Category: Adventures in Church History

Selective Condemnation

Published on by D. G. Hart36 Comments

I am still wondering about the wisdom of Pope Francis’ condemnation of Turkey for the Armenian genocide. If the pope opposes the persecution of Christians, why not also condemn the nation of France since the French persecuted Protestants in the 16th century and Roman Catholics in the 18th? Or what about condemning England for persecuting Roman Catholics? Or Spain for persecuting Calvinists? So many persecutors, so few condemnations.

But Philip Giraldi offers the best reasons against seeing the pope’s condemnation in an endearing light:

But one nevertheless has to wonder at the consequences of an ex post facto establishment of accountability for a crime that began 100 years ago in a now nonexistent political entity with victims and perpetrators who are no longer alive. When I lived in Istanbul in the 1980s I knew many Armenians well enough to be invited into their homes and attend their church services. I also knew Roman Catholics with whom I went to Mass, and had friends at the Greek Patriarchate, the Phanar. Christians were allowed to worship freely, but there was always a sense that they were being permitted to do so on sufferance and that it was a privilege rather than a right in an overwhelmingly Muslim country. I visited Istanbul again this summer, and the increase in visible Islamic religiosity was startling, so I assume that Christians are even more on edge.

Given that Christians in Turkey are still allowed to worship and associate more or less freely, Pope Francis’s declaration can only make their status somewhat more delicate, as those who see Turkey as a Muslim rather than a secular nation, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will be able to play the nationalist card to make that vision a reality. The pace of the conversion of surviving historic churches into mosques will no doubt accelerate. In short, Pope Francis makes their situation more difficult in exchange for what I believe to be no actual net gain.

And then there is the essential hypocrisy of papal pronouncements. All too often the Church fails to live up to its own values. For me that occurred in dramatic fashion when Pope John Paul II conferred the appearance of Christian legitimacy on President George W. Bush by granting him four papal audiences. To his credit, the pope raised the issue of the deteriorating status of Christians in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East and called for peace in the region, but he did not do or say anything that might have a serious impact. If Turkey must be held accountable for massacres that took place in wartime 100 years ago, one has to wonder why the man who started a war unnecessarily, which at that point had killed scores of thousands of civilians and enabled the destruction of the ancient Christian communities in the Middle East, should be rewarded with multiple papal audiences.

I for one would have liked to have seen the pope refuse to meet with Bush or at least politely but publicly confront the president during the audience over what he had unleashed. Such a gesture could have had a real impact in the United States and just might have put the lie to the claims of success of the Iraq venture, which one still tends to hear on occasion, recently from Bush himself declaring that it brought “democracy.”

I understand that the sensitivities of the U.S. Catholic Church are important to the Holy See, and no pope would want to gratuitously contradict an American president, but it seems to me that the Church has a responsibility to bear witness as an antidote to ongoing evil backed by an assertion of Christian values. A public display of disapproval delivered to 78 million American Catholics might have served to restrain Bush-Cheney. And even if it did not, it would have been the right thing to do.

Which brings us to here and now. Concerning Pope Francis and his condemnation of Armenian genocide, I have to ask, “What have you done for me today?” The reticence of Christian organizations to get behind the Boycott, Divestments, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel in an attempt to help deliver self-determination and fundamental human rights to the Palestinians has mystified me. I understand that the Catholic Church does not want to make more confrontational its interaction with the often difficult Israeli overlords of ecclesiastical properties in Jerusalem, and the Church has its own priorities in support of Christian-Jewish dialogue that it would not want to damage. There is also lurking the issue of historic anti-Semitism within the Church, but BDS is a perfect vehicle for helping to redress a current wrong. It is nonviolent, nonconfrontational, and conforms with international law. Precisely what is boycotted, divested, or sanctioned can be tailored to specific issues like settlement building. BDS seeks to establish fundamental liberties for Palestinians, including the freedom to run their own affairs either as a separate state or as part of a truly democratic Israel that grants equal rights to all.

