Category: Adventures in Church History

We Are Making a Difference (even if Bill Evans Can't See)

Published on by D. G. Hart553 Comments

The Ecclesial Calvinist tries to correct the historical record by claiming that Machen and Van Til are more transformational (and less 2k) than some think. I do believe that Van Til’s record is mixed since he drank so deeply at the well of neo-Calvinism. At the same time, Van Til’s involvement in the OPC, which was hardly a transformationalist church (just ask Tim Keller), and Van Til’s vigorous work for the church would certainly complicate Evans’ invocation. Not to mention that Evans does not seem to recognize that he is no transformationalist on the order of Van Til’s rhetoric. For instance, Evans features this quotation from Van Til:

He knows that Satan seeks to destroy his Christian culture by absorbing it into the culture of those who are still apostate from Christ. He knows that the whole course of history is a life and death struggle between the culture of the prince of the powers of darkness and his Christ, who has brought life and light into the world. He knows that he must fight the battle for a Christian culture first of all within himself and then with those who seek to destroy his faith and with it all true culture. He knows that the weapons of this warfare between a Christian and the non-Christian culture are spiritual. He would deny the norm of his own culture and be untrue to his own ideal if he descended to the coarse and the uncouth, let alone to the use of physical force, as he engages his foes whom he wants to make his friends and brothers in Christ.

But when it came to the 2012 election, apparently Evans didn’t have this same knowledge:

If human redemption ultimately depends on divine activity at the end of history, then one should not try, as some have put it, to “immanentize the eschaton” in the here and now. Both Jews and Christians learned that lesson long ago as the biblical holy-war tradition was eschatologically conditioned and spiritualized. Jews wisely decided to eschew the apocalyptic impulse of the Jewish Wars in the first and second centuries, and to wait for the messiah to come and set things right. Christians did much the same thing as holy warfare motifs were understood in terms of spiritual conflict in the present and the second advent of Jesus in the future (and yes, I’m quite aware of the post-millennial scenario that achieved some popularity in more culturally optimistic times or recently as an incentive to action among Christian Reconstructionists).

When it comes to theonomy, 2k sounds pretty good to Evans.

Nor was he so confident of what Van Til knew when Evans commented on homosexuality:

It seems to me that there is a lot of soul-searching to be done. To be sure, at this point even a low-key statement of biblical morality comes across as narrow-minded and intolerant, and there is probably not much that can be done about that in the short term. But the problems are more complicated than the substance of biblical morality. First of all, we have come across as hypocritical. American Evangelicalism is, by and large, thoroughly compromised on the issue of heterosexual marriage. . . . Second, we are often perceived as majoring on condemnation rather than compassion. Having lectured every year to undergraduates on the Apostle Paul’s view of homosexuality, I’m convinced that many Evangelicals have tended to misread him in two ways—on the moral status of homosexual behavior and the appropriate response of the church.

That doesn’t sound very every-square-inchish.

But what is oddest about Evans’ recent brief against 2k is the notion that somehow he represents the mainstream of the Reformed tradition (I am not sure one exists since so many different hands and so many different circumstances informed the Reformed churches in so many different lands):

In short, what seems to be emerging is a “Reformed” theology of culture tailored for deeply pessimistic times. Like most theological and historical revisionisms, it is worth discussing. But let’s just not confuse it with the mainstream of the Reformed tradition.

The gasp you may have heard was your vinegary writer when reading a man who is in a secession church — an immigrant one to boot — talking about mainstream Reformed. Evans teaches at Esrkine Theological Seminary, an institution with roots in the original Reformed secession — the Associate Presbytery of 1733 where Ralph and Ebenezer Erskine walked away from the mainstream of the Scottish Kirk (letting goods and kindred go in Luther’s words) for the sake of the gospel and the freedom of the church. Of course, the Reformers had already left the mainstream to pursue reform (and boy did the church need it — still does). But after 1733, secession, or exiting the mainstream, was what various Reformed heroes thought necessary to protect the ministry and integrity of the church. The Afscheiding among the Dutch in 1834 left the national church to be faithful to the Three Forms of Unity. Thomas Chalmers almost a decade later led another secession group out of the Scottish Kirk, this time the Free Church, again to protect the gospel and to reject infidelities in the mainstream churches. Abraham Kuyper in 1886 would reluctantly and mournfully do the same because of the compromises in the Dutch Reformed Church. Rounding out this list was J. Gresham Machen and the OPC’s 1936 break from the PCUSA.

The historical record once again shows that being outside the mainstream is not a bad thing but may actually be what conservative Reformed Protestants and Presbyterians do. It also shows that since the Reformation churchmen and laity have considered the task of the church to be more important than the kind of social good they could accomplish from inside the mainstream churches. They also believed that sacrificing cultural connections and influence was price to be paid for faithfully ministering God’s word.

Which is why Evans other point about 2k being the theology for pessimistic times is odd. Has he not heard? Christians have always lived in pessimistic times. That’s the nature of being aliens and exiles. That’s what happens when you worship in the church militant. Sure, Christians are optimistic about going home to be with their Lord. But they’re not optimistic about making their home here, this side of glory.

And that is why Evans does not seem to be able to recognize that 2kers do want and try to make a difference in this world. The difference is what constitutes difference. 2kers are not impressed, the way Evans appears to be, with political engagement or attempts to win the culture war. 2kers, in fact, know that we are always in a battle and that culture wars often distract from the real warfare which is spiritual and that can only seen by faith and not by sight. But for some reason, the efforts of 2kers to remind the church of its higher calling, to avoid identifying the cause of Christ with “conservative” politics or Western Civilization or the politics of identity, do not impress Dr. Evans.

