Category: Adventures in Church History

The Presbyterian Narrative

Published on by D. G. Hart69 Comments

If Ref21 had commboxes with their posts, I could simply make this point (or set of points) in response to Rick Phillips over there. But I guess ACE stands for Anti-Commbox Evangelicals.

At the risk of offending Bill McClay (as if he reads OL) who wrote a very fine piece on the “American narrative,” the invocation of the bad n-word, narrative, and attaching it to Presbyterian may allow me to make my point/s. Here is what McClay finds vexing about “narrative”:

It is one of those somewhat pretentious academic terms that has wormed its way into common speech, like “gender” or “significant other,” bringing hidden freight along with it. Everywhere you look, you find it being used, and by all kinds of people. Elite journalists, who are likely to be products of university life rather than years of shoe-leather reporting, are perhaps the most likely to employ it, as a way of indicating their intellectual sophistication. But conservative populists like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are just as likely to use it too. Why is that so? What does this development mean?

I think the answer is clear. The ever more common use of “narrative” signifies the widespread and growing skepticism about any and all of the general accounts of events that have been, and are being, provided to us. We are living in an era of pervasive genteel disbelief—nothing so robust as relativism, but instead something more like a sustained “whatever”—and the word “narrative” provides a way of talking neutrally about such accounts while distancing ourselves from a consideration of their truth. Narratives are understood to be “constructed,” and it is assumed that their construction involves conscious or unconscious elements of selectivity—acts of suppression, inflation, and substitution, all meant to fashion the sequencing and coloration of events into an instrument that conveys what the narrator wants us to see and believe.

I invoke “narrative” less to be trendy than to introduce to Presbyterians (real Calvinists?) the idea that we all have narratives and that we may want to be more self-conscious about them even without using the word. (Self-aggrandizement alert — I am a historian and I am actually licensed to think about “narrative.”)

Rick Phillips has a Presbyterian narrative that generally derives from New Side Presbyterianism, the ones who supported the First Pretty Good Awakening. That gives him the leverage, apparently, to further identify with New Calvinism over the Old (at least as long as the Old are critical of the new — mind you, criticism isn’t bad because New Siders and New Calvinists criticize Lutherans; where the Old Calvinists go off the rails, apparently, is in siding with Lutherans over New Calvininsts). Phillip’s affection for the New likely cools when it comes to the New School Presbyterians since they weren’t very good Calvinists. The Old School Presbyterians were good Calvinists, but they were also generally New Siders at heart — they liked aspects of the Pretty Good Awakening of the 18th century. When it comes to New Life versus Old Life, I’m betting Phillips will side with the former since Tim Keller represents the former and OL (duh) represents the latter. Plus, ins’t Keller a New Calvinist?

The problem with this narrative is that it does not address the rupture that the First Pretty Good Awakening introduced into Reformed Protestantism. The stress on experimental piety and revivals undermined the formal ministry and routine piety that had characterized many pockets of the Reformed world prior to the first celebrity pastor – George Whitefield.

What is also important to notice is that Reformed Protestants prior to Whitefield had no trouble identifying with Lutherans. Just look at the Harmony of the Confessions (1581). According to Wikipedia (another no no, but it sure is handy):

It grew out of a desire for one common Creed, which was modified into the idea of a selected harmony. In this shape it was proposed by the Protestants of Zurich and Geneva. Jean-François Salvart, minister of the Church of Castres, is now recognized as the chief editor of the work with some assistance from Theodore Beza, Lambert Daneau, Antoine de la Roche Chandieu, and Simon Goulart. It was intended as a defense of Protestant, and particularly Reformed, doctrine against the attacks of Roman Catholics and Lutherans. It does not give the confessions in full, but extracts from them on the chief articles of faith, which are classified under nineteen sections. It anticipates Georg Benedikt Winer’s method, but for harmonistic purposes.

But look at what these Old Calvinists decided to include in the Harmony:

Besides the principal Reformed Confessions (i.e., the Tetrapolitan, Basel and Helvetic, and Belgic Confessions), three Lutheran Confessions are also used, viz., the Augsburg Confession, the Saxon Confession (Confessio Saxonica), and the Württemberg Confession, as well as the Bohemian Confession (1573) and Anglican Confession (1562). The work appeared almost simultaneously with the Lutheran Formula of Concord, and may be called a Reformed Formula of Concord, though differing from the former in being a mere compilation from previous symbols.

So the question is, where did the love go? Why not more love for New Calvinists instead of Lutherans? And more importantly, what does this reveal about the Presbyterian narrative? Doesn’t it show that we have lost touch with a part of our tradition that used to regard Lutherans as more in sympathy with Reformed Protestantism than charismatics? It’s a free country and Phillips can tell whatever narrative he wants. But shouldn’t he admit he’s not telling the whole story? And one of the main factors that have prevented American Presbyterians from telling the whole story is their love affair with the First Pretty Good Awakening — an event that had all sorts of detractors on good confessional and ecclesiological grounds, sometimes who go by the name Old Side (not Old Light a Congregationalist term). (Self-serving alert: see Seeking A Better Country.)

