and not pray? My own sense is that good manners involve respecting the rules of the house in which I am a guest. Better then to pray before entering the non-believing home than to make the hosts feel uncomfortable or embarrassed when I bow my head, say a prayer, and invariably miss the mashed potatoes while they are being passed. Doh!

What is impermissible, it seems to me, is for me to turn to the head of the non-Christian household and say, “let me lead us in prayer,” stand, and ask God’s blessing in the name of Christ. If I use the words “we” and “our” in my prayer, I am rightfully including my wife. But I am also including people who have not professed Christ and perhaps given them the impression that they are Christians by the use of “we.” If they are generic God-fearing Americans, that won’t alarm them. If they are some of my secular academic friends, they will think I’m nuts and likely lose respect. And if I pray in the first-person singular – “I just want to thank you Lord” – then why am I praying out loud? Am I not guilty at that point of doing exactly what Jesus told his disciples not to do when he said, “When you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by men” (Matt 6:5)?

But so far these questions and considerations are only the sub-point for this post’s point, which is how Christians act in public life in the greatest nation on God’s green earth. For a long time in our country’s history — 1789-1965 — Protestants acted like the public square was their dining room. They could go out and pray in Jesus’ name and not have to worry about anyone else taking exception because those from other faiths were not “real” Americans. The genuiness attributed to being American could sometimes reach back to New England’s Puritan federal theology, or sometimes to the nation-shaping energy of the Second Great Awakening’s Benevolent Empire, or sometimes it was simply a civil religion that put “in God we trust” on coins and “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance to show those atheistic Russkies just who was God-fearing. But no matter what version of Christian America, Protestants believed that this land was their land and they did not have to be bashful about praying in public. The public and private were indistinguishable. For proof, just look at the way that Protestants defended prayer and Bible reading in public schools.

The problem with this conception of “real” America was that lots of non-Protestants were also citizens of the nation. The U.S. public square was also the home of Jews, Roman Catholics, Mormons, and various strains of unbelief. In which case, to enter into the public square and speak in Christian categories was akin to going over to a non-Christian friend’s home for dinner and insisting that a prayer be said before the meal. It is one thing to do that in your own home when non-Christian friends come over for a meal – though even then what pronouns do we use for such a prayer to show respect for the guests but not pray falsely to our Lord? But to go over to a non-believers house and be pushy about including non-Christians in forms of Christian devotion is rude.

It seems to me that this is what happens when Christians insist that faith and religious discourse be part of American politics. They don’t seem to recognize that non-Christians also live in the United States. This nation belongs to non-believers as much as it belongs to Christians. In which case, the insertion of religion in American public life is a modern version of Nativism – that nineteenth-century phenomenon that sought to keep Roman Catholics from becoming citizens of the United States (and sometimes burned Roman Catholic buildings). Driving unbelief from the land was wise domestic policy for Israel in the centuries before Christ – not just wise but holy. It is folly for any nation after Christ. For Christ’s followers, it is down right inhospitable.

Some of This and More of That

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Rabbi Bret explains why short of theonomy, even transformationalists like the Baylys are guilty of two-kingdom thinking:

. . . the Bayly’s are victims of compartmentalized thinking. They seem to think that one can have a Constitutional objection or financial objection that isn’t at the same time a theological connection. Would someone mind introducing me to an objection, that at its root, isn’t theological?

Let’s take the Constitutional objection. The Baylys admit that they may have a Constitutional objection that is somehow cordoned off from a theological objection. Now, presuming that the Baylys are here suggesting that they object to paying social security tax because they believe that the Constitution doesn’t make provision for it how is that not at the same time a theological objection? Theologically we are to give taxes to whom taxes are due (Romans 13:7) but if the King is asking for taxes that is not his due (i.e. – social security tax) given the law of the land as expressed in the Constitution then suddenly I immediately also have a theological reason to not pay social security taxation. My Constitutional reason not to pay the social security tax flows out of my theological reason not to pay the social security tax. When Government demands taxes (governments never “ask” for taxes) that are not its due then the Government is engaged in theft, which is a violation of the 8th commandment. What began as a Constitutional issue, when traced back to its origin, has found its theological source.

Apparently evangelical arguments against porn are now retreading arguments against alcohol – both alter brain cells. I wonder if there is a cure for testosterone. I know of one – aging.

John Fea thinks the Holy Ghost Hokey Pokey is a reason for breaking with evangelicalism. I can think of other reasons but many thanks for additional ammunition.