But maybe J. Gresham Machen will and the words he spoke to future ministers:

Remember this, at least — the things in which the world is now interested are the things that are seen; but the things that are seen are temporal, and the things that are not seen are eternal. You, as ministers of Christ, are called to deal with the unseen things. You are stewards of the mysteries of God. You alone can lead men, by the proclamation of God’s word, out of the crash and jazz and noise and rattle and smoke of this weary age into the green pastures and beside the still waters; you alone, as minsters of reconciliation, can give what the world with all its boasting and pride can never give — the infinite sweetness of the communion of the redeemed soul with the living God. (Selected Shorter Writings, 205)

When the transformationalist can say that about the ministry of the word compared to the temporal blessings of this life, we can have a conversation.

Mother Church, Baby Bible, Grandpa Pentateuch

Published on by D. G. Hart30 Comments

Peter Kreeft is writing a series of posts to defend Roman Catholicism against fundamentalism. I am not sure why fundamentalism is a threat but I am still getting up to speed on things Romish.

In his post on the Bible, he has this line:

It is a fault, of course, to ignore Mother Church. But it is a virtue to love Baby Bible, a virtue we should respect and imitate.

This is apparently a clever way of saying that the church gave birth to the canon of Scripture, a common point that Roman Catholics make against Protestants. But does this line implicitly and unintentionally contain an element of anti-Semitism?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I do believe the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures was well in place well before Peter allegedly became bishop of Rome or before Constantine started to convene ecumenical councils (without consulting the bishop of Rome, I might add). Peter himself, Paul, Christ, and all the authors of the New Testament recognized the Old Testament sacred books.

(And one other wrinkle, parenthetically, is why would high papalists back the idea that the early church councils gave us Scripture and then deny the councils authority later when they decree that popes need regularly to convene councils?)

So why write the priests and rabbis out of the formation of the canon? Or why show disrespect to the Hebrew Scriptures, as if they were not authoritative until the Council of Hippo? (Answer: it doesn’t fit the RC paradigm which may turn out to be as authoritative as the pontiff of Rome.) And why not recognize how much longer and agenda setting the Old Testament is for what happens with Jesus and the church? If we are going to play the genealogy game, as Kreeft wants, then lets include the Hebrew saints. Does that mean King Saul is a forerunner of the papacy?

Should I (all about me) Be Hurt?

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A sampling of various Roman Catholic takes on Protestants:

First (@September 1, 2013 at 8:07 am):

And this is why I have repeatedly said that if the Church were what Protestants claim it to be, then there would be no reason to be Christian in the first place. I very much appreciate that Protestants can manage the cognitive dissonance required to sustain that state of affairs, but let’s be clear that it is cognitive dissonance. Under no circumstances can what was produced by the Reformation be reconciled with the Christian Church of the conciliar era. And if there is no such institution remaining, then Christianity is dead, and we’re all just in denial about the fact. So that’s what your argument, if sound, would really prove, that Catholics and Protestants are both in denial about Christianity having died in the early modern era and that its death throes have taken a very long time. If we’re all in denial about history, then the inexorable conclusion is that history shows following Christianity is a fool’s game, indulged only by the foolish and unwise.

. . . Protestantism has done the same thing that the Brennan-led justices did to substantive due process; it takes what was a solution to a crisis based on internal principles (the use of a council to clarify papal selection) and used that to work the annihilation of the underlying framework. This is why Protestants are all liberals, even the “conservative” ones, just as even “conservative” judges are now operating in a framework built by liberals. Denial of the principles of the Church is built into your origin; what you teach was an invention that is not what the Church is or ever was. You would do the same thing to the Church that the liberal judiciary has done to the rule of law: destroy it by sheer imposition of your subjective opinion. Alasdair MacIntyre and Brad Gregory have warned you, but you aren’t listening.

Then this:

Mormonism is another version of Protestantism. Instead of deleting books out of scripture, they added books to scripture, which the template of Protestantism permitted them to do. Who could deny them? Luther? Calvin? Henry VIII? Wesley? Mary Baker Eddy? It might be noted that none of those individual’s consulted the others on breaking away or seeking a method of holiness.

The template of Protestantism is that one can make up one’s own version of religion to suit one’s self by making the scripture say whatever that individual wants it to say.

And to round out (@August 31, 2013 at 1:27 pm) the anti-Protestantism (emerging among some Americans as the new acceptable prejudice):

If there is so much agreement in the Solas, why are there over 23,000 Protestant communities? Apparently, it makes quite a bit of difference to Protestants.
I can’t speak for the rest of the Catholics, but I’m pretty sure they agree that what matters is that:
a. Protestant doctrine contradicts Sacred Tradition.
b. Protestant doctrine contradicts Scripture.
c. Protestant doctrine contradicts the Teaching of the Church.
d. Protestant doctrine is illogical.
e. Protestantism is ahistorical.
That is why I’m Catholic and not Protestant. Whether Protestants agree with each other is besides the point. Even if they agreed with each other, they would simply be agreeing upon errors.

Are their bishops reading? Is Pope Francis who said:

The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone! And this Blood makes us children of God of the first class! We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all! And we all have a duty to do good. And this commandment for everyone to do good, I think, is a beautiful path towards peace. If we, each doing our own part, if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.

