Author: D. G. Hart

Lent is Like Spring Training

Published on by D. G. Hart3 Comments

With friends of the church calendar like this, who needs Presbyterian critics?

Craig Higgins, a PCA pastor in Westchester, NY, wrote over at PCA Conversations (how did we miss this?) a couple of posts about the value of observing Lent. In the first, he gave two main reasons. The second was that Lent is part of the traditional wisdom of the church, “a tradition the church has observed for centuries.” He adds, “we dishonor our spiritual ancestors when we casually disregard their wisdom.”

That raises an interesting question: were indulgences part of “the church’s” wisdom? How about monasticism, clerical celibacy, prayers to Mary? To paraphrase Alasdair McIntyre, just which church are we talking about, and whose wisdom? And what of the particular wisdom of the Presbyterians who repudiated the observance of the church calendar?  Are the Westminster Divines chopped liver?

Higgins’ other reason, his first, is that Lent is like Spring Training for baseball players. “Just as a baseball player may work at staying in shape year round but still give special attention to conditioning before the start of spring training, so we may find great spiritual benefits in setting aside a few weeks to give special attention to the state of our souls.”

Does this mean that coming out of Lent, just as pitchers are generally ahead of the hitters (you wouldn’t know this from following the 2009 Phillies), are some Christians more sanctified than others?

It is a curious defense of Lent, one that spawned surprisingly little conversation at a site dedicated to PCA Conversations.  It is also a post that would be a lot easier to take if sanctifying the Lord’s Day were as much a part of Reformed piety as Lent.  In fact, if Lent is useful, as Higgins argues, for taking stock of our lives, an annual “spiritual” exam, wouldn’t the practice of weekly ordering our lives to set aside Sunday for worship and rest be more effective (not to mention the sort of self-examination that goes with partaking of the Lord’s Supper, or the daily help of “improving our baptism”)?  Come to think of it, maybe Reformed piety does not need the lift of the church calendar, which was sort of the point in one of the Reformation’s many reforms.

If the Bible Speaks to All of Life, Why Not the Confession?

Published on by D. G. Hart34 Comments

I do not do Facebook, though I might sign up for MyFace. I am happily uninterested in Twitter, which as T. David Gordon has suggested, is what twits do. So using a blog to tell others about what I’m doing seems silly if not narcisistic.

With those qualifications out of the way, a recent speaking engagement at Grove City College (where I heard Gordon make a very compelling presentation on the need for caution in using technology that requires batteries and plugs) got me thinking about the world-and-life-viewitis that has reached epidemic proportions among Protestants. Most evangelical Protestant colleges these days are justifying their existence and identity by saying they provide a wholistic vision on learning that is grounded in the Christian faith. The Lordship of Christ, the authority of Scripture, even the cultural mandate come in for aid and comfort.

This ideal is an honorable one and springs from generally wholesome motives. Who would not want to see Christ honored in all aspects of the created order, and who would want to be unfaithful where Scripture has revealed God’s holy will?

There’s just one problem: the Bible doesn’t speak to all the arts and sciences, let alone whether incoming freshmen should receive a laptop or whether it should be an Apple or an IBM machine. In fact, the one place where Christ is revealed, the Bible, has very little to say about the curriculum of an undergraduate education. If we say that it does, we are in danger of putting the imaginations of men above the Word of God — that is, making the Bible say what we want it to say. Continue reading “If the Bible Speaks to All of Life, Why Not the Confession?” →

The Great Debate: Psalms vs. Hymns III

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

(From NTJ Jan 1997 and April 1997)

From: Glenn Morangie
To: T. Glen Livet
Date: 9/3/96 3:21pm
Subject: Psalmody -Reply -Reply

Glen,

Are you a ninny or what? How can you say that Reformed worship is not centered on the Word and then in the next sentence write, “God speaks to us and we speak to him.” That sounds to me like words are pretty central, and that it is God’s word at the center, both in calling us to his presence, and in guiding what words we say to him. Just a nitpick.

The example of preaching does not entirely settle the issue of non-inspired words in worship. If the Second Helvetic confession is right and the sermon, even from an unregenerate man, is the word of God, then there is something going on in preaching that is different from the words that non-ordained people speak. It certainly is not inspired in the sense of canonical revelation. But it is more on that order than the poem some proto-Unitarian wrote in the 18th century. Preaching and praying, then, are of a different order than poetry. Granted they are all words. But preaching and praying done by one of God’s appointed undershepherds causes something different to happen. God has promised to bless them in a way that he has also promised to bless his inspired word. But I don’t see any promise attached to the hymns the church may produce. Continue reading “The Great Debate: Psalms vs. Hymns III” →

2K Food Fight?

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Over at Heidelblog, Scott Clark takes some exception to the proposal at Old Life for a Bureau of Weaker Siblings.

