Category: Adventures in Church History

Feeling at Home

Published on by D. G. Hart25 Comments

I used this quote over at Patheos but given the excitements round hyeh the last week or so, a reminder about being strangers and aliens from a Roman Catholic intellectual invoking Augustine might be useful. I will include as well Peter Lawler’s comments about the Confederate Flag for good measure:

I really was quite moved when, driving through the heavily gay midtown section of Atlanta last Sunday, I saw so many homes and businesses flying the rainbow flag with the American flag. It’s not a a small thing that so many gays now feel fully at home in their country, where they’re free to live openly as who they are. But I wish more people were moved by Catholic writers calling for the American flag to be removed from the sanctuaries of their churches. Some argue that it never should have been there in the first place, and a Christian should always think of himself, as Saint Augustine says, as an alien or a pilgrim in his country. Still, many Christians have written in the last few days they have come to think of themselves, for the first time, as aliens in their country, and they know they will soon be marginalized if they live loudly and proudly (and charitably) as who they are.

Notice that I’ve managed to avoid waxing judgmental about the Confederate battle flag, although Apple moved to banish Civil War games that show that flag in the context of Confederate soldiers actually going into battle. Well, let me add one point: The main flag fact about the South today, especially the small-town South, is not the Stars and Bars; it’s the Stars and Stripes seen everywhere in places public and private, commercial and residential. The Confederate flag, it goes without saying, is hardly at all and shouldn’t be at all a sign of some present-tense form of allegiance. That doesn’t mean Americans should be deprived of historical literacy just because one flag lost and even deserved to lose. And it shouldn’t be a thought crime to believe that Lee and Jackson were really great generals and even good (although certainly misguided) men.

Now all we need is for President Obama to apologize for flying the gay pride flag.

No, wait. I forgive him. Who says Old Life is angry?

2 Paradigms and a 2K Wrinkle

Published on by D. G. Hart77 Comments

Maura Jane Farrelly thinks the difference between the way Roman Catholics and Protestants know God also explains support for political freedom:

What is curious about this unwillingness of non-specialists in American Catholic history to entertain the possibility that nineteenth-century anti-Catholicism might have been rooted in something real is that historians who focus on the American Catholic experience have acknowledged for many years now that there was (and to some extent still is) a fundamental tension between “American” and “Catholic” values. Granted, polemicists like George Weigel and Michael Novak would have us believe that there is a seamless philosophical and even theological line running from “Thomas Aquinas to [the Italian Jesuit] Robert Bellarmine to the Anglican divine, Richard Hooker; then from Hooker to John Locke to Thomas Jefferson.” In an essay kicking off the American Catholic bishops’ campaign against the Affordable Care Act in 2012, Weigel insisted that the United States owes more to Catholics for its tradition of religious liberty “than the Sage of Monticello likely ever knew.”

But among those writers on Catholicism who have been motivated by a desire to engage with a faithful rendering of the past (rather than a desire to use history to dismantle the signature legislative achievement of a Democratic president), the consensus is that American Catholics have been animated, in historian Jay Dolan’s words, by “two very diverse traditions,” one exemplified by “Thomas Aquinas and Ignatius of Loyola,” and the other exemplified by “Jefferson and Lincoln.”

Dolan has been joined by John McGreevy, Jim O’Toole, Mark Massa, and others in acknowledging that—to quote Massa —”in the history of Western Christianity, there have been two distinctive (and to some extent, opposing) conceptual languages that have shaped how Christians understand God and themselves.” The first language—which shapes the world of people who have been raised as Catholics, American or otherwise—”utilizes things we know to understand things we don’t know, including and especially God.” The Church, in this language, becomes an incarnation of Jesus—its community and the doctrines and hierarchies that govern that community and can be known and experienced by the community’s members become a tangible (dare we even say “fleshy”?) way for Catholics to comprehend God and the salvation that God promises. The mindset that emerges from a language such as this, according to Mark Massa, is one that exhibits a “fundamental trust and confidence in the goodness of … human institutions.”

