Category: Because Someone Has to Provide Oversight

Do People Still Read Keller?

Published on by D. G. Hart91 Comments

I am beginning to wonder if Tim Keller’s remarkable run of influence is beginning to expire. The reason for wondering is his recent post — an excerpt from his new book, Center Church — at the co-allies’ blog. Although Keller’s failure to be the Presbyterian minister his credentials say he is aggravate the bejeebers out of me, this time his call for a gospel movement seems tired, bordering on #sotenminutesago. It used to be that a megachurch in New York City receiving favorable press coverage in both religious and secular publications was novel. Now it’s not. Does anyone get excited about Willow Creek anymore? Or does Bill Hybels look in comparison to Rob Bell the way Larry David Lucille Ball does to Lucille Ball Larry David? At a certain point, Keller’s cheerleading for the modern metropolis and Redeemer’s cutting edge ministry sounds stale.

In this case, though, Keller himself sounds fatigued. The reason may be that the only way he can conceive of transforming the city is to concoct a set of hoops and ladders that only the Navy Seals could negotiate. According to Keller, a gospel movement requires three things: a contextual theological vision, church planting and church renewal movements (that’s only one thing even though its a mouthful and a bit redundant — you need a movement to have another movement), and specialized ministries. Here’s where tiredness sets in, at least for readers:

Based in the churches, yet also stimulating and sustaining the churches, this third ring consists of a complex of specialty ministries, institutions, networks, and relationships. There are at least seven types of elements in this third ring.

1. A prayer movement uniting churches across traditions in visionary intercession for the city. The history of revivals shows the vital importance of corporate, prevailing, visionary intercessory prayer for the city and the body of Christ. Praying for your city is a biblical directive (Jer 29:4-7). Coming together in prayer is something a wide variety of believers can do. It doesn’t require a lot of negotiation and theological parsing to pray. Prayer brings people together. And this very activity is catalytic for creating friendships and relationships across denominational and organizational bounderies. Partnerships with Christians who are similar to and yet different from you stimulates growth and innovation.

2. A number of specialized evangelistic ministries, reaching particular groups (business people, mothers, ethnicities, and the like). Of particular importance are effective campus and youth ministries. Many of the city church’s future members and leaders are best found in the city’s colleges and schools. While students who graduate from colleges in university towns must leave the area to get jobs, graduates form urban universities do not. Students won to Christ and given a vision for living in the city can remain in the churches they joined during their school years and become emerging leaders in the urban body of Christ. Winning the youth of a city wins city natives who understand the culture well.

3. An array of justice and mercy ministries, addressing every possible social problem and neighborhood. As the evangelicals provided leadership in the 1830s, we need today an urban “benevolent empire” of Christians banding together in various nonprofits and other voluntary organizations to address the needs of the city. Christians of the city must become renowned for their care for their neighbors, for this is one of the key ways that Jesus will become renowned.

4. Faith and work initiatives and fellowships in which Christians from across the city gather with others in the same profession. Networks of Christians in business, the media, the arts, government, and the academy should come together to help each other work with accountability, excellence, and Christian distinctiveness.

6. Systems for attracting, developing, and training urban church and ministry leaders. The act of training usually entails good theological education, but a dynamic city leadership system will include additional components such as well-developed internship programs and connections to campus ministries.

7. An unusual unity of Christian city leaders. Church and movements leaders, heads of institutions, business leaders, academics, and others must know one another and provide vision and direction for the whole city. They must be more concerned about reaching the whole city and growing the whole body of Christ than about increasing their own tribe and kingdom.

Who can stand in that great day? What congregation of any means is capable of maintaining members who not only have the financial resources to pay for the church staff all of these ministries require? But after these folks have worked hard for their incomes and given to the church, do they have time to volunteer for all the additional work that this movement requires? If I were a church planter (I am sort of but I understand Hillsdale is unimportant in the world of ministering to global cities), I’d close Keller’s book and look for another model.

The funny thing is that the pastoral epistles provide an alternative (not to mention the Protestant Reformation’s success in European cities) and the way to advance the kingdom of grace is not nearly as arduous as what Keller prescribes. Granted, the preaching of the word may not produce a self-sustaining movement that will rock the earth’s biggest cities. But for some reason, Paul did not peg the value of the kingdom of grace according to the gospel’s reception among city dwellers.

Why We Need More Redemptive Historical Preaching

Published on by D. G. Hart87 Comments

To avoid the sanctimony of those who slander redemptive historical preachers.