Among the points he makes, these are the most interesting:

Hart mentions a natural law approach to resisting fornication (that the act of fornication is contrary to the creational intent of sex for procreation). This view seems to concede the Romanist view of sex. We should rather say that fornication is contrary to creational intent because, by definition, it entails sex outside of marriage. I’m not ready to concede the case that birth control is sinful. He also suggests that the hotel owner might not have “access” to natural law. This is an odd concession. Who doesn’t have access to natural law? To whom has natural law not been revealed? Isn’t one of the points of NL that it is universal? (Rom 1-2)? Continue reading “2K Food Fight?” →

Booalism

Published on by D. G. Hart3 Comments

Why is the idea of dualism so threatening to many contemporary Reformed Christians? To talk about two kingdoms or to introduce the idea of differences between sacred and common jurisdictions is apparently a concession to secularism and a denial of Christ’s Lordship over every square inch of created order.

But in point of fact, a streak of dualism runs through the Reformed tradition. To help the medicine go down, the following quotations may show that dualism is less scary that it first seemed.

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. John Calvin, Institutes, II.2.13
Continue reading “Booalism” →

Why Should Lutherans Have All the Good Poetry?

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“Seven Stanzas at Easter” (a meditation on 1 Corinthians 15)
John Updike

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

[Written in 1960 for a religious arts festival sponsored by the Clifton Lutheran Church, of Marblehead, Mass.]

Thanks to Gregory Reynolds, OPC pastor in Manchester, New Hampshire for passing this on.

Bureau of Weaker Siblings

Published on by D. G. Hart24 Comments

Imagine the following scenario (not apparently one conceived by John Lennon): a hotel owner refuses to let out a room to couples whom he knows may engage in fornication, adultery or sodomy. The owner decides upon this policy out of his own Christian convictions. But the owner conducts his business in a civil polity that grants civil rights to fornicators, adulterers, and sodomites. What is the owner to do?

This is a conundrum which supposedly trips up two-kingdom thinking because the idea of a distinction between civil or common and religious realms denies the possibility of the existence of anything like a Christian hotel. If no such religious hotels exist, then apparently the owner should, according to 2k logic, change his policy and make rooms available to those who violate God’s laws. But if he insists on his policy, informed by his conscience, then he should sell his hotel because he lives in a land that will prohibits “Christian” hotels. One other option is to suffer the penalty for his violation of civil rights and either pay a fine or go to jail.

This test case for two-kingdom thinking actually fails to recognize that the alternatives here are actually more than two, and that the either-or approach that afflicts so much anti-thetical analysis does not do justice to the variety of God’s creation and providence. First, the hotel owner could actually appeal to natural law as a common standard for local laws. He could argue that sexual encounters outside marriage are inappropriate because they ignore the telos of sex, namely, procreation and reproduction. Second, if natural law is unavailable to this Christian hotel owner, he could appeal to the mercy of his local magistrate and petition for an exception to the laws of the county, city, or state. If he asked for such an allowance, he might actually find a kinder hearing than if he simply asserted to the town council, while wagging his finger, that the state’s laws were an affront to God’s moral will.

Third, to ensure that his hotel was thoroughly Christian, he could also deny rooms to liars, blasphemers, idolaters, thieves, and murderers, as well as anyone who has considered such acts and words in his or her heart. Of course, the owner might have to go out of business because no patron, not even a saint, could meet the owners’ righteous standards. Fourth, the owner could show his zeal for God’s law by also refusing to cohabit with his spouse and children for violating any one of God’s laws in heart, word, or deed.

The last option might be the most ingenious of all. If the Christian hotel owner is a member of a Presbyterian Church, he might prevail upon his session to petition the local magistrate in a case “extraordinary,” as tolerated by the Confession of Faith, ch. 31. What the session could do would be to work with the local government to establish a Bureau of Weaker Siblings in which the church would provide members of a public committee whose charge would be to evaluate the religious scruples of this hotel owner, and similar cases, to determine if he qualifies as one of St. Paul’s weaker brothers. Owners who cannot provide services to sinners, or to those who perform certain, more heinous kinds of sin, clearly lack the strong conscience that allows other Christians to regard such services to sinners as a legitimate part of their calling before God and love of neighbor. If a person, like the hotel owner in this example, were approved by the bureau as a weaker sibling, then he could gain permission from the state to be exempted from the scope and sanctions of laws that violated his conscience. Certificates of Weakness would be valid ideally for sixty days, and renewable, after meeting monthly with the Bureau, up to ten times.

Why Blogging Beats Youtube

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

So I receive my daily email from the History News Network which includes a report about a panel at the Organization of American Historians annual meeting on the state of the history of American conservatism.  Research and personal interests, not to mention the entertainment supplied by liberal academics having to talk about conservatives, prompt me to click on the link.  And what do I find?  More links, but not to papers or synopses of papers, but to videos of the panelists. 

Now, I know ingratitude is unbecoming in Christians and annoying in others, but I have to admit that I was not in the best of humor having to watch three roughly 10-minute videos of the presentations.  (The fourth was deleted from Youtube before I could get to it, suggesting authors were not consulted before the videos went on line.)  Sure, it was better than not being there, or having to wait for the papers to show up in print. 