The second language, utilized by Protestant theologians from Martin Luther and Jean Calvin to Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, emphasizes the “fact of human estrangement and distance from God.” In this language, it is the Word—the message of judgment and grace, embodied in Christ and found not in the institution of the Church, but in the sanctified lines of Scripture—that convicts the soul, convinces it of its sinfulness, and “prepares us for an internal conversion that makes us true children of God.” The mindset that emerges from language such as this is one that tends to be suspicious of institutions and sees them as distractions that stand between the individual and the Word. Doctrines and hierarchies are “potentially an idolatrous source of overweening pride,” Massa writes; the danger in them is that they are corruptible examples of human beings’ mistaken belief that they can save themselves.

(Parenthetically, if a difference does exist between American and Roman Catholic ideals, then Pope Francis’ encyclical may be another indication of such.)

Farrelly goes on to use this difference — between respect for institutions and hierarchy and promoting civil liberties — to conclude that the U.S. bishops Fortnight for Freedom is more American than Roman Catholic:

It is probably still true that the politicians and religious leaders who railed against Catholicism in the first half of the nineteenth century were motivated by a certain degree of status anxiety—some, perhaps, such as Lyman Beecher, more than others. But it is also true that these leaders were motivated by a real sense that the Catholic understanding of freedom was different from theirs, and they were right to see Catholics’ support of the institution of slavery as the embodiment of this difference. Freedom, for Catholics, was corporate; it was born of the “reciprocal duties” that one priest from colonial Maryland insisted all people had to one another. Freedom, for Catholics, was not “personal,” the way it was for Protestants like Theodore Parker.

It is no small irony, therefore, that modern-day Catholics like Bishop William Lori of Baltimore have been appealing to personal freedom in their attempt to protect the collective freedom of the Catholic Church from the mandates of a law that supporters say defines healthcare as a “requirement of a free life that the community has an obligation to provide.” In 2012, on the eve of the Church’s first “Fortnight for Freedom”—a now annual event that highlights “government coercions against conscience” such as the birth control provision in the Affordable Care Act—Lori made his reasons for opposing the healthcare overhaul clear: “If we fail to defend the rights of individuals,” he warned, “the freedom of institutions will be at risk.”

The problem with this analysis is — see what I’m doing here — two-fold.

Conceptually, a religious conviction need not — and here I duck because of the A2K blow back — require a political practice or ideal. At least for confessional Protestants who distinguish between the civil and spiritual realms, one can, for instance, advocate aristocracy (Presbyterianism) in the church while still supporting monarchy in the kingdom (most Scottish Presbyterians did this). And if Roman Catholics were 2k, you could conceivably support hierarchy and submission in the church (say hello to papal monarchy) and republicanism in society. Think Richard John Neuhaus.

Practically, Farrelly’s distinction also fails to make sense of American Protestants and the civil religion they have cultivated. If God is only known in Scripture, then why can his ways be discerned either in the “redeemer nation,” the United States, or in the God-and-country party, the GOP? If only Protestants were as wary of nation-states and political parties as Farrelly suggests they are.

The difference between Roman Catholics and Protestants is this. The former are conflicted about the United States. The options appear to be either a sloppy wet kiss of America and its ways, or an ultramontanist critique of the United States as a land of self-centered, imperialistic ambition (see Laudato Si). Protestants are also conflicted but not in the same way. Evangelical and liberal Protestants think of America as a Christian nation — either it is a beacon of truth and liberty and justice or it should be condemned for failing to be such. Confessional Protestants who reside in America think about the nation not redemptively but politically and so appear to be insufficiently patriotic.

Even Romans Wasn't That Long

Published on by D. G. Hart25 Comments

Boniface once again shows why he is a much more important read than Bryan and the Jasons. This time he explains why a papal letter has to be 187 pages (!!!!) long:

Modern encyclicals are a curious thing. The encyclical developed from the papal bull. The bull was a primarily juridical instrument used as a means of promulgating an authoritative judgment of the Holy See, either in matters of doctrine or governance. These could often be very short; we marvel today at reading something like Boniface VIII’s Unam Sanctam (1302) – which famously declared that submission to the Roman pontiff was necessary for salvation – and is only a page long! Papal bulls in the old days knew what they wanted to say and they said it.

