Category: Adventures in Church History

Sunday School

Published on by D. G. Hart37 Comments

Church plants these days, especially those of the hipster or urban-chic variety, are much less likely than in previous generations to include Sunday School. An institution that began among Anglo-American Protestants around 1820 to provide instruction in the rudiments of learning for children who worked during the week and could not attend common or private schools, by 1870 — thanks to the rise of public schooling and compulsory attendance laws — had become a vehicle for educating children in Scripture and Christian song. It is hard to believe, but Sunday school was arguably more influential than church services, likely because parents did not have to go and because it was less churchly than the churches themselves. Along with Vacation Bible School, Sunday school was a significant vehicle in extending the reach of Protestant Christian civilization.

That is, at least, the strong conclusion that confronts readers of memoirs by H. L. Mencken and Eudora Welty. I am teaching a seminar this term on memoir and Sunday school figured prominently in the childhood of these two very different writers, separated almost by a generation (Mencken was born in 1880, Welty in 1909). First Welty:

Both our parents had grown up in religious households. In our own family, we children where christened as babies, and were taught our prayers to say at night, and sent as we were growing up to Sunday school, but ours was never a churchgoing family. At home we did not, like Granpa Welty, say grace at table. In this way we were variously different from most of of the families we knew. On Sundays, Presbyterians were not allowed to eat hot food or read the funnypapers or travel the shortest journey; parents believed in Hell and believed tiny babies could go there. Baptists were not supposed to know, up until their dying day, how to play cards or dance. And so on. We went to the Methodist Episcopal Church South Sunday School . . . .

In the primary department of Sunday school, we little girls rose up in taffeta dresses and hot white gloves, with a nickel for collection embedded inside our palms, and while elastic bands from our Madge Evans hats sawed us under the chin, we sang songs led and exhorted by Miss Hattie. This little lady was a wonder of animation, also dressed up, and she stood next to the piano making wild chopping motions with both arms together, a chair leg off one of our Sunday school chairs in her hand to beat time with, and no matter how loudly we sang, we could always hear her even louder: “Bring them in! Bring them in! . . . Those favorite Methodist hymns all sounded happy and please with the world, even though the words ran quite the other way. “Throw out the lifeline! . . . went to a cheering tune. I was sinking deep in sin, Far from the peaceful shore, Very deeply stained within, Sinking to rise no more” made you want to dance, and the chorus — “Love lifted me When nothing else would help, Love lifted me!” — would send you leaping. . . . many of the Protestant hymns reached down to us from the same place; the were old English rounds and dance tunes, and Charles Wesley and the rest had — no wonder — taken them over. (One Writer’s Beginnings, 31-32)

Not to be outdone, here is Mencken on the joy that Sunday school brought to boys:

The one thing I really remember about that Sunday-school is the agreeable heartiness of the singing. It is, of course, the thing that all children enjoy most in Sunday-schools, for there they are urged to whoop their loudest in praise of God, and that license is an immense relief from the shushing they are always hearing at home. . . .

My favorite then, as now, was “Are You Ready for the Judgment Day?” — a gay and even rollicking tune with a saving hint of brimstone in the words. . . . We grouped it, in fact, with such dolce but unexhilarating things as “In the Sweet By-and-By” and “God Be With You Till We Meet Again” – pretty stuff, to be sure, but sadly lacking in bite and zowie. The runner up for “Are You Ready?” was “I Went Down the Rock to Hide My Face,” another hymn with a very lively swing to it, and after “the Rock” come “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus,” “Throw Out the Lifeline,” “At the Cross,” “Draw Me Nearer, Nearer, Nearer, Blessed Lord,” “What A Friend We Have in Jesus,” “Where Shall We Spend in Eternity?” . . . and “Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Revive Us Again.” . . . It was not until I transferred to another Sunday-school that I came to know such lugubrious horrors as “There Is A Fountain Filled with Blood.” The Methodists avoided everything of that kind. They surely did not neglect Hell in their preaching, but when they lifted up their voices in song they liked to pretend that they were booked to escape it. (Happy Days, 178-79)

Mencken himself wondered why his father, an infidel, would send his boys to a Methodist Sunday school. The reason is that dad tired of shushing:

What moved him, he confessed, was simply his overmastering impulse to give over the Sunday afternoons of Winter to quiet snoozing. This had been feasible so long as my brother and I were puling infants and could be packed off for naps ourselves, but as we increased in years and malicious animal magnetism and began to prefer leaping and howling up and down stairs, it became impossible for him to get any sleep. (177)

Here we have an example of the best laid plans. While evangelical Protestants thought they were improving on catechesis with Sunday school, they were providing a social service that domesticated Christianity. The Weltys and Menckens felt no threat from the Christianity on tap in Sunday school. Even the whiff of brimstone in the songs were no match for household demands and childhood vigor.