What should also be noticed is that the Old Calvinists who put together the Harmony did not affirm union with Christ to the degree that Phillips does, as if it is the central dogma that holds Reformed Protestantism together. In fact, union is never mentioned in either the Belgic Confession or the Three Forms of Unity. If it does appear it is always in the word communion. So is Phillips prepared to dismiss the Three Forms of Unity (no pun here) in his insistence on union with Christ?

Finally, I have to take issue with Phillips’ misrepresentation of 2k, which in my mind borders on the rhetoric of the BBs:

Moreover, if being a Lutheran-leaning Old Calvinist means that I must embrace a radical two kingdoms position that will keep me from speaking publicly against manifest evils like abortion and homosexual marriage, then once again I am willing to have my Old Calvinist credentials held in derision.

I would prefer that Phillips extend the same generosity to 2k that he does to New Calvinism. But if he doesn’t want to, he should know that 2kers all affirm the confessions and catechisms of the Reformed churches which teach that murder and homosexual marriage are sinful. But even Lutherans know that carrying a baby to birth or marrying a person of the opposite sex is not going to merit God’s favor. And that is the point of 2k — for the guhzillionth time — that the good works performed in obedience to the law (state or ecclesiastical) won’t save. Can we get some credit here?

Postscript: Here’s is how a charismatic outsider sees it:

It is the revivalist style of at least some members of the New Calvinism punctuated by constant references to Jonathan Edwards and the rise of charismatic Calvinism that has many Old School Presbyterians concerned. Piper side-stepped the main issue between the two camps: from an Old-School perspective the New Calvinism smacks of the evangelical revivalism of a D. L. Moody, or, more to the point, the baseball-player-turned-evangelist Billy Sunday (insert Mark Driscoll reference here). Sunday once called the novelist Sinclair Lewis “Satan’s cohort” in response to Lewis’s 1927 satirical novel Elmer Gantry, whose main character—a hypocritical evangelist—was modeled on Sunday’s flamboyant style.

That older coalition of Congregationalists, Baptists, and New School Presbyterians combined dispensationalism, celebrity revivalism, and fundamentalism—the very traits that Old School Presbyterians disliked then and now. It is not without some irony that Piper acknowledged the important role of Westminster Seminary while not even mentioning that it was the epicenter of Old School Presbyterianism with its anti-revivalist and cessationist stance (at the end of his lecture Piper got a laugh when he said, “you don’t even want to know my eschatology.” Indeed!). . . . All of this is to say that the New Calvinism looks a lot like the old New School Presbyterianism with a Baptist and charismatic flair to it.

Does this make me an outsider? Or can outsiders pick up better what’s going on than insiders?

Postpostscript: Look mom, no inflammation:

In speaking of Old Calvinism, I admit that I am using the expression loosely for the community of Calvinists generally connected with Old School Presbyterianism and their conservative Reformed Baptist counterparts. One thinks of Martyn Lloyd-Jones and the Banner of Truth, and James Montgomery Boice and the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals (the host organization of this blog). They are united by a commitment to Five-Point Calvinism, ordinary means of grace ministry, the regulative principle of worship, and a traditional elder-rule approach to church polity.

Why Monarchies Are Out of Favor

Published on by D. G. Hart31 Comments

For more of the West’s history than not (from roughly 600 to the present), monarchy has been the preferred political order. Not until 1789 did constitutional republicanism become an alternative. Since then, republicanism (rule by the few) or democracy (rule by the many) have been the characteristic features of the West’s politics. Sure, we still have a monarch in England and the Netherlands, but they function more like furniture than political figures with real power.

This trend in the West’s politics has not transferred to the West’s ecclesiology. Rule by one (episcopacy) is still popular (even sacred) for some of the West’s Christians, while rule by the many (congregationalism/independency) dominates the worlds of New Calvinism, Baptists, charismatics, and beyond. Rule by the few (presbyterianism) is practiced by a few.

All of this is to provide some context for the recent news that an English Roman Catholic bishop, Michael Campbell has used the power of rule by one to reign in a renegade deacon:

A deacon who runs a Catholic website that criticised bishops, theologians and lay groups for being out of step with church teaching has been asked to stop posting material.

Deacon Nick Donnelly has been asked by the Bishop of Lancaster to stop posting on his Protect the Pope site and undergo a “period of prayer and reflection”.

A spokesman for the Diocese of Lancaster said that Bishop Campbell had asked Mr Donnelly to “voluntarily pause” from publishing in order to reflect “on the duties involved for ordained bloggers/website administrators to truth, charity and unity in the Church.”