The modern encyclical developed out of the Enlightenment period as the popes realized that broader literacy and intellectual challenges to Christian revelation necessitated using the papal bull as a means of educating the flock on Catholic teaching, and hence by the time of the French Revolution the bull had begun to transform into the encyclical, the teaching letters of the modern pontiffs.

The encyclicals of the 19th and early 20th century are lucid and clear. Their purpose is to expound Catholic doctrine and defend it against modern errors, which they do very admirably. A friend recently commented to me that in thinking back on great documents like Pascendi, Quas Primas, Casti Conubii and so forth, one can immediately recall the substance of of them and the force of their arguments. Pius XII taught that the encyclical was the normative means by which the Roman pontiff exercised his teaching office. The same cannot be said about modern encyclicals – who can easily summarize what Redemptor Hominis or Populorum Progressio are about except in the vaguest terms?

That’s not to say pre-Vatican II encyclicals were always to the point; the pre-Conciliar popes certainly had their moments of rambling – but at least their rambling was clear and fun to read!

When we get to Vatican II, a noticeable change comes about. I personally attribute this to John XXIII’s famous principle from the opening of the Second Vatican Council:

“Nowadays however, the Spouse of Christ prefers to make use of the medicine of mercy rather than that of severity. She consider that she meets the needs of the present day by demonstrating the validity of her teaching rather than by condemnations.”

This principle has effected the manner in which the post-1965 ecclesia docens functions. Essentially, the post-Conciliar encyclical doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. The popes have still utilized them as a means of teaching, but rather than teaching what Catholic doctrine consists of, they have increasingly become occasions for popes to explain why Catholic doctrine is what it is.

That’s not entirely a bad thing; fides quaerens intellectum, right? But somewhere along the way the popes seemed to have dropped the declarative aspect of the encyclical in the overly optimistic hope that if we could just explain our teaching to the world – just walk them through our thinking step by step – then maybe the world would accept the Church’s message. Maybe if we simply “proposed” our rationale for belief humbly instead of declaring that we “had” the truth, the world would reciprocate and enter into a “fruitful dialogue” with Christianity that would mutually enrich everybody?

Boniface also explains why recent popes are attractive to intellectualist Protestants even while forgetting the real (or historic) source of their power:

(a) The world does not reject the Gospel because it has not been adequately explained. They reject it “because the light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than the light: for their works were evil” (John 3:19).

(b) Even when its has opted for explaining rather than declaring the Church’s teaching, the Church has done a poor job of it because it has chosen to explain its teachings in terms of humanist phenomenology rather than having recourse to the Church’s traditional pedagogy.

(c) By focusing so much on the explanation and presentation over the declaration, the Church has unwittingly given the false impression that the validity of its teachings are bound up with the force of her argumentation, a kind of false intellectualism. She feels shaky and inadequate simply saying, “Such is the voice of the Church; such is the teaching of our Faith”; she feels she must offer a humanistic centered explanation for everything – an explanation that will “suit” the needs of “contemporary man” – with the effect that her message has become completely man-centered. “He taught as one who had authority” (Matt. 7:29) said the people of old about Christ; but when the Church forgets the supernatural force that stands behind her teaching and opts instead for an anthropomorphized message, she no longer “speaks with authority”, in the sense that her words lose their force. Hence people shrug at the latest papal document and move on.

(d) Finally, because the popes have sought for novel means to propose their teachings, encyclicals lose their strenght as teaching documents and become instead opportunities for the popes to foist their own theological or literary tastes on the Catholic people. The phenomenology of John Paul II, the Balthasarian-Hegelian-Teilhardism of Benedict XVI, and now the sort of “literary theology” of Francis. Each pontiff has opted not use traditional pedagogy, which means every pope has to “try something new” in how they choose to teach.

The irony, of course, is that the more popes “teach,” the less Roman Catholics learn.

Surely someone is smart enough among the bishops to figure this out.