Three Things Joe Carter Needs to Know about the Vatican's New Secretary of State

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From John L. Allen, Jr.:

First, Francis does not appear determined to dismantle the bureaucratic structures of the Vatican, but rather to make them work. If he wanted to blow things up, Francis would hardly have reached out to a career Vatican official, as well as an Italian churchman who hails from the Veneto region – two strong indicators of continuity.

In effect, this outsider pope has acknowledged he needs some insider help. In that sense, his reform shapes up not as a wholesale rejection of previous ways of doing things, but rather as a sort of “system restore” operation.

Second, by naming a veteran diplomat, Francis has signaled that he doesn’t want the church’s political and cultural relevance to dim while he puts out fires and fixes internal problems.

In Parolin, Francis didn’t just hire a CEO but also a statesman.

Third, Francis has also confirmed the moderate and pragmatic stamp of his papacy. Parolin profiles as basically non-ideological, a classic product of the Vatican’s diplomatic corps who prizes flexibility and realism.

What Oldlifers already know is that a spirituality of the church church needs no secretary of state. Not sure if Joe Carter knows this.

Logocentrism is Good

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(What does it mean for sacerdotalism?)

. . . this short list will identify some reasons for words’ preeminence throughout time as the highest form of communication:

#1. The ability to communicate through words makes us human.

Any monkey can take a picture with a smartphone. Point and click. But the ability to encapsulate a moment in nouns and verbs, adjectives and adverbs – only a human can do that. It is the height of linguistic and cognizant evolution to the evolutionist, the sacredness of humanity to the Christian (“In the beginning was the Word”).

#2. Words give expression to the abstract in a way that image cannot.

“To be or not to be – that is the question.” (William Shakespeare, Hamlet)

The moment you can take an Instagram photo that captures this sentence, with all its philosophy, anguish, and transcendence, perhaps you will convince me that an image can properly replace words.

#3. Word gives us the full story: its context, background, beginning and ending.

Humans love story. We always have. It enchants the two-year-old and 70-year-old, binds the angst-ridden teenager and wizened professor. While pictures can capture a beautiful moment in story, they cannot capture narrative in its entirety. Story at its best includes words.

#4. Words connect us to the other.

In story, we lose ourselves to the beauty of another’s story. We explore the memories and thoughts of people long dead. Words open our souls to human thought and feeling beyond our own, in a way that an image cannot. They connect us to human nature and to an entire history.

#5. Words awaken our imagination.

Taking a picture of a waterfall or a sunset is a good thing. Writing a Facebook status about your wonderful evening with friends is good. But read these words:

Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries. (Jack Kerouac)

When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun. (Shakespeare)

Precious are the dead that lie there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of such passionate faith in their work, their truth, their struggle and their science, that I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them; though I’m convinced in my heart that it’s long been nothing but a graveyard. And I shall not weep from despair, but simply because I shall be happy in my tears, I shall steep my soul in emotion. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach. (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

And he knew, also, what the old man was thinking as his tears flowed, and he, Rieux, thought it too: that a loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one’s work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart. (Albert Camus)

Reading such words, one cannot help feeling a connection beyond the sensory to timeless truths explored, forgotten, and explored again. Eteraz’s article references Stendhal, who once said writing holds a mirror to the world. Eteraz surmises this “is no longer appropriate (especially as smartphone screens reflect better).”

But perhaps we have merely been entranced looking in one mirror – a fun, but rather pixelated one. And with time, perhaps our imaginations will seek out those inky, mysterious, beautiful word mirrors once again.

Transforming History

Published on by D. G. Hart67 Comments

Bill Evans thinks that a few pokes at the cultural transformers means the neo-Calvinists are taking it on the chin these days. It is in fact odd to see folks express surprise when others don’t agree with them, as if neo-Calvinism were the settled position of Reformed Protestantism since the days of Ulrich Zwingli and Zacharias Ursinus. One way a tradition becomes fossilized is to imagine that everyone is agreed; arguments keep you sharp, unless you are a follower of Abraham Kuyper whose authority cannot be questioned. I doubt Kuyper himself would be pleased with that group think.

Evans is a little worked up about a post by Carl Trueman that wonders whether the transformationalists have accomplished enough to make news:

The secular and religious media are awash with reports of how the millennial generation of evangelicals is burned out on the political activism of the religious right, and the Two-Kingdoms theology (2K) currently being trumpeted by some faculty members at Westminster Seminary in California (WSC) certainly provides a theological fig-leaf for such culture-war fatigue. In short, H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, with his favored model of “Christ transforming culture,” and the great Dutch Neo-Calvinist theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper are not exactly the flavor of the month.

Nevertheless, I was a bit surprised, though certainly not shocked, to see Carl Trueman jumping decisively on the anti-transformational bandwagon (here on Ref21 and here on TheAquilaReport). Dr. Trueman, as most of us know, teaches church history at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia (WTS), and is the former Provost and academic dean there. But despite Trueman’s very public aversion to all things trendy, he seems to be right in step with the Zeitgeist on this one. He also seems to be somewhat out of step with his institution’s history.

Evans goes on to assert that Trueman is out of step with the history of Westminster Seminary. Trueman himself is fully capable of defending himself and I won’t speak for him. But I will observe that Evans is remarkably ill informed about the history of Westminster.

