Author: D. G. Hart

At Least One Alliance Knows Where It Stands on Baptism

Published on by D. G. Hart12 Comments

That is a plausibly drawn conclusion after the kerfuffle created by Mark Dever’s post on “Things He Can and Cannot Live With.”   Like others to comment on this post, I admire Mark and count him a friend.  During a recent conference at Southern Baptist Seminary, where Mark is chairman of the board,  he and I enjoyed several pleasant conversations.  He is not only the pastor of the church where Jay and Ellen Hart were married (TMI – alert), but he is a Calvinist and says a lot of sensible and valuable things about congregational life, church membership, and discipline.  He is one of my favorite Baptists, most of whom orbit around Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville.

It should also be said that Mark deserves real credit for saying what he did about paedobaptism being a sin.  I disagree with him.  What do you expect from a Presbyterian elder?  But I’m not offended, much less annoyed.  If you take the sacraments seriously, not to mention being a faithful minister of the word, you need to say that the wrong practice of baptism is sinful.  (It should also be pointed out that Mark was not singling out paedobaptism.  He did mention it along with racism and universalism, but his list actually ran to 15 and included drum, organs, and female elders, none of which hit the threshold of paedobaptism but this was a free-flowing column.)

What is curious about the post is what it means for the variety of evangelical parachurch agencies like the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Together for the Gospel, and Gospel Coalition, all of which find credo- and paedobaptists inhabiting membership cheek by jowel under the umbrella of a lower-common denominator evangelicalism.  Mark actually has a very good interview with a fundamentalist pastor who questions Mark’s own participation in these alliances and coalitions on the grounds of not participating with those who observe sinful practices.  It was a frank even if friendly exchange.  (Why do conservative Presbyterians today keep wanting to “hang” with Baptists who think paedobaptism is a sin?) Continue reading “At Least One Alliance Knows Where It Stands on Baptism” →

Give It Up

Published on by D. G. Hart4 Comments

It, in this case, is evangelicalism.

Rick Phillips, over at the Ref21 blog, comments on Michael Spencer’s (aka Internet Monk) piece on the collapse of evangelicalism. Phillips writes:

. . . what many have been saying for years is true: American evangelicalism is for the most part non-Christian, if biblical definitions are used. Bible doctrine has not been taught for years, and there are largely-populated areas with scores of evangelical churches where one cannot find any serious Bible teaching. Youth ministry has been the pinnacle of this phenomenon, as evangelical youth ministries have tended to be virtually devoid of truth or godliness. So the situation is as bad as we have feared, and I agree with Michael Spenser that in the coming years (really, starting now) this is going to be revealed dramatically.

So why continue to call yourself “The Allicance of Confessing Evangelicals”? Isn’t this sort of like calling yourself “The Alliance of Confessing Modernists”? Hello!?!

(I’d submit a comment over at Ref21 but unlike some blogs, their posts remain above the fray.)

Timmerman is Our (Paleo-Calvinist) Homeboy

Published on by D. G. Hart7 Comments

If any publications inspired the NTJ, it was (and is) the New Republic, First Things, and the Reformed Journal (not necessarily in that order). The latter has not been in print for over a decade, but it was a refreshing, provocative and often wrong-headed outlet for considerations of Reformed faith and practice. 

The quotation below comes from an article that was part of a series on Reformed identity in American life: John J. Timmerman, “Whatever Happened to Sunday?” Feb. 1981.  It may come as close to an expression of Old Life piety as you can find.  It is Lord’s day-centric, logocentric, and supremely aware of the Christian life as a pilgrimage.  If only more Grand Rapidians could find this part of their Kuyperian selves. 

Sunday was church in Orange City, Iowa, in the first decades of the century. I suspect that is is so even now in the little pockets of piety that dot Northwest Iowa, though it can’t be as still in the town or in the homes as it was in my youth. There were three services, which I attended with simulated docility. The preacher delivered three sermons before his often critical sheep, dressed in a somber Prince Albert, sweating it out in August afternoons without air-conditioning before a whir of variegated hand-propelled fans. He spoke in these churches, some of them large, without the aid of electronic devices, and a voice of good timbre could be heard on the street through the open windows. There were always competitive babies in the crowd, quieted not by artful jouncing but by breast feeding. As the sermon pounded on, squirming little boys were pinched. Sometimes fractious older boys in the back seats were policed by elders. Dutch psalms were fervently sung while a lathering janitor pumped the bellows of the organ at 110 degrees. There was no choir – an irrelevant impertinence.