More Doctrinal Evolution

Published on by D. G. Hart195 Comments

If it’s wrong for Protestants to think that Calvin and Luther were simply reiterating what Paul and Peter taught, isn’t it also wrong for Roman Catholics to think that Trent was a doctrinal glimmer in the eye of the early church fathers? Merely waving the wand of doctrinal development won’t help you think historically, or understand that history is always moving, never static. And if history is fluid — which it is, as I, a licensed historian, can assure you — then what happened in the sixteenth century was not inevitable.

The way to look at it is that Luther and Calvin were in the mix of theological reflection that was going on for well over five hundred years and the Council of Trent decided to go one way and not the other. And if that is true, then Roman Catholicism as we know it (minus — ahem — Vatican I and Vatican II) started in the 1540s as much as Lutheranism started in the 1530s and Reformed Protestantism in the 1540s.

For support I appeal to Richard Muller:

The understanding of “catholic” and “schismatic” thought in the sixteenth century must be revised away from the modern denominational approach that, on the side of historians of the Roman Church, has all too willingly denied patristic and medieval roots to the Reformation and that, on the other side of older generations of Protestant historians, has tended to view the Middle Ages as harboring but few forerunners of the Reformation. The Reformers did not view themselves as schismatic; rather, they understood themselves as representative thinkers of the Catholic church. Nor can they be seen as radicals who allowed only the Bible as their foundation to the exclusion of tradition: their approach, as easily documented from their citations, was to use scripture as their ultimate norm and tradition as a subordinate, albeit fallible, support. This approach to the relation of scripture and tradition is, of course, contrary to the views of the Council of Trent, but it is surprisingly like the position of Thomas Aquinas and a great number of other major medieval thinkers. The Protestant use of patristic and medieval sources, moreover, became more explicit in the later generations of the Reformation; the nature of that reception should be a significant element of a revised historiography. (from Seeing Things Their Way)

Historians may not save us, but they can help.

White Smoke over Synod of Dordt

Published on by D. G. Hart1,260 Comments

Commissioners to the 82nd General Assembly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church have unanimously elected Archibald Alison as its moderator. We did not even vote. Only one nomination and then silence.

For information on Archie, go here.

In point of fact, Presbyterians, who do things decently and orderly, don’t blow smoke when we elect a moderator. And being moderator is not a matter of privilege. You are virtually on your feet for 10 hours a day and have to keep score of motions, seconds, substitute motions, Robert’s Rules, and privileges of the floor.

Gray smoke will be evident once commissioners retire for the evening.

Muslims and Baptists Together (Calvinists too)

Published on by D. G. Hart12 Comments

Barry Hankins observes that Baptists are beginning to understand the experience of Muslims in the United States:

what if Baptists, like Muslims, wanted to live by a different set of laws than the state of Texas or the United States? Funny you should ask, since in the run up to the Supreme Court’s gay marriage case, the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission (CLC) urged churches to insert in their bylaws a clause specifically defining biblical marriage. Anticipating the Court’s ruling, expected in June, CLC writer John Litzler said that if gay marriage becomes legal, this “will affect the relationship of all Texas Baptist churches in their dealings with local, state, and federal laws.”

Under current civil rights law, churches should be exempt from a redefinition of marriage. But no one can be sure where this issue may go in the future. . . .

So, what does the CLC warning to Baptists on gay marriage have to do with Sharia law? It’s simply this: Muslim leaders acknowledge that their religious practices are at odds with some facets of American law. Baptists are beginning to realize the same thing could happen to them. Under Sharia law, a panel of Muslim clerics wants the right to say to mosque members, “American law may say you can divorce or have an abortion, but Sharia says ‘maybe not.’ ” Likewise, Baptists want to be able to say, “American law may say gay marriage is legal, but it will not be practiced in a Baptist church. Baptists live by a different moral code.” Of course the individual Muslim or Baptist can choose to leave the mosque or church. Neither Sharia law nor Baptist bylaws can be enforced by the state.

It has been a long time since Baptists have had to live with this sort of tension between their theology and their nation’s civil law, but it was once the norm. As my new book Baptists in America: A History shows, for the first two centuries of their history Baptists were outsiders. In order to practice their faith they had to violate laws. Their colonial governments said they had to pay religious taxes. They refused.

