Author: D. G. Hart

Putting Christ's Righteousness in a Lock Box

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presidentronaldreagan Adult Sunday school students at Calvary OPC (Glenside) had the privilege of hearing Richard M. Gamble, an Orthodox Presbyterian elder at Hillsdale OPC and historian at Hillsdale College speak on the appeal of the “city on a hill” in American civil religion. Lest some think the lesson promoted mixing biblical metaphors with America’s civic faith, Gamble indicated his own discomfort with efforts to underwrite earthly powers with a redemptive purpose. For those who missed the lecture, the following is a quotation from Gamble’s book, War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation:

America’s anointment as the world’s political messiah did not end when demobilized troops returned from Europe in 1919. It did not end with America’s opposition to the Treaty of Versailles, nor with America’s refusal to join the League of Nations. The cumulative product of generations of reflection, experience, and anticipation, the American identity reached too deep and far to have been uprooted in a moment of supposed renunciation. Transcending party politics and most ideological boundaries, nearly all of the language of universality and emancipation, of the “city on a hill” and the world’s rebirth, of light and dark, Messiah and Armageddon, reverberates down to the present moment. Like Woodrow Wilson before them, few modern presidents have been able to resist the allure of America’s global redemptive consciousness. In the 1940s, Franklin Roosevelt planned for a future refounded on four freedoms, freedoms that would prevail “everywhere in the world.” In the fourth of these universal freedoms, freedom from fear, he anticipated a day when “no nation will be in a position to commit and act of physical aggression against any neighbor – anywhere in the world.” In countless speeches from the 1960s through the 1980s, moreover, Ronald Reagan reached back to the earliest metaphors of America’s divine destiny” to reaffirm the nation’s special calling as a “city on a hill.” Combining the Puritan errand with the Enlightenment dream of earthly regeneration, he also embraced Tom Pain’s longing to “begin the world over again.” And on September 11, 2002, George W. Bush, speaking with the colossus of the Statue of Liberty behind him, called America the “hope of all mankind” and appropriated the world of John 1:5 as if they described not just the Incarnation of Christ but the mission of the United States: “And the light shines in the darkness; and the darkness will not overcome it.” To one degree or another and with varying motives and consequences, each of these men continued to speak of the United States as if it were the Salvator Mundi, following a pattern of thought that has endured for more than four centuries.

Mencken Day 2009

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MenckenTo honor the great American writer and editor born in 1880 on this day in Baltimore, comes the following reflection on conversion:

Converting me to anything is probably a psychological impossibility. At all events, it has never been achieved by anyone, though I have been exposed more than once to the missionary technic of very talented virtuosi. I can’t recall ever changing my mind about any capital matter. My general body of fundamental ideas is the same today as it was in the days when I first began to ponder. I was never religious, and never a Socialist, even for a moment. My aversion to conversion extends to other people. I always distrust and dislike a man who has changed his basic notions. When a reader writes in to say that some writing of mine has shown him the light and cured him of former errors I feel disgust for him, and never have anything to do with him if I can help it. I dislike, more or less, all Calvinists, Communists and other such enemies of season, but I dislike ex-Calvinists and ex-Communists very much more. (From Minority Report, #162)

Was Calvin a Neo-Calvinist or an Evangelical?

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The punch line is, what’s the difference? Badop bop.

Timothy George, dean of the Beeson Divinity School at Samford University, has a number of articles in a recent issue of Christianity Today that is devoted to John Calvin. George is a very fine historian of the Reformation so the reason for his rendition of Calvin may owe more to his editors and readers at CT than to his training at Harvard University. Still, to make Calvin appealing to American evangelicals, in “John Calvin: Comeback Kid,” George lays on thick the French reformer’s globalizing transformational identity. He writes:

Calvin’s theology was meant for trekkers, not for settlers, as historian Heiko Oberman put it. In the 16th century, Calvinist trekkers fanned out across Europe initiating political change as well as church reform from Holland to Hungary, from the Palatinate to Poland, from Lithuania to Scotland, England, and eventually to New England. . . . Like the Franciscans and the Dominicans in the Middle Ages, Calvin’s followers forsook the religious ideal of stabilitas for an aggressive mobilitas. They poured into the cities, universities, and market squares of Europe as publishers, educators, entrepreneurs, and evangelists. Though he had his doubts about predestination, John Wesley once said that his theology came within a “hair’s breadth” of Calvinism. He was an heir to Calvin’s tradition when he exclaimed, “The world is my parish.”