For Catholics there is also a personal stake in what goes on in Israel, namely that the Church has an ancient physical presence in Israel and Palestine that is diminishing and under siege. The abuse of Christian clergy and laity in Israel has been widely reported, and there are 50 laws that discriminate in various ways against non-Jews. The Israeli bureaucracy de facto aids the process by refusing basic services for non-Jews, appropriating or infringing on Christian and Muslim religious sites, and systematically denying things like building permits even if there is no law that is directly applicable.

Best of all, if ministers of God’s word need a “thus sayeth the Lord” before their utterances, bishops, pastors, and priests might say a lot less and shepherd the flock a lot more. Hallelujah.

What Would Happen if the PCUSA and OPC Started Ecumenical Dialogue?

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

If the OPC began to enter into ecumenical discussions with the PCUSA would someone be justified in thinking that the OPC had changed its estimate of the PCUSA? And would this change indicate a shift within the OPC itself to the point that you might plausibly argue that the denomination’s teaching had changed? In other words, what would it take for the OPC to recognize the PCUSA at least as a conversation partner?

On the matter of confessional statements, the OPC would have to get around the Barmen Declaration and the Confession of 1967. That’s enough to end the conversation.

On matters of practice and discipline, the OPC would have to overlook the ordination of women, the ordination of homosexuals, and the recognition of gay marriage. In questions about worship, the OPC would have to come to terms with a PCUSA hymnal that has some clunkers and that took the stuffing out of good hymns.

So with all these reservations, if the OPC went ahead and opened up discussions with the PCUSA, onlookers might well think that the OPC had lost its way, that the doctrine and practice that had once characterized the communion were no longer important, and that the OPC’s understanding of Reformed Protestantism had changed?

So now as folks like Ross Douthat wonder if changes surrounding sex and marriage will change not just discipline but the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, why don’t those same folks wonder about what Vatican II did in reclassifying Protestants as separated brethren? Sixteenth-century bishops only knew those outside the church as infidels, schismatics or heretics. Separated brethren did not become part of episcopal language until the 1960s. And this came at a time when the Protestant churches were liberal (at least from the perspective of communions like the OPC). Sure, they weren’t in the ballpark of going soft on homosexuality and marriage. But the Protestants the bishops had in mind were not in communions like the OPC but were in denominations like the PCUSA where Reformed orthodoxy was hardly firm.

What would allow the bishops to change that understanding of Protestantism? And isn’t this indicative of a change in doctrine — not technically in the language of the catechisms or papal documents? Doesn’t this reflect a change in the understanding of the doctrine that defined Roman Catholicism or the degree to which doctrine or liturgy matter? If folks who were once in error and whose views needed to be anathematized now look like Christians who are worthy of dialogue, hasn’t something changed?

Should Biography Be So Important?

Published on by D. G. Hart23 Comments

Ross Douthat’s article on Pope Francis reflects the smarts, insights, and courage that characterizes almost everything the columnist writes. His conclusion about a potential disruption of the church by the current pope is again refreshing, especially coming from a conservative, since most converts and apologists hum merrily the tune of “nothing changes, we have the magisterium.” Douthat recognizes that this ecclesiology makes it almost impossible for conservatives to stop a progressive-led disruption:

In the age of Francis, this progressive faith seems to rest on two assumptions. The first is that the changes conservatives are resisting are, in fact, necessary for missionary work in the post-sexual-revolution age, and that once they’re accomplished, the subsequent renewal will justify the means. The second is that because conservative Catholics are so invested in papal authority, a revolution from above can carry all before it: the conservatives’ very theology makes it impossible for them to effectively resist a liberalizing pope, and anyway they have no other place to go.

But the first assumption now has a certain amount of evidence against it, given how many of the Protestant churches that have already liberalized on sexual issues—again, often dividing in the process—are presently aging toward a comfortable extinction. (As is, of course, the Catholic Church in Germany, ground zero for Walter Kasper’s vision of reform.)