This review of David VanDrunen’s new book on bio-ethics may be instructive for those who think that two-kingdom theology and natural law are just so much pie-in-the-sky rationalizations of the status quo. Rated BBW (for Baylys Be Warned, with love, of course). Bill Edgar, the reviewer, writes:

In the opening chapter VanDrunen compares several possible Christian attitudes toward participation in public healthcare. He concludes that, although the world’s agendas are often different, even at loggerheads with the biblical approach, Christians need to be active in healthcare, if only because we are called to defend God’s justice in a hostile environment. More positively, as VanDrunen articulately demonstrates, cultural activities are still enjoined, alongside the duty to proclaim the gospel.

And for those old enough to remember “2001: A Space Odyssey,” this graphic on the creation of the Space Station may bring back bad memories, not to mention Chicken Little-like fears about what happens when this mass of gadgets falls out of its orbit.

Forensic Friday: Justification and Assurance

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Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. (Rom. 5:1)

On this verse Calvin writes:

Here indeed is the chief hinge on which faith turns: that we do not regard the promises of mercy that God offers as true only outside ourselves, but not at all in us; rather that we make them ours by inwardly embracing them. Hence, at last is born that confidence which Paul elsewhere calls “peace” [Rom. 5:1], unless someone may prefer to derive peace from it. Now it is an assurance that renders the conscience calm and peaceful before God’s judgment. Without it the conscience must be harried by disturbed alarm, and almost torn to pieces; unless perhaps, forgetting God and self, for the moment sleeps. And truly for the moment, for it does not long enjoy that miserable forgetfulness without the memory of divine judgment repeatedly coming back and very violently rending it. Briefly, he alone is truly a believer who, convinced by a firm conviction that God is a kindly and well-disposed Father toward him, promises himself all things on the basis of his generosity; who, relying upon the promises of divine benevolence toward him, lays hold on an undoubted expectation of salvation . . . . the apostle does not consider the eyes of our minds well illumined, except as we discern what the hope of the eternal inheritance is to which we have been called [Eph. 1:18]. And everywhere he so teaches as to intimate that we cannot otherwise well comprehend the goodness of God unless we gather from it the fruit of great assurance. (Institutes, 3.2.16)

Why the PCA Needs the Spirituality of the Church

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Regular readers of Oldlife know about the imbroglio between the Brothers Bayly and those who hold two-kingdoms and the spirituality of the church. The major objection apparently is that these doctrines won’t let the church do what activists on certain moral issues want the church to do in the public square (you know, bad ju ju versus do do). In which case, the spirituality of the church is offensive because it restrains the spiritual and moral dynamic necessary for fighting the culture wars over sex and its illegitimate consequences.

But the Baylys are not alone in wanting the church to be a culture-shaping institution. Tim Keller has recently written (thanks to oldlife reader Zeke Zekowski for the link) at his blog about the need for the church to be engaged in culture making. He writes:

Most of the young evangelicals interested in integrating their faith with film-making, journalism, corporate finance, etc, are getting their support and mentoring from informal networks or para-church groups. Michael Lindsay’s book Faith in the Halls of Power shows that many Christians in places of influence in the culture are alienated from the church, because they get, at best, no church support for living their faith out in the public spheres, and, at worst, opposition.

(A minor quibble here is that I’m not sure Lindsay shows any such thing in a work of sociology that shakes the pom-poms for evangelicals rising in elite sectors without the slightest sense of ambivalence about the theology of glory deeply embedded in [and should be haunting] the evangelical quest for greatness.)

A major kvetch is this: why do Christians pursuing communications and the arts need the church to have their hand held more than plumbers, bakers, farmers, Home Depot check-out clerks, and subway train engineers? How much does the church support the work of the average Mary or Joe? And do these modest workers complain about the church not affirming them? One would think that the perks that come with putting your name on a piece of art or a newspaper column might make up for the lack of gratification that comes with changing the filters in the boiler room of the twelve-floor apartment building.

Keller continues:

At the theological level, the church needs to gain more consensus on how the church and Christian faith relate to culture. There is still a lot of conflict between those who want to disciple Christians for public life, and those who think all “engagement of culture” ultimately leads to compromise and distraction from the preaching of the gospel. What makes this debate difficult is that both sides make good points and have good arguments.