For some neo-Calvinists the reference to Wesley may be off putting, but not so for evangelicals. But how about one to Walter Rauschenbusch, the father of the Social Gospel? George continues:

And so was the Baptist Walter Rauchenbusch [an heir to Calvin] in his concern for the social gospel, which (as Rauchenbusch used the term) did not mean another gospel separate from the one and only gospel of Jesus Christ. It simply meant that that gospel must not be sequestered into some religious ghetto but taken into the real ghettos and barrios of our world.

Despite disputes over links between Calvin and Wesley or Rauschenbusch, indisputable is George’s claim that swarms of Reformed Protestants went to a lot of places and changed them. Whether this is the genius of Calvinism or simply one part of the Great European Migration is another question. After all, the Lutherans who in the seventeenth century came to Germantown, Pennsylvania, also changed that section of modern-day Philadelphia, but they don’t get credit as transformationalists.

But migrating and establishing towns, villages, and counties is one thing. Teaching about how Christians should regard the present life is another. This is where some historians and neo-Calvinists always seem to stumble with Calvin. For he did not advocate trekking but just the opposite:

Let the aim of believers in judging mortal life, then, be that while they understand it to be of itself nothing but misery, they may with greater eagerness and dispatch betake themselves wholly to meditate upon that eternal life to come. When it comes to a comparison with the life to come, the present life can not only be safely neglected but, compared to the former, must be utterly despised and loathed. [Institutes, III.ix.4]

So much for Calvin the transformer of culture.

What then was Calvin’s advice to pilgrims in this weary world?

. . . lest through our stupidity and rashness everything be turned topsy-turvy, [God] has appointed duties for every man in his particular way of life. And that no one may thoughtlessly transgress his limits, [God] has named these various kinds of livings “callings.” Therefore, each individual has his own kind of living assigned to him by the Lord as a sort of sentry post so that he may not heedlessly wander about throughout life. [III.x.6]

Could it be that Reformed trekkies actually cease to be Reformed when they trek? Could it be that they need to reject Calvin to follow Methodists and Social Gospelers instead? It sure looks that way. In which case, Calvin’s comeback in this 500th anniversary of his birth will likely be thin and short-lived.

Easy Obeyism

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Over the last several decades discussions of justification among Presbyterians have too often included a remark or two about how salvation is more than justification. When asked to explain the partial nature of justification, interlocutors will talk about the need for sanctification and good works, and sometimes mention the impossibility of entering into glory with any trace or residue of sin. The idea seems to be that some kind of moral renovation is necessary so that believers can be transformed, and once changed, enter into God’s presence in glory.

Whether they know it or not, the ones who make such remarks are sounding a lot like Norman Shepherd, the godfather of purging any whiff of antinomianism from Reformed circles’ (and letting Lutherans bear the odor alone). Those too young to have experienced the controversy of justification at Westminster may not be familiar with many of Shepherd’s writings. But in his infamous Thirty Four Theses he wrote about the necessity of obedient faith, good works, and repentance in relation to faith in ways that tried to guard Reformed doctrines of grace from an easy-believism. To counter implications that follow from the idea that our works do not contribute to our salvation Shepherd wrote statements like the following (Thesis 23):

Because faith which is not obedient faith is dead faith, and because repentance is necessary for the pardon of sin included in justification, and because abiding in Christ by keeping his commandments (John 15:5; 10; 1John 3:13; 24) are all necessary for continuing in the state of justification, good works, works done from true faith, according to the law of God, and for his glory, being the new obedience wrought by the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer united to Christ, though not the ground of his justification, are nevertheless necessary for salvation from eternal condemnation and therefore for justification (Rom. 6:16, 22; Gal. 6:7-9).

The wonder of such an effort to commend good works in such proximity to justification is that it way overestimates the goodness of the believer’s good works. Missing from this conception of good works is any recognition of their filthy rags caliber. The Confession of Faith says that the disproportion between our good works and the glory to come is so great that we “can neither profit, nor satisfy for the debt of our former sins.” In fact, it adds that when we have performed good works we “have but done our duty, and are unprofitable servants.” As much as our good works proceed from the Spirit’s transforming power, they are truly good. But because we do them, our good works “are defiled, and mixed with so much weakness and imperfection that they cannot endure the severity of God’s judgment” [16.5]. Good works that should be condemned – what does that conception of good works do to efforts to tack them or repentance on to justification in order to give us the personal righteousness some say we need to enter into glory?

