Seeking a Better Country is a readable and lively survey of American Presbyterianism since its founding in 1706. Its aim is not to celebrate but to understand how Presbyterians formed one of the largest and most influential denominations in the United States, and those historical developments that led to their decline.
Author: D. G. Hart
Can This Co-Editorial Relationship be Saved?
The editors of the NTJ are big baseball fans. They also root for teams that are rivals and whose fans generally hate each other. For that reason it is profitable and even Christian to feel the love that National Review Online has assembled before the animosity of MLB’s season begins. “For the Love of the Game” includes a brief tribute from one adoring fan to the Major League’s thirty franchises. (BTW, the Mets bleep.)
It Can't Happen Here
About twenty years ago, when George Marsden came out with his history of Fuller Seminary, Reforming Fundamentalism (1987), faculty, administrators, and board members at Westminster Seminary invited the author to talk to them about what the history of FTS might teach them. The general verdict of many who participated in that seminar with Marsden was that Fuller’s break with its founding faculty’s mission – especially on the doctrine of inerrancy – could not happen at WTS.
Sure, Fuller like Westminster had tried to replicate Old Princeton’s commitments to historic Protestantism and first-rate scholarship. But FTS received the Princeton tradition more awkwardly than WTS. Even if Westminster, like Fuller, was a parachurch institution and so free from the oversight of a governing church, WTS was so closely tied to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church – all its faculty were OP ministers – that Westminster is still often confused as the seminary of the OPC. In addition, WTS tried to perpetuate Old Princeton’s pursuit of polemical theology as part of its mission to maintain and defend the Reformed faith; Fuller by contrast hoped to achieve a kinder, gentler Old Princeton as part of its effort to wean fundamentalism from meanness. (Fuller’s kindness would eventually take the form of concluding that Machen too was mean and his polemics unnecessary.) Furthermore, Westminster’s faculty subscribed the Westminster Standards in their entirety – maybe the name was important, ya think? Fuller could only embrace a modified Calvinism through its own statement of faith. These differences led to the supposition that FTS could not happen to WTS.
(Not so fast, pilgrm. To read the entire essay, you need to subscribe to the NTJ. You don’t have to smoke to get it.)
Would A Reformed-World-and-Life View Be More Effective?
Jeremy Beer has many good points to make about Newt Gingrich’s conversion to the Roman Catholic Church. Among them is the following, that has surprising resonance with a two-kingdoms theology (why wouldn’t it? All Western Christians of merit are deep-down Augustinian):
It is unwarranted in the first place to think that serious, practicing Catholics will automatically agree on matters of social, economic, and political philosophy and policy. To state the thesis in a more moderate form, it is unwarranted to believe that they would agree if they were all pious enough or smart enough or understood the faith enough. That’s not how it works. The church doesn’t declaim authoritatively on anything that isn’t a matter of faith or morals because it can’t. Outside the quite small realm of faith and morals, there’s ample room for disagreement and debate even among Catholics of good will and well-formed consciences. (I am not claiming to be a Catholic of good will, and certainly not one with a well-formed conscience; I’m just laying out the theory here, as well as I understand it.)
But let me come to the interesting and in some ways opposite point. Gingrich is the latest in a steadily lengthening string of high-profile converts to Rome among political conservatives and neoconservatives. In the last few years, that list includes Sam Brownback and Robert Novak and Robert Bork and Larry Kudlow and a number of others.
Now, reflect, and let me know if I’m wrong. Did any of these men (or any other high-profile politician/journalist/muckety-muck convert not listed here) change his public opinions about any idea, policy, or other matter of public significance after his conversion?
The Great Debate: Psalms vs. Hymns
Before blogs existed, email did.
(From the NTJ, Jan. 1997)
From: Glenn Morangie
To: T. Glen Livet
Date: 9/3/96 9:28am
Subject: Hymns
Glen,
The word here in Green Bay is that I am not impressed by arguments against exclusive psalmody. Mr. Mears gave one in Sunday School this week.
Here are my reasons: 1) that we may sing hymns is not very Reformed even though it may work for Lutherans; 2) if we believe that Col. 3 commands the singing of hymns, why hasn’t our denomination commissioned capable people to write hymns reflecting NT revelation? 3) why also do we sing prayers written by men, namely Charles Wesley and Isaac Watts in the “golden age” of hymnody, who couldn’t pass licensure or ordination exams (and so wouldn’t be allowed to lead prayer in public worship)? 4) is any hymn as good as a good metrical psalm? 5) why does our denomination rely so heavily on John Murray on Gen. 2:7 but when it comes to Eph. 5 or Col. 3 finds him to be quite human? and 6) don’t we need to revise our standards since the divines were exclusive psalmodists (and isn’t our fudging here the tip of the iceberg when it comes to other worship novelties)? Continue reading “The Great Debate: Psalms vs. Hymns”
How Cultural Warriors Morphed into Culture Vultures
See the book review here.
Still Crazy After All These Years
(From NTJ, 39 Alexander Hall, July 1998)
While the principle is subject to abuse, we would affirm the idea that communities of faith, like individuals, are products of their age. For example, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, founded in 1936, came about immediately following what historian Robert Handy has described as the great religious depression in American history. And in his multivolume twentieth century American religious history, Martin Marty locates the birth of the OPC squarely in the thick of the cacophonous “noise of the conflict.” Without a doubt the context of depression and conflict have markedly shaped the identity of that little denomination in its first sixty years.