This is not to say that the passing of Sunday school will not be without its disadvantages. But those who worry about the demise of the institution should not overestimate its accomplishments.

If Everything is Holy

Published on by D. G. Hart24 Comments

A piece of reflection on Pope Francis’ recent consecration of Russia (does such scope of office make the evangelical takeover of NYC look like chopped liver or what?) that might give neo-Calvinists and Jason and the Callers pause. It’s a two-fer:

This Sunday our Holy Father Pope Francis will consecrate the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Of course, there are no plans to mention Russia specifically, and the bishops of the world have not been asked to participate. It looks as if our current pontiff will be continuing in the trajectory set by previous pontiffs of performing generic world consecrations that do not fulfill Our Lady’s request at Fatima. . .

And what is the point of a consecration of “the world”? To consecrate something means to set it apart, dedicated to the service of God. Now, “the world” is really everything. How can you set apart everything? What is it being set apart from? Perhaps I am being a little simplistic here, and I will willingly receive correction on this point, but to consecrate the whole world seems like playing a game where everybody wins. And if everybody wins, then nobody does; if everything is consecrated, is anything consecrated? And if the entire planet is to be consecrated, why the necessity of repeating this consecration again and again over the past sixty years? Each subsequent consecration suggests and imperfection in the previous one; unless we take the position that consecrations periodically need to be renewed.

Comprehensive and cosmic Christianity does give the feeling of t-ball or youth soccer. All exercise but no contest and thus inconsequential.

I Thought Canadians Were Smarter than This

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

But w-w seems to obscure the clarity that comes with distinguishing between the heavenly and the earthly.

Over at the Cardus Blog, Doug Sikkema employs Wendell Berry with a view toward a higher estimate of the environment. He goes as far as to liken the earth to a sacrament:

Religion is an elusive term. Bron Taylor, author of The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, has traced the term’s origins to Roman rituals (religio) and sacrifices (sacra), and to the Latin leig, meaning “to bind fast”—definitions which place religion in opposition to mystical beliefs (superstitio). If religion, then, is concerned with unifying actions as well as unifying beliefs, it coincides nicely with Berry’s notion of caritas, a love that extends to creatures and the land. Also, this love is not meant to be abstract, but particularly applied to actual places and creatures within our purview.

. . . [Berry believes that] the Bible, read deeply and sympathetically, gives powerful support to appreciating the world’s sanctity. One of Berry’s strengths in this regard is to go beyond the conventional discussions of stewardship towards a sacramental vision of the environment. In “The Gift of Good Land” he writes: “[T]o live we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully reverently, it is a sacrament.” Berry is not asking us to run from use, but to exercise discretion and self-restraint and to recognize the necessary limitations we face as creatures in a fallen world.

I don’t object to Berry‘s critique of the industrial economy nor to Sikkema’s effort to prompt Christians to think of their responsibilities to planet earth as stewards. What does concern me is a blurring of the spiritual and temporal that apparently elevates creation care to the Lord’s Supper (remember the quote from Belgic 35).

I would argue that Abraham Kuyper turned neo-Calvinists down that path when he likened every vocation to a sacred obligation:

Thus domestic life regained its independence, trade and commerce realized their strength in liberty, art and science were set free from every ecclesiastical bond and restored to their own inspirations, and man began to understand the subjection of all nature with its hidden forces and treasures to himself as a holy duty, imposed upon him by the original ordinances of Paradise : “Have dominion over them.” Henceforth the curse
should no longer rest upon the world itself, but upon that which is sinful in it, and instead of monastic flight from the world the duty is now emphasized of serving God in the world, in every position in life. (Lectures on Calvinism, 30)

Which makes the frequent charge that folks who distinguish the temporal from the spiritual are fundamentalists. Kuyperianism strikes me as a form of fundamentalism that instead of drawing the line between the movies and worship, draws the line between all legitimate activities and sin (such as prostitution, theft, card-playing, theater, and dance). Neither fundamentalists nor Kuyperians make room for those earthly activities that are common, basic, and ordinary, neither holy nor profane, the things that sustain pilgrims on earth who await a heavenly home.

Postscript: Here is Kuyper’s brief against cards, theater, and dance (in case you think I was taking a cheap shot):

. . . scarcely had Calvinism been firmly established in the Netherlands for a quarter of a century when there was a rustling of life in all directions, and an indomitable energy was fermenting in every department of human activity, and their commerce and trade, their handicrafts and industry, their agriculture and horticulture, their art and science, flourished with a brilliancy previously unknown, and imparted a new impulse for an entirely new development of life, to the whole of Western Europe.

This admits of only one exception, and this exception I wish both to maintain and to place in its proper light. What I mean is this. Not every intimate intercourse with the unconverted world is deemed lawful, by Calvinism, for it placed a barrier against the too unhallowed influence of this world by putting a distinct “veto” upon three things, card playing, theatres, and dancing — three forms amusement. . . (74-75)

Who's Afraid of Distinguishing the Temporal from the Eternal?

