Category: Adventures in Church History

A 2K Pope

Published on by D. G. Hart13 Comments

This from “On Faith” at the Washington Post:

Second, Pope Francis seems to be making the point that Christ did not come to promote a political agenda. Pope Francis warns against the faith becoming an “ideology among ideologies.” If the church is defined by its political agenda, it will inevitably be divisive and distort the true mission of the church.

An excessive focus on politics and waging a culture war will lead many to define church teaching using secular political labels like liberal and conservative that do not reflect the church’s understanding of human dignity and the common good. Those who identify with the political left or right will feel alienated when their views clash with the church’s social and moral teachings, instead of challenged by the difficult task of ensuring that their political positions reflect Gospel values. Meanwhile, those who share the church’s positions may feel triumphant and look to drive others from the church, instead of drawing them into it.

The core teachings of the Catholic faith revolve around the church’s understanding of God, Jesus Christ, and the Gospel. Pope Francis makes this clear when he states that “the proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives.” Pope Francis notes, “Proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on the necessary things: this is also what fascinates and attracts more, what makes the heart burn, as it did for the disciples at Emmaus.”

This focus on the actions, life, love, and redeeming power of Christ and the God that Christ helps us to more fully comprehend is the true foundation of Catholicism, and these teachings should be seen as the core, central teachings of the church. As Pope Francis stated, “The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent.”

Now if only Pope Francis can remove Boniface VIII, Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII, and Pius XII from the history of the Roman Catholic Church.

A Difference between Church and "Regular" Historians?

Published on by D. G. Hart17 Comments

Thanks to John Fea who treated his readers to a minor kerfuffle among historians of the American Revolution, I noticed ways in which the alleged disparity between church and secular history is less obvious than I had thought. The source of the dispute concerns whether historians can actually identify with the founding of the U.S. and affirm that the American Revolution was a good thing, sort of like the founding of Christianity and saying Jesus was a good thing. I know, I know, America is not the church, but the relationship between historians who are U.S. citizens (at least) and the United States of America is comparable to church historians who belong to a sector of Christianity that they study.

Here is how the debate started:

Non-academic J.F. Gearhart asked one group of commentators if they thought the American Revolution was a good thing. Is the world a better place because the American Revolution occurred? The pained look on their silent faces spoke volumes. The anguished mental gymnastics of the three visibly uncomfortable academics was reminiscent of an American President coming up with “What is ‘is.’” Finally Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Harvard University, managed to say (and I am paraphrasing), “There were some good things which came out of the American Revolution and some bad things.” Gearhart pressed her to provide a “net-net” rendering on the Revolution. She declined to do so and laughingly noted that her students want her to do the same.

Her answer called to mind the motto from the 1980s: “some people are communist, some people are capitalist” meaning so why can’t we all live together. “Because it is a god-damned Evil Empire” replied the simple-minded American-exceptionalist president Ronald Reagan. Everyone knew that the Soviet Union would be around forever…which turned out to be about five years in real time. The post 9/11 actions of simple-minded American-exceptionalist president George Bush reinforced the negative attitudes towards traditional interpretations of the American Revolution by the Vietnam era and post-Vietnam generation scholars. Commentator Linda Colley, Princeton University, emphatically called on Americans to stop stressing exceptionalism. (I have double exclamation points in my notes on her comment.) Out with city on a hill. No more last best hope of mankind. Forget about making the world safe for democracy. America has no rendezvous destiny. America is the problem not the solution for thinking it is the solution and not the problem.

To this, Michael Zuckerman responded:

I don’t for a moment discount the bright visions and the glowing words of the Founders, and I don’t know any other academics who do. The scholars who spoke at The American Revolution Reborn study the founders – all the founders – because they treasure those ideals and that rhetoric. But the world of the Founders and the founders is not ours, and their virtues no longer characterize us distinctively or, in some cases, at all. The question is how we salvage something of those virtues in a world transformed, and largely transformed in ways inimical to those virtues. The question is how we renew those virtues under new circumstances and against the odds. But we can’t take up those questions and a dozen others like them if we simply reiterate the old verities. If we are to engage in the conversation we have to have in 2013, we have got to acknowledge the realities of our new world.

Peter Feinman, who started the imbroglio, finished with this:

If however, the language of academics today is condescending, doesn’t take pride in the American Revolution, and only criticizes America, then Mike Zuckerman is right: the battle over the changes America needs to live up to its potential is lost.

There is a difference between challenging America to be great and simply constantly condemning it for its shortcomings. Academics haven’t learned to speak the language of patriotism when criticizing America. They should champion the journey the Founding Fathers began, rather than only criticizing them for failing to meet their 21st century moral standards.

Yes, the American Revolution was a good thing, but we can’t rest on our laurels.

Yes the American Revolution was a good thing, but there is more that needs to be done.

Yes, the American Revolution was a good thing, and with your help the journey the Founding Fathers began can be renewed for the 21st century.