In point of fact, all Christians have had to live with differences between civil and ecclesiastical (or canon law) since the disestablishment of churches in Massachusetts in 1833. Blue Laws might close down all businesses but the state wasn’t going to make you go to the evening service. State laws about divorce may have reinforced Christian notions about marriage but finding a church to let you out of a marriage (unless you’re Ted Kennedy) was much harder once upon a time in the church than in the legislature.

2k would have helped Christians set their expectations for public life appropriately. But from Dwight Eisenhower to Barack Obama, Christians have loved the fusion of religious and national identity. Should we thank homosexuals for reminding that we seek a better country?

What A Call with Integrity Sounds Like

Published on by D. G. Hart21 Comments

If Bryan and the Jasons had truly been conservative Presbyterians, they would have carried suspicions of liberalism into the Roman Catholic Church with them. But that they continue to insist that Protestantism and Roman Catholicism represent two distinct paradigms while not recognizing the two paradigms that exist on both sides of the Tiber — one anti-modernist and one indifferent to modernism and its effects — they miss the central dynamic of modern Christianity.

Boniface at Unam Sanctum lays out that dynamic well. It is the relationship between the church and the world. Conservative Presbyterians after the 1920s were and still are on the look out for compromises with the world. So was the Roman Catholic Church. But since Vatican 2, Roman Catholic wariness has disappeared. Boniface explains:

The goal of the Christian life if holiness. Yet what is holiness? What does it meant to be holy? We understand that we are called to be loving, forgiving, etc. But what does it mean to be “holy”? Is holiness a mere sum of all other natural and supernatural virtues? And what about God? God is love, power, forgiveness, justice and so on. But what does it mean when the angels cry that God is “holy, holy, holy?”

The fundamental definition of holiness is separation. The Latin word for holiness is sanctitas, from whence sanctity. Holiness denotes separation or consecration unto God. When the angels cry “holy, holy, holy” it is because God is so far separate and distinct from all created things that awe is the only appropriate response in his presence. “Between creator and creature there can be noted no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them”, the Fourth Lateran Council taught (cap. 3, “On Heretics”). St. Thomas defines holiness as a firm separation of created things which are translated from profane use to use in the service of God (STh II-II Q. 81 art. 8). This is why Holy Water, Holy Cards, Holy Candles, Holy Oil, etc. have the adjective “holy” – once they are consecrated, they are “set apart” for divine worship exclusively. To use Holy Oil for cooking for Holy Water for common washing would be sacrilegious. Their consecration is what makes them “holy”, and hence set apart for divine use exclusively.

Of course, a person is holy in a different sense than an object, but the fundamental reality that holiness means separation remains. A man with Holy Orders is set apart for the service of God. A holy person is one whose life is separated from worldly concerns and activities and who already lives, even in the flesh, in contemplation of heavenly things. Holiness is separation; separation from worldly uses and a setting apart unto God, “who is above all, through all, and in all” (Eph. 4:6).

* * * * *

With the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church adopted a posture of “openness” to the world. Pope John XXIII harbored great hopes for a kind of reconciliation between the Church and the world that would lead to the mutual building up of both; what he called a “new order of human relations”, while also condemning those “prophets of gloom” who only saw the modern world in a negative light. This led to a massive paradigm shift in the post-Conciliar Church, a pivot towards the world. It matters not whether the Council documents ever called for this pivot; the essential weakness of the conservative response to the Council has been a narrow focus on the Council documents’ language and a failure to comprehend the Council as an event (see, USC, “Book Review: Second Vatican Council: An Unwritten Story”, Aug. 2013). The pivot happened and it must be acknowledged as a fact.

The result of this pivot was a blurring of distinction between the Church and world, between merely natural goods and supernatural goods. Worldly concerns seemed to be become the Church’s concerns. It started innocently enough with “world peace,” but then moved on to all sorts of other issues, occupying bigger and bigger parts of the Church’s canvas until the Church appeared as little more than an NGO concerned with worldly problems like climate change and youth unemployment. Not that the Church has no concern with temporal evils that offend God; but as the Church shifted its focus more and more towards merely natural goods, it began to address them with increasingly little reference to man’s supernatural ends.