Published on by D. G. Hart42 Comments

Neo-Calvinists are, is the short answer. Even James Bratt’s kvetch about the abuse of every-square-inch language, offered this resistance to hierarchical distinctions between the world and the spirit:

Over against any kind of body-soul, nature-grace, fulltimeChristianservicevs.secularwork dualism, Kuyper’s words insist that God can—must—be served anywhere and everywhere. No better jobs or worse jobs before the Lord by how “spiritual” they are. No writing off whole sectors of culture or society as inherently worldly, or privileging others as inherently good. No more traditional pietist (Victorian?) hierarchies. I get it, and endorse it.

Lots to unpack there and not enough space in a post to do it. A lot of the spade work needs to go in the direction of “pietist” and “Victorian” as code for some sort of objectionable distinction between the realms of religion and common life. At the same time, the entire history of the West, philosophy, and liberal education makes no sense without some kind of distinction between what Greeks, Romans, and Christians deemed were higher aspects of human existence (the realm of the spirit or philosophy or reason or language) and the lower (eating or sex or wealth). In fact, what continues to bedevil me about neo-Calvinism is this Turrets Syndrome like reaction to binary distinctions. It is as if the West was swimming along sorting out and thriving on the distinctions between spiritual/intellectual and temporal/physical spheres and along came Kuyper and said, “we will have none of it” or “this is all fault of the French Revolution.” And he might have added “we will not pay any attention to similar distinctions between flesh and spirit, or Caesar and God, in Scripture.” “Dualism is bad because all of life, the cosmos (do we hear an echo of Carl Sagan?) needs to be integrated.” So writes Kuyper in his famous Lectures:

. . . wherever two elements appear, as in this case the sinner and the saint, the temporal and the eternal, the terrestrial and the heavenly life, there is always danger of losing sight of their interconnection and of falsifying both by error or onesidedness. Christendom, it must be confessed, did not escape this error. A dualistic conception of regeneration was the cause of the rupture between the life of nature and the life of grace. It has, on account of its too intense contemplation of celestial things, neglected to give due attention to the world of God’s creation. It has, on account of its exclusive love of things eternal, been backward in the fulfilment of its temporal duties. It has neglected the care of the body because it cared too exclusively for the soul. And this one-sided, inharmonious conception in the course of time has led more than one sect to a mystic worshipping of Christ alone, to the exclusion of God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. Christ was conceived exclusively as the Savior, and His cosmological significance was lost out of sight.

This dualism, however, is by no means countenanced by the Holy Scriptures. (118)

What is particularly troubling about Kuyper’s disregard for distinguishing the temporal from the eternal is that paleo-Calvinism used this distinction for making sense of Christianity and the work of the church. For instance, here is the very confession and Kuyper subscribed on the Lord’s Supper:

We believe and confess that our Savior Jesus Christ has ordained and instituted the sacrament of the Holy Supper to nourish and sustain those who are already born again and ingrafted into his family: his church.

Now those who are born again have two lives in them. The one is physical and temporal– they have it from the moment of their first birth, and it is common to all. The other is spiritual and heavenly, and is given them in their second birth; it comes through the Word of the gospel in the communion of the body of Christ; and this life is common to God’s elect only.

Thus, to support the physical and earthly life God has prescribed for us an appropriate earthly and material bread, which is as common to all as life itself also is. But to maintain the spiritual and heavenly life that belongs to believers he has sent a living bread that came down from heaven: namely Jesus Christ, who nourishes and maintains the spiritual life of believers when eaten– that is, when appropriated and received spiritually by faith.
To represent to us this spiritual and heavenly bread Christ has instituted an earthly and visible bread as the sacrament of his body and wine as the sacrament of his blood. He did this to testify to us that just as truly as we take and hold the sacraments in our hands and eat and drink it in our mouths, by which our life is then sustained, so truly we receive into our souls, for our spiritual life, the true body and true blood of Christ, our only Savior. We receive these by faith, which is the hand and mouth of our souls. (Belgic Confession, Art. 35)

Parenthetically, if you apply this distinction then you might distinguish between the eternal words of Holy Writ and the temporal words of Shakespeare, which would in turn shape the way you understand the task of Christian education and the relationship between the humanities and divinity.

But if neo-Calvinists have their way, then Belgic makes a distinction that partakes too much of a pietistic or Roman Catholic or Greco-Roman view of the sacrament.