Striking (to all about me) is the degree to which both sides in this debate identify with the “values” or ideals of the American founding. They may disagree about the state of those goods in other periods of U.S. history, but these historians apparently are not bashful in taking sides. Of course, I never suspected that scholars were reluctant to spell out what the U.S. should do or be. But scholars who study a subject are supposed to be dispassionate, removed, unbiased. Even if w-wers would have us know that no such intellectual position of neutrality is possible, historians do try to remove their personal convictions as much as possible from the way they try to understand the past. If they did not, then they would be like your average proponent of the antithesis who roams through the past and points out the saved and the damned as he goes. Instead of relying on personal convictions about good politics, fair societies, or virtuous politicians, historians try to follow the conventions of the academic discipline and look for what is significant in the past, based on a shared understanding of say, electoral politics, dominant and subordinate people groups, economic developments, or the scale and scope of the nation-state.

But if a historian is a citizen of the United States, she cannot be entirely objective about U.S. history because a member of the body politic she is studying generally has definite views about how the nation should conduct its affairs, the relations between states and the national bureaucracy, which partisan groups should shut up, and which lobbyists should be monitored. It is akin to being a member of the Presbyterian Church and having definite views about revivalism, limited atonement, and exclusive-psalmody. Both church and “regular” historians study parts of humanity, not the whole, and they look to institutions as a way to generalize about the affairs of an institution’s members. And if they happen to belong to some of those parts of humanity, then their study will be colored by their own commitments as members of church or nation.

For at least a half century, the assumption in history circles is that church historians are less trustworthy than regular historians because the former, who generally belong to some religious group, are prone to bias and relying on interpretive standards that are not available to all people. But this exchange between Feinman and Zuckerman may indicate that such a distinction is much more theoretical than real. After all, historians of the U.S. who are citizens of the U.S. are prone to biases and interpretive standards that Danes or Italians who study the U.S. do not share. And if a historian of the U.S. who is a citizen of the U.S. is loyal to the Constitution, the Republican Party, or hawkish foreign policy as a citizen, is she any less parochial (compared to the people who inhabit planet earth) than a church historian who is anti-revival, pro-liturgy, or anti-women’s ordination? I don’t think so.

Does this change the status of church history? Or should it? Should departments of history include church historians among their ranks, the way they employ labor, political, foreign policy, or Central American historians? It all depends (such courage). But on the basis of this exchange between Feinman and Zuckerman, I see no reason for regarding church historians as inherently different (and thus inferior) to “regular” historians.

I Haven't Seen Jesus in Business Class Either

Published on by D. G. Hart6 Comments

Vatican reporters give reasons for thinking Pope Francis is channeling Charles Sheldon, the originator of WWJD:

“You cannot know Jesus without having problems. And I dare say, ‘But if you want to have a problem, go to the street to know Jesus – you’ll end up having not one, but many!’ But that is the way to get to know Jesus! You cannot know Jesus in first class!” Francis said.

On the contrary: “One gets to know Jesus in going out [into] every day [life]. You cannot get to know Jesus in peace and quiet, nor even in the library: Know Jesus.” Certainly, he added, “we can know Jesus in the Catechism,” for, “the Catechism teaches us many things about Jesus. We have to study it, we have to learn it.” Thus, “We know the Son of God, who came to save us, we understand the beauty of the history of salvation, of the love of the Father, studying the Catechism.” Nevertheless, he asked, how many people have read the Catechism of the Catholic Church since it was published over 20 years ago? Yes, you have to come to know Jesus in the Catechism – but it is not enough to know Him with the mind: it is a step.”

The important step however, is getting to “know Jesus in dialogue with Him, talking with Him in prayer, kneeling. If you do not pray, if you do not talk with Jesus, you do not know Him. You know things about Jesus, but you do not go with that knowledge, which He gives your heart in prayer. Know Jesus with the mind – the study of the Catechism: know Jesus with the heart – in prayer, in dialogue with Him. This helps us a good bit, but it is not enough. There is a third way to know Jesus: it is by following Him. Go with Him, walk with Him.” It is necessary, “to go, to walk along the streets, journeying.” It is necessary, said Pope Francis, “to know Jesus in the language of action,” Francis said.

The Anglo-Catholics are looking like the surest defenders of high church Christianity.

Still Trying to Figure Out Reformed Protestantism

Published on by D. G. Hart19 Comments

Bill Evans may or not be responding to the post here about C2k, but he has written a rejoinder to Kevin DeYoung’s mild raising of questions about transformationalism. The gist is this: how can you maintain the spirituality of the church and continue to affirm and practice diaconal ministry (as if the diaconate in Acts 6 was the hinge on which the church’s transformation of society turned — talk about blurring categories). In Evans own words:

Historically, Christians have seen in the Mosaic Law, the ministry of the Old Testament prophets, and in Jesus’ own wholistic ministry both the mandate and model for diaconal ministry and the care of the poor. They have taken the Apostle Paul seriously when he said, “So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all men, and especially to those who are of the household of faith” (Galatians 6:10).

. . . I can’t help but wonder what is driving these overly spiritualized conceptions of the church’s ministry. Why has this spiritual vs. temporal dichotomy (which as we have seen is open to question) gotten so much traction? I have noticed that those who speak in these terms often evince a laudable concern to protect the church from agendas and distractions that are inconsistent with the church’s fundamental mission. The real question here is the nature of that mission.