For one, he does not seem to recall that WTS’ chief founder was J. Gresham Machen, a man whom neo-Calvinists will contort into a transformationalist but who better than anyone else in the first half of the twentieth century articulated the spirituality of the church over against the transformationalism that dominated the PCUSA:

In the first place, a true Christian church, now as always, will be radically doctrinal. It will never use the shibboleths of a pragmatist skepticism. It will never say that doctrine is the expression of experience; it will never confuse the useful with the true, but will place truth at the basis of all its striving and all its life. Into the welter of changing human opinion, into the modern despair with regard to any knowledge of the meaning of life, it will come with a clear and imperious message. That message it will find in the Bible, which it will hold to contain not a record of man’s religious experience but a record of a revelation from God.

In the second place, a true Christian church will be radically intolerant. At that point, however, a word of explanation is in place. The intolerance of the church, in the sense in which I am speaking of it, does not involve any interference with liberty; on the contrary, it means the preservation of liberty. One of the most important elements in civil and religious liberty is the right of voluntary association – the right of citizens to band themselves together for any lawful purpose whatever, whether that purpose does or does not commend itself to the generality of their fellow men. Now, a church is a voluntary association. No one is compelled to be a member of it; no one is compelled to be one of its accredited representatives. It is, therefore, no interference with liberty of a church to insist that those who do choose to be its accredited representatives shall not use the vantage ground of such a position to attack that for which the church exists. . .

But when I say that a true Christian church is radically intolerant, I mean simply that the church must maintain the high exclusiveness and universality of its message. It presents the gospel of Jesus Christ not merely as one way of salvation, but as the only way. It cannot make common cause with other faiths. It cannot agree not to proselytize. Its appeal is universal, and admits of no exceptions. All are lost in sin; none may be saved except by the way set forth in the gospel. Therein lies the offense of the Christian religion, but therein lies also it glory and its power. A Christianity tolerant of other religions is just no Christianity at all. . . .

There are certain things which you cannot expect from such a true Christian church. In the first place, you cannot expect from it any cooperation with non-Christian religion or with a non-Christian program of ethical culture. There are those who tell us that the Bible ought to be put into the public schools, and that the public schools should seek to build character by showing the children that honesty is the best policy and that good Americans do not lie nor steal. With such programs a true Christian church will have nothing to do. . . .

In the second place, you cannot expect from a true Christian church any official pronouncements upon the political or social questions of the day, and you cannot expect cooperation with the state in anything involving the use of force. Important are the functions of the police, and members of the church, either individually or in such special associations as they may choose to form, should aid the police in every lawful way in the exercise of those functions. But the function of the church in its corporate capacity is of an entirely different kind. Its weapons against evil are spiritual, not carnal; and by becoming a political lobby, through the advocacy of political measures whether good or bad, the church is turning aside from its proper mission. . . .

The responsibility of the church in the new age is the same as its responsibility in every age. It is to testify that this world is lost in sin; that the span of human life — nay, all the length of human history — is an infinitesimal island in the awful depths of eternity; that there a mysterious, holy, living God, Creator of all, Upholder of all, infinitely beyond all; that He has revealed Himself to us in His Word and offered us communion with Himself through Jesus Christ the Lord; that there is no other salvation, for individuals or for nations, save this, but that this salvation is full and free, and that whosever possesses it has for himself and for all others to whom he may be the instrument of bringing it a treasure compared with which all the kingdoms of the earth — nay, all the wonders of the starry heavens — are as the dust of the street. ( “The Responsibility of the Church in the New Age,” 1933)

Lest Evans think that Machen was Westminster’s conciliar tradition swamped by the high papalism of neo-Calvinism, he should also remember that after Machen’s death, the Westminster faculty (including R.B. Kuiper, Cornelius Van Til, and Ned Stonehouse, all sons of neo-Calvinism) opposed the transformationalists who formed with Carl McIntire the Bible Presbyterian Synod. The Bible Presbyterians wanted to retain the transformationalism of American Presbyterianism as the genuine Presbyterian tradition in the United States, hence the overture that split the OPC — one in favor of prohibition, the very crusade that had cost Machen a promotion at Princeton Seminary.

So Evans can argue for neo-Calvinism and its superiority all he wants. But he can’t read his preference back into the history of American Presbyterianism. And he should not let his preference prevent him from considering the real tension that comes from trying to harmonize Abraham Kuyper and J. Gresham Machen.

Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Moralism

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While away this summer I read Mary Gordon’s Final Payments, a story about a Roman Catholic women, with a strongly plagued conscience, who figures out to do with her life after her father dies, a man whom she had offended and to whom she tried to make amends by taking care of him (a stroke incapacitated him) for eleven years. It is a novel about growing up in pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism and whiffs of what the new order are like emerge. But it is not a heavily religious novel. It does, though, have this observation about Protestantism in comparison to Roman Catholicism:

Protestants, it said, thought about moral issues, drank water and ate crakcers, took care to exercise and had a notion that charity was synonymous with good works. Catholics, on the other hand, thought about eternity, drank wine, smoked cigards, were somtimes extravavgant, but knew that charity was a fire in the heart of God and never confused it with that Protestant invention, philanthropy.

It is an odd take on Protestantism since one of Trent’s major objections to the Reformation was the idea that one could be saved apart from good works (of course, I’d need to qualify that as the Reformed confessions did). For Rome, Protestantism was an open invitation to licentiousness and antinomianism. Now, Gordon, among others, is telling us we are moralists.