I remain baffled why cultural engagement is a pressing need for the church. I would think it pretty important to shepherd members of Christ’s body in the notion that they are a royal priesthood, a holy nation, whose identity in Christ far transcends the work they do no matter how creative or dull. The church, it seems, has plenty of work to do to confirm Christians in the truth that even when they cease being culture makers or low-level grunts, they are still priests and citizens of a heavenly kingdom with all the affirmation that comes with belonging to Christ, in body and soul, in life and in death. Instead of taking on the task writing a confession for cultural engagement or policy prescription, better is the work of catechizing the faithful in the truths of God, man, sin, salvation, and the church. Those teachings are more important and lasting, even if they do not produce great art or Christian manuals of plumbing.

But without such a consensus on the spirituality of the church and the Christian’s otherworldly identity, communions like the PCA are in danger of becoming balkanized into either the arts-and-culture congregations, or the culture-war churches. Not only are the arts and the politics of nation-states not taught in the PCA’s confessional standards, but very difficult is the task of finding a “thus, sayeth the Lord” for such cultural ambitions.

So irony of ironies, the Baylys and Keller are on the same page in rejecting the spirituality of the church for the culturality of the church. And in so conceiving the church, pastors in the same communion end up driving each other bonkers. Keller doesn’t want the Baylys’ crusading activism and the Baylys don’t want Keller’s urban-chic programming. Wouldn’t the spirituality of the church put an end to these squabbles and make the PCA even more effective than it apparently already is?

Postscript: a good question related to this post is why the OPC does not appear to suffer from the culturality of the church, at least not in the same degree. Maybe it is because the OPC is so small we have enough sense not to beat our breasts about being change agents in the culture. We have enough trouble paying the bills of our standing committees, presbytery committees, and struggling congregations to take on the planet’s policies and art. But it could also be that the spirituality of the church that Machen taught the first generation of the OPC, leavened with the potent supplement of amillennialism taught by Vos, Murray, and Kline, has made Orthodox Presbyterians less impressed with the good, but ultimately fading, culture of this world.

Where's Waldo Wednesday

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The Priority

Although no fundamental issue of theology, or specifically of soteriology, would be at stake if regeneration were giving the priority in the application of redemption, yet the evidence shows that the call occupies this position. If we fail to accord to it the place which the exegetical considerations demand, we miss a great deal of the emphasis of Scripture and are also liable to overlook what belongs to its specific and distinguishing character. The key passage evincing its priority is Romans 8: 29, 30. There are so many indication of order in this passage that we are compelled to regard the apostle as enunciating the order: calling, justification, glorification, in verse 30, and also establishing calling as the act of grace directly joined to predestination, and as that which in the realm of application brings the latter to expression. Other passages, particularly those in the Pauline epistles, create the strongest presumption in favour of the conclusion which Romans 8:29, 30 would require (cf. 1 Cor. 1:9; Gal. 1:15; 2 Tim. 1:9; 1 Peter. 2:9; 5:10; 2 Pet. 1:10). (John Murray on “The Call” in Collected Writings, vol. 2, pp. 161-62.)

For Doug Wilson Apparently Being Reformed Means Evangelicalism That Is Effective

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Doug Wilson joins the Bayly Bros in heaping scorn on our good friend Scott Clark and the case for recovering the Reformed confessions. To Doug’s credit, he avoids the vituperative edge that characterizes the Baylys’ outbursts.

What unites Wilson and the Brothers Bayly in their criticism of Clark, apart from disdain for Meredith Kline, mind you, one of the true geniuses of twentieth-century Reformed Christianity, is nostalgia for Geneva. Of course, this is not the Geneva that sent Castellio packing or Servetus to the flames – well, it is, but most contemporary pining for Geneva manages to overlook the downside of Constantianism even when practiced by Reformer pastors.

Wilson is writing in response to a piece that Clark did for Table Talk on what evangelicals should expect from a Reformed church. Clark tries to cushion the blow that might come from the doctrinal, polity, and liturgical trappings that disorient the average born-again Christian. When Clark explains that “confessional churches are isolated from both the old liberal mainline and the revivalist traditions” and so offer an alternative to liberal and evangelical Protestantism, Wilson goes off.

First, Wilson laments Clark’s isolationism. Not only are Reformed confessionalists separated from evangelicals and liberals, but also “from the cultural potency of Reformed theology and piety.” This is lamentable because for Wilson, the Reformed theology that he has read and studied “built a great civilization.” In contrast, Clark’s brand of Reformed theology, that of “the truncated brethren,” “would have trouble building a taco stand.”