Is Evans really trying to imply that the “wholistic” ministry of the diaconate is the basis for founding Christian labor unions, Christian schools, creating Christian sit-coms? His post does seem to resort to that John Framean mental tick of taking certain outward similarities of two things (drama and preaching) and turning overlap into a justification for everything (liturgical drama). However Evans wants to use diaconal ministry for “wholistic” ends, Reformed churches like the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (the communion of one of Evans’ favorite theologians, Richard B. Gaffin, Jr.) have had no trouble maintaining the spiritual character of the church’s power and ministry while also carrying out deeds of mercy:

The spirituality of the church:

2. Those who join in exercising ecclesiastical jurisdiction are the ministers of the Word or teaching elders, and other church governors, commonly called ruling elders. They alone must exercise this authority by delegation from Christ, since according to the New Testament these are the only permanent officers of the church with gifts for such rule. Ruling elders and teaching elders join in congregational, presbyterial, and synodical assemblies, for those who share gifts for rule from Christ must exercise these gifts jointly not only in the fellowship of the saints in one place but also for the edification of all the saints in larger areas so far as they are appointed thereto in an orderly manner, and are acknowledged by the saints as those set over them in the Lord.

Government by presbyters or elders is a New Testament ordinance; their joint exercise of jurisdiction in presbyterial assemblies is set forth in the New Testament; and the organization of subordinate and superior courts is founded upon and agreeable to the Word of God, expressing the unity of the church and the derivation of ministerial authority from Christ the Head of the church.

3. All church power is only ministerial and declarative, for the Holy Scriptures are the only infallible rule of faith and practice. No church judicatory may presume to bind the conscience by making laws on the basis of its own authority; all its decisions should be founded upon the Word of God. “God alone is Lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men, which are, in anything, contrary to his Word; or beside it, if matters of faith, or worship” (Confession of Faith, Chapter XX, Section 2).

4. All church power is wholly moral or spiritual. No church officers or judicatories possess any civil jurisdiction; they may not inflict any civil penalties nor may they seek the aid of the civil power in the exercise of their jurisdiction further than may be necessary for civil protection and security. (BCO, ch. 3)

The diaconate:

1. The Scriptures designate the office of deacon as distinct d perpetual in the church. Deacons are called to show forth the compassion of Christ in a manifold ministry of mercy toward the saints and strangers on behalf of the church. To this end they exercise, in the fellowship of the church, a recognized stewardship of care and of gifts for those in need or distress. This service is distinct from that of rule in the church. (BCO ch. 11)

Of course, if Evans wants to return to the social conditions that made diaconal “wholism” possible, as in state churches that had a monopoly on religious life and excluded dissenters, heretics, and schismatics, it is a free country. But if he is going to hold any contemporary Reformed church to a pre-1789 standard, he will need to make his Erastian leanings clear.

Kuyperian Doubts

Published on by D. G. Hart59 Comments

I did not agree much with John Suk when he was editing The Banner, but this post from the summer shows that a neo-Calvinist with some self-awareness can actually sense the way Kuyperianism harshes a Reformed Protestant’s buzz:

Kuyper’s words were an apt summary of what Reformed people most believed in, namely the sovereignty of God. But more than that, Kuyper’s words were inspiring because they gave us young Calvinists something to do with our lives, a program. Our mission was to boldly claim each and every sphere of human activity as one that needed to be brought into alignment with—even submission to—the sovereign rule of God. We were shock troops for raising his flag over those square inches. So we set up Christian organizations to proclaim, in each sphere of human activity, what God’s rule would look like. Kuyperian Calvinists in Canada set up Christian labor unions, Christian schools, Christian hospitals, and Christian political parties—all in the image of what their parents and grandparents had done for Conservative Christianity in the Netherlands, and what the socialists and communists and liberals and monarchists had done for their respective gods and heroes in the Netherlands.

But now I’m not so sure. I have two related reasons to doubt this program.

First, the identification of human institutions with God’s rule inevitably invites making God’s sovereignty the perfect cover for acting coercively. After all, if God is on our side, how can we be wrong? Of course, acting in this way is inevitably shortsighted, or unloving, or even evil. In justifying their actions by appealing to God’s rule, people and institutions inevitably bring God’s name into disrepute.

History is full of examples. Over and over, the identification of the church and or the Christian establishment with the ruling monarchies of Europe put the church, and thus in the eyes of the people, God on the side of the rich, the powerful, and the unjust. I think it was Felicite de Lamennais who said that the alliance of church and monarchy before the French revolution meant the loss of three generations of Christians to the faith. But there are endless other examples. Consider the barbarity of the crusades. The one instance of a country besides the Netherlands where rulers actually put Kuyper’s ideas to use was apartheid South Africa. Kuyper’s notion of sphere sovereignty and his disciple Dooyeweerd’s concept of cultural differentiation were both used to support the idea of apartheid. Back in the Netherlands, Kuyper’s Antirevolutionary Party would go on to defend the cruel Dutch colonial presence because the rape and pillage of Indonesia’s resources was good for the Dutch economy.

The bottom line is this. When those in power believe they are doing God’s sovereign will, beware if you’re not on their side. The practical good that has come from politicians trying to implement God’s sovereignty in the world has not been impressive.

Unfortunately, Suk takes this piece where he sometimes took his editorials in the Banner and seems to abandon sovereignty altogether. But if he could have stopped with the implicit idea that divine sovereignty does not mean we are sovereign to “fix” the world, he would have had two enthusiastic vigorous thumbs up from (all about) me.