Contemporary progressive Catholicism has been stamped by the experience of the Second Vatican Council, when what was then a vital American Catholicism could be invoked as evidence that the Church should make its peace with liberalism as it was understood in 1960. But liberalism in 2015 means something rather different, and attempts to accommodate Christianity to its tenets have rarely produced the expected flourishing and growth. Instead, liberal Christianity’s recent victories have very often been associated with the decline or dissolution of its institutional expressions.

Which leaves the second assumption for liberals to fall back on—a kind of progressive ultramontanism, which assumes that papal power can remake the Church without dividing it, and that when Rome speaks, even disappointed conservatives will ultimately concede that the case is closed.

Aside from Douthat’s insights into the dynamics of the Francis papacy, his article also reveals the fundamental problem with episcopal church government. Most of the article is a review of three biographies in which Douthat tries to discern from the tea leaves of Francis’ life the direction of his papacy:

Yet several crucial issues—some raised explicitly by Ivereigh, some implicit in all three biographies—set Francis’s background and worldview apart. They help explain why his pontificate looks much more friendly to progressive strands within Catholicism than anyone expected from the successor to the previous two popes.

First, Jorge Bergoglio had a very different experience of globalization than Karol Wojtyła (who would become Pope John Paul II) and Joseph Ratzinger did in Europe, one shaped by disappointments particular to his country. For most of his life, his native Argentina was an economic loser, persistently underperforming and corruption-wracked. During the 1980s, inequality and the poverty rate increased in tandem; in the late ’90s and early 2000s, while Bergoglio was archbishop, Argentina endured a downturn and a depression. Where his predecessors’ skepticism of capitalism and consumerism was mainly intellectual and theoretical, for Bergoglio the critique became something more visceral and personal.

Second, in the course of his political experience in Argentina, he encountered very different balances of power—between the left and the right, between Church and state, and within global Catholicism—than either of the previous two popes confronted. As much as Bergoglio clashed with Marxist-influenced Jesuits, the Marxists in Argentina weren’t running the state (as they were in John Paul’s Poland, and in the eastern bloc of Benedict’s native Germany). They were being murdered by it. Likewise, the fact that the Church in Argentina was compromised during the Dirty War had theological implications: it meant that for Bergoglio, more-intense forms of traditionalist Catholicism were associated with fascism in a very specific, immediate way. And coming from the Church’s geographical periphery himself, Bergoglio had reasons to sympathize with the progressive argument that John Paul had centralized too much power in the Vatican, and that local churches needed more freedom to evolve.

Third, while highly intellectual in his own distinctive way, Francis is clearly a less systematic thinker than either of his predecessors, and especially than the academic-minded Benedict.

Douthat may not mean it this way, but why is it unfair to surmise that in the case of a bishop (even the one in Rome), the personal is truly political. Was this the way it was supposed to be, especially when the bishops were supposed to follow apostolic teaching? Where are the teaching of Scripture, the dogma of the church, or sacramental observance as decisive for Francis’ ministry? Why would his own personal experience be more important for setting the papacy’s agenda than the received traditions of the church?

The advantage of Presbyterianism, aside from its commitment to the antiquity of the prophets and the apostles, is that the rule by committee prevents any single bishop (read overseer or presbyter) from having his biography determine the assemblies or ministry of the church (unless you’re in the PCA in NYC). That may not be enough to crack the logic of Bryan’s noggin or turn Loser Ken’s head from all those trophies, but it’s something.