Meanwhile, Calvin himself relied on this very distinction between the temporal and eternal when trying to understand the relation of church, state, and the heavenly kingdom:

Having shown above that there is a twofold government in man, and having fully considered the one which, placed in the soul or inward man, relates to eternal life, we are here called to say something of the other, which pertains only to civil institutions and the external regulation of manners. For although this subject seems from its nature to be unconnected with the spiritual doctrine of faith, which I have undertaken to treat, it will appear as we proceed, that I have properly connected them, nay, that I am under the necessity of doing so, especially while, on the one hand, frantic and barbarous men are furiously endeavouring to overturn the order established by God, and, on the other, the flatterers of princes, extolling their power without measure, hesitate not to oppose it to the government of God. Unless we meet both extremes, the purity of the faith will perish. We may add, that it in no small degree concerns us to know how kindly God has here consulted for the human race, that pious zeal may the more strongly urge us to testify our gratitude. And first, before entering on the subject itself, it is necessary to attend to the distinction which we formerly laid down (Book 3 Chap. 19 sec. 16, et supra, Chap. 10), lest, as often happens to many, we imprudently confound these two things, the nature of which is altogether different. For some, on hearing that liberty is promised in the gospel, a liberty which acknowledges no king and no magistrate among men, but looks to Christ alone, think that they can receive no benefit from their liberty so long as they see any power placed over them. Accordingly, they think that nothing will be safe until the whole world is changed into a new form, when there will be neither courts, nor laws, nor magistrates, nor anything of the kind to interfere, as they suppose, with their liberty. But he who knows to distinguish between the body and the soul, between the present fleeting life and that which is future and eternal, will have no difficulty in understanding that the spiritual kingdom of Christ and civil government are things very widely separated. Seeing, therefore, it is a Jewish vanity to seek and include the kingdom of Christ under the elements of this world, let us, considering, as Scripture clearly teaches, that the blessings which we derive from Christ are spiritual, remember to confine the liberty which is promised and offered to us in him within its proper limits. (Institutes IV.20.1)

None of this means necessarily that neo-Calvinists are wrong and 2kers are right. Maybe Kuyper came along and corrected a deep flaw within both Reformed Protestantism and the West more generally. But since distinctions between spiritual and worldly affairs haunt the pages of Scripture, not to mention the leading texts of Western civilization, neo-Calvinists have some obligation to explain why they reject (or appear to) the categories that practically all Europeans and their offspring have used to make sense of the world and Christianity.

What Hath Amsterdam To Do with Tertullian?

Published on by D. G. Hart92 Comments

While James Bratt writes about being sick of “every square inch” rhetoric, Greg Thornbury (friend of Eric Metaxas and Tim Keller and all hip New York evangelicals) is proving Bratt’s point.

First, from the very biographer of Kuyper himself:

Here’s my beef. In announcing that any work can be God’s work, we run the risk of saying that any work is God’s work. That whatever we want to do, we may do and put a God stamp on it. Wherever, however, with whomever, with all the standard rewards in that field. You don’t need Kuyper to crown the main chance with piety; all sorts of Christians in every tradition have been at it for centuries. Plus the inference is a whole lot short of what Kuyper said, and what the Gospel teaches. So if we’re going to intone “every square inch,” let’s have some riders attached.

Mind you, Bratt is not dismissing Kuyper’s objections to dualism (more on that to come), but he does worry that neo-Calvinism has become simply a pious sounding rationale for doing whatever a Christian wants to do:

“There’s not a square inch in the whole domain of human existence over which Christ, who is Lord over all, does not exclaim, ‘Mine’!” This has become Kuyper’s most famous statement, at least in North America. So popular that most people don’t get the quotation right, sometimes not even close. But the sentiment’s attractive, and the line’s becoming something of a mantra among culturally engaged evangelicals. I worry lest it join other phrases on what I call the evango-babble list. Like haveyouacceptedtheLordJesusChristasyourownpersonalsavior. Like juswanna: Lordwe/IjuswannathankyouhereLordforyour/my/ourfillintheblankitude. Everysquareinch—Kuyper doesn’t deserve that fate.

And then we have Greg Thornbury, the new president of King’s College (NYC) who in this interview claims in that every-square-inch-way Friedrich Hayek and free markets for Christ:

Jerry: I watched your convocation address and found it fascinating, and I watched your orientation address to the incoming students as well. You had a great little section under the heading, “I want to go to there,” on Friedrich Hayek and on how you as a Christian philosopher think about a guy like Friedrich Hayek. Can you kind of give us a little bit of that now?

Dr. Thornbury: Sure. The point that I was making to our student body – and this actually ties into what we just came from, about “how do we be relevant to the culture of our time?” – I was describing (again, to talk about a post-world [war] environment), a situation in which you have young men and women who had served in the armed forces and in supporting capacities to that great conflict. Those who looked in the face of totalitarianism and fascism and a century of holocaust and said, “What are the ideas that keep people free?” The point that I was making was that Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was a bestseller. It was pulp nonfiction. They were selling it at supermarkets in the middle of the war; it went through fifteen pressings in the UK. In other words, it answered a fundamental question: what is going to get you through the blitzkrieg? What do you want to have in your hands when you come out of the underground by dawn’s early light? What’s going to steel you in courage to think that, “We’re going to get through this!” It is this notion that after this is over we are going to be able to reboot society on the basis of liberty, and consecrated self-direction, and the kinds of things that lift people out of the bog of collectivist notions that led, certainly, Germany and Italy to the most gruesome and bloody century ever known to man. I see my role as the president of The King’s College as re-enchanting a new generation with those animating ideals that once made Western civilization great in general, and American society distinctive in particular.