The Pietist Pope

Published on by D. G. Hart330 Comments

I was at first dismissive of the lead singer of Jason and the Callers’ invocation of categories I developed in Lost Soul of American Protestantism to explain the current statements from Pope Francis. Not to say I wasn’t flattered or surprised that an arch-Roman Catholic would lean on Protestant categories to defend an institution and person who is so superior to Protestantism. But after reading Francis’ interview, I believe Jason is more astute than he realizes (but not so much here). (He should also realize that he belongs to a flock of interpreters, the members of which seem to have forgotten that it was the papacy itself that was supposed to end the Protestant craze of various interpretations.)

Several commentators have been concerned about the mainstream media’s highlighting the pope’s apparently lackadaisical views about homosexuality and abortion, such as:

In Buenos Aires I used to receive letters from homosexual persons who are ‘socially wounded’ because they tell me that they feel like the church has always condemned them. But the church does not want to do this. During the return flight from Rio de Janeiro I said that if a homosexual person is of good will and is in search of God, I am no one to judge. By saying this, I said what the catechism says. Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.

A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‘Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?’ We must always consider the person. Here we enter into the mystery of the human being. In life, God accompanies persons, and we must accompany them, starting from their situation. It is necessary to accompany them with mercy. When that happens, the Holy Spirit inspires the priest to say the right thing.

A confessionalist, that is, a churchly Christian who values ecclesial forms and ordinances (preaching, sacraments, prayer) as the means by which the Spirit works, as opposed to a pietist who generally disregards forms and elevates the Spirit over all religious externals or man-made doctrines or liturgies, might have responded to the predicament of homosexuality or abortion by pointing a person struggling with these matters to the regular ministry of the church. For someone like Francis — “is the Pope ecclesial?” could be a new taunt — you would expect him to uphold Rome’s sacramental system of Baptism, the Eucharist, and Penance. Say what you will about the flaws in those teaching and practices from a Reformed Protestant perspective, Rome’s ministry as outlined, for instance, in Trent’s Catechism is as thorough a way of addressing the plight of sinners as someone could imagine.

But instead of upholding the gracious character of the sacramental system, or the mercy that Rome shows in recommending that a person wrestling with sin seek forgiveness and repentance through the ministry of her priests, Francis went in a pietistic direction. That is, he spoke of ways to make the church seem more responsive and charitable.

How are we treating the people of God? I dream of a church that is a mother and shepherdess. The church’s ministers must be merciful, take responsibility for the people and accompany them like the good Samaritan, who washes, cleans and raises up his neighbour. This is pure Gospel. God is greater than sin. The structural and organisational reforms are secondary­ – that is, they come afterward. The first reform must be the attitude. The ministers of the Gospel must be people who can warm the hearts of the people, who walk through the dark night with them, who know how to dialogue and to descend themselves into their people’s night, into the darkness, but without getting lost. The people of God want pastors, not clergy acting like bureaucrats or government officials. The bishops, particularly, must be able to support the movements of God among their people with patience, so that no one is left behind. But they must also be able to accompany the flock that has a flair for finding new paths.

“Instead of being just a church that welcomes and receives by keeping the doors open, let us try also to be a church that finds new roads, that is able to step outside itself and go to those who do not attend Mass, to those who have quit or are indifferent. The ones who quit sometimes do it for reasons that, if properly understood and assessed, can lead to a return. But that takes audacity and courage.”

I mention to Pope Francis that there are Christians who live in situations that are irregular for the church or in complex situations that represent open wounds. I mention the divorced and remarried, same-sex couples and other difficult situations. What kind of pastoral work can we do in these cases? What kinds of tools can we use?

“We need to proclaim the Gospel on every street corner,” the pope says, “preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing, even with our preaching, every kind of disease and wound. In Buenos Aires I used to receive letters from homosexual persons who are ‘socially wounded’ because they tell me that they feel like the church has always condemned them. But the church does not want to do this. During the return flight from Rio de Janeiro I said that if a homosexual person is of good will and is in search of God, I am no one to judge. By saying this, I said what the catechism says. Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.

To be sure, Francis does mention briefly the role of the confessor in the life of a woman who has had an abortion:

This is also the great benefit of confession as a sacrament: evaluating case by case and discerning what is the best thing to do for a person who seeks God and grace. The confessional is not a torture chamber, but the place in which the Lord’s mercy motivates us to do better. I also consider the situation of a woman with a failed marriage in her past and who also had an abortion. Then this woman remarries, and she is now happy and has five children. That abortion in her past weighs heavily on her conscience and she sincerely regrets it. She would like to move forward in her Christian life. What is the confessor to do?

But the pope’s presentation of the issue is open ended. What should the confessor do? No answer. A woman with a guilty conscience? She needs to work it out with a confessor, but not in a way that would involve the pain of repentance or the acts of contrition, confession, and satisfaction. What happened to the words of Trent which defined contrition as “a sorrow and detestation for sin committed, with a purpose of sinning no more . . . joined with a confidence in the mercy of God and an earnest desire of performing whatever is necessary to the proper reception of the Sacrament”?