The heart of the service was the sermon; upon that the evaluation of the preacher and the determination of his ecclesiastical fortunes depended. Then, as it was well into the sixties, it was as rhetorically fixed as the terza rima. Apparently all texts were best analyzed and interpreted in terms of three points. I remember a preacher saying, “One more point and then we go home.” Whether the content was brilliant or mediocre, it was formulated in terms of an introduction, three divisions, and application. The three points were often chosen with care and memorably phrased. These pegs to remembrance enabled certain people to recall sermons accurately for years. A lady of eighty-eight wrote me recently saying about some sermons she had heard “I know the introduction and application he made and often talk about them.” She also gave the three points of several sermons she had remembered for fifty years. Such fixed rhetoric may seem wooden, bit its mnemonic helpfulness was striking. As a boy, of course, I had no interest in these sermons. I spent my time counting the pipes in the organ, the panes in the colored glass windows, watching the consistory up front, and daydreaming. I am glad that later I learned to appreciate the meticulous preparation, craftsmanship, and meditation that went into their making. Some of these older ministers operated on volubility, but others on a lot of mind and heart; not a few had style and some had class. . . .

Three services, three trips to church, three meals pretty well consumed the day. What time remained was to be used in a way compatible with the spiritual tone of the day. To many this all sounds like “a hard, hard, religion,” as well as something of a bore. Indeed, it took something out of one but it put something real into one also. The church was a sanctuary, a renewal of hope, a confirmation of faith. These people did not have easy, pleasure-filled lives. They had a profound sense of the mystery and misery of human existence. There were no protective barriers. I remember my mother crying over the deaths of little children. Children were sometimes marred by smallpox, weakened by scarlet fever, dead of diphtheria. Diseases now almost routinely cured carried off parents, leaving homes fatherless and motherless. Fearful accidents occurred on the farm. Hail, storm, and drought brought destruct to crops. But the death of the saints was precious in the sight of the Lord, and in the eye of the storm was the providence of God. How often these people prayed for a rainbow, how often they found a spiritual rainbow in the church where God spoke to them through his servants, and promised cure for all misery.

At that time and even into the sixties, there was a remarkable consensus as to the meaning and practices of Sunday. Although the Bible did not specify the number of services to be held on Sunday, congregations attended with notable faithfulness and did not appear to grow weary of that kind of well-doing. Even though the services in the earlier decades of the century were a surcease from loneliness on the empty prairie, a stay against loss of identity in a strange land, and the warm concourse of friends, these were not the reasons that brought them to church. What did bring them to church was a felt spiritual need and a sense of duty. They believed God wanted them to come as often as they could and that it was good for them to be here. That kind of consensus has been eroding for years, whether out of spiritual amplitude, secular diversions, boredom, or alienation. . . .

The consensus on Sunday behavior is also waning. Whereas in the early decades of the century, attendance at church three times was common, today attendance twice is lessening. The blue laws have almost vanished. If a member of my old church in Iowa had spun his Buick over to the Blackstone Cafe at Sioux City for a Sunday dinner of prime rib and cocktails, he would have been in danger of losing his membership; if one does that in Grand Rapids today he risks only losing his shirt. The old blue laws were based on the idea that the Sabbath is a “day of sacred assembly” and that “wherever you live, it is a Sabbath to the Lord.” The older generation thought God made the Sabbath for man to insure rest and spiritual growth, not to do what he wanted. They were uptight and possibly self-righteous about Sunday. The present generation is relaxed and self-righteous about it. . . .

Why John Calvin Was No Neo-Calvinist (and pass the Paxil)

Published on by D. G. Hart5 Comments

Now our blockishness arises from the fact that our minds, stunned by the empty dazzlement of riches, power, and honors, become so deadened that they can see no farther. The heart also, occupied with avarice, ambition, and lust, is so weighed down that it cannot rise up higher. In fine, the whole soul, enmeshed in the allurements of the flesh, seeks its happiness on earth. To counter this evil the Lord instructs his followers in the vanity of the present life by continual proof of its miseries. . . .
     Then only do we rightly advance in the discipline of the cross, when we learn that this life, judged by itself, is troubled, turbulent, unhappy in countless ways, and in no respect clearly happy; that all those things which are judged to be its goods are uncertain, fleeting, vain, and vitiated by many intermingled evils. From this, at the same time, we conclude that in this life we are to seek and hope for nothing but struggle; when we think of our crown, we are to raise our eyes to heaven. For this we must believe: that the mind is never seriously aroused to desire and ponder the life to come unless it be previously imbued with contempt for the present life.