Tim Bayly needed to vent and took aim at redemptive historical preaching. The occasion for the outburst is not entirely clear. One reason is that the Baylys have little tolerance for anyone who doesn’t share their convictions. Another may be that Tim is preparing for an upcoming Clear Note conference on preaching. It seems that at this conference Tim is planning to do to the disciples of Ed Clowney what David did to Goliath.

In response to a professor who warns about isolating biblical narratives from the overarching narrative of salvation, Tim slashes and burns:

Holding David up as a hero is to isolate this narrative from the flow of redemptive history? Really? “Only a boy named David, only a little sling” is out the window now? Everyone all through church history has been wrong to speak well of David’s courage and faith? We must only speak well of God’s power and plan? To hold David up as an example to the young men and little boys of the church is to “isolate” the story of David and Goliath “from the flow of redemptive history?”

Bunk and double bunk.

Well, how much bunk is involved in explaining to those little boys who sing about David and his sling what they should think of David and his prurient thoughts about a certain bather named Bathsheba? How do you explain to the child who collected all of Bobby Barry Bonds baseball cards that the all-time home run leader cheated? Maybe avoiding heroes in the Bible is a good idea.

But the problem with redemptive historical preaching goes deeper:

The failure of men who take pride in being Christ and Gospel-centered isn’t that they’re wrong in affirming how types and examples point to Christ. Reading, teaching, and preaching Christ in all of Scripture is foundational. Obvious.

Their failure is that they deny the morals and virtues of the types and examples–the flesh and blood of history, if you will. It’s as if no one is capable of loving David as a man and desiring to be like him while also loving the God Who made him as he was and worked through him to accomplish his sovereign decrees, including the very public execution of blaspheming Goliath, the very public vindication of His Name resting on Israel, the eventual replacement of King Saul with this man whose Davidic Line would end with our Messiah, and so on.

To speak of courage and faith together does not tie even, or especially, very young boys’ brains in knots. They get it. God has made man capable of amazing intellectual feats and those feats are often seen at their most brilliant in little people who haven’t yet had blinkered professors tell them they can’t think that way. Those possessing wisdom rather than degrees are fully capable of thinking both ways at the same time, and for intellectuals to tell them that they must choose one way and delete the other from their mind, also deleting all those obvious paths criss-crossing between both ways, is for professors of hermeneutics and exegesis to chain Scripture to the same pulpits the Roman Catholics had chained it to back at the time of the Reformation.

Well, tell this to the apostle Paul who could claim all sorts of bona fides in the virtue and courage sphere of Old Testament heroes and called those qualities rubbish:

. . .though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also. If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith. . . (Phil. 3:4-9)

Paul seems to be wary, as redemptive historical preachers are, of putting confidence in human ability to keep the law, to be moral, even to be heroic. That kind of esteem for human morality has a tendency to lead people not to trust in Christ but to look to themselves and their own righteousness.

In fact, if Tim Bayly had listened to more redemptive historical preaching, he would not only be saved from a lack of charity, but he might regard his own moral posturing for what it is — double bunk.

Infallibility In Denial

Published on by D. G. Hart92 Comments

Here I thought we had entered a new era of warm relations between Protestants and Roman Catholics. We are almost twenty years from the first iteration of Evangelicals and Catholics Together. The architects of that project, Richard John Neuhaus and Chuck Colson have passed from the scene but the George brothers (in name only), Timothy and Robbie, have extended the spirit of culture war cooperation with the Manhattan Declaration. Add to mix Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom’s Is the Reformation Over? and you have a setting in which the lines dividing Rome, Geneva, Wittenburg, and Wheaton are increasingly fuzzy. That could be a reason for Protestants to convert to Rome since the differences aren’t great. But it could also be a reason to remain Protestant. If the differences aren’t significant, why bother putting up with bad liturgical music when you can keep the lousy praise band in your own congregation?

And then along comes the ex-Prots who write at Called to Communion to remind all the partyers that a curfew exists and, oh, by the way, they also called the cops if we don’t break up the revelry. CTC’s heavy handed insistence on older Roman Catholic verities is laudable in many respects but comes as a complete surprise to the world of Protestant-Roman Catholic relations. If some wonder why objections to CTC have been so pronounced at Old Life of late, the reason has something to do with how out of synch CTC seems to be with the rest of the Roman Catholic world and the vibe Protestants get from that Roman universe. Instead of telling us how much we share in common with them the way most Roman Catholics do these days, CTC is there to remind us how far Protestants fall short of the fullness of glory that is Rome. Like I say, this bracing splash of alcohol on the wound is welcome at a time when differences between Rome and Protestants look increasingly like personal preference.