In other words, Francis appears to be confused like many pietists, who mistake experience for authenticity. He apparently wants to offer forgiveness to a broken world but does not value highly the very means that his own communion has (and has had for six hundred years) for reaching out to a broken world. It is as if he had read too much Gilbert Tennent and believed that new circumstances required new ministry measures. It is a Roman Catholic instance of pietism’s promotion of feelings and experience at the expense of the outward and ordinary means of grace.

By the way, it is also breathtaking since it is supposed to be either the low church Protestants or the Roman Catholic mystics who are so indifferent to sacraments and ordinances.

Postscript: in a related story, the Vatican press reported on Francis’ efforts to avoid taking a hard line with couples who are cohabiting:

The Pope told priests they should welcome couples that live together and championed the courageous and creative choices involved in going out to the “existential peripheries”, RomaSette says in its article. But the truth factor is crucial here. “The truth must always be told,” not just in the dogmatic sense of the world but in the sense of “love and God’s fullness”. The priest must “accompany” people.

Francis referred to some experience he had in Buenos Aires as examples of creativity. For example, when some churches were kept open around the clock, with confessors or “personal courses” available for couples who want to marry but can’t attend a prenuptial course because they work till late. The “existential peripheries” are the priority. These also refer to the kinds of family contexts Benedict XVI often talked about, for example second marriages. Our task is to “find another way, the just way,” Francis said. . . .

“The problem cannot be reduced to whether” these couples “are allowed to take communion or not because whoever thinks of the problem in these terms doesn’t understand the real issue at hand,” Francis said. “This is a serious problem regarding the Church’s responsibility towards families that are in this situation.” Francis reiterated what he said on the return flight from Rio to Rome after World Youth Day, saying he will be discussing the issue with the group of eight cardinals who will be meeting in the Vatican in early October. Francis added that the issue will also be discussed at the next Synod of Bishops on the Gospel’s anthropological relationship with individual people and the family, so that the whole Synod can look into this problem. “This,” Francis said “is a real existential periphery”.

C2K (hint, confessional)

Published on by D. G. Hart53 Comments

While Kevin DeYoung summons James Bannerman to help Bill Evans figure out 2k, I will once again appeal to the doctrinal standards of the Reformed churches. Evans summarizes the “cash value” of 2k as follows:

I think the basics can be summarized as follows: (1) There are two realms [or Kingdoms]—a. the world, which is governed by creational wisdom/natural law, and b. the Church, which is shaped and governed by the Gospel. (2) There is no distinctively “Christian worldview” that is to be applied to all of life (i.e., no Christian-worldview perspective on politics, economics, etc.). (3) Christian efforts to transform or redeem society will inevitably fail, and the ministry of the Church is exclusively spiritual in nature.

Since Evans’ summary received scholarly blessing on Facebook (always a reliable theological resource), he felt comfortable proceeding to register three complaints against 2k, all of which he also needs to take to the Reformed churches that confess either the Westminster Standards or the Three Forms of Unity:

“First, there is a failure to understand the nature of the Kingdom of God. More specifically, the institutional Church is wrongly equated with the Kingdom.”

As an accommodated Reformed Protestant living under Dutch neo-Calvinist hegemony, Evans goes on to appeal to the “seminal” Herman Ridderbos to show that the kingdom is bigger than the church. Maybe, but that is not what Evans’ communion, the OPC, or the PCA confess:

The visible church, which is also catholic or universal under the gospel (not confined to one nation, as before under the law), consists of all those throughout the world that profess the true religion; and of their children: and is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, the house and family of God, out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation. (25.2)

I don’t blame Evans for being confused on this one. I still have vivid memories of a conference in Colorado where I presented a paper on the spirituality of the church and appealed to the confession on the visible church only to receive questions from two notable ministers (one from the OPC, one from the PCA) about whether I really believed this. The influence of Ridderbos has been so great that we Presbyterians no longer believe that we confess.

“Second, 2K theology persistently evinces a radical dualism in its understanding of the relationship between creation and redemption. There is a denial of any real continuity or carryover from the old creation to the new.”

Perhaps Evans doesn’t remember the split in 1937 between the Bible and Orthodox Presbyterians, but one of the controverted points concerned whether the church would tolerate a variety of views about the millennium. The OPC came down on the side of eschatological liberty, and opted to require only the language of the Confession of Faith. The last two chapters of the Confession (32 and 33) are completely silent about the relationship between the existing creation and glorification, other than to affirm that bodies will be resurrected and judged, with believers going “into everlasting life, and receiv[ing] that fullness of joy and refreshing, which shall come from the presence of the Lord” and the “wicked who know not God, and obey not the gospel of Jesus Christ, . . . be[ing] cast into eternal torments, and . . .punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power.”

If Evans wants to argue for a confessional amendment that would require postmillenialism, he is free to do so. But he is wrong to argue that 2k is somehow outside the bounds of Reformed orthodoxy, unless he wants to define that narrowly — and dare I say provincially — with a certain strain of extra-confessional Reformed Protestantism.

“Third (and most important), there seems to be at work in 2K a real skepticism about any sort of intrinsic transformation—personal or corporate. In an earlier post on this topic I noted that there is “a connection between personal transformation, or individual soteriology, and corporate transformation, and battle lines on the question of individual soteriology have been sharply drawn more recently.” Related to this, there is in 2K a persistently disjunctive impulse—separating sanctification and justification, Law and Gospel (another Lutheran distinctive), the transformatory and the forensic, the kingdom of the world and the institutional Church.”