Wilson also takes exception to Clark’s claim that confessional churches today approximate the churches of the sixteenth century more than other Protestant congregations. For Wilson, this is patently untrue because the sixteenth-century Reformed churches were actually Reformed cities – that is, they were more than merely religious institutions. They were civil polities where supposedly Calvinism shaped all of Geneva’s or Strasbourg’s or Edinburgh’s life (tell that to the magistrates who stuck their neck out against the Holy Roman Empire and hired the Reformed pastors). This suggests that Wilson regards Reformed Protestantism as a way of taking names and kicking butt.

Furthermore, when Clark claims that evangelicals coming to Reformed churches will need time to acclimate to the new spiritual environment, Wilson retorts that Clark has the picture “exactly backwards” because Clark’s otherworldly version of the Reformed faith turns out to be warmed over evangelicalism (read: pietism). According to Wilson:

As an evangelical, and the son of an evangelical, allow me to give my testimony. I was part of the exodus from pop evangelicalism (not historic evangelicalism). I was sick of the cultural irrelevance and impotence of “believe in Jesus, go to Heaven when you die.” I was sick of a pietism that couldn’t find its way out of the prayer closet. I wanted to stop confessing that Jesus was Lord of an invisible seventeenth dimension somewhere. Why not here? Why not now? It was a long story, but the trail to historic evangelicalism, God-honoring worship, and a culturally potent and world transforming faith led me straight to the Reformed faith — the same faith that John Calvin and his successors confessed. Calvin preached to milkmaids and Calvin wrote letters to princes. Calvin drafted catechisms, and he drafted ordinances for the city council. Calvin thought that the idea of a civil society without enforcement of the first table of the law was “preposterous.” Calvin was a loyal son of Christendom, as am I.

It is remarkable that Wilson would seemingly dismiss the idea of people going to heaven, unless he thinks that this world is more than a foretaste but an actual embodiment of the world to come. I mean, people who milk cows to the glory of God still die, at which point the realities of the after life become fairly pressing compared to a Reformed way to pasteurize milk.

Also odd is Wilson’s sleight of hand regarding “pop” and “historic” evangelicalism. My own testimony (both from experience and study) instructs me that appeals to historic evangelicalism generally depend less on historical realities and more to the point the appellant is trying to make. Does Wilson really mean to suggest that Clark has more in common with Joel Osteen than Carl Henry? Let me testify again and say that I’ve spent time with Clark and know that his locks cannot compete with Osteen’s.

But the really arresting aspect of Wilson’s critique of Clark is the idea that cultural relevance and effective change of this world is what characterizes Reformed Christianity. I get it that post-Niebuhr and post-Kuyper Wilson’s brand of transformationalism is par for the course. But what is shocking is the conceit that Reformed are more effective than evangelicals in changing things.

The history of Protestantism in the United States shows that the groups that were most influential in creating the Protestant establishment and its many institutions, along with a civil religion that made the greatest nation on God’s green earth unfriendly to Roman Catholics, Jews, Mormons, and other forms of infidelity, were those evangelicals like Charles Finney and Lyman Beecher, or the ecumenical and liberal Protestants like Josiah Strong and Reinhold Niebuhr. Funny how Calvinism did not characterize those influential voices.

The reason for evangelicalism’s can-do body (as well as spirit) has to do with the inherently activistic and this-worldly faith of born-again Protestantism. Here I am reminded of Mark Noll’s response to a paper by Nick Wolsterstorff about the need for evangelicals to become more engaged in cultural and social matters. Noll said that telling evangelicals to be more active was like pointing an addict to dope.

So Doug Wilson may be the real evangelical. He may be more culturally relevant and effective than Clark and other two-kingdom proponents, though I hear that even in Moscow, Idaho the work of cultural clean up is not perhaps a model for taking on the rest of the nation, globe, or cosmos. Granted, if Wilson can rid the United States of automobiles, Walmart, and illegal drugs, I won’t complain. But I would ask that he put church reform higher on his list. All the infidelity among churches that claim to be Christian (even some Reformed communions) certainly appears to be a matter of greater alarm than getting non-believers to conform outwardly to the manners and customs of Credenda Agenda ‘s readers.

Which means that if Wilson think’s Reformed confessionalism’s dualism is bad ju ju, his works righteousness is bad do do (is the works righteousness of do doism ever good?).