Ross Douthat’s recent post on Jody Bottom’s switch on gay marriage (Bottom was formerly editor of First Things) reminded me of this passage from Gordon and my plan to comment on it:

In the longstanding, not-unjustified stereotypes of Western religious conflict, Roman Catholicism was generally seen as far more accommodating and tolerant — or, alternatively, more decadent and lax — than its Protestant rivals on matters related to the human body and the human heart. The structure of Catholicism, with its elevation of religious life in all its varied forms above the family unit, was always friendlier to what today we might call non-heteronormative aspirations, male and female, than many other churches (and, indeed, than many other civilizations). The emphasis that the church’s sacramental life placed on the cycle of confession-sin-repentance, as Bottum notes, tended to create a moral economy in which fallenness was taken for granted, and wider latitude extended to people who persisted in their sins than was sometimes the case in the sterner, Calvin-influenced precincts of Christendom. (The old Protestant image of Jesuitical confessors performing elaborate logical contortions to minimize the gravity of moral faults — and has — some basis in reality.) And then of course the deeply carnal nature of Catholic liturgy and art and culture created a broad religio-aesthetic landscape in which a wide diversity of enfleshed desires could be projected, expressed, sublimated, channeled, fulfilled.

This historical and cultural backdrop helps explain several things about how the gay marriage debate has played out among American Catholics. (And elsewhere, as well.) First, it’s probably one of the reasons why Catholics as a demographic have tilted somewhat more strongly in favor of same-sex marriage than other major Christian groups.

Of course, Rome was not always tolerant of all form of deviancy. It did give us the Inquisition, the Index of Books, and bishops at Vatican I were excommunicated for not endorsing papal supremacy and infallibility. Why the church would fudge on morality but not on words, ideas, or authority, or not see how looking the other way on morality might actually jeopardize authority is another matter.

What I find intriguing about Douthat’s piece is this kind of admission about Roman Catholic laxity in the context of a major sex scandal. Again, I don’t like going after the child abuse business because it is a case of hitting a man when he is down. But would the kind of leniency Douthat describes account in part for a culture that covered up what priests did? Wouldn’t that also explain why Vatican officials ignored the enormous indiscretions of the Renaissance popes? Might it not also explain why the Vatican was cozy — too much at times — with fascist governments? Sure, you could say that the fascists were anti-Communist. But John Lukacs has long argued that Communism is closer to Christianity than fascism. In other words, rather than a strength, Douthat’s depiction of Rome is a weakness (some would say major).

Meanwhile, the church did advocate celibacy, poverty and other forms of self-abasement as the surest way to salvation for monks, nuns, and clergy. Maybe they needed to be forgiving of sexual shenanigans since the laity didn’t have a clear guide for life in the secular world.

One last thought concerns the severity of Calvinism. I have no doubt that Calvinism draws its share of moralists — just say hello to the theonomists. But if you read through the registry of Geneva’s consistory — at roughly the very time when Englishmen were being inspired to be Puritans (as in purify church and society) — you see remarkable patience with the sins of the Genevans. One case, for instance, involved a man who had gotten his married chambermaid pregnant through fornication. This fellow’s penalty: he was admonished and sent to the city council who imprisoned him for 9 days. (Registers of the Consistory of Geneva, Vol. 1, 388-89). If this example is any indication — and I’ve only skimmed the Register, the moralism that afflicts contemporary Reformed Protestants may have less to do with Reformation theology than the spread of middle class virtues and an egalitarian intolerance of difference.

Bottom line: I’m not sure why Douthat finds this side of Rome appealing. Nor am I certain that moralism is inherent to Calvinism.

Rome in American Exceptionalism

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A constant refrain among Jason and the Callers is the notion that Roman Catholicism has one, holy, catholic, and apostolic interpretive paradigm for reading the past. (Jason has 26 posts in the category of paradigm.) I believe this is supposed to apply to the early church fathers as much as Trent, Vatican I, or the post-Vatican II church. It is, of course, a very flat view of history (and maybe the planet). As a historian, I don’t understand how this paradigm (derived from the magisterium’s dogmatic utterances almost as certainly as the neo-Calvinist w-w follows from neo-Calvinist epistemology) can actually make sense of an institution as vast and old and idiosyncratic as the Roman Catholic Church. But I am especially intrigued by the historiographical ignorance (this is Roman Catholic historiography, mind you) that claims to a single interpretive paradigm require. It is like the Landmark Baptist notion that all other Baptists, except those that trace their lineage directly to the New Testament, are not Baptists and therefore not true churches.

If Jason and the Callers read more history they might understand how far from mainstream Roman Catholic discussions of history their paradigm is. To help them out, a few excerpts from Peter D’Agostino’s important book, Rome in America:

For more than a century before Vatican Council II, American Catholics had been making two claims central to the invention of “American Catholicism.” First, like Pius IX, they demonized a vast spectrum of European liberalisms as evil, Masonic, and linked to secret and criminal forces bent on attaching the Holy Father and destroying the Church. . . . Second, American Catholics insisted that the liberal premises of the U.S. political order were profoundly different from the false, degenerate liberalism of Europe. Normative American liberalism was warm and welcoming, and it granted true liberty to the Catholic Church. In fact, Catholics argued, the natural law principles behind American liberalism and the U.S. Constitution were derived from medieval Catholicism. Both claims shaped Father John Courtney Murray’s classic essays brought together in We Hold These Truths (1960).