The site, however, is being operated by his wife, with the latest posting encouraging readers to submit their own articles. Mr Donnelly, who has agreed to his bishop’s request, told The Tablet that his wife was running the site on her own and he has “no say” over what is posted.

Protect the Pope, which received 100,000 hits a month, regularly criticised groups and individual bishops and took issue with several Tablet articles for being at odds with church teaching.

One of the curious aspects of this story is that it conflicts with what George Weigel tried to teach us about the pope’s power: “Popes, in other words, are not authoritarian figures, who teach what they will and as they will.” Well, when have monarch’s ever not been authoritarian figures except when they ran up against a constitution or parliament that supplied checks and balances? And if bishops (rule by one) have power to act unilaterally within their dioceses, why doesn’t Pope Francis have similar authority to reign in priests, deacons, bishops, and church members in the universal church?

And that makes Pope Francis’ affect all the more remarkable because at times he seems more interested in playing the court jester than the king:

“I want things messy and stirred up.”

This statement by Pope Francis to youth on Copacabana beach last summer in Rio de Janeiro during World Youth Day will no doubt become one of the iconic quotes from this papacy, not only because it is a pithy sound bite, but also because — we are learning — it seriously represents Francis’ modus operandi. He stirs things up and then waits to see what will rise out of the chaos.

Francis’ delight in stirring things up is no more evident than in the preparation for the October’s Synod of Bishops. Even before the Vatican officially announced an extraordinary Synod of Bishops on the new evangelization of the family, there were signs that this event would be different.

What's Wrong with Calvinism?

Published on by D. G. Hart64 Comments

If you can attribute American patriotism or the Tea Party to Calvinism, you have a term that is almost as much of a wax nose as evangelicalism. This is why the phrase Reformed Protestant is better than Calvinism. Reformed Protestant has a definite meaning that Calvinism doesn’t.

And this is why the so-called New Calvinism thrives (at least in its own promoters’ minds). Take for instance the question of diversity, a factor that lets New Calvinists think they are the mainstream. Here is Matthew Barrett on John Piper:

Some today are surprised by the wide diversity within New Calvinism, including everyone from Lecrae to the Gettys, or R. C. Sproul to Francis Chan. Piper points out that this diversity among Reformed-minded folks has always been present. All one has to do is look back at the long list of Calvinists in church history. Piper suggests comparing Augustine and Adoniram Judson, Francis Turretin and John Bunyan, John Calvin and Chapiper-writingrles Spurgeon, John Knox and J. I. Packer, Cotton Mather and R. C. Sproul, Abraham Kuyper and William Carey, Haynes and Dabney, Theodore Beza and James Boice, Isaac Backus and Martin Lloyd-Jones, etc. “If there is such a diversity in the Old,” Piper argues, “then we really cannot find dividing lines between the Old and the New.”

He goes on to say, “The Old is too diverse and the connections between Old and New too organic to claim things that are new in the New that were not present in any aspects in the Old.” The New is too assorted to claim any “downgrade” or “upgrade” from the Old. History is too complex for “broad brush commendations of one over the other or condemnations of one under the other.” Hence, any “given issue that you try to address you can find periods and persons and movements among the Old that would outshine the New.” Piper concludes, “There is no claim, therefore, in my assessment that the New is better.” From here Piper goes on to give 12 features that define the New Calvinism.

I wonder what Piper or Barrett would say about New Calvinism’s diversity being the product (as Nate commented) of waffling, for instance, on baptism and charismatic gifts, the way that Old Calvinism doesn’t. In other words, diversity is a sign of failure, not an indication of strength.

Plus, if you define Calvinism by the creeds and confessions of the Reformed churches, which is how Calvinism started, you find remarkable coherence. Spurgeon, Judson, and Piper are out. Knox, Kuyper, and Dabney are in.

And this is what Old Calvinists find so alarming about the New Calvinists. They can understand themselves entirely as a categorical abstraction (Piper’s 12 points) without relationship to word, sacrament, or discipline — the marks of the church (as in, Reformed according to the word). In fact, aside from the implicit hubris in the New Calvinists’ understanding of the past, do these guys, as Tim Challies apparently believes, think they are in the mainstream? Can you really be in the mainstream when instead of church you chart your existence by conferences and organizations like Gospel Coalition, Acts 29, and Sovereign Grace? Have I got a book for Tim.

My understanding of earth sciences is spotty, but new bodies of water generally do not become the mainstream within three decades unless you do some serious dirt moving (and that didn’t even spare New Orleans). But cheerleaders always think their team is number one, even when they are losing.