Clearly Shepherd didn’t have this conception of good works in view when he wrote the next thesis (24) and denied that good works done according to the law or by righteousness derived from the law or from the flesh were truly good. Only works wrought by the Holy Spirit, or that sprang from true faith according to the law and for God’s glory qualified as good works in the biblical sense.

But how do filthy rags qualify as clean? Maybe the answer to that question explains why Calvin taught in his catechism that rather than tacking sanctification on to justification, justification needed to precede and follow sanctification.

Master. – But after we have once been embraced by God, are not the works which we do under the direction of his Holy Spirit accepted by him?

Scholar. – They please him, not however in virtue of their own worthiness, but as he liberally honours them with his favour.

Master. – But seeing they proceed from the Holy Spirit, do they not merit favour?

Scholar. – They are always mixed up with some defilement from the weakness of the flesh, and thereby vitiated.

Master. – Whence then or how can it be that they please God?

Scholar. – It is faith alone which procures favour for them, as we rest with assured confidence on this-that God wills not to try them by his strict rule, but covering their defects and impurities as buried in the purity of Christ, he regards them in the same light as if they were absolutely perfect.

So instead of being on the lookout for antinomianism, maybe the real error is semi-antinomianism – that is, evaluating good works and Christian living apart from the demands of the law. For semi-antinomianism is clearly the perspective needed if someone is going to posit obedience or good works can escape condemnation without the overlay of Christ’s imputed righteousness.

The Federal Vision and the Decalogue

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I was under the impression that covenant faithfulness was a big part of Federal Vision teaching.

I also thought that Old Testament law was a big part of being covenantally faithful.

So what’s up with this (not a song making fun of Samson but going to see a comic on a Lord’s Day evening)?

In case folks think Old Lifers are humorless, the song is not without its amusement.

Military Chaplains — What's Up with That?

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I have long wondered about the propriety of military chaplains. Mind you, I know some military chaplains and even have them for friends. But the complications to jure divino Presbyterianism that come from ministering as an agent of the state pale in comparison to the sort of ministerial promiscuity that goes on among the denominations (both liberal and non-Protestant) represented in the chaplaincy.

And sometimes you find support for your views in the oddest of places. I was reading John Frame’s book, Evangelical Reunion, recently and came across this:

A fellow minister in my presbytery is a navy chaplain. He is a pretty strict Calvinist, zealous to maintain doctrinal purity in the church. He would, I have no doubt, strongly oppose any candidate for the Presbyterian ministry who was charismatic in his theology.

Yet, in a recent report of his work as a chaplain, he told the presbytery that God had given him a fellow worker who was a member of the Assemblies of God. The chaplain rejoiced, for this worker was a real evangelial believer who proclaimed the gospel. There was little if any conflict between them; the theological difference seemed small compared with the great gap between the Christian and the non-Christian servicemen.

I could not help but remark (mentally!) that my fellow Presbyterian was rejoicing in a kind of alliance that he would certainly repudiate within his denomination.

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Of course, Frame was using this as an argument for greater unity and cooperation among Presbyterians and evangelicals. But can’t it also be used to pull the plug on ordaining men as military chaplains?

Presbyterians and Puritans Apart?

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Some say it is nonsense to posit any difference between Puritans and Presbyterians. Others put it more delicately and argue for essential agreement among British Calvinists. The URC pastor, Mike Brown, has given some attention to this subject through the lens of Calvin and Owen on worship. He writes with some surprise that “the likes of Horton Davies and J. I. Packer . . . see a gap between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (at least) on worship practices. The piece of evidence that stands out is that John Calvin used and advocated a liturgy. John Owen opposed liturgies. To bring the Presbyterians into the debate, John Knox developed a liturgy for the kirk that became part of the early Presbyterian experience.

But Brown is unconvinced. He sees essential agreement:

Where one witnesses obvious discontinuity between the Continental Reformer and the English Puritan is in the use of liturgies. For Calvin, the liturgies he put to use in Strasbourg and Geneva displayed his understanding of a worship service that was spiritual, simple and in complete accordance with what Scripture alone prescribed. On the other hand, Owen clearly reveled great disdain for liturgies. In his Discourse Concerning Liturgies, Owen made many statements that suggest he believed liturgies somehow quenched the Spirit and obscured the simplicity of worship. Understood in its context, however, Owen’s Discourse is a polemic primarily against the imposition of liturgies. While Calvin knew well the difficulties of having a Protestant state make certain impositions upon the order of worship (such as the Genevan city council denying him his request for weekly communion), he never faced the type of situation which Owen and his fellow Nonconformists faced in England during the 1660s. This must be taken into consideration when evaluating any discontinuities between Calvin and Owen and their theologies of worship. Both Calvin and Owen were men of their times. Yet, both of these towering figures in the Reformed tradition firmly and unwaveringly believed that worship must be biblical, spiritual, and simple.