Institutes, III.ix.1

If Guilt "Causes" Corruption . . .

Published on by D. G. Hart58 Comments

. . . why can’t innocence “cause” moral renovation?

Article 9 of the French Confession of Faith (in which Calvin played a large role) affirms: “We believe that man was created pure and perfect in the image of God, and that by his own guilt he fell from the grace which he received, and is thus alienated from God, the fountain of justice and of all good, so that his nature it totally corrupt.”

This assertion, which implies the priority of the forensic to moral degeneracy, only makes sense of the idea that man was created with a good and upright nature. If Adam’s guilt proceeded from corruption then his original nature could not be perfect and pure.

So why is it a problem to talk about a similar relationship between the forensic and the renovative in the remedy for sin, namely, salvation? Why is it wrong to assert that the removal of guilt, the declaration of innocence, causes or results in the removal of corruption?

Of course, the language of causality is a bit rough and simplistic — but no more rough or simplistic as saying that union with Christ “causes” justification and sanctification. Actually, in a monergistic scheme, God is the cause of every part of salvation. But in trying to discern the relationship among the aspects of salvation, asserting the priority of the forensic to the renovative does not appear to be an obvious problem or error. It would seem actually to follow symmetrically from the doctrine of the fall.

This would seem to be the point of the Belgic Confession, Article 24, which says that without justifying faith, men “would never do anything out of love to God.” It also asserts: “For it is by faith in Christ that we are justified, even before we do good works, otherwise they could not be good works any more than the fruit of a tree can be good before the tree itself is good.”

(Disclaimer: this post is not necessarily the view of the NTJ or its editors. What are blogs for?)

So You Don't Need a Brown Paper Bag

Published on by D. G. Hart1 Comment

(From NTJ, January  1998)

Nicotine of Hippo 

   We recently heard a wonderful suggestion about the name of our journal, one that might help readers who want their church libraries to take the NTJ but fear what other church members will make of the title and its association with the evil weed. Why not tell your church librarian about what a wonderful publication the NTJ is, how it is chock-full of wisdom and carries a style of argumentation rarely found in religious periodicals. Don’t say it’s smart alecky. When asked about the name, respond with as straight a face as possible that Nicotine is not what he or she thinks. Say that Nicotine is Augustine of Hippo’s obscure younger brother, whose obscurity is almost complete thanks to the modern jehad against RJR/Nabisco. Add that if the church would readily subscribe to a journal named the Augustine Theological Journal then no one could possibly object to the Nicotine Theological Journal, a publication dedicated to the memory of the first Old School Presbyterian. And because Nicotine was African the NTJ will make your church library a multi-cultural place.

Also, make sure that when you pronounce our journal’s title you put the accent on the second, rather than the first syllable of nicotine (as in ni-CO-tine), and make the last “i” short (as in “tin”).

Actually, we have a better way for churches to subscribe to the NTJ short of violating the ninth commandment (as the Reformed count them). In response to great demand (actually one EPC pastor in Texas inquired) we are now offering bulk subscriptions for congregations. Churches that order between ten and fifty subscriptions may receive the NTJ for $4 per subscription. The rate goes down to $3 per subscription for orders over fifty.

(By the way, we need to give credit to George and Lucie Marsden who suggested the new derivation of Nicotine but who have yet to subscribe and so should not be accused of sharing the NTJ’s outlook or bad habits.)

A Journal By Any Other Name Would Be As Serious

Published on by D. G. Hart15 Comments

The Nicotine Theological Journal is a name that invites either a snicker or a wince. A self-conscious reference to the chief chemical in tobacco surely does not manifest sufficient seriousness about theology — hence the reactions of uncomfortable giggles or tisk-tisks implying we should act our age.

Here a little historical reminder may be in order. The editors grew up in an era of American Protestantism not too distant from the time when Harold John Ockenga, the founding president of Fuller Seminary and the National Association of Evangelicals, was publicly ridiculed for his behavior during a trip in 1947 to Europe. In his new book, The Surprising Work of God, Garth M. Rosell writes:

Throughout the months of autumn, . . . a flurry of letters arrived in Ockenga’s Park Street Church postbox asking if the rumors swirling about him were really true. ‘You are probably aware of the rumors relative to your personal actions while on the European trip this summer,’ wrote one concerned friend. Other letters added the specifics: that Ockenga had insisted on visiting the pope despite the objections of the Protestant clergy in Rome, that he had made ‘obeisance’ to the Pope when the delegation had visited him in the Vatican, that he was seen drinking ‘intoxicating liquor’ at meals and receptions, that he had attended the opera and theater in Paris, and that he had purchased ‘cigarettes in the P.X. and then sold them on the black market.