The New Calvinism is not the Old Calvinism

Published on by D. G. Hart251 Comments

We can be sure of that thanks to Jared Oliphint:

Twelve Thirteen features of the New Calvinism:

1.The New Calvinism, in its allegiance to the inerrancy of the Bible, embraces the biblical truths behind the five points (TULIP), while having an aversion to using the acronym or any other systematic packaging, along with a sometimes qualified embrace of limited atonement. The focus is on Calvinistic soteriology but not to the exclusion or the appreciation of the broader scope of Calvin’s vision.

1. The Old Calvinism begins with the doctrine of Scripture summarized in confessions like the Westminster Confession of Faith and is willing to use TULIP as a handle for understanding Calvinist soteriology. Old Calvinism also relies on systematic thought.

2. The New Calvinism embraces the sovereignty of God in salvation, and in all the affairs of life in history, including evil and suffering.

2. The Old Calvinism affirms divine sovereignty in everything, even in Christ’s death on the cross for the elect.

3. The New Calvinism has a strong complementarian flavor as opposed to egalitarian, with an emphasis on the flourishing of men and women in relationships where men embrace a call to robust, humble, Christ-like servant leadership.

3. The Old Calvinism follows biblical teaching on male ordination and refuses to describe human life this side of glory as flourishing.

4. The New Calvinism leans toward being culture-affirming rather than culture-denying, while holding fast to some very culturally alien positions, like positions on same-sex practice and abortion.

4. The Old Calvinism understands salvation to be distinct from culture, hence Old Calvinists’ belief that deceased saints are saved even though they no longer inhabit a culture.

5. The New Calvinism embraces the essential place of the local church. It is led mainly by pastors, has a vibrant church-planting bent, produces widely-sung worship music, and exalts the preached word as central to the work of God locally and globally.

5. The Old Calvinism does not exist apart from congregations where the marks of the church are evident and which are part of regional, national, and ecumenical assemblies.

6. The New Calvinism is aggressively mission-driven, including missional impact on social evils, evangelistic impact on personal networks, and missionary impact on unreached peoples of the world.

6. The Old Calvinism actually calls and supports home and foreign missionaries through assemblies of presbyters that oversee such ministry.

7. The New Calvinism is inter-denominational with a strong (some would say oxymoronic) Baptistic element.

7. The Old Calvinism is Reformed Protestant and seeks fraternal relations with communions of like faith and practice.

8. The New Calvinism includes charismatics and non-charismatics.

8. The Old Calvinism excludes charismatics because Old Calvinists believe in the sufficiency of Scripture.

9. The New Calvinism puts a priority on pietism or piety in the Puritan vein, with an emphasis on the essential role of affections in Christian living, while esteeming the life of the mind and being very productive in it, and embracing the value of serious scholarship. Jonathan Edwards would be invoked as a model of this combination of the affections and the life of the mind more often than John Calvin, whether that’s fair to Calvin or not.

9. The Old Calvinism does not drop names and includes Reformed Protestants who are temperamentally restrained (read Scots, Dutch, Germans, Swiss).

10. The New Calvinism is vibrantly engaged in publishing books and even more remarkably in the world of the internet, with hundreds of energetic bloggers and social media activists, with Twitter as the increasingly default way of signaling things new and old that should be noticed and read.

10. The Old Calvinism has more books than New Calvinism, and many of them are ones that New Calvinists need to tell the difference between Calvinism and other kinds of Protestantism.

11. The New Calvinism is international in scope, multi-ethnic in expression, culturally diverse. There is no single geographic, racial, cultural governing center. There are no officers, no organization, nor any loose affiliation that would encompass the whole. I would dare say that there are outcroppings of this movement that nobody (including me) in this room has ever heard of.

11. The Old Calvinism was and still is international in ways that the New Calvinists would not understand. Old Calvinists also appreciate in ways that New Calvinists don’t how European and Western Calvinism is. This means that Old Calvinists speak English without feeling guilty.

12. The New Calvinism is robustly gospel-centered, cross-centered, with dozens of books rolling off the presses, coming at the gospel from every conceivable angle, and applying it to all areas of life with a commitment to seeing the historic doctrine of justification, finding its fruit in sanctification personally and communally.

12. The Old Calvinism teaches that Christ died on the cross only for the elect and Old Calvinists are happy to let the Reformed creeds and confessions define the way that Reformed pastors teach and apply the atonement (among other doctrines taught and professed by the Reformed churches).