One question that lurks behind assessments like this is whether Puritans like Owen opposed all liturgy all the time, or simply the liturgy coming down from on high in the Church of England. Sure, most state-imposed measures are unwelcome, but Owen seems to go beyond this when he argues that liturgies restrain the free operation of the spirit.

This leads to an additional question, which concerns the way that Puritanism and Presbyterianism played out in the United States. New England was more receptive to revivalism than were the most Scottish segments of the Presbyterian Church (the Old Side and the Old School). This raises the further question, again for some unthinkable, whether Puritanism encouraged enthusiasm and spontaneity in ways that Old World Presbyterians regarded as a threat to confessional subscription and church polity. After all, if you can accept the word of others for creed and church order, why not in the prayers and forms of worship. (And, by the way, the Westminster Standards reveal much more detail on the interiority of Christian devotion — i.e. the ordo salutis — that The Three Forms of Unity or the Scottish Confession of Faith.)

One way to illustrate that these intuitions as more realistic than hypothetical is to remember that Presbyterianism started out in Scotland with liturgies (from Knox) and that arguably the greatest Puritan theologian, John Owen, wrote an essay against liturgy.

It may not prove the point about differences between Puritanism and Presbyterianism. But the different ways that those traditions played out in the United States do make you wonder.

Peculiar, Idiosyncratic, Vinegary, Nonsensical

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These are just some of the words used to describe this pilgrim’s efforts to explain, defend, and promote a Reformed understanding of two-kingdom theology and the spirituality of the church. Thanks to David Strain, I get another chance and readers have an opportunity to expand my vocabulary.

I first met Pastor Strain at a Reformation Day conference in Douglasville, Georgia. He was then a Free Church minister to a congregation in London. Now he is a PCA pastor in a setting even more southern. His background, outlook, and location are reasons for keeping up with his posts at Letters from Mississippi.

The Limits of Theology and of Those Who Use It

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Our favorite theonomic pastor in the Christian Reformed Church has ranted yet again on the infection he diagnoses as the “radical 2k virus.” The good pastor’s comments are useful for showing what the two-kingdom view actually says and does not say, and also for showing the inherent weakness of those who overrealize Christ’s Lordship in this life.

The pastor in question is responding specifically to the claim made here that the teaching of history should differ little if taught in a class at a secular university or a Christian college. The point being that the standards governing historical scholarship do not come from Scripture – since the Bible as little to say about the use of primary and secondary sources or about the polity of nation-states and the relations among them – but from organizations like the American Historical Association.

The really right reverend comments:

Can Darryl be so thick as to miss the decided difference between the Marxists Charles and Mary Beard teaching a survey of American History and a R. L. Dabney teaching a survey of American History? Darryl assumes his position and then goes on to act as if the standards of “secular” history proves his position. Talk about circular reasoning! What Darryl has forgotten is that Theology is the Queen of the Sciences. Biblical Christians would insist that History is but Theology clothed in a different discipline, but this is not the way Darryl reasons. For Darryl, Theology resides in the Church and each compartmentalized discipline is Lord over its own realm. Talk about creating sacred and profane realms. By Darryl’s standards a student could become a Marxist historian, complete with all that implies, and still be a Christian as long as he could navigate the gross contradiction.

A couple of points show how convoluted this reaction is. First, hello! Robert Louis Dabney was not a historian and simply being a theologian does not grant proficiency or expertise in every single academic discipline, secular vocation, or square inch (Kuyper even knew this). If it did, then theologians would function in western society the way Imams do in Islamic societies – that is, as interpreters of God’s word they have authority over everything. So, I would likely trust the Beard over Dabney on interpreting American history – though I might give Dabney extra credit on the South.

Second, why does being a Marxist invalidate one’s credentials as a historian? Why even some very good Christian historians such as Carl Trueman have been known to have affection for Marx and the usefulness of Marxist analysis not only for secular but also church history. Our CRC pastor is apparently aware that sometimes Christian historians apply the insights of Marx but rejects outright the compatibility of Christianity and Marxism.