The results were a spiritually deadening and embarrassingly banal Church that gives us such gems as “Driver’s Ten Commandments”, documents about immigration reform, and of course, encyclicals on global warming.

Boniface even detects such banality in the Pope Emeritus’ recent letter:

Perhaps this all expresses the tension in modern Catholicism – once one has opened up to the world, what is the overlap between one’s duties to the Church and to the world? What happens when they are in contradiction? Can they be in contradiction? In traditional Catholicism the answer was clear: the Church and the world were in a fundamental state of opposition. But once we have pivoted towards the world, what now?

Case in point: Consider Pope Benedict XVI’s recent letter in which the Pope Emeritus states that the Church’s pastors should be “shepherds for the whole world.” Benedict wrote:

“The service of a shepherd cannot be only limited only to the Church [even though] in the first place, we are entrusted with the care of the faithful and of those who are directly seeking faith. [The Church] is part of the world, and therefore it can properly play its service only if it takes care of the world in its entirety.”

What is a Catholic to make of these words? It is certainly true, in one sense, that since the mission of Christ was to redeem the whole human race, the Church can never concern herself solely with matters entirely internal. She must always be considering her mission ad gentes; God wills all men to be saved, and so we must labor for all men to be so.

This is nothing new. But is that the sense in which Benedict means it? He goes on to say that the Church “must be involved in the efforts that humanity and society put into action” to address “the questions of our times.”

The fundamental question is this: Is he envisioning the Church reaching out to make the world think about heavenly things, or the Church focusing more of its attention on worldly things? Does he want the Church to call the world to remember man’s supernatural ends, or is he proposing the Church help to world attain its merely natural ends? Is this a call of the world to the Church or a capitulation of the Church to the world? The problem is both philosophies can be read into Benedict’s words, depending on one’s predisposition.

Let me help Boniface out here by mentioning Pope Francis’ recent promotion of the “new evangelism.” Social gospel alert.

“We must not have fear to make the times of great challenges ours,” he continued.

Francis then said that people today are waiting on the church, “that it may know to walk with them, offering the company of the witness of faith that offers support with all, in particular with the most alone and marginalized.”

“How many poor people are waiting for the Gospel that frees!” the pope said. “How many men and women, in the existential peripheries generated by the consumer society, wait for our closeness and our solidarity!”

“The new evangelization therefore is this: to take awareness of the merciful love of the Father to truly become ourselves instruments of salvation for our brothers,” he said.

The term “new evangelization” was used frequently by Pope Benedict XVI, who created the pontifical council on the issue in 2010 and held a global meeting of bishops in Rome to discuss the matter in 2012. The exact meaning of the term and directive for the council have, however, remained a bit unclear.

Francis’ redefinition of the term seems to place the emphasis on evangelizing by example and in showing mercy and care for the poorest in society.

Touching on the process of catechesis later in his talk Friday, the pontiff said the question of how to educate the faithful “is not rhetorical but essential.”

Of course, the tension between the church and the world is not the dynamic merely of recent church history. When Tertullian asked about the relationship between Jerusalem and Athens, he was invoking the conflict between belief and unbelief. But since the late nineteenth century when Christians of various stripes wanted to do away (anti-dualism) with distinctions between nature and grace, special and general revelation, church and society, sacred and secular, the fundamental dilemma for western Christians (at least) has been whether to insist on such distinctions or whether to do away with them by making the kingdom of God a reality so much larger than the church (either bloated or itty-bitty).

If Bryan and the Jasons had picked this up while in Presbyterian circles, their call would sound different. And Bryan himself might be embarrassed by his alma mater’s decision to embrace diversity over evangelism:

Saint Louis University has removed a statue on its campus depicting a famous Jesuit missionary priest praying over American Indians after a cohort of students and faculty continued to complain the sculpture symbolized white supremacy, racism and colonialism.

Formerly placed outside the university’s Fusz Hall in the center of the private Catholic university, the statue will go to the university’s art museum, a building just north of the bustling urban campus.