Even Michael Sean Winters thinks the bishops need more accountability (and who can blame him after what’s happened in Kansas City, but don’t forget about Pope Francis’ approval of what’s happening in Chile):

There are structural changes the Church can make that would serve to provide greater accountability. For much of the Church’s history, the decisions of a bishop could be appealed to his metropolitan archbishop, and the decisions of the metropolitans could be appealed to another metropolitan or to a national or regional body of metropolitans. The system was undone not by any decision the Church made but by the disruption in the Church’s life caused by Napoleon. In those tumultuous years, appeals to Rome became the norm. Today, the only vestige of the earlier system is that a bishop’s judicial decisions can be appealed to the metropolitan, and the decisions of a marriage tribunal are automatically reviewed by the metropolitan tribunal. But, only about ten percent of any bishop’s decisions are judicial. The other 90% are administrative, and if any appeal is sought from those, the appeal must be sent to Rome.

Just as the Holy Father has introduced a new body, the Council of Cardinals, to advise him, the Church could bring back the earlier system of appeal to metropolitans for all administrative decisions. How would that change things? If a bishop knew his decisions were open to expedited review by someone nearby, he might be more inclined to try and work things out amicably within his own diocese, or to consult with the other bishops about an especially problematic situation, in advance. It would not guarantee there would be no mistakes, but it would start to put flesh on the idea of episcopal collegiality articulated at Vatican II.

Hey, Mike, this is the kind of review that happens every single month when a consistory or session meets, or every four months when classis or presbytery meets, or every year when Synod or General Assembly meets. Face it, Reformed Protestantism put the reform in Reformation.

How Far Is the Sidestream from the Main One?

Published on by D. G. Hart104 Comments

Travels to Hungary earlier this week and a pleasant conversation with a young woman training to be a pastor in the Hungarian Reformed Church got me thinking about women, gender, and how important male clergy is to “the gospel.” This woman could not quite wrap her mind around the idea that a church still places restrictions on ordination. The argument that Paul taught that elders and pastors should be male, since they should be married to only one wife (and Paul wasn’t thinking of Ellen DeGeneres), didn’t seem to be sufficient.

So I started to think, thoughts that took me back to CRC days, what is such a big deal about ordaining women? It is an error and violates God’s word, which is synonymous with sin (“any want of conformity unto or transgression of”). But Covenanters can fellowship with hymn singers which for some exclusive psalm folks is a violation of God’s word. Which means we all look the other way at least ecumenically when it comes to interpreting God’s word.

The experience of conservative Reformed boomers, however, was that the hermeneutic that allowed the ordination of women was one that would lead to cutting and pasting the rest of God’s word and church order. As a boomer this argument — the slippery slope one that almost sent me to Vietnam — makes some sense. But what if a communion decided simply to draw the line at women’s ordination? We will go this far, the women’s ordinationists might say, but no farther. Isn’t that what some communions have done with hymns? We will sing them but not P&W Praise Songs? In which case, what is the threshold that women’s ordination crosses by itself? Or is it simply a case of knowing what history teaches — when women ascend the pulpit doctrine slips.

Along with this set of thoughts went the one about women and head coverings. Should a communion like the OPC be consistent and encourage (maybe discipline) women to cover their heads in worship, with some preference given to those with long hair? Is this another one of those hermeneutical instances where we look the other way? At the same time, doesn’t the reality of women not wearing scarves in OPC churches, along with our hip and up-to-date revision of the Confession of Faith on the civil magistrate — doesn’t this make the OPC mainstream?

Oh yeah. What Christian women today would wear a head scarf? That’s Islam.

Independence Day in Calvinist "Rome"

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

After a stimulating conference in Hungary on international Calvinism, yesterday conferees concluded their visit by taking a tour of Debrecen, the stronghold of the Hungarian Reformed Church, and the place where on April 14 (which was yesterday), 1849, the Hungarians declared independence at the city’s Great (not pretty good) Church. Here’s one account of what happened:

Hungary had been ruled successively by Turkish sultans and Austrian emperors for centuries when the 1848 upsurge of revolutionary nationalism in Europe struck Budapest, where liberty, equality and fraternity were rousingly declared, the single political prisoner left in gaol was freed (a tiresomely loquacious old soul he proved to be) and the Habsburg regime was forced to accept a Hungarian national government. The new, eighteen-year-old Emperor Franz Josef’s attempt to regain control was countered the following year by a declaration that ‘the perjured House of Habsburg-Lorraine’ had broken every tie of mutual obligation between itself and Hungary. ‘Therefore the House of Habsburg is for ever deposed from sovereignty over Hungary and declared to have forfeited the throne and to be excluded and banished in the name of the nation.’ Henceforth, Hungary was independent. ‘We inform all the peoples of the civilised world of this fact,’ the manifesto went on, ‘in the firm conviction that it will accept the Hungarian nation, as the youngest but not unworthy brother, into the ranks of independent nations.’