Jerry: Should a Christian be a Hayekian? Do you see overlap there?

Dr. Thornbury: I definitely see overlap for this reason: I think that when you study the texts of particularly the New Testament, although it has its origins in the Mosaic Law, I think what you see there is the seedbed of freedom of conscience. You see democratic religion in the pages of the New Testament. So whereas some people in Acts chapter 5 see some kind of nascent socialism, actually what you’re seeing is free people electing to gather together in solidarity around key principles and ideals and goals, and the people who joined in that were people like Lydia. There was a mercantile aspect to the early Christian movement. When I read Hayek and I see his argument for the link between private property and freedom, I see a direct line going all the way back to those pages of the New Testament, because what the Apostle Paul and others were representing was an alternative to totalitarianism. When you look at the Apostle John – and whatever else you think the Book of Revelation says about the future—what it definitely was, was the greatest political protest letter ever penned in the history of the world, because he was saying, “The state has no business telling us how we should govern our own life together.” And when I say “society” or “culture”, here’s how I’m defining that, Jerry: I take a nineteenth century definition by Johann Herder, who many recognize as the founding father of modern sociology. He said, “Culture is the lifeblood of a civilization. It’s the flow of moral energy that keeps a society intact.” So, when I see Hayek talking about making sure that we stay free of tyranny, I see the entailments of that going all the way back to the emperor and Domitian and the Apostle John.

Have neo-Calvinists and their evangelical progeny made it impossible for Protestants to enter a world where a Christian like Tertullian would ask with a straight face, “what has Jerusalem to do with Athens,” and answer not much? With all the effort to turn every piece of the cosmos into a reality with redemptive significance, the transformers appear to think a separation between the world and the faith is somehow foreign to Christianity. But such a thought was entirely plausible to the first Christians who were highly aware that the world was different from Christianity.

Can Arminians Enjoy "The Wire"?

Published on by D. G. Hart42 Comments

Thanks to the video going round on the world-wide interweb, I’ve been thinking about aspects of Calvinism that had been safely buried in old files from seminary. This is the relationship between Arminianism and Calvinism and the old objections to Reformed Protestant teachings on election, the atonement, and divine wrath. The video above by Jerry Walls is quite clear in presenting an argument that Calvinists don’t believe God is love. The implication is that Arminianism is superior (and true) because it teaches that God is love. Arminians really take John 3:16 seriously.

Here’s an instance of the complaint against Calvinism from Roger Olson:

Arminian: “You Calvinists don’t really believe in God’s love.”

Calvinist: “Oh, but we do. You’re so wrong! The Bible is clear about God being love.”

Arminian: “But you don’t believe God loves all people, so how can you believe, as the Bible says, that God is love?”

Calvinist: “God loves all people in some ways but only some people in all ways.”

Arminian: “Uh, you seemed to be in a trance as you said that. Are you sure you didn’t just hear that somewhere and are repeating it like a mantra—without really thinking about what you’re saying?”

Calvinist: “No, that’s what I really believe!”

Arminian: “How does God love those he predestined, foreordained, to hell?”

Calvinist: “He gives them many temporal blessings.”

Arminian: “You mean he gives them a little bit of heaven to go to hell in.”

I can certainly appreciate Olson’s point. One of the harder aspects of Calvinism to fathom is the notion of election. It is not a consoling doctrine if you are looking for charity and equality as most humans conceive of these ideals.

At the same time, I can’t imagine Arminians with their view of divine love ever convincing the likes of Woody Allen that God is love. Granted, Calvinism wouldn’t be persuasive either. But it is not as if secular folks like Allen don’t notice other features of existence that give pause to believing in a loving God. Human suffering is evidence that in this world not every human being experiences a slice of heaven before receiving their ultimate reward. Would Arminians really have us believe that a loving God makes sense of disparities on both sides of death?

For instance, if God is love, why do the penguins have to march and swim as far as they do to reproduce?

Or, if God is love, why does he allow people like Jimmy, Bunk, Omar, and Stringer Bell to live in as dysfunctional a place as 1990s Baltimore?

Or, if God is love, how do Arminians make sense of what Joshua and the Israelites did to the inhabitants of Jericho and Ai?

Everywhere you look, we don’t see a “wonderful day in the neighborhood.” So maybe the current crop of Arminian promoters need to switch from PBS to HBO where they could ponder circumstances that suggest a dark side of God, a deity who so loves the world that he sent his beloved son to bleed and die on a cross.