13. The New Calvinism uses words like robust, vibrant, embrace and lots of adverbs.

13. Old Calvinists don’t.

Golden Oldie (part three)

Published on by D. G. Hart15 Comments

From Make War No More?: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of J. Gresham Machen’s Warrior Children

J. Gresham Machen may not be the gold standard for twentieth-century Reformed orthodoxy but he does stand out not only in every account of American Presbyterianism but in most accounts of religion in United States as arguably the most important defender of historic Christianity. Some of the reasons are circumstantial. Machen happened to be teaching at a seminary, Princeton, that was firmly linked to the Protestant establishment and that had a long history of educating conservatives in other denominations. This placed Machen at the center of a the fundamentalist controversy when it erupted in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. with support and admiration from non-Presbyterian conservatives. If he had been teaching at Columbia Seminary in South Carolina or at Wheaton College, the reporters who covered the religion beat in America would likely have been less interested than in a Princeton professor. Other reasons for Machen’s reputation stem from those attributes he brought to bear in his circumstances. His writings show remarkable acumen, courage, and even fairness to his opponents. In addition, Machen carried on in his battles with liberalism for the better part of two decades and, not being content with celebrity or individual effort, recognized the importance of establishing institutions to sustain a Reformed witness. As a man of his times and a person who distinguished himself from his contemporaries, Machen was, in the words of the novelist, Pearl Buck, “worth a hundred of his fellows who, as princes of the church, occupy easy places and play their church politics and trim their sails to every win, who in their smug observance of the convention sof life and religion offend all honest and searching spirits.” That is why Buck, whom Machen had opposed, wished that he had lived longer so he could “go on fighting them.”

Yet, for all of Machen’s accomplishments, the verdict on his efforts has been mixed even among conservative Presbyterians and evangelicals. Much of the discomfort with Machen surrounds his flair for controversy. Of course, critics such as Robert Moats Miller, the biographer of Harry Emerson Fosdick, might be expected to focus on the unflattering aspects of Machen’s career. In fact, Machen’s combativeness was so extreme for Miller that he could, without qualification or fear of misinterpretation, in a respectable academic journal refer to Machen as “quite loony.” Ernest R. Sandeen, one of the first American historians to give fundamentalism an even-handed inquiry would not let his impartiality extend to Machen whose belligerency was supposedly characterized by “perverse obstinacy.”

But when scholars with ecclesial ties to Machen demonstrate a similar unease with his combativeness, the problem is particularly grave. On the fiftieth anniversary of Machen’s death, Mark A. Noll, then an elder in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, observed that the cost of Machen’s contentiousness was “large.” He “undermined the effectiveness of those Reformed and evangelical individuals who chose to remain at Princeton Seminary, with the Presbyterian mission board, and in the Northern Presbyterian Church.” Furthermore, according to Noll, Machen “left successors ill-equipped to deal with the more practical matters of evangelism, social outreach, and devotional nurture.” George M. Marsden, in a piece for Princeton Seminary Bulletin expressed similar reservations to Noll’s about Machen’s “cantankerousness.” Even though Marsden was a son of the OPC and his father had been a prominent official in the OPC and at Westminster Seminary, he still could not warm up to Machen’s propensity to fight. Marsden conceded that Machen’s critique of liberalism had merit, but he “had a personality that only his good friends found appealing, and he stood for a narrow Old School confessionalism and exclusivism that many people today find appalling.”

One last example of an Orthodox Presbyterian who could not stomach Machen’s combativeness is John R. Frame, for many years a professor at Westminster (in Philadelphia and at California) and a minister in the OPC. In his book, Evangelical Reunion Frame indicated his discomfort with the militancy that had characterized the OPC since its founding, and more recently in his infamous article, “Machen’s Warrior Children,” he registered a complaint similar to Noll and Marsden: “The Machen movement was born in the controversy over liberal theology.” “I have no doubt that Machen and his colleagues were right to reject this theology and to fight it,” Frame added. “But it is arguable that once the Machenites found themselves in a ‘true Presbyterian church’ they were unable to moderate their martial impulses. Being in a church without liberals to fight, they turned on one another.”

Aside from the merits of these assessments, the verdicts of Noll, Marsden, and Frame all point to a curious phenomenon among those in the second generation of Orthodox Presbyterians – that is, an unwillingness to fight for the Reformed faith combined with a strong dose of theological and ecclesiastical pacifism. None of these scholars thought Machen was wrong to oppose liberalism per se even if each person might assess the strength’s of Machen’s critique differently. But beyond the errors that liberalism posed, like many who were associated with the institutions that Machen founded – the OPC, Westminster Seminary, and the Presbyterian Guardian – these scholars were unprepared to go. Combating liberalism, then, was apparently acceptable because it was obviously wrong. But opposing errors among evangelical or Reformed Christians was apparently unacceptable for many in the second generation. Indeed, the views of Noll, Marsden, and Frame were not unusual among conservative Presbyterians during the 1970s and 1980s. In the OPC particularly, the reasons for contending for the Reformed faith looked increasingly pointless and the church sought ways to escape its rut, first by seeking a merger with the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod, and then with the Presbyterian Church in America. In less than forty years, the fight had left the OPC and with its departure had come reassessments of Machen, his role in the controversies of the 1920s and 1930s, and even his legacy.