At the same time, the other wrinkle in CTC’s project is how little they seem to notice that Rome is not a monolith of fidelity to the teachings of the pope, magisterium, and church councils. The Jesuits, Roman Catholic higher education in the United States, and the nuns are all examples of Roman Catholics out of sync with official church teaching and practice. But when you search around at CTC, you find more about problems among Reformed Protestants than you do about the nuns. Perhaps it is a function of a poor search engine, but if you want to know about the deficiencies of President Obama receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Notre Dame, you’re not going to find it readily at CTC.

CTC’s lack of attention to problems in the Roman Catholic Church has me wondering if CTCers’ insistence on infallibility in ways that would have made Benjamin Warfield’s head swim is responsible for this apparent hiding from Rome’s difficulties. Could it be that if you are so committed to an innerant church hierarchy, you’re predisposed deny errors in your communion?

To illustrate the point, I refer to the recent remarks at Old Life about development of doctrine and certain caricatures of Rome that may have surfaced. In one of my comments, I believe, I questioned the persuasiveness of an exegetical case for Rome’s view of justification since it didn’t seem to me that the Bible figures all that prominently in CTC defenses of Rome (minus Matt. 16:18 which is for CTCers what John 3:16 is for Free Will Baptists). Jason Stellman responded that this was a bit of a cheap shot since Roman Catholics care about the Bible do do exegesis. Only children who are ignorant make the mistake of saying that Roman Catholics don’t read and know their Bibles.

Well, that’s not what David Carlin says over at CatholiCity:

According to the poll, 25 percent of Evangelical Protestants read the Bible daily, as do 20 percent of other Protestants, while daily Bible-reading is done by only 7 percent of Catholics. Now this result didn’t bother me very much, since one can be very familiar with, and very greatly influenced by, a book without reading it on a daily basis. I myself don’t read the Bible daily; nor do I give a daily reading to Plato or Shakespeare; and it’s years since I read Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. Yet I know that all these writing have had a strong influence on the way I look at life and the world.

Far more disturbing was the poll result that showed that 44 percent of Catholics “rarely or never” read the Bible, while this is true of only 7 percent of Evangelicals and 13 percent of non-Evangelical Protestants. The level of religious vitality must be very low in a Christian church in which 44 percent of the membership almost never bothers to read the Bible.

Carlin explains this phenomenon by appealing to Trent, and part to the sacramental nature of the church:

All this changed, officially at least, at Vatican II, which dropped the Church’s 400-year-old “defensive mode of being.” Lay Catholics were now at long last given the green light to read the Bible; indeed, they were encouraged to read it. Yet today, nearly a half-century later, 44 percent of American Catholics “rarely or never” read the Bible, and only 7 percent read it on a daily basis. How can this be?

Part of the answer, of course, is inertia. Four centuries of a certain policy cannot be changed immediately overnight – any more than an aircraft carrier at sea can make a turn of 180 degrees on a dime. Another part of the answer is the sacramentalism of the Catholic Church: To save your soul, it is more important to participate in the sacraments than to read the Bible. But a third part of the answer is, alas, that the leadership of the Church (I mean its bishops and priests) have not stressed the importance of Bible-reading for shaping the Christian mind and heart.

Carlin’s point about Trent’s defensiveness on Bible reading is confirmed by an article in the old New Catholic Dictionary (1910) on Bible Reading by Laity (the date is important because this is a description of the Roman Catholic Church prior to Vatican II:

The Council strictly prohibited the reading of all heretical Latin versions, unless grave reasons necessitated their use. The Council itself did not forbid the reading of the new Catholic translations, although even these later fell under the ban of the Index Commission which Trent set up for the supervision of future legislation regarding the Bible. In 1559 the Commission forbade the use of certain Latin editions, as well as German, French, Spanish, Italian, and English vernacular vereions. Two centuries later, however, it modified the severity of this legislation by granting permission for the use of all versions translated by learned Catholic men, provided they contained annotations derived from the Fathers, and had the approval of the Holy See. Our present discipline grows out of the decree, “Officiorum ac Munerum,” of Leo XIII. This decree states that all vernacular versions, even those prepared by Catholic authors, are prohibited if they are not, on the one hand, approved by the Apostolic See, or, on the other hand, supplied with proper annotations and accompanied by episcopal approbation. However, it contains a provision whereby, for grave reasons, biblical and theological students may use non-Catholic editions as long as these do not attack Catholic dogma.