Where Is the Bishop of Rome When You Need Him?

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

Stellman thinks the Westminster Divines differed from the early church fathers on the Eucharist. He relies on J.N.D. Kelly to make his point and lists quotations from various early church fathers.

But since Stellman is a high papalist, what difference does it make if Augustine or Ambrose or Ignatius held a certain view of the sacrament? The task of the pope is to interpret infallibly the Christian faith. All other interpreters are fallible, right?

So which is it?

Jason may think this is just more Hart-kvetching, but he really should get his argument straight about Protestantism’s defects. Are we suspect because we don’t line up with the church fathers? Or are we deficient because we are not in submission to the pope?

He also needs to think through the exact relationship between the early church fathers and the papacy. J.N.D. Kelly is not at all clear that the early church was as on board with high papalism as Jason and the Callers are.

The crucial question . . . is whether or not this undoubted primacy of honour was held to exist by divine right and so to involve an over-riding jurisdiction. So far as the East is concerned, the answer must be, by and large, in the negative. While showing it immense deference and setting great store by its pronouncements, the Eastern churches never treated Rome as the constitutional centre and head of the Church, must less as an infallible oracle of faith and morals, and on occasion had not the least compunctions about resisting its express will. (Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 407)

Stellman belongs to the party of reason and we to the one of skepticism. So reason up. If you follow the church fathers on the Eucharist, why not on the See of Rome?

Celebrity Fades

Published on by D. G. Hart72 Comments

Thanks to one of our Iowa correspondents for bringing to our attention Ross Douthat’s column yesterday on Pope Francis. Douthat believes that the pope is trying to find a middle route between the mainstream culture and the church:

You can hew to a traditional faith in late modernity, it has seemed, only to the extent that you separate yourself from the American and Western mainstream. There is no middle ground, no center that holds for long, and the attempt to find one quickly leads to accommodation, drift and dissolution.

And this is where Pope Francis comes in, because so much of the excitement around his pontificate is a response to his obvious desire to reject these alternatives — self-segregation or surrender — in favor of an almost-frantic engagement with the lapsed-Catholic, post-Catholic and non-Catholic world.

The idea of such engagement — of a “new evangelization,” a “new springtime” for Christianity — is hardly a novel one for the Vatican. But Francis’s style and substance are pitched much more aggressively to a world that often tuned out his predecessors. His deliberate demystification of the papacy, his digressive interviews with outlets secular and religious, his calls for experimentation within the church and his softer tone on the issues — abortion, gay marriage — where traditional religion and the culture are in sharpest conflict: these are not doctrinal changes, but they are clear strategic shifts.

John Allen Jr., one of the keenest observers of the Vatican, has called Francis a “pope for the Catholic middle,” positioned somewhere between the church’s rigorists and the progressives who pine to Episcopalianize the faith.

But the significance of this positioning goes beyond Catholicism. In words and gestures, Francis seems to be determined to recreate, or regain, the kind of center that has failed to hold in every major Western faith.

So far, he has at least gained the world’s attention. The question is whether that attention will translate into real interest in the pope’s underlying religious message or whether the culture will simply claim him for its own — finally, a pope who doesn’t harsh our buzz! — without being inspired to actually consider Christianity anew.

I wonder if Pope Francis suffers from a version of Roman Catholic exceptionalism since mainline Protestants tried this about a century ago and their communions have not recovered (despite the efforts of David Hollinger to improve our understanding of the liberal Protestantism’s consequences).

But I also wonder why Douthat doesn’t think that John Paul already accomplished what Francis may be attempting. After all, John Paul II was at the center of resistance to Communism and right there with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher inside the ranks of world changers. Today’s mainstream media may not find such a group of “conservatives” very appealing, but is hard to think of a pope more mainstream in world developments than John Paul II, a man who took a very different posture regarding drift within the church from Francis.

Could it be that Douthat’s column is an indication that John Paul II’s shelf life has expired? If so it would be ironic that just at the moment when he is about to be canonized, John Paul II no longer functions as the model for a successful papacy.

But we residents of planet earth are a forgetful lot. Billy Graham has also faded from memory at the very moment when historians are assessing his legacy. Ken Garfield wondered how many young people, “younger than 60” are listening to the historians:

As Duke Divinity School’s Grant Wacker told the Wheaton College gathering dominated by graying heads, during a recent lecture at Trinity College just one student knew the name Billy Graham. And that student thought Billy Graham was a professional wrestler.

“His story,” Wacker said, speaking of modern Christendom’s most famous figure, “is rapidly receding into the mists of history.”

How Calvin Might Have Sounded Had He Been a Neo-Calvinist

Published on by D. G. Hart3 Comments

When they read about “taking every thought captive,” goosebumps follow.