Religious Tests for Having an Opinion

Published on by D. G. Hart29 Comments

This piece reminded me of a thought I have had for a long time. It first came to me when studying neo-Calvinism and the demands of w-w thinking. But it continued to haunt me when dealing with the logician-paradigmatists over at Deduced Into Church. The thought is that Christian “conservatives” insist that philosophy precedes religion, which of course is remarkably ironic since these believers (both Reformed and Roman Catholic) are arguing for the ultimacy of faith. But to do so they use philosophical arguments about incoherence, epistemological foundations, and moral consistency that wind up making human reason, not faith or Scripture or tradition or Christ, the answer to life’s most difficult questions. Mind you, the question, “how am I right with God?” is hardly the same level of difficulty as “how do I know?” or “how do I become virtuous?”

In the post over at Imaginative Conservative, we see once again the effects of philosophical supremacy applied to fellow citizens, in this case libertarians:

Many secular libertarians hold that if there is a divine arbiter who will judge our actions, then one can’t fully enjoy the freedom, say, to consume pornography and illegal drugs, and engage in promiscuous sex. Philosopher Thomas Nagel made the point well when he admitted, “I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”

But the impression that atheism or materialism is an accomplished host for libertarian values is mistaken. Individual rights, freedom and individual responsibility, reason, and moral realism: none of these make much sense if reality is ultimately blind matter in motion, if, as Carl Sagan said, “the cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.” Libertarians may be surprised to learn that these core values—if not the entire repertoire of libertarian ideas—makes far more sense in a theistic milieu. But they need not take my word for it. The history of the West supports this view, as do the arguments of leading materialist intellectuals.

Historically, the very idea of human rights and the related idea of equality emerged over many centuries in a theistic and specifically Christian culture. In the West, major milestones include the Magna Carta (1215), the English Bill of Rights (1689), the Declaration of Independence (1776), and the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights (1791). A specific anthropology emerges from these documents with greater and greater clarity. Human beings are made in the image of God, and as such, should be accorded special rights and dignity manifested in law.

I don’t reject this argument, though I do wonder how conducive it is to Christian orthodoxy (Protestant or Roman Catholic) if the heterodox Christians who primarily conceived of the United States become evidence in support of belief in God. Doesn’t this wind up with a standard of minimal Christian belief rather than one of full-blown orthodoxy? And doesn’t such minimal Christianity wind up turning on fuller expressions of Christianity when they move past belief in God to the Eucharist or limited atonement as sectarian or parochial? In which case, theistic thinking can be just as hostile to serious Christianity as libertarian secularists may be?

But my objection concerns the way this argument may sound to unbelievers, the people with whom we share planet earth this side of the eschaton. If Christians insist that you cannot have ideas about political rights, or civil freedoms, or limited government without prior claims to belief in God, are they not questioning the status of non-believers in the public square? The U.S. Constitution makes no religious test for holding pubic office. State constitutions also now refuse to use religious tests for office holders. So why would Christians want to privilege theistic citizens in public debates while discrediting agnostic or atheistic citizens? Perhaps the better way of expressing that question, since I can see also sorts of ulterior motives for excluding non-Christian citizens from public debate, is why don’t the philosophically inclined Christians sense that their philosophical rigor comes across as another effort to exclude unbelief from the public life?

That’s one side of this recurring thought. The other is the great affinity that neo-Calvinism and pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism have in privileging philosophy. Both of those traditions grew up spooked by the French Revolution and carved up the universe between theism and atheism, both fought the Enlightenment with Christian philosophy or w-w, and both left a legacy of antithesis — intellectual, cultural, political. If a gateway drug for Protestant converts to Rome (the anti-revolutionary anti-modern one) exists, it could be neo-Calvinism with its bending the knee to philosophy.

Sola Scriptura Has Its Moments

Published on by D. G. Hart31 Comments

Carson Holloway explains why the Roman Catholic Church teaches what it does about marriage and divorce (and in doing so sounds like a Protestant):

It turns out, then, that the Church’s rather rigorous teaching on marriage is based not on the words of some little known celibate old man, but on the words of one very well known and important celibate young man. The teaching is based on the words of Jesus Christ, whom faithful Catholics believe to be God. Perhaps, then, Christians at least, and even all those people who claim to respect Jesus as a moral teacher, could cut the Church some slack and acknowledge that it has good reason to think that it is not just imposing some man-made morality on human beings but in fact preserving what was delivered to her by her divine founder.

And there you have the logic of Protestantism, a form of reasoning that makes sense to most Christians unless they are trying to protect the prerogatives of specific offices. Sometimes the word of God really is a lot more compelling than the word of men (even episcopal ones).