The statue features famous Jesuit Missionary Pierre-Jean De Smet S.J. praying over two American Indians dressed in traditional clothing. Last Monday, just two days after graduation, it was removed from the location it has called home on campus for decades. . . .

The statue’s removal comes just months after controversy broke out at the Jesuit campus over a proposed statue to commemorate a six-night sit in that served as an extension of protests in nearby Ferguson.

After donors threatened to pull donations over the proposed statue, the university walked back the original intent of the statue, saying it would instead highlight the university’s values of diversity and inclusion.

If Bryan and the Jasons really want to reach the conservative Presbyterian and Reformed demographic, they really do need to find their anti-modernist selves.

You Can't Spell Presbyterian with "Me"

Published on by D. G. Hart48 Comments

My personal advice to any American Protestant is never to interrupt a debate between two English dissenting Protestants about celebrity pastors, but when one of them, Paul Helm, calls the other, Carl Trueman, a Presbyterian perfectionist, afflicted with “Bannerman’s Disease,” and “the zeal of a convert,” I can’t resist.

There are books of Church Order to be read, the contents of which are mastered by the lawyer-types of the church, and I confess that I do not find these a very satisfying genre. But besides this, I know without looking, that presbyterianism, like any such human system, leaks all the way. It leaks through nods and winks, through unattributable comments, through what is said and what is not said. Human society cannot be otherwise. We all know of poor people who have to protest their innocence all the way up, in courts of law and in Christian denominations, and that have been ruined by the attendant exposure, quite apart from the weeks and months of strain while documents are prepared and friendly counsel advised and the day of judgement awaited…. I say, in such circumstances thank God for religious consumerism. At least the aggrieved party can walk away, find another place of worship, and still earn a living.

I fancy that Carl goes on about this because he suffers from a sort of presbyterian perfectionism. Call it Bannerman’s Disease. A cynic might say that he has the zeal of a convert. When he bids us all to think with him of the church of Christ as a remnant, as living its life as if in exile, I’m with him all the way. And as I said in the post, I agree with critiques of the Big Men such as his. But not with the cure-all of Presbyterianism. The Black Book does not solve the bugbear of accountability. And the point is, if there’s nothing better in the Church of Christ that presbyterianism, let’s at least acknowledge its flaws. Carl recognizes the imperfections of the human natures of those that thumb the Black Book, and this is welcome. And this was my point. A perfect system administered by those with imperfections is de facto imperfect. Spurgeon famously said (from memory) ‘For me “lead me not into temptation” means “keep me off the committee”’.

Helm is right in a general Protestant church-is-imperfect sort of way that Presbyterianism leaks. But the system of church government that Calvin developed has real assets that Helm too readily ignores. Imagine, for instance, a faculty meeting where provost, department head, senior professor, and lecturer are all equal and you have some sense of the dynamics of session or presbytery. Or imagine a meeting of politicians where queen, prime minister, and back benchers are all equal, with the same authority, same access to debate, the same number of votes — 1. Presbyterianism is the great leveler and is no respecter of celebrity, age, fame, or Facebook friends. And because the meetings of elders are regular and absences must be excused by the wider body, to be Presbyterian is to be involved in a regular pattern of attendance where you are just one more member with no more rank or privilege than the guy sitting next to you. You have 12 books. He doesn’t have a Masters degree. You have journalists from national publications seeking an interview. The guy next to you fixes leaking toilets. In Presbyterianism, if you both are ordained you are both equal.

For the sake of the temptations that had to accompany his fame, Spurgeon should have said, “committees, put me on more of them.”

And even in those odd circumstances where a single officer has broad power thanks to the consolidation of finances and administration — say in a denominational committee — in Presbyterianism that rule of one becomes a secretary of a committee. The head of the foreign missions committee, does he have powers of the purse and can he influence votes? Maybe. But he’s merely a “general secretary” in Presbyterian church government. That means he is doing the bidding of the committee on foreign missions, which is a sub-committee of the whole assembly.

You want to knock the pride out of celebrity pastors? Make them Presbyterian.