Again, Evans holds 2k up to a standard that may have an informal consensus (not here of course) but that has no confessional standing among the Reformed churches. For instance, nowhere do the Reformed confessions or catechisms state or imply that sanctification of the person leads to transformation of society:

1. They, who are once effectually called, and regenerated, having a new heart, and a new spirit created in them, are further sanctified, really and personally, through the virtue of Christ’s death and resurrection, by his Word and Spirit dwelling in them: the dominion of the whole body of sin is destroyed, and the several lusts thereof are more and more weakened and mortified; and they more and more quickened and strengthened in all saving graces, to the practice of true holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.

2. This sanctification is throughout, in the whole man; yet imperfect in this life, there abiding still some remnants of corruption in every part; whence ariseth a continual and irreconcilable war, the flesh lusting against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.

3. In which war, although the remaining corruption, for a time, may much prevail; yet, through the continual supply of strength from the sanctifying Spirit of Christ, the regenerate part doth overcome; and so, the saints grow in grace, perfecting holiness in the fear of God. (Confession of Faith, 16)

Evans may think that sanctified saints (pardon the redundancy) will make the world a better place, but the confession only speaks of the “whole man” not the whole world.

Meanwhile, he trots out once again the Niebuhrian boilerplate on Lutheranism and Christ and culture (was ever a liberal Protestant ever followed so carefully?), and fails to remember what the Heidelberg Catechism says about law and gospel:

Question 3. Whence knowest thou thy misery?

Answer: Out of the law of God.

Question 4. What does the law of God require of us?

Answer: Christ teaches us that briefly, Matt. 22:37-40, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength. This is the first and the great commandment; and the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Question 5. Canst thou keep all these things perfectly?

Answer: In no wise; for I am prone by nature to hate God and my neighbour. . . .

Question 14. Can there be found anywhere, one, who is a mere creature, able to satisfy for us?

Answer: None; for, first, God will not punish any other creature for the sin which man has committed; and further, no mere creature can sustain the burden of God’s eternal wrath against sin, so as to deliver others from it.

Question 18. Who then is that Mediator, who is in one person both very God, and a real righteous man?

Answer: Our Lord Jesus Christ: “who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption.

Question 19. Whence knowest thou this?

Answer: From the holy gospel, which God himself first revealed in Paradise; and afterwards published by the patriarchs and prophets, and represented by the sacrifices and other ceremonies of the law; and lastly, has fulfilled it by his only begotten Son.

Question 21. What is true faith?

Answer: True faith is not only a certain knowledge, whereby I hold for truth all that God has revealed to us in his word, but also an assured confidence, which the Holy Ghost works by the gospel in my heart; that not only to others, but to me also, remission of sin, everlasting righteousness and salvation, are freely given by God, merely of grace, only for the sake of Christ’s merits.

One of the more curious features of the current debate over 2k is that it comes from folks in the orbit of Dutch Calvinism, a variety of Reformed Protestantism that was arguably the least hostile to Lutheranism of the major branches of Reformed and Presbyterian churches. Indeed, Heidelberg has the law-gospel dynamic woven into its teaching. But that won’t stop 2k critics from the philosophical parochialism that searches for a version of Calvinism that is intellectually self-contained and pure. Sometimes that urge for purity is so strong that 2k’s critics even forget to check what the Reformed churches confessed and continue to confess.

Maybe the churches were wrong. We have ways of amending the confessions since we don’t believe in infallible popes or churches inerrant. But if neo-Calvinists were to claim that the Reformed churches erred on the kingdom of Christ, or eschatology, or sanctification, then their argument that 2k is outside the mainstream would put them a good stone’s throw from that stream. Confessionalist, confess thyself.

Religious Liberty in Geneva

Published on by D. G. Hart7 Comments

Okay, I know this is going to be anachronistic, to suggest that Calvin’s Geneva should conform to United Nations policy, but it may help to clarify differences between 1555 Geneva and 2013 United States.

First the eighteenth article from the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Then Tommy Kidd’s commentary on the Obama administration:

This statement is definitive because it is so specific. Religious liberty does not just entail the oft-criticized phrase “freedom of worship” that the Obama administration has often employed instead of the 1st amendment’s guarantee of “free exercise of religion.” Here religious liberty includes the freedom to convert to another religion, or to renounce religion altogether. This freedom is most obviously curtailed in the Muslim world, but also in places like China where many pay a steep political or legal price for openly professing faith.

It also entails the liberty to “manifest,” or to make public, one’s religion by expressing opinion, engaging in advocacy, and yes, attending worship services. This guarantee would also presumably include the freedom from government coercion requiring people of faith to engage in practices that violate conscience (such as military service or, more controversially, providing consumer wedding or church services to gay and lesbian couples, or offering contraceptive and abortifacient coverage to employees).

Debates about our current president aside, this is a pretty tall standard set for religious liberty. It was not the view that Calvin or Luther for that matter advocated. It did not become a desirable outlook until the late eighteenth century with the American and French revolutions. It may have become universally desirable during the middle decades of the twentieth century.

That rough historical schema should prompt readjustments to those who would attribute the American founding to Calvinism.