This year the Presbyterian Church of America is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary, and the occasion has prompted reflections on the state of the culture at its birth in 1973. One minister in the church has described that year in this way: “The PCA came into being as a separate entity at a very crucial time in the history of the church and world. The year 1973 was marked by great cultural transition from modernism to post-modernism, from liberalism and a reaction to it, to a younger generation that was searching for truth, to a time when evangelicals were becoming aware once again that the Gospel of Jesus Christ did have social implications and applications.”
Wow! The editors of the NTJ, like many of their contemporaries, may have been guilty of sleep-walking through most of the 1970s. Even so, we were taken aback by those claims. We do not believe that 1973 witnessed the decline of modernism, and we have argued elsewhere that modernism is alive and well and looking an awful lot like evangelicalism. (And please: the language of postmodernism surely did not come into vogue until fully a decade after the PCA’s birth).
Still, 1973 is a watershed year of sorts, as evidenced by these cultural milestones:
1. McDonald’s unveils the Egg McMuffin.
2. The NIV (New Testament) is published.
3. Construction begins on the Alaska pipeline.
4. Nixon fires special prosecutor Archibald Cox in his “Saturday Night Massacre.”
5. Ron Blomberg of the New York Yankees becomes the American League’s first designated hitter.
6. Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
7. Supreme Court hands down its Roe v. Wade decision.
8. The IBM Selectric typewriter becomes “self-correcting.”
9. Death claims Pearl Buck, Pablo Picasso, and Bruce Lee (hmm, perhaps modernism died after all).
10. The world’s first video game, “Pong,” debuts.
We leave for others the task of drawing any conclusions about PCA identity. But lest readers complain that we have unfairly listed the more unsavory aspects of a most forgettable year of a most miserable decade, we remind them that we deliberately excluded any reference to the uniforms of a certain Major League Baseball team from western Pennsylvania, a historic bastion of American Presbyterianism.
What if Lutherans and Reformed Agreed on Sanctification?
Some Reformed will concede agreement with Lutherans on justification. But they draw the line at sanctification. Supposedly, the Lutheran doctrine of salvation is so justification-centric that Lutheranism neglects the other benefits of salvation.
A piece by David P. Scaer, professor of systematic theology at Concordia, Ft. Wayne, suggests that Lutherans are closer to Reformed than many think. He wrote:
Lutherans recognize that Christians as sinners are never immune to the Law’s moral demands and its threats against sin, but in the strictest sense these warnings do not belong to Christian sanctification, the life believers live in Christ and in which Christ lives in them. In Roman Catholic and some Protestant systems, the Gospel brings the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ, but is replaced by the Law which sets down directives for Christian life and warns and threatens the Christian as Christian. Law, and not the Gospel, becomes God’s last and real word for the believer. So Christianity deteriorates into an implicit and eventually coarse legalism and abject moralism. Jesus faced this understanding of an ethically determined concept of sanctification among the Pharisees. Holiness was defined in terms of fulfilling ritual requirements. Sixteen centuries later for similar reasons, Luther raised his protest against medieval Catholicism. At times, the New Testament uses the words sanctify and sanctification of God’s entire activity of God in bringing about man’s salvation. More specifically it refers to the work of the Holy Spirit to bring people to salvation, to keep them in the true faith and finally to raise them from the dead and give them eternal life (Small Catechism). All these works are also performed by the Father and the Son. Since God is not morally neutral and does not choose to be holy, but He is holy, all His works necessarily share in His holiness. The connection between the Holy Spirit and sanctification is seen in the Latin for the Third Person of the Trinity, Spiritus Sanctus. The Spirit who is holy in Himself makes believers holy, sanctifies them, by working faith in Christ in them and He becomes the sources of all their good works.
Sanctification means that the Spirit permeates everything the Christian thinks, says and does. The Christian’s personal holiness is as much a monergistic activity of the Holy Spirit as is his justification and conversion. The Spirit who alone creates faith is no less active after conversion than He was before.
Speaking of Front Porch Republic
Caleb Stegall, a descendant of five generations of Covenanter preachers — so you know he must be good (and odd), tells about his experience with preparing a hog to go to the butcher. Aside from being funny, it is a reminder to all of us would-be agrarians that the trade off between soul-killing office work and body killing farm work is a deal that most of need to keep.
So How is Blogging Different from Facebook?
While catching up on the blogosphere last night, I ran across news from two good friends over at Front Porch Republic. From one friend came word that he is battling the disease of shingles. The other wrote about his experience with law enforement in Arizona — two speeding tickets thanks to cameras installed on Phoenix’s freeways (I guess they’re not so free).Â
After reading these and emailing the one friend to wish him good health, I wondered if I had just experienced what millions do through Facebook, an Internet phenomenon that entirely escapes me. I don’t know what it does, why it’s useful. But maybe what I encountered at FPR is exactly what happens on Facebook – going on line to see what friends are doing (or, in this case, is being done to them).Â
And then I recovered and realized that on Facebook (it seems) people only tell what they’re doing. On blogs, at least the better ones, people reflect on what their doing.Â
That would appear to make blogging more valuable (he wrote while patting himself on the back). It may explain the difference between improper and proper personal disclosures.  If it’s done in a way that let’s people know who shouldn’t, then it’s improper. If it’s done for the purpose of generalizing about the human predicament, then its proper.  (But it better be good.)
Thus ends today’s meditative moment.
Old Life 