So as in all good circular reasoning, what goes around comes around. We trust the Pastor will not become so dizzy about two-kingdom theology that his mind explodes. Here’s the trick: take two aspirin (get it?) and keep your theology in the appropriate kingdom.

Caritas in Flagrande

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Caleb Stegall over at Front Porch Republic has already asked a good question about a recent evangelical statement, “Doing the Truth in Love,” that commends the pope’s recent encyclical Caritas in Vertate to the wider evangelical world. Caleb asked, “how many evangelicals does it take to comment on an encyclical?” The answer is a whole lot more than the teamsters it takes to change a lightbulb. The answer to Caleb’s question is 68, the number of evangelicals who signed “Doing the Truth in Love.” The answer to the question about the teamsters is “10, you gotta problem with that?”

Maybe it is oldlife’s current obsession with neo-Calvinism, but we couldn’t help but notice a strong attraction of Kuyperians to Benedict’s encyclical. The Protestant statement backing the pope originally stemmed from a Center for Public Justice effort, and a number of neo-Calvinists added their signatures, among them our favorite Byzantine-rite Calvinist. The convergence of neo-Calvinists and the Roman church’s pontiff does not prove our repeated contention here that a preoccupation with worldview turns the confessional and ecclesial lobes of one’s brain into jello. But it does add to the mix of examples that show neo-Calvinists to be promiscuous in their discernment.

Meanwhile, the neo-Calvinist theological interpretation of Benedict is not reassuring. DTL states:

In Christ’s death and resurrection, God removes all that stands in the way of right relationships between God and the world, among humans, and between humanity and the rest of creation. Human development is included in this restoration of all things to right relationship.

This is the typical neo-Calvinist cosmological rendering of redemption, the license that tells Christians they need to save the world – not just the lost tribes in Africa, but also the kitchen sink. Is it really possible that Benedict is a neo-Calvinist? What would Abraham Kuyper, who thought Rome had nothing to offer the modern world, say?

We do not want to suggest that Benedict or any other pope cannot be read for insight and wisdom. In this case, oldlife has yet to read the encyclical. But would the evangelical signers of DTL also be willing to draft and sign the books by other authors who possess a lot of wisdom about the economy and globalization – say Niall Ferguson or P. J. O’Roarke?

And what about Wendell Berry? Is he chopped liver? Almost twenty years ago he wrote:

Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible. Those who have “thought globally” (and among them the most successful have been imperial governments and multinational corporations) have done so by means of simplifications too extreme and oppressive to merit the name of thought. Global thinkers have been and will be dangerous people. National thinkers tend to be dangerous also: we now have national thinkers in the northeastern United States who look on Kentucky as a garbage dump. A landfill in my county receives daily many truckloads of garbage from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. This is evidently all right with everybody but those of us who live here. (“Out of your Car, Off Your Horse,” 19)

So why no statement recommending The Unsettling of America to evangelical readers. Berry had some of us thinking about the problems of globalization a while ago. It didn’t take the Bishop of Rome to get us to do it. And we didn’t have to issue a declaration and seek signatures to call attention to our debt to Berry.

Mind you, if Benedict actually agrees with DTL when the statement says, “globalization has indeed lifted millions out of poverty, primarily by the integration of the economies of developing nations into international markets. Yet the unevenness of this integration leaves us deeply concerned about the inequality, poverty, food insecurity, unemployment, social exclusion—including the persistent social exclusion of women in many parts of the world—and materialism that continue to ravage human communities, with destructive consequences for our shared planetary habitat” – if that’s what the encyclical affirms, then maybe a Berry declaration is in order. As Stegall notes, “Take it from me, sitting in the belly of the beast, when Evangelicals ask you for a ‘serious dialogue’ about ‘new models of global governance,’ reach for your gun. Or your rosary.”

Beyond globalization, Benedict, and Berry is the cringe produced by watching low church Protestants jump on the papal bandwagon. Could it be that evangelicals get more mileage out of siding with the pope than even a popular American author? Impugning motives is always unwise, but why don’t these evangelicals worry just a little bit about coming off as Vatican groupies?

Sorry for the cynicism, but any good Protestant knows something is wrong when those who are not in fellowship with the Bishop of Rome, and who remain tarnished by the condemnations of Trent, are so eager to recommend the chief officer of the church whose jurisdiction their communions have purposefully renounced.