If Presbyterianism checks the sort of privilege to which bishops are prone, it also beats congregationalism. To be sure, the democratic nature of congregational polity could also restrain the kind of egotism that afflicts celebrity pastors. But more often than not, the politics of local congregations witness large clans or members with large wallets having more sway than other members or families. And pastors of independent churches often resemble bishops since they function in a capacity above the rest of the church and have no formal peers in ministry.

What Helm fails to see is that Presbyterianism, if all officers go to meetings and submit to their fellow presbyters (if they don’t, they’re not Presbyterian), by its very nature humbles the proud. And face it, famous preachers are prone to pride as much as any other celebrity. But among those churches where Presbyterian government is most evident and Roberts Rules most consulted, celebrity is hardest to discern in the deliberations of assemblies.

Presbyterianism is not a perfect solution to either the parachurch (Gospel Coalition) or helicopter church (Rome), but it has its moments.

No It's Not

Published on by D. G. Hart788 Comments

Evangelicalism’s greatest problem is its beliefs. So thinks Jake Meador:

Evangelicalism’s biggest problem with regards to those outside evangelicalism isn’t our image, it’s our beliefs. That’s why Louie Giglio was uninvited from President Obama’s second inaugural. That’s why there was a mass freakout about Chick-fil-a despite the fact that even gay rights activists admitted that the leadership at Chick-fil-a was consistently kind and gracious to them. That’s why laws so modest and restrained as the Indiana RFRA illicit such outrage and why the SCOTUS Hobby Lobby ruling met a similar reaction last year. The groups being attacked in these cases are not Fred Phelps clones or even Pat Robertson clones. They are simply ordinary evangelical believers trying to live out their faith.

If the issue actually was that most cultural elites outside of the church simply didn’t understand what we actually believed and had all sorts of wrong ideas from seeing one too many stories about Fred Phelps, then maybe a rebranding campaign could “work” in the way that marketing campaigns work. Trying to convince everyone outside the church that we’re cool and “get it” and care about all the things Portlandia hipsters care about would get us somewhere. I’m not sure it’s a place worth going, mind, but it’d be something.

But the events of the past five years, or at least the past three years, should make it abundantly clear that ours is not a credibility problem. The issues are much greater than that. As Rod Dreher noted several months ago (and David Sessions made much the same point here), what we’re actually talking about are two societies that have beliefs about the basic nature of reality that are fundamentally antagonistic to one another. Note that they aren’t simply fundamentally different, but antagonistic. Set next to a difference of that nature, the attempts at finding superficial similarities look rather silly–which is precisely what they are.

Consider this if you want to make a big deal of Christian belief. Once upon a time the Christian world divided with important cultural implications when the Western Church added filioque to the Nicene Creed. Or remember the 16th century when beliefs really did matter to the differences between Roman Catholic and Protestant churches and the societies that underwrote them. Or remember too a more recent past when differences of beliefs made even liberal Protestants worry about a Roman Catholic president like Josiah Bartlet.

Beliefs have mattered.

They don’t any more. What matters now are divisions over morality, yes. And you can’t have a full-bore ethical system without some kind of theological or philosophical system. And that leads to a host of doctrinal differences that should actually divide Jake Meador from Rod Dreher. But for now those doctrinal convictions don’t divide the two bloggers.

What matters and has always mattered in U.S. history is morality and the degree to which personal moral convictions must be implemented as public policy or law. In the 1970s thanks to Francis Schaeffer channeling neo-Calvinism (in part), evangelicals bought the idea that neutrality didn’t exist, that faith went all the way down (read identity politics), and that secularism was stripping the public square of clothes. It was possible and still is every single day to practice most of one’s Christian convictions — Sabbath observance? — without turning it into law. Heck, you can even voluntarily choose life (even though Christians are right to try to protect the lives of innocents).

So the credibility that evangelicals seek has taken a beating because of the way they have conducted public arguments. Would they have won? Would social life have turned out any better if they didn’t adopt the very logic of gay rights — that one’s political identity cannot be distinguished from one’s personal convictions? I doubt it. News from Ireland today about the referendum on gay marriage suggests that Christians have few tricks up their sleeves in public debates.

But the difference has far less to do with beliefs than with politics and especially the age-old American trope of LIBERTY.