Paul declares that he is not one of this class, inasmuch as he is furnished with other weapons than those of the flesh and the world. Now, what he affirms respecting himself is applicable, also, to all true ministers of Christ, including parents, magistrates, and school teachers. For they carry an inestimable treasure in earthen vessels, as he had previously said. (2 Corinthians 4:7.) Hence, however they may be surrounded with the infirmities of the flesh, the spiritual cosmic power of God, nevertheless, shines forth resplendently in them.

The warfare corresponds with the kind of weapons. He glories in being furnished with spiritual cosmic weapons. The warfare, accordingly, is spiritual cosmic. Hence it follows by way of contraries, that it is not according to the flesh. In comparing the ministry of the gospel to a warfare, he uses a most apt similitude. The life of a Christian, it is true, is a perpetual warfare, for whoever gives himself to the service of God will have no truce from Satan at any time, but will be harassed with incessant disquietude. It becomes, however, ministers of the word and pastors and parents, magistrates, and school teachers to be standard bearers, going before the others; and, certainly, there are none that Satan harasses more, that are more severely assaulted, or that sustain more numerous or more dreadful onsets. . . . But by what weapons is he to be repelled? It is only by spiritual cosmic weapons that he can be repelled. Whoever, therefore, is unarmed with the influence of the Holy Spirit, however he may boast that he is a minister of Christ, will nevertheless, not prove himself to be such. At the same time, if you would have a full enumeration of spiritual cosmic weapons, doctrine, Shakespeare, biology, philosophy, and law must be conjoined with zeal, and a good conscience with the efficacy of the Spirit, and with other necessary graces. Let now the Pope go, and assume to himself the apostolic dignity. [Bold added for effect] (From Calvin’s Commentary on 2 Corinthians 10:1-5)

Trouble is, Calvin distinguished between the temporal and the eternal, between the spiritual and the earthly, the way Paul did.

Differentiation of Ecclesiastical and Civil, Differentiation of Ecclesiastical and Civil (rinse, chant, and repeat)!

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

Tim Bayly is at it again with a post containing his talk at a CREC gathering. It is another instance of that Framean habit of mind which blurs categories simply because topics sort of sound or look alike. In this case, he is for integration — as in integrating faith and politics, faith and learning. But he also believes he can score points against 2kers by upholding the integration of races. So bringing up the racism of Southern Presbyterians who affirmed and taught the spirituality of the church is another way of making the point that 2kers are against integration — that is, we split church and state, faith and learning, whites and blacks.

The problem is that Tim can’t quite stay on track. He brings up his father’s decision to start a Christian school in the 1940s located in the suburbs of Philadelphia. The integration here is faith and learning, and racial, since well before the Civil Rights movement Tim’s dad founded a school that welcomed blacks and whites. But what proves integration also proves separation. The Baylys school was not part of the public school system. It segregated Christians from non-Christians (and even other Christians) in the public schools. You can’t have integration all the time in a neo-Calvinist world that runs on the fuel of anti-thesis. In fact, the Bayly’s MO is largely one of underscoring the difference between true Christians and fake ones, between people who are good for America (Christians) and those who aren’t (professors at Covenant Seminary and gays). Integration can’t quite circle the square. But that’s okay. It allows Tim to feel superior in an integrated way.

The difficulties in Tim’s assessment also lead to such woppers as this:

Who is the Reformed group who is whole-hog into patriotism today? Which men are wrapping themselves in the flag, crying out “my country, right or wrong?” Who are the Reformed men who are zealous to gag God’s prophets of righteousness, instead casting their lot in with the ACLU, the powers that be inside the Beltway, and the chattering classes up and down the seaboards, Eastern and Western as they all chant: “Separation of church and state! Separation of church and state!”

I think the answer is supposed to be 2kers, but last time I checked, it was 2kers who actually wonder out loud about the propriety of patriotism in Christian circles, such as the display of the U.S. flag in churches. 2kers have also been known to avoid commenting on politics, thus leaving the subject to the deliriums of folks like the Baylys and other neo-Calvinists. Try telling these guys that Christ’s kingdom transcends the politics of any nation and see who starts bellyaching about “my country.”

Even so, Tim goes to Cornel Venema for apparent help to undermine any sense that the 2k position enjoys some kind of standing historically among the Reformed churches:

…the two kingdoms doctrine is alleged to be the venerable, original position of the Reformed churches. …(This) historical claim on the part of two kingdoms advocates… represents a tendentious reading of the historical record.

The difficulty for Venema and Bayly is that the Reformed churches have historically affirmed a differentiation between the civil and ecclesiastical spheres.