Seeing the World through Kuyperian Lenses

Published on by D. G. Hart170 Comments

Speaking of childish notions, when I was a youth my mother told me I should only have Christian friends. She and my father never enforced this policy. But growing up in a fundamentalist home gave me a pronounced wariness of “the world.” It also meant that I tried to fashion my childhood heroes according to pious wishes.

Case in point: Richie Allen. He was the 1964 rookie of the year who played third base for the Philadelphia Phillies. He was my favorite player. Some might say that the Phils provided few options, but Tony Gonzalez, Tony Taylor, and Johnny Callison all had appeal. What set Allen apart was the long ball. He could hit towering homers over the quirky architectural features of Connie Mack Stadium.

To justify my fondness for Allen, I turned him into a Christian. Yes, I truly believed for a good 18 months or so that Richie Allen was a born-again believer. Why? Because I was not supposed to show such admiration for non-Christians. Wonderful solution then to turn Allen into a Christian hero. But that bubble burst during one telecast of a Phillies game when the camera panned the dugout and there sat Richie doing what he did frequently — smoking a cigarette. I was devastated because in my fundamentalist w-w I knew that a Christian did not smoke (or that if they did they were in serious trouble). Up went my first man crush in nicotine-infested smoke. (Not that anyone cares, but I continued to root for Allen and this may have been the beginning of my 2k life where I separated what was common from what is holy.)

Recent comments at Old Life by neo-Calvinists about Machen the tranformationalist (along with Bill Evans’ assessment of 2k) have reminded me of my attempt to make the world fit my conception of it. I don’t deny that Machen had his Kuyperian sounding moments. What the neo-Calvinists have yet to do, though, is actually account for those Old School Presbyterian hours in Machen’s writings. Could there have been a tension between Machen the postmillennial Calvinist and the Old School, amillenial church reformer, the way I experienced cognitive dissonance between my loyalty and love of my Christian parents and my baseball rooting interests? Could — horrors — Machen and Kuyper actually disagree in some important ways, ways that reflect the different trajectories of Old School Presbyterianism and neo-Calvinism? Recent neo-Calvinist sightings at Old Life suggest that no such tension may exist. Abraham Kuyper hung the moon and all Reformed Protestants must follow to his decrees.

This is an odd way to read Machen (though it does seem to fit the w-w pattern of forcing reality into ideal schemes) if only because folks close to Kuyper and his legacy have no trouble spotting important differences between the archbishop of neo-Calvinism and the fundamentalist Machen (at least that’s how neo-Calvinists used to regard him). I posted this before, but Jim Bratt’s comparison of Kuyper to American Presbyterianism is useful for noticing the variety of Reformed Protestantisms:

Put in Dutch Calvinist terms: if forced to choose, Machen would let the Christian cultural task give way to the confessional church; Kuyper would force the confessional church to take up the cultural task. Put in American Presbyterian terms, Kuyper had some strong New School traits where Machen had none. To be sure Kuyper’s predestinarianism was at odds with the New Schools Arminian tints and his movement had a low impetus for “soul-saving,” but his organizational zeal was like Lyman Beecher’s in purpose and scale, his educational purposes at the Free University recalled Timothy Dwight’s at Yale, and his invocation of the “city on a hill” to describe the church’s place in a world recalled the charter image of Puritan New England which was ever the New Schools’ aspiration. In fact Kuyper honored New England as the “core of the American nation” and shared its definition of Christian liberty as a communal opportunity to do the right thing. At that Machen would only shudder. He indicted the “angry passions of 1861″ by which New England trampled on southern rights, and defined Christian liberty as the individual’s protection from the wrong thing. When put to the test, Machen endorsed the political model of Thomas Jefferson. At that Kuyper would only shudder back. (“Abraham Kuyper, J. Gresham Machen, and the Dynamics of Reformed Anti-Modernism,” Journal of Presbyterian History Winter 1997 75.4, 254)

Does this prove that Machen didn’t mean what he said to Christian school teachers? Hardly. But it does reflect a historical interpretation that takes into account far more than an isolated quote or two, one that also situates both Kuyper and Machen in particular church and political contexts. And here Bratt is useful again for highlighting the political differences between the two men. In his new biography of Kuyper, Bratt identifies the neo-Calvinist leader with the sort of progressive politics that dominated the Transatlantic world at the beginning of the twentieth century:

For all their differences, however, progressive movements shared three motifs. All yearned for a fresh form of politics to replace decrepit regimes. All felt liberated from the dead hand of laissez-faire orthodoxy to intervene in the economy — at least to blunt the hardest edges of the new industrial order, at most to move toward real “democracy” in economic as well as political life. And all anticipated that these changes would unleash a new personal vitality that would lead (one more crucial assumption) to a more harmonious society. Kuyper shared everyone of these hopes. (Bratt, Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat, 299)

In contrast, Machen’s politics ran in the exact opposite direction of progressivism. All the major reforms of American Progressives, women’s suffrage, prohibition, child labor reform, public education reform, Machen opposed. The reason was that Machen was a Southern Democrat who took a libertarian line on most political matters, informed by the Southern tradition of States’ Rights and strict construction of the Constitution.