Golden Oldie (part two)

Published on by D. G. Hart11 Comments

An excerpt from “‘Reformed’ or ‘Revived’: Why Words Matter”, Modern Reformation (July/August 1998):

Perhaps a better way of showing these differences is to contrast the words “revive” and “reform.” These words connote the same difference already noted between Tennent and the Second Helvetic Confession. The word, “revive,” suggests an effort to recover genuine spiritual existence and vitality in the lives of believers, and to introduce non-believers to the eternal life that comes through Christ. A revival cuts through the forms and “vain repetitions” of established and hypocritical religion and goes to the heart to cause and nurture genuine conversion and real repentance. Not only does revivalism thrive on the desire for authentic religion but its aim is individualistic. To be sure, the more people revived, the better the church may be. But revival stresses individual conversion and personal morality.

The word, “reform,” however, suggests a restructuring of a specific order. A reform’s purpose is to take an existing organization or body and making it conform to a correct or true standard and norm. So while revivals aim at generating or deepening spiritual life in individuals, reformations strive to impart a more faithful shape to the visible church in its corporate life, in doctrine, worship, and government. For example, individuals sitting through the Mass may be Reformed in their understanding of the Lord’s Supper, but the liturgy presently violating their conscience hardly is.

Though these meanings of “revive” and “reform” don’t come from Webster’s dictionary, they are implicit in the arguments used to defend both revivalism and reformation. If a revival occurs, its defenders argue that spiritual life has been imparted, in other words, that the spirit of God is at work. This was not only true in the eighteenth century but is still so today. Tennent, for instance, not only thought that ministers who supported Whitefield’s revivals were regenerate — after all, he assumed that Whitefield’s opponents were dangerous because unconverted. But Tennent also presumed that the revivals of his day were a work of God. More recently, Iain Murray has followed a similar logic. Though he has not gone so far as Tennent in questioning the regeneration of individual ministers, Murray is convinced that the First Great Awakening was a work of God. Though he believes revivals are occasions where God blesses the ordinary means of grace in an extraordinary way, Murray is not reluctant in concluding that the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century was the result of the work of the Spirit. Murray’s conclusion should not be surprising. Since Calvinists believe that only God can give spiritual life to the unregenerate, a revival ipso facto has to be a work of God. But that begs the epistemological question of whether we can know for sure where and when God’s Spirit is active.

The interpretive stakes are not quite so high, however, when it comes to telling whether reformation has taken place. The marks of the church, according to the Reformers, are one very important way to discern where the gospel is. Unlike revivalism which encourages the evaluation of things that are invisible, namely, the human soul, the Reformation promoted the search for phenomena that can be observed by the human senses. In the words of the Belgic Confession, Article 29, “The marks by which the true church is known are these: if the pure doctrine of the gospel is preached therein; if she maintains the pure administration of the sacraments as instituted by Christ; if church discipline is exercised in punishing of sin; in short, if all things are managed according to the pure Word of God.” In other words, to look for Reformation is to evaluate visible or external forms. But to look for revival is to make judgments about things invisible and internal.

So the “reformed” and the “revived” make two different kinds of determination when they look for Reformation and revival. Proponents of revival make claims that should be reserved for God, that is, whether a soul has truly come to new life in Christ. To be sure, the “revived” look for evidence in visible and external things such as profession and deed. But to say that a revival occurred is to determine that God did actually regenerate a remarkable number of souls. The Parable of the Sower suggests the need for less certainty in making such a determination. The “reformed,” however, do not pretend to look into the state of souls or make judgments about God’s intervention into human history. Yes, they do use the language of “true” and “false” churches, which are forms of evaluation that connote eternal significance. Still, they make no claims about the spiritual state of individuals. And in the context of sixteenth-century Europe one did not need to be a believer to spot a Reformed church. A professing Roman Catholic would see an extraordinarily different liturgy in a Protestant church and know that this congregation had been “reformed.” The difference, of course, would be that the Protestant would call such visible changes “true,” while the Catholic believer would regard them as “false.”

The lesson taught by the differences implicit in the words, “reformed” and “revived,” is not simply that we should be careful about claiming to know things we can’t. It is also that our assessment of Christian expressions and practice will always be limited to forms. We cannot see into the human heart and therefore must judge whether the words and deeds of an individual believer’s life are credible, and whether the liturgy, teaching, and government of a congregation are reformed according to the Word. In other words, we are limited to the world of appearances and our conclusions should always reflect a caution befitting the limits of our knowledge. For this reason, professing believers who cherish the Reformed Faith might want to delete the words, “revival,” “revived,” and “revive,” from their vocabulary. If you are Reformed you should know that detecting the pulse of spiritual life in a convert or the hand of God in human history is work that only God, who surpasses human understanding, can do.