Continue reading “A Journal By Any Other Name Would Be As Serious” →

Is (or Was) Sam Walton Your Neighbor?

Published on by D. G. Hart19 Comments

(From NTJ, January 1998)

A report on NPR about a sermon by a priest in the Church of England prompted some thoughts about the implications of the Eighth Commandment. The news service copy indicated that this priest had told his parishioners that shoplifting from supermarket chains was not stealing. His reasoning was that such chains were putting the village food markets out of business and, thus, destroying the social fabric of English town life.

This priest’s teaching is not what we would prefer to hear in the pulpit. It does appear to be something of a stretch to say that shoplifting is not theft. And, no doubt, the character of English town life changed long before supermarkets and malls began to show up in the UK. Just ask the Luddites. But his admonishment does raise some interesting questions about how we observe the Eighth Commandment.

For instance, among the sins forbidden by this commandment, according to the Westminster Larger Catechism, are “oppression” and all “unjust or sinful ways of taking or withholding from our neighbor what belongs to him.” Which might mean that chains like WalMart, McDonalds and Winn Dixie, may actually excessively burden and deprive our neighbors who run local businesses from what would normally belong to them were it not for the consolidation of wealth in corporations and their ability to buy goods in mass quantities and distribute those goods throughout the world. As long as our only consideration in purchasing any item, from food to houses, is simply the lowest price, we will always be suckers for chains and the services they provide.

Continue reading “Is (or Was) Sam Walton Your Neighbor?” →

Mark Driscoll is Joining the Christian and Missionary Alliance

Published on by D. G. Hart64 Comments

Or so it seems on the basis of Driscoll’s recent post on the differences between the New and Old Calvinism.  (My, how pertinent the paleo/neo distinction has become.) 

According to Driscoll, the differences between Calvinism 1.0 and 8.2 are simple and short: 1) New Calvinism is missional; 2) it is urban; 3) it is charismatic; and 4) it is loving.  Old Calvinism, accordingly, is not these things.  (Do I feel loved?  Not really, but it doesn’t matter since New Calvinists are loving.) 

What Driscoll may not realize is that American Calvinists have been there and done that.  They did so in the person of  A. B. Simpson, a Canadian Presbyterian who ministered in the PCUSA, established urban missions and a training school (Nyack) in New York City, and was open to the emerging (couldn’t resist) Pentecostal revival.   The institutions Simpson founded, along with his teaching, formed the basis for the Christian and Missionary Alliance (1887).  (Before Keller, there was Simpson.)

So whether Driscoll knows it, he has a denominational home.  The upside is that Driscoll’s Calvinism could develop into the mature evangelical Protestantism of C&MA guru, A. W. Tozer, who could be remarkably perceptive about worship.  But just as likely the New Calvinism will go in a diferent direction because folks like Tozer and the C&MA are not new or hip.

What Would John Calvin Say to Rowan Williams, and to Billy Graham for that matter?

Published on by D. G. Hart31 Comments

David Neff, editor-in-chief at Christianity Today, writes a piece under the provocative title of “What would John Calvin Say to Dick Cheney?” Calvin is hot.  It’s the 500th, after all.  And the Bush administration is as out of favor as Calvin is supposedly accessible.

The point of Neff’s piece is actually quite sensible.  It has to do with the abuses of the Bush administration in asserting to itself powers above the law.  (Pssst.  Real American conservatives know that Congress is the branch to trust, not the White House.)  Granted, Neff may be guilty of sucking up to the new administration when he credits President Obama with understanding that “whether the issue is the torture of detainees, due process for American citizens suspected of terrorism, or eavesdropping on our private communications without appropriate judicial warrants, the President of the United States is bound by law.”  We’ll see how well any American president resists the temptation of imperial power.

Neff goes on to write as if Calvin would have agreed with Obama and opposed Cheney.  According to Neff:

But what about the unfaithful political leader? Calvin wrote that “dictatorships and unjust authorities are not governments ordained by God.” They are no longer “God’s ministers” if they “practice blasphemous tyranny.”

What a striking phrase: “blasphemous tyranny”! And how apt. When rulers place their own goals ahead of protecting God-given laws and liberties, they are not only being tyrannical, they are also blaspheming.

Continue reading “What Would John Calvin Say to Rowan Williams, and to Billy Graham for that matter?” →