A new generation of Catholics who lived through, or vicariously participated in, the enthusiasms of Vatican Council II have reinvented “American Catholicism.” From Murray’s Catholic argument for an American exceptionalism, the new generation made a theological and historical leap to an environmental argument for an American Catholic exceptionalism. The unique American environment of liberty, this new generation of historians and theologians claimed, gave birth to a unique Catholicism in the history of the Church. This American Catholicism was part and parcel of the American landscape, a mainstream denomination, and not . . . a loyal minority religion operating under distinctive premises within the United States. This American Catholicism was a denomination like any Christian denomination, not “the Church.” For Ellis and Murray, it had been self-evident that the Church was a hierarchical, clerical, patriarchal, and international institution (although they might not have used those terms). Their concern had been to demonstrate that the one, holy, apostolic Church founded by Christi thrived legally and loyally within a properly ordered republic. The new generation, in contrast, claimed normative American Catholics was democratic in impulse, congregational in polity, collegial in leadership; a Catholic version of the novos ordo seclorum. (311)

This should sound familiar to Protestants in the United States who made similar intellectual moves by forgetting their European origins, conflating their churches with the American republic, and producing their own American exceptionalism. The odd feature about Roman Catholic American exceptionalism is that these Christians were supposed to be subject to a prince and prelate on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, an attachment that would supposedly undercut investing so much providence in the United States. At the same time, this exceptionalism does help to account first for Rome’s branding of Americanism as a heresy and second for the “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” phenomenon where U.S. civil religion has helped Protestants and Roman Catholics forget about their differences.

But D’Agostino believes that this exceptionalism among Roman Catholics has obscured the real tensions between Rome’s antimodernism and the West’s modernization:

The two foundational claims of American Catholic exceptionalism need to be historicized and relativized . . . . First, there was no shortage of anti-Catholicism in the eighteenth century embryonic American nation. The founders, both deists and a broad spectrum of English-speaking Protestants, did not have to seriously contend with Catholicism and surely did not have to protect the new state from the instransigent likes of Pius IX. If they had, anti-Catholic fangs would surely have shown themselves more frequently. Whether or not the American Revolution was a transatlantic religious war between dissenting Protestants and Anglicans (the English approximation of “papists”), it surely drew upon cultural forces that were deeply anti-Catholic. . . .

Second, many European liberals were also liberal Catholics. The moderate advocates of Risorgimento, those men who ruled the Kingdom of Piedmont and then the Kingdom of Italy until 1876, were overwhelmingly Catholic. After they defeated their republican opponents and protected the Church in Italy from a Kulturkampf, they granted privileges to the Church and secured the safety and independence of the pope. Had the papacy cooperated with the Catholic constitutional monarchy and taken the opportunity to reform the Church’s more antiquated structures, forces that were genuinely anti-Catholic might never have won the influence they gained in the decades of the nineteenth century. (314)

In other words, the Vatican dug in against liberalism and moderate constitutional political reforms in nineteenth-century Europe as much as Vatican II made it possible for Jason and the Callers to be spirituality of the church Roman Catholics, indifferent to politics and uncomfortable with past papal pronouncements. Hitching your wagon and paradigm to the papacy means you are in for one roller coaster of a ride.

A Blustering Bigot Who Can’t String Together a Cogent Argument if His Life Depended On It

Published on by D. G. Hart64 Comments

I sure do hope that charge in the comm box does not mean that I am incapable of putting together thoughts that will at least allow me to purchase food for the cats (down to one feline inside, but the cats in the hood have found our back door to be bounteous). Jason Stellman doesn’t appreciate my bringing up unpleasant parts of Roman Catholic history. He also thinks I misrepresent his position on the nature of the papacy.

On the former, I understand the discomfort of having to answer for historical events you may not have known about. But if you want to play fair while making a case for the superiority of Rome, then you need to do something with the less than desirable parts of Rome’s existence.

On the latter, I don’t think Jason’s position is all that complicated. The Jason-and-the-Caller line is that Protestantism cannot settle its diversity because it has no infallible or authoritative mechanism. In other words, Protestants don’t have a pope or magisterium. Got it. So Jason thinks he has overcome the dilemmas he faced while considering the relative claims of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism on Scripture and church authority.

But by siding with the papacy and the theory of an infallible successor to the apostles in the eternal city, Jason did not seem to see where that decision put him. On the one hand, he seems to want a papacy that only orders the confusion that afflicts Protestantism. He doesn’t apparently want a papacy whose authority will extend to these proportions — as the cohesive not only for the church but for all of European society and possibly the world:

4. And, since where religion has been removed from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine revelation repudiated, the genuine notion itself of justice and human right is darkened and lost, and the place of true justice and legitimate right is supplied by material force, thence it appears why it is that some, utterly neglecting and disregarding the surest principles of sound reason, dare to proclaim that “the people’s will, manifested by what is called public opinion or in some other way, constitutes a supreme law, free from all divine and human control; and that in the political order accomplished facts, from the very circumstance that they are accomplished, have the force of right.” But who, does not see and clearly perceive that human society, when set loose from the bonds of religion and true justice, can have, in truth, no other end than the purpose of obtaining and amassing wealth, and that (society under such circumstances) follows no other law in its actions, except the unchastened desire of ministering to its own pleasure and interests? For this reason, men of the kind pursue with bitter hatred the Religious Orders, although these have deserved extremely well of Christendom, civilization and literature, and cry out that the same have no legitimate reason for being permitted to exist; and thus (these evil men) applaud the calumnies of heretics. For, as Pius VI, Our Predecessor, taught most wisely, “the abolition of regulars is injurious to that state in which the Evangelical counsels are openly professed; it is injurious to a method of life praised in the Church as agreeable to Apostolic doctrine; it is injurious to the illustrious founders, themselves, whom we venerate on our altars, who did not establish these societies but by God’s inspiration.”5 And (these wretches) also impiously declare that permission should be refused to citizens and to the Church, “whereby they may openly give alms for the sake of Christian charity”; and that the law should be abrogated “whereby on certain fixed days servile works are prohibited because of God’s worship;” and on the most deceptive pretext that the said permission and law are opposed to the principles of the best public economy. Moreover, not content with removing religion from public society, they wish to banish it also from private families. For, teaching and professing the most fatal error of “Communism and Socialism,” they assert that “domestic society or the family derives the whole principle of its existence from the civil law alone; and, consequently, that on civil law alone depend all rights of parents over their children, and especially that of providing for education.” By which impious opinions and machinations these most deceitful men chiefly aim at this result, viz., that the salutary teaching and influence of the Catholic Church may be entirely banished from the instruction and education of youth, and that the tender and flexible minds of young men may be infected and depraved by every most pernicious error and vice. For all who have endeavored to throw into confusion things both sacred and secular, and to subvert the right order of society, and to abolish all rights, human and divine, have always (as we above hinted) devoted all their nefarious schemes, devices and efforts, to deceiving and depraving incautious youth and have placed all their hope in its corruption. For which reason they never cease by every wicked method to assail the clergy, both secular and regular, from whom (as the surest monuments of history conspicuously attest), so many great advantages have abundantly flowed to Christianity, civilization and literature, and to proclaim that “the clergy, as being hostile to the true and beneficial advance of science and civilization, should be removed from the whole charge and duty of instructing and educating youth.”

So, without a rightly ordered society in which the church stands at the head (and we know who stands at the head of the visible church), we have only ruin and turmoil.

That is why the church needs to continue to assert its authority:

8. Therefore, in this our letter, we again most lovingly address you, who, having been called unto a part of our solicitude, are to us, among our grievous distresses, the greatest solace, joy and consolation, because of the admirable religion and piety wherein you excel, and because of that marvellous love, fidelity, and dutifulness, whereby bound as you are to us. and to this Apostolic See in most harmonious affection, you strive strenuously and sedulously to fulfill your most weighty episcopal ministry. For from your signal pastoral zeal we expect that, taking up the sword of the spirit which is the word of God, and strengthened by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, you will, with redoubled care, each day more anxiously provide that the faithful entrusted to your charge “abstain from noxious verbiage, which Jesus Christ does not cultivate because it is not His Father’s plantation.”7 Never cease also to inculcate on the said faithful that all true felicity flows abundantly upon man from our august religion and its doctrine and practice; and that happy is the people whose God is their Lord.8 Teach that “kingdoms rest on the foundation of the Catholic Faith;9 and that nothing is so deadly, so hastening to a fall, so exposed to all danger, (as that which exists) if, believing this alone to be sufficient for us that we receive free will at our birth, we seek nothing further from the Lord; that is, if forgetting our Creator we abjure his power that we may display our freedom.”10 And again do not fail to teach “that the royal power was given not only for the governance of the world, but most of all for the protection of the Church;”11 and that there is nothing which can be of greater advantage and glory to Princes and Kings than if, as another most wise and courageous Predecessor of ours, St. Felix, instructed the Emperor Zeno, they “permit the Catholic Church to practise her laws, and allow no one to oppose her liberty. For it is certain that this mode of conduct is beneficial to their interests, viz., that where there is question concerning the causes of God, they study, according to His appointment, to subject the royal will to Christ’s Priests, not to raise it above theirs.”12

Jason may not realize it, but his church once thought that the health of Europe depended on the papacy’s authority. This was not simply a question of restoring the unity of the church in its teachings and practices (spiritual). This was the protection of Christendom (temporal). In other words, the papacy Jason backs is the one that followed for the better part of a millennium the Christ-the-transformer-of-culture model (not the exilic, pilgrim model he once advocated).

But times are different (though John Paul II and Benedict XVI did a lot of speaking about Europe’s intellectual and moral crises). The papacy does not have the power it once had, whether because it lost is temporal power or simply owing to turf battles within the church. Nor does the church Jason picked have the clarity that it once did. In fact, the Roman Catholic Church is facing a crisis of authority (even if you’d never hear that from Jason and the Callers). Here is how one of the contributors to The Crisis of Authority in Catholic Modernity put it:

A second important difference from the Leonine church is evident in the [Second Vatican] council’s opening to the ecumenical and interfaith relations and with it the continued softening of the traditional belief that there is no salvation outside the church. If that doctrine suggested service to a jealous God, trimming it suggests an appropriate emerging sense of theological and historical humility. For Leo, it was fundamental that “those who refuse to enter the perfect society or leave it are separated forever from life eternal.” In the Decree on Ecumenism (1964), on the other hand, heretics and schismatics have become “separated brethren.” They “have a right to be called Christians and with good reason” to be “accepted as brothers by the children of the Catholic Church.” While all the elements necessary for salvation are said to “subsist” in their “fullness” in the Catholic Church, “which in the Creed we profess to be one, holy, catholic and apostolic,” it is nevertheless true, according to Lumen Gentium, that “many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside its visible confines.” In other words, there is no sacred monopoly on holiness and truth, a teaching that Leo would have regarded as undermining the basic mission of the church. As Karl Rahner made the point, there has been a growing recognition that “many whom God has, the Church does not have; and many whom the Church has, God does not have.”