The proclamation’s author was a radical journalist and agitator of forty-six named Lajos Kossuth, an ardent Magyar chauvinist although himself, ironically, of mixed Slovak and German stock. The Magyars were now in the minority in Hungary, outnumbered by Serbs, Croats, Romanians and Germans, and this was one of the complicating factors in the situation. Kossuth’s political pamphleteering against Austrian rule had earned him several years in prison for subversion in the 1830s and the sentence made him a popular hero, though his opinions were too extreme for many of the progressive intellectuals of the day. Elected to the Hungarian parliament, or Diet, in 1847, and a brilliant and inspiring speaker, he demanded the removal of the dead hand of Austrian absolutism as the essential preliminary to political and social reform. Bold, magnetic, resourceful and high-handed, he was appointed minister of finance in the new national government.

When a Croat army invaded Hungary in September 1848 to restore Austrian control, the Diet appointed Kossuth to head the committee of national defence. He organised a surprisingly successful Hungarian army and inspired the mass demonstrations which propelled the remaining rump of the Diet into issuing its manifesto of independence on April 14th, 1849. The Diet now appointed him Governor of Hungary.

That act of independence hardly fixed things for Hungarians or Hungarian Calvinists in a very complicated part of Europe. But as folks at the conference learned, the Reformed churches of central Europe are alive and kicking. Even though they may not be up to the standards that Presbyterians and Reformed promote in the Land of the Free, it’s hard to blame a communion that has had to deal with the Habsburgs and the Communists. And comparisons of United States’ and Hungarian Calvinism may teach a lot about how important environments are for the fauna that bloom as Reformed Protestantism. They may even teach yet again how positive religious liberty really is even if it also means freedom for a lot of objectionable stuff. No one said it would be all good.

If You Can Believe In God

Published on by D. G. Hart26 Comments

. . . you can believe almost anything.

Struck down on Good Friday, Lincoln, like Jesus, was viewed as a martyr who shed his blood and offered a redeeming sacrifice. Orators, editors, ministers, and statesmen across the North exalted Lincoln as the “savior of his country,” and sermons two days later on “Black Easter” and subsequent Sundays frequently compared Lincoln with Washington and Jesus. While Washington was the nation’s founder and father, ministers averred, Lincoln was its restorer and redeemer. While Christ died so that people could enjoy heaven, Lincoln died so they could have a better life on earth.

In making Lincoln the nation’s redeemer, ministers had to surmount two major difficulties: first, that he was fatally shot in a theater, an embarrassingly unsanctified place for a savior during the Victorian era. The clergy rationalized his attendance at Ford Theater, arguing that he had gone reluctantly to please his wife and gratify others.

The second, larger difficulty these pastors encountered was that Lincoln had never explicitly testified to his faith in Christ. While some pastors bitterly regretted that he did not publicly profess faith in Jesus Christ as his Lord, others countered that his actions demonstrated his faith or that he had accepted Christ as his savior in response to his son Willie’s death in 1862, or at Gettysburg in 1863, or at some other unknown time.

In their funeral sermons at Washington and Springfield respectively, the two ministers who knew Lincoln best—Phineas Gurley, the pastor of New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, which Lincoln regularly attended, and Methodist Bishop Matthew Simpson—said little about his personal faith. Gurley stressed that he had an “abiding confidence in the overruling providence of God.” Simpson emphasized that the president had “read the Bible frequently, loved . . . its profound teachings,” and sought to follow its precepts. He also claimed that Lincoln had sincerely striven to live by “the principles of revealed religion” and that no other ruler had shown as much “trust in God.”