Forensic Friday: Warfield on Justification

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Sometimes we are told that Justification by Faith is “out of date.” That would be a pity, if it were true. What it would mean would be that the way of salvation was closed and “no thoroughfare” nailed up over the barriers. There is not justification for sinful men except by faith. The works of a sinful man will, of course, be as sinful as he is, and nothing but condemnation can be built on them. Where can he get works upon which he can found his hope of justification, except from Another? His hope of Justification, remember – that is, of being pronounced righteous by God. Can God pronounce him righteous except on the ground of works that are righteous? Where can a sinful man get works that are righteous? Surely, not from himself; for, is he not a sinner, and all his works as sinful as he can offer to God as righteous. And where will he find such works except in Christ? Or how will he make them his own except by faith in Christ?

Justification by Faith, we see, is not to be set in contradiction to justification by Works. It is set in contradiction only to justification by our Own Works. It is justification by Christ’s Works. The whole question, accordingly, is whether we can hope to be received into God’s favor on the ground of what we do ourselves, or only on the ground of what Christ does for us. If we expect to be received on th e ground of what we do ourselves – that is what is called Justification by Works. If on the ground of what Christ has done for us – that is what is mean by Justification by Faith. Justification by Faith means, that is to say, that we look to Christ and to him alone for salvation, and come to God pleading Christ’s death and righteousness as the ground of our hope to be received into his favor. If Justification by Faith is out of date, that means, then, that salvation by Christ is out of date. There is nothing, in that case, left to us but that each man must just do the best he can do to save himself.

Justification by Faith does not mean, then, salvation by believing things instead of by doing right. It means pleading the merits of Christ before the throne of grace instead of our own merits. It may be doing right to believe things, and doing right is certainly right. The trouble with pleading our own merits before God is not that merits of our own would not be acceptable to God. The trouble is that we haven’t any merits of our own to plead before God. Adam, before his fall, had merits of his own, and because he had merits of his own he was, in his own person acceptable to God. He didn’t need Another to stand between him and God, whose merits he could plead. And, therefore, there was no talk of his being Justified by Faith. But we are not like Adam before the fall; we are sinners and have no merits of our own. It we are to be justified at all, it must be on the ground of the merits of Another, whose merits can be made ours by faith. And that is the reason why God sent his Only Begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish but have everlasting life. If we do not believe in him, obviously we must perish. But if we believe in him, we shall not perish but have everlasting life. That is just Justification by Faith. Justification by Faith is nothing other than obtaining everlasting life by believing in Christ. If Justification by Faith is out of date, then salvation through Christ is out of date. And as there is none other name under heaven, given among men, wherein we must be saved, if salvation through Christ is out of date then is salvation itself out of date. Surely, in a world of sinful men, needing salvation, this would b a great pity. (“Justification by Faith, Out of Date,” Selected Shorter Writings, I, pp. 281-282)

What is interesting to notice, at least for this forensically obsessive compulsive oldlifer, is the way Warfield identifies salvation with justification as in: “If Justification by Faith is out of date, that means, then, that salvation by Christ is out of date. There is nothing, in that case, left to us but that each man must just do the best he can do to save himself.”

Warfield may be in error, and may need correction by the likes of — insert the name of your favorite union theologian here. But he does exemplify the way some of us old timers have regarded the centrality of justification to the Reformed faith. It also accounts for why some become a tad concerned to hear that without union in the picture to supplement justification we have an impoverished understanding of salvation. Warfield explains well that justification is at the heart of the gospel.

Calvin on Lloyd-Jones

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Writing on Luke 12:14, Calvin argues:

Secondly, our Lord intended to draw a distinction between the political kingdoms of this world and the government of his Church; for he had been appointed by the Father to be a Teacher, who should divide asunder, by the sword of the word, the thoughts and feelings, and penetrate into the souls of men, (Hebrews 4:12,) but was not a magistrate to divide inheritances This condemns the robbery of the Pope and his clergy, who, while they give themselves out to be pastors of the Church, have dared to usurp an earthly and secular jurisdiction, which is inconsistent with their office; for what is in itself lawful may be improper in certain persons.

David Bayly agrees:

And of course, to all this I say, “Amen and amen.” Yes, absolutely. I have no quarrel with such a two-kingdom approach, in fact I emphatically agree with Calvin that is it wicked for pastors of the Church “to usurp an earthly and secular jurisdiction.”

So I guess if Calvin was 2k and Bayly agrees with Calvin, then Calvin must have praised Lloyd-Jones and Jonathan Edwards. Ba dop bop.