The transforming response to the new universalism is evident here as well. The late Avery Cardinal Dulles concluded a recent review of the development of church teaching on the question of who can be saved with these observations: “Catholics can be saved if they believe the Word of God as taught by the Church and if they obey the commandments. Other Christians can be saved if they submit their lives to Christ and join the community where they think he wills to be found. Jews can be saved if they look forward in hope to the Messiah and try to ascertain whether God’s promise has been fulfilled. Adherents of other religions can be saved if, with the help of grace, they sincerely seek God and strive to do his will. Even atheists can be saved if they worship God under some other name and place their lives at the service of truth and justice. God’s saving grace, channeled through Christ the one Mediator, leaves no one unassisted.” Theologically speaking, while Dulles holds that all grace is mediated through the one, triune God, he does not insist, as Leo felt he had to do, that is it mediated exclusively through the one true church. The post conciliar church reads history and culture differently from the way the Leonine church read them. (79-80)

And they tell us there is one holy catholic and apostolic paradigm.

So the problem, and I apologize for sounding condescending, is that Jason has bitten off more than he can chew by arguing for the superiority of Rome’s ecclesiology to Protestantism’s. If he wants a magisterium that can objectively and authoritatively settle disputes in the church, he is going to get a church that also condemns all aspects of modernity as 19th century popes did because those aspects of modern life were creating disputes within the church and hurting the souls of believers. If Jason wants a spirituality of the church papacy, he is not going to find it (until the recent post-Vatican II past) because the spiritual weight of the papacy was always at odds with creating space for the political apart from the faith (which is why it took until Vatican II for Rome to embrace religious freedom and separation of church and state). In other words, a papacy with the kind of clout that would reign in the faithful with denunciations of Americanism and Modernism was also a papacy intent on asserting or recovering its temporal power (because temporal power gave the church freedom to assert its spiritual authority).

But then when Jason finds out that he does have a spirituality of the church papacy in the post-Vatican II era, he gains a church where popes are still echoing their older temporal power through various “social teachings” while also following a theological proposal like Dulles’ where the church sounds like it would have trouble settling basic theological conflicts (which may explain why so many conservative Roman Catholics associate orthodoxy with a male priesthood and not using contraceptives). In other words, he now has a crisis of authority that makes dispute between Baptists and Presbyterians look like sandbox rivals fighting over a scoop.

So when Jason left Protestantism thinking he had left behind its problems, my sense is that he did not realize just how big the problems were in his new communion. Roman Catholicism’s crisis of authority — going all the way back to Gregory VII’s battles with Henry, through the Avignon papacy and conciliarism, to the nineteenth-century controversies over the Papal States and Rome’s standing among Europe’s ruling class, down to Vatican II and its effort to appropriate communio ecclesiology — is the ecclesiastical equivalent of the earthquakes that erupt from the movement of earth’s tectonic plates. Jason entered a conflict almost a millennium old. If he understood that, he might not be so quick in his assertions of superiority or his claims that his critics “don’t understand.”

Mainline Celebrity Blues

Published on by D. G. Hart22 Comments

The word for mainline Protestants these days, apparently, is progressive. I guess this is what happens when you are no longer mainline. This isn’t gloating. How could an Orthodox Presbyterian ridicule progressives for joining the sideline? For a while (maybe 1890 to 1970) they were the mainline. The OPC (and the rest of NAPARC, TKNY’s presence notwithstanding) never was mainline.

Still, Carol Howard Merrit’s reflections on celebrity culture at various Protestant conferences do an injustice to what the mainline was.

In Progressive Protestant circles, David Heim makes the case that we don’t really have celebrities. We’re uncomfortable with them. We assume that if they have glitz then they must be shallow. And if they have an audience then they must be dumbing things down.

The post in question from the Century’s editor, David Heim, makes a similar point:

Occasionally the Century editors sit down to talk with experts in magazine marketing. They sometimes tells us that we need to do more with celebrities–feature a celebrity on the cover of the magazine, for example.

No, they’re not pressing us to feature Brad Pitt or Lindsay Lohan. What they have in mind is featuring the celebrities of our world, that is, the celebrities of the mainline Protestant world.

We usually respond: “But mainline Protestants don’t really have celebrities.” When the experts look doubtful, the editors look at one another. “Well, we might come up with a few living semi-celebrities–but that would take care of only two months worth of covers.”

The absence of a celebrity culture seems like one of the healthy things about the mainline Protestant world, even if it limits marketing opportunities. We tend to get uneasy when a person’s charisma or accomplishment is the focus of attention. Adulation seems not only naïve and credulous but also ignorant of the mysterious and paradoxical ways God chooses to work.

Nothing wrong about this, but I wonder if the editors of the Century were concerned about the health of the mainline churches when the likes of Henry Sloane Coffin (1926), Reinhold Nieburh (1948), Henry Pitney Van Dusen (1946), Karl Barth (1962), and Eugene Carson Blake (1961) adorned the covers of Time magazine. Once upon a time the mainline did have celebrities and those celebrities were responsible for giving the mainline coherence and brand loyalty. And you can chart the decline of the mainline by Time’s covers. Jerry Falwell made it in 1985, Billy Graham in 1993, 1996, and 2007.

To be sure, that kind of dependence can be damaging to the spiritual health of the church. So the change at the Century is a welcome development. But is revisionist history to say that the mainline has no celebrities or that progressive Protestants have always understood healthy churches this way (though it is indicative of how difficult it is to maintain celebrity status in the former mainline when those former celebrities don’t measure up to today’s progressive standards and so are dispensed in the dustbin of dead white European men).