The Limits of Kuyper's Appeal

Published on by D. G. Hart29 Comments

First, Jim Bratt raises questions about the triumphalism that traffics under the banner of all things Kuyper:

Kuyper himself favored military images. His newspapers were named The Standard and The Herald, and he often used metaphors of combat, titanic struggle, desperate battle. Of course, it was an age of heroic language, the era of muscular Christianity. Lead on Oh King Eternal (1887). Onward Christian Soldiers (1865). Dare to Be a Daniel (1873), which he quoted on the floor of Parliament! Two world wars and the whole bloody twentieth century have taught us to be wary of such language, though we must in fairness remember that Kuyper and his contemporaries lived prior to all that. The man was stunned and deeply shaken—not to mention financially bankrupted—by the outbreak of the first war, now exactly a hundred years ago.

The legacy of separate Christian institutions that grew out of Kuyper’s work in the Netherlands the Dutch labeled “pillarization”—each religio-ideological group inhabiting its own column of consociation, cradle-to-grave. At another place Kuyper imagined Dutch higher education as a collection of ideologically defined universities that were hermetically sealed off from each other, communicating not in person but only via a “post office.” But then again, he pictured the universe of knowledge as a tree, everyone sharing a common trunk and root system, but different schools of thought—including Christian—diverging ever farther apart from each other as branches the greater growth and maturity they attained.

Pillars. Armies. Islands. Branches. Not much hope of colloquy there. Not much of a truly engaged conversation with religio-ideological rivals, an ideal or expectation that we entertain—realistically?—today.

Then, Chris Lehmann questions whether contemporary appeals to Kuyper (like George Marsden’s latest) can withstand the errors of Francis Schaeffer (thanks to our Pennsylvania correspondent):

. . . Marsden doesn’t place Schaeffer at the demoralized rear-guard of a massive breakdown of intellectual discipline on the evangelical right. Indeed, one of Schaeffer’s unacknowledged oversights, Marsden suggests, was that he unwittingly shared in the very Enlightenment tradition that he was attempting to banish to the margins of the American spiritual consensus. “The strictly biblicist heritage fosters a rhetoric that sounds theocratic and culturally imperialist, and in which a Christian consensus would seem to allow little room for secularists or their rights,” Marsden writes. But these same figures remained in thrall to an Enlightenment legacy that privileges “the necessity of protecting freedoms, especially the personal and economic freedoms of the classically liberal tradition.” As a result, Marsden argues, when evangelical thinkers like Schaeffer talk “about returning to a ‘Christian’ America, they may sound as though they would return to the days of the early Puritans; yet, practically speaking, the ideal they are invoking is tempered by the American enlightenment and is reminiscent of the days of the informal Protestant establishment, when Christianity was respected, but most of the culture operated on more secular terms.”

Marsden is persuasive here—until he overreaches. It’s true that in annexing the American founding and most of its skeptical Enlightenment apostles to the broader sweep of a redeemed Christian history, Schaeffer and others like him at least paid lip service to the rationalist ideals of religious toleration—a tradition, moreover, that was deeply imprinted in the history of dissenting Protestant denominations such as Baptism. But there’s little suggestion, in the general brunt of the emerging religious right’s brief against the secular humanist enemy, that the ideals of toleration merit much more than lip service. . . .

The contradictory impulses on display in The Twilight of the American Enlightenment may well help explain why Marsden’s study finally alights on the author’s own plea for a sort of Protestant revival—by suggesting that American thinkers more closely examine, and appropriate to their own ends, the model of plural religious observance advanced by Abraham Kuyper. That’s right: Marsden is proposing that we move beyond the present impasse in the annals of evangelical controversy by returning to the Dutch theologian and statesman who inspired Cornelius Van Til to envision an evangelical order of pure and absolute presuppositionalist certainty.

The Callers' Dilemma

Published on by D. G. Hart211 Comments

On the one hand (from a traditionalist Roman Catholic perspective):

If John Paul II is truly a saint, the Catholic faithful must recognize that the Catholic Church and the Orthodox communities are sister churches, responsible together for safeguarding the one Church of God. . . . If John Paul II is truly a saint, the Catholic faithful must recognize the Anglicans as brothers and sisters in Christ and express this recognition by praying together. . . . If John Paul II is truly a saint, the Catholic faithful must hold that what divides Catholics and Protestants . . . is minimal in comparison to that which unites them. . . . The Catholic faithful must recognize the value of the religious witness of the Jewish people. . . . The Catholic faithful must recognize that after the final resurrection, God will be satisfied with the Moslems and they will be satisfied with Him. . . . Faithful Catholics must recognize that heads of state may not arrogate to themselves the right to prevent the public profession of a false religion.

On the other hand (from a culture wars perspective):

I think the article (quite contrary to its intent) makes a pretty good case for why John Paul II should be canonized: In the West’s MSM narrative, he was a reactionary because he opposed abortion, contraception, and women’s ordination — but the SSPX offers us a helpful reminder of how deep his commitment was to the agenda of Vatican II, to opening the Catholic Church in outreach to other Christians and members of other religions.

Don’t expect Jason and the Callers to weigh in — too many early church fathers to read.

(Thanks to an e-correspondent.)