To repeat, if Lincoln why not Obama?

Did We Miss May?

Published on by D. G. Hart79 Comments

All the talk about religious freedom has turned the calendar ahead to June — the traditional month of weddings. Kevin DeYoung reminds us why marriage ceremonies are so important:

A wedding ceremony, in the Christian tradition, is first of all a worship service. So if the union being celebrated in the service cannot be biblically sanctioned as a an act of worship, we believe the service lends credence to a lie. We cannot come in good conscience and participate in a service of false worship. I understand that sounds not very nice, but the conclusion follows from the premise; namely, that the “marriage” being celebrated is not in fact a marriage and should not be celebrated.

Moreover, there has long been an understanding that those present at a marriage ceremony are not just casual observers, but are witnesses granting their approval and support for the vows that are to be made. That’s why the traditional language speaks of gathering “here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation.”

This is true.

But have Christians truly been relying on such convictions in the way they practice wedding ceremonies? When my brother was married in 1973, the ceremony was simple and the reception even simpler — cake and punch in the church basement. (For all fathers with daughters out there, one phrase — “cake and punch, cake and punch.”) By the time of mine eight years later, we upgraded to upscale finger food, and a trio of string instruments at an offsite location — one that wouldn’t allow champagne or wine (which was just as well because both sets of parents were abstainers). Today, a Christian family can’t hold a wedding and reception for under five figures — or a good down payment on a home, and the list of guests is a sign of which friends and family need to be honored or included.

In other words, Christians have hardly preserved a distinct way of doing marriage but have joined the surrounding culture in turning it into something excessive — sort of the marriage version of the Super Bowl.

So if Kevin wants us to go back to simpler times, fine and good. But let’s not act like Christians have been preserving the sanctity of ceremonies or vows or commitments. And let’s not forget the way gay marriage has spooked us into rethinking marriage. We didn’t object to weddings when our non-Christian neighbors invited us to the local mainline Protestant church for the ceremony and the country club for the reception. But now we do.

Did He Really Say That?

Published on by D. G. Hart3 Comments

David Robertson does his best impersonation of a 2ker (minus the fear of Islam):

Why is Islam a threat to our society?

It was Christianity that brought the sacred/secular divide into the Western world. It was Christianity, especially after the Reformation, which taught that there were two kingdoms and that the one was not subject to the other. It was within that Christian context that secularism was able to develop and flourish. Christianity is the bedrock and foundation of our secular society. Islam is different. Islam has no doctrine of separation of the spiritual from the political. Islam is, and has always been, a political movement. There can be no such thing as secular Islam.

So secularization is a good thing. The sacred/secular divide is a good thing. The separation of the spiritual from the political is a good thing.

What 2k’s sayin’.

I wish the defender of Christian Scotland would employ this argument when he is tempted by political Christianity.

Will Heaven Be Boring?

Published on by D. G. Hart19 Comments

Maybe not the most sanctified question but after reading a fascinatingly sobering piece about the “troubles” in Northern Ireland I had to ask.

Sure the idea of no more suffering has appeal:

1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling placea of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people,b and God himself will be with them as their God.c 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (Revelation 21)

But part of what makes a story like this one in the New Yorker about Belfast so riveting is precisely the presence of mourning, crying, pain, loss, injustice, and death. For instance:

The disappearance of Jean McConville was eventually recognized as one of the worst atrocities that occurred during the long conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles. But at the time no one, except the McConville children, seemed especially concerned. When Helen returned home, she and Archie went out to look for Jean, but nobody could—or would—tell them anything about where she had been taken or when she might be back. Some weeks later, a social worker visited the apartment and noted, in a report, that the McConville children had been “looking after themselves.” Their neighbors in Divis Flats were aware of the kidnapping, as was a local parish priest, but, according to the report, they were “unsympathetic.”