Does that mean that Kuyper is a bad Calvinist or that Machen is one? I frankly suspect that Kuyper would have not doubted Machen’s Calvinism despite his Southern Democratic instincts (or 2k views for their stress on the church as the kingdom of Christ). Kuyper believed that uniformity was the curse of modern life and wrote an essay with that title. Kuyper likely acknowledged what many of his his adherents cannot, namely, that other forms of Calvinism, just as legitimate as Kuyper’s, exist, and that they do not need to be squeezed into a tube of neo-Calvinist uniformity. Does that make Kuyper 2k? David VanDrunen has well answered that question. But it does echo the kind of willingness to tolerate diversity that neo-Calvinists’ most vociferous critics cannot summon.

Which Historical Actors Will Stand In That Great Day?

Published on by D. G. Hart13 Comments

Something that Bill Evans wrote about 2k has me wondering about the way we use and abuse the past. He made the standard reductio ad hitlerum argument that discredited an idea by historical actors who used it. In this case, Evans tried to show how 2k prevented German Lutherans from standing up to Hitler, and from there it was an easy leap to tar 2k with defenses of slavery:

. . . we do well not to underestimate the impact that our increasingly negative cultural situation has on our theology. To paraphrase Peter Berger on the sociology of knowledge, this cultural context provides a key “plausibility structure” for our thinking. It informs our sense of what is plausible and possible. And so, in the face of an increasingly hostile and seemingly intractable cultural situation many are concluding that real transformation is impossible. It is to be lamented that, in order to provide an ecclesiological framework for such pessimism, some have turned to positions that have been implicated in the toleration of real and palpable evil by Christians. Here I’m thinking of the Two-Kingdoms doctrine employed by some so-called “German Christians” to justify silence in the face of the Nazi regime, and the exaggerated conception of the spirituality of the church as it was used to defend the institution of chattel slavery in the antebellum South.

This was roughly the same time that Mike Horton also tried to separate himself from certain proponents of 2k who defended slavery:

. . . Southern Presbyterian theologians who labored indefatigably to defend slavery may have cloaked some of their arguments in appeals to the church’s spiritual mission, but they were calling the state to perpetuate the institution from the pulpit and classroom lectern. I have in mind especially R. L. Dabney and James Henley Thornwell, who based their arguments on a vision of a Christian society that would make the South the envy of the world and enemy of revolutionaries everywhere. Their arguments for slavery were not based on the spirituality of the church (I’m not even sure how they could be) but on racist dogmas, Scripture twisting, and wicked cultural prejudices that vitiated the gospel. Charles Hodge was exactly right when he said that Thornwell was using the spirituality of the church as a cover for his errors. Assimilating Christ to culture is the sort of thing that the spirituality of the church is especially designed to guard against.

(By the way, the way you use spirituality of the church to defend slavery is to argue, as folks like Charles Hodge did, that the Bible does not condemn slavery. I understand that introduces a touchy subject. But to do justice to the southern Presbyterians, you do need to do justice to their exegetical arguments, something that Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese did — and if a former Marxist turned Roman Catholic can perform that feat, surely a Reformed Protestant can.)

You can go to other places to see how these ways of posing the issue don’t do justice to the historical actors. For instance, Matt Tuininga did a good job of showing that Lutherans were as much responsible for the Barmen Declaration as was the Reformed Barth (even though practically no one, neither Lutheran nor Reformed, was interested in severing ties between state and church). And others point to a troubling relationship between at least some neo-Calvinists and those who collaborated with the Nazis who occupied the Netherlands. Meanwhile, I tried to point out that racism was not something that exclusively afflicted the Southern Presbyterian theologians who defended slavery. It even afflicted the pretty good emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, who on the eve the Emancipation Proclamation told a “Committee of Colored Men,” “even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race.” Lincoln added, “It is better for us both to be separated.” (Quoted in Louis P. Masur, The Civil War, 43) (This was the same Lincoln who also said in his first inaugural that slavery was legal according to the Constitution. In other words, slavery was a legally and theological contested issue then even if it is not today.)

The dead, in other words, are people too. Scoring points on their failings does not seem to be particularly charitable or self-interested (since one day we won’t be around to defend ourselves or the limitations of our historical moment). It is not simply bad history to sort through the past for heroes and villains, since part of what historical scholarship attempts to do is understand something that is a foreign place. Such sorting also presumes that we are free from similar historical constraints that color our judgments and actions, or worse, that we reside at a time when moral reflection is as good as it ever was — the ethical parousia.

Of course, Jason and the Callers have a different problem with history — one where they do not seem to be able to comprehend the villainous things their heroes did. And since their heroes are supposed to protect the church from error, it supplies a little glitch in their argument to find that the alleged heroes erred.

But if Jason and the Callers ignore the past, Protestant historical cherry-picking is no less troubling. The past should help us to understand the clay feet that we all have. It should also make us cautious about determining the good and the bad saints. Of course, it is impossible today to defend Nazism or slavery. But part of what history does is help us understand why people even with good intentions (paving the road to hell) were loyal to Hitler or defended slavery. For Calvinists this is Total Depravity 101. Sin afflicts everyone, even when we try to show that we are better than our ancestors, or when we try to discredit our neighbors on the basis of what ancestors did or thought.

History doesn’t come to us wrapped in a pretty package that opens to reassuring truths. Just read the Old Testament. It’s a troubled world back there. It still is.