But I’d much rather have had the papers.  I could have skimmed them in about as much time as it took to watch one of the videos, and then filed them away with their footnotes for help at another point.   This offers further evidence that for learning, old technologies are superior to new ones.  I mean, would you rather watch an author read a book or simply read (or skim) it for yourself?

Neo-Conn-versation vs. Paleo-Conn-versation

Published on by D. G. Hart1 Comment

The legacy of Harvie Conn, home and foreign missionary for the OPC, and longtime member of the WTS faculty, is less contested than it should be. A blog, though dormant of late, has been dedicated to preserving Harvie’s insights about contextualization and globalization. One former WTS Old Testament professor has also recently been posting a series of Conn quotations on mission and theology that were somehow the inspiration for appropriating Ancient Near Eastern Studies in OT interpretation (imagine how a paper on missions would go over at the Society of Biblical Literature).

Despite these progressive appropriations of Conn, another side of the man exists, the one that informed his efforts first as a home missionary for the OPC in Stratford, New Jersey. The following quotations come from “Where is Everybody Sunday Night?” Presbyterian Guardian (March 15, 1959).

One of the thorns in the flesh that plagues every home missionary is the Sunday evening service. From what I’ve heard, it also gives many a sleepless night to other pastors as well. Actually, the Sunday evening service isn’t the problem. The problem is: where are the people at the Sunday evening hour set for meeting in God’s house? Why do people make a habit out of not coming? . . . .

Remember the blessedness of being in God’s house on all His day. Look at what the man with the withered hand would have missed if he had skipped church the time Jesus was there to heal him. Anticipate the added blessing of the evening hour. Ask yourself if you are hungering and thirsting for truth. If you are, why aren’t you present also Sunday night to be filled? Or maybe your appetite isn’t what it ought to be, but it will increase if you go where the food is being served! Jesus said that the Sabbath was made for man. It is for our use and blessing.

Makes me wonder if I could take theological progressivism better from someone who kept the entire Lord’s Day holy.

The Great Debate: Psalms vs. Hymns II

Published on by D. G. Hart2 Comments

(From the NTJ, Jan. 1997)

From: Glenn Morangie
To: T. Glen Livet
Date: 9/3/96 11:10am
Subject: Psalmody -Reply

Glen,
Thanks for the response. This is surely better, but I am still uneasy about the compositions of men. Which means I think the inspired words of God are a pretty good way of singing praise to him. Is there any better?

Now of course, versifications are not inspired, which might be an argument for chanting psalms or any other hymn that is part of the canon, like the Magnificat, Nunc Dimitis, i.e. those NT hymns Calvin included in worship. But neither are translations of the Bible inspired and we don’t seem to object to their use in public worship. We wouldn’t read Chuck Colson’s thoughts about Eph. 1 instead of reading the Word. We probably wouldn’t read Colson at all. And in my book, his writings are no better or worse than Isaac Watts’.

In sum, I find it a very different thing to sing the composition of an author who has sat down and composed five verses based on a passage of Scripture or a particular doctrine, than to sing words that closely parallel the words of Scripture and use them as forms of prayer and praise. And this, I believe fits with Terry Johnson’s argument in his new book. If the Reformed tradition has made the Word central to worship, why not make it central to our singing as well?

So I guess I am not an exclusive psalmodist and, therefore, able to take the Lord’s Supper at your church (since I am not advancing sin). But I think exclusive psalmodists’ instincts to be on the whole admirable.

And what do you do with our standards? Don’t they need to be revised and don’t we need to say that the early Reformers were wrong and show why?

Unpersuadedly yours,
Glenn

____________

From: T. Glen Livet
To: Glenn Morangie
Date: 9/3/96 1:36pm
Subject: Psalmody -Reply

Glenn,
Our Reformed worship is not in fact centered on the Word. Reformed worship is dialogical; God speaks to us and we speak to him. In Word and Sacrament, God speaks to us; in prayer and praise, we speak to him. Thus, the rules governing the singing of praise are essentially the same as those governing prayer; the words should be faithful to the scriptures, according with biblical truth (including emphasizing what scripture emphasizes), but they need not be restricted to inspired words. For instance, how could we ever pray for Mrs. Jones, dying of cancer, using the language of scripture?

Indeed, as regards the sermon, the matter becomes even more pointed, doesn’t it? In preaching, God speaks to his people. Yet, we do not limit the sermon to a reading of canonical scripture, but we entrust this grave responsibility to men who are orthodox and of good judgment. If we entrust uninspired men to speak God’s Word to us, we can as easily trust uninspired men to speak our words to God.

I agree with you that the instincts of the exclusive psalmist position are largely admirable, especially in light of the poor quality of much hymnody. On the other hand, an instinct that denigrates praise being offered explicitly to the Second Person of the Trinity is not entirely noble.

Glen