Rumors circulated that McConville hadn’t been abducted at all—that she had abandoned her children and eloped with a British soldier. In Belfast, this was an incendiary allegation: Catholic women who consorted with the enemy were sometimes punished by being tied to a lamppost after having their heads shaved and their bodies tarred and feathered. The McConvilles were a “mixed” family; Jean was born Protestant and converted to Catholicism only after meeting her husband. The family had lived with Jean’s mother, in a predominantly Protestant neighborhood in East Belfast, until 1969, when they were driven out, as internecine tensions sharpened. They sought refuge in West Belfast, only to discover that they were outsiders there as well. Several weeks after the abduction, on January 17, 1973, a crew from the BBC visited the apartment and taped a segment. As the younger siblings huddled on the sofa—pale children with downcast eyes, looking shy and frightened—the reporters asked Helen if she had any idea why her mother had left. “No,” she said, shaking her head. Agnes McConville, who was thirteen, noted, hopefully, that her mother was wearing red slippers when she was taken away. She added, “We’ll keep our fingers crossed and pray hard for her to come back.”

So the dark and conflicted parts of life that make the Coen Brothers movies sing will no longer be part of the titles in my Netflix queue in the New Jerusalem. Hard to fathom.

Not only that, but the very notion of a narrative and a direction in history — part of what defines dramas, stories, movies, and history, a beginning, middle, and end — will no longer be part of human consciousness. Or what will be is some sort of awareness of living in a constant or on-going end.

Again, hard to imagine. Can anyone help (all about) me?

Proto-Protestant On A Roll

Published on by D. G. Hart57 Comments

And Constantinians (all kinds) should be very afraid:

Leithart’s Christ is not the Christ of Scripture. I say that not as a theological liberal who views Christ as a type of Gandhi and finds the idea of a coming Judgment to be abhorrent. I say this as a follower of Christ who understands the nature of the Spiritual Kingdom and our call to suffer as martyr-witnesses in This Age. The Triumphalism of Leithart is only to be understood in light of the Second Coming and in a context in which sin has been eradicated. A Postmillennialist like Leithart looks for the Church to bring in a millennial golden age, a Church through the force of cultural transformation to all but eradicate sin. Through culture and legislation (and presumably the Spirit) the reign of Christ will be brought to bear on This Age. Christ returns after the world has been Christianized… again a term and concept I would argue is the result of abstract philosophical commitment and speculation, not the fruit of New Testament exegesis.

I’ve always found it ironic that Calvinists, believers in Total Depravity would embrace such a vision of Christianization. I too embrace Total Depravity and believe there’s no Scriptural warrant for this view. They would argue the Spirit will effect this change. The same Spirit inspired the New Testament and provides a very different interpretation of the Old Testament than they will grant or receive and nowhere is there any suggestion that sin will in any way be diminished before Christ’s return or through the cultural efforts and/or political expressions of the Church.

Like the Dispensationalists they prioritize the Old Testament and its prophetic visions over and against the New Testament and its interpretation of them. In their systems The Old Testament interprets the New rather than vice versa. Rejecting the Apostolic hermeneutic they insist (like the Dispensationalists) that a future chiliastic kingdom is the destiny of the Church. The Dispensationalists believe this promise to be centered on Israel of the Old Covenant. The Postmillennialists rightly believe The Church is the New Israel and the inheritor of its promises but it wrongly believes that not only will the Church conquer Palestine, it will politically and culturally conquer the whole world. One camp believes the political millennium will be based on the Jews, the other on the Church but their basic assumptions are the same. They both embrace a politico-cultural doctrine of the Kingdom.

Both schools seek prophetic fulfillment apart from the Christocentric teachings of the New Testament. Both reject the New Testament’s teaching that all the Old Testament promises, types and symbols point to and find their fulfillment in Christ (2 Cor 1.20).