God, the supreme Lord and King of all the world, hath ordained civil magistrates, to be, under him, over the people, for his own glory, and the public good: and, to this end, hath armed them with the power of the sword, for the defense and encouragement of them that are good, and for the punishment of evildoers. (WCF 23.1)

That’s the magistrate’s duty. It is hardly the same or comparable to the church’s:

Unto this catholic visible church Christ hath given the ministry, oracles, and ordinances of God, for the gathering and perfecting of the saints, in this life, to the end of the world: and doth, by his own presence and Spirit, according to his promise, make them effectual thereunto. (25.3)

And that has something to do with what synods may or may not do:

Synods and councils are to handle, or conclude nothing, but that which is ecclesiastical: and are not to intermeddle with civil affairs which concern the commonwealth, unless by way of humble petition in cases extraordinary; or, by way of advice, for satisfaction of conscience, if they be thereunto required by the civil magistrate. (31.4)

This may not be exactly an endorsement of the separation of church and state, but the distinction between civil and ecclesiastical spheres is certainly more in the 2k ballpark than one where integration rules, which means it is far more venerable and original that Venema indicates. I mean, if you want the integration of church and state, you likely don’t distinguish overly precisely the work of the church from the task of the magistrate, which is exactly what is missing in those who advocate a Christian America or Christian schools. Introduce the distinction between the civil/temporal and ecclesiastical/heavenly and these folks think you are a bastard child of Thomas Jefferson.

And then if you question whether the church or Christians or both should be inaugurating God’s kingdom, the way Calvin did, then you are definitely a blasphemer. And yet, those early Reformed Protestants seemed to be able to keep their wits about the direction of history and not trying to associate cultural or political advances or set backs with God’s divine plan:

THE SECTS. We therefore condemn all who deny a real resurrection of the flesh (II Tim. 2:18), or who with John of Jerusalem, against whom Jerome wrote, do not have a correct view of the glorification of bodies. We also condemn those who thought that the devil and all the ungodly would at some time be saved, and that there would be an end to punishments. For the Lord has plainly declared: “Their fire is not quenched, and their worm does not die” (Mark 9:44). We further condemn Jewish dreams that there will be a golden age on earth before the Day of Judgment, and that the pious, having subdued all their godless enemies, will possess all the kingdoms of the earth. For evangelical truth in Matt., chs. 24 and 25, and Luke, ch. 18, and apostolic teaching in II Thess., ch. 2, and II Tim., chs. 3 and 4, present something quite different.

I have no doubt that being a confessional Reformed Protestant is hard. It is easier to look at big churches, celebrity pastors, and religiously boisterous politicos as bearing the marks of the coming kingdom. Seeing the world through the eyes of faith, and not being duped by externals or cultural decay requires sobriety, restraint, and patience in ways that conflict with our own desire for either justice to prevail or self to be vindicated. But if Calvin could summon up such discipline even in the glory days of Reformed Geneva, surely Tim Bayly can do the same in the face of Obamacare:

We must, therefore, know that the happiness which is promised to us in Christ does not consist in external advantages—such as leading a joyful and tranquil life, abounding in wealth, being secure against all injury, and having an affluence of delights, such as the flesh is wont to long for—but properly belongs to the heavenly life. As in the world the prosperous and desirable condition of a people consists partly in the abundance of temporal good and domestic peace, and partly in the strong protection which gives security against external violence; so Christ also enriches his people with all things necessary to the eternal salvation of their souls and fortifies them with courage to stand unassailable by all the attacks of spiritual foes. Whence we infer, that he reigns more for us than for himself, and that both within us and without us; that being replenished, in so far as God knows to be expedient, with the gifts of the Spirit, of which we are naturally destitute, we may feel from their first fruits, that we are truly united to God for perfect blessedness; and then trusting to the power of the same Spirit, may not doubt that we shall always be victorious against the devil, the world, and every thing that can do us harm. To this effect was our Saviour’s reply to the Pharisees, “The kingdom of God is within you.” “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation,” (Luke 17:21, 22). It is probable that on his declaring himself to be that King under whom the highest blessing of God was to be expected, they had in derision asked him to produce his insignia. But to prevent those who were already more than enough inclined to the earth from dwelling on its pomp, he bids them enter into their consciences, for “the kingdom of God” is “righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost,” (Rom. 14:17). These words briefly teach what the kingdom of Christ bestows upon us. Not being earthly or carnal, and so subject to corruption, but spiritual, it raises us even to eternal life, so that we can patiently live at present under toil, hunger, cold, contempt, disgrace, and other annoyances; contented with this, that our King will never abandon us, but will supply our necessities until our warfare is ended, and we are called to triumph: such being the nature of his kingdom, that he communicates to us whatever he received of his Father. Since then he arms and equips us by his power, adorns us with splendour and magnificence, enriches us with wealth, we here find most abundant cause of glorying, and also are inspired with boldness, so that we can contend intrepidly with the devil, sin, and death. In fine, clothed with his righteousness, we can bravely surmount all the insults of the world: and as he replenishes us liberally with his gifts, so we can in our turn bring forth fruit unto his glory. (Institutes, II.15.4)