This does not prove that Roman Catholics can’t or should not do exegesis. The point instead is about the conservative Roman Catholics who are more intent on showing Protestantism’s errors than the problems in their own ecclesiastical home. And I cannot help but think that an emphasis on infallibility produces a culture in which denial is a habit of mind if not a w-w.

Pugilist, Hit Thyself

Published on by D. G. Hart56 Comments

Anthony Bradley has been dishing it out pretty good of late against Doug Wilson, almost to the point of making Wilson look like Tom Reagan from Miller’s Crossing. Bradley is alarmed by Wilson’s neo-Confederate arguments. He believes Wilson harbors racism because of his defense of slavery. And Bradley is surprised — maybe even aghast — at the traction that Wilson has among the co-allies of the gospel. These musings have led Bradley to wonder about a conspiracy among Christian Reconstructionists to use social and political issues to gain new recruits, especially among the young, restless, and gullible.

It’s been about 20 years since I first encountered this stuff but I think the combination America’s secularism, masculinity crisis, growing socialistic public policy, and the like, have opened the door for Christian Reconstruction to avail itself to new generation of young Calvinists but not through the front door–“Christian Reconstruction,” “Theonomy,” and the like–but through the back door of apologetics, the family, masculinity, big government, and so on.

Bradley even speculates on a connection between Christian Reconstruction and Roman Catholicism in that both groups use social teaching to gain converts.

What makes Bradley’s criticisms of Wilson, Christian Reconstruction, and the Young Restless crowd odd is that Bradley himself follows the political script that those he criticizes use. Bradley is generally a fan of neo-Calvinism. I have also heard him appeal to the language of cultural transformation in his interview at Christ the Center.

In which case, the problem with Wilson, slavery, the Confederacy and Christian Reconstruction may not be the actual forms these efforts to Christianize the social order take. The problem may be any attempt to read a social order out of Scripture. For instance, it would be interesting to know what Bradley thinks of his fellow Manhattanite, Tim Keller’s programs of word and deed ministry. Or for that matter, what does Bradley do with the use to which the creators of apartheid put neo-Calvinism? Does the gospel have a social program that Wilson, for example, misses or distorts? Or does the gospel have almost nothing to say about a social order?

Either way, it might be helpful to Wilson’s bruised ego to see Bradley acknowledge both men’s common debt to Kuyper.

And for what it’s worth, part of the appeal of the Confederacy, at least among political conservatives as opposed to the Religious Right, is that the South did stand for an understanding of the United States that was closer than Lincoln’s or the Progressive’s to the Constitution. The phrase, states’ rights, generally receives smirks from those who assume it represents a defense of slavery or worse, racism. But the Constitution itself was not particularly clear on how to sort out the relative powers of the states and the federal government, which was a large factor in the sectional crisis. But if folks want to dismiss states’ rights as simply the cant of “Crackers” who wanted to keep African-Americans in place, they should consider the good that states’ rights might serve today when applied to gay marriage and abortion. That may explain some of the appeal of the Confederacy, though I don’t presume to speak for Doug Wilson.

Silence is Golden

Published on by D. G. Hart69 Comments

The controversy surrounding a post at the Co-Allies of the Gospel website has me thinking that if the Mark Driscolls and Tim Kellers of the world would not write books about marriage and sex we all might be better off. Open discussions these days of sex and marriage has nurtured an environment where Doug Wilson, provocateur par excellance, has stepped in “it” by writing about sex in a way offensive or objectionable to some. Since the point here is that silence about sex might do Christians some good, I am not going to quote from Wilson here.

I am going to comment as an aging baby boomer, though, that when I was a kid growing up in evangelical circles believers didn’t talk about sex. We didn’t even conceive of our parents or minister (and wife) conceiving. Call it the Hamlet phenomenon where you don’t want to picture what your parents do in privacy. But that notion of privacy has of course been shattered not just by the sexual revolution but by cultural assumptions about the goodness of intimacy and transparency and the badness of hang ups or uptightness.

The literature on marriage and sex from Christians is from one angle, then, not a reflection of the Lordship of Christ over all areas of life. It is instead a further indication of Christian capitulation to a culture that lacks restraint about private matters. Just as the 1950s knew something (though imperfectly) about distinctions between religion and politics, so that era also could distinguish between the living room and the bedroom. The United States (and probably the West more generally) was better for it.

The Gloating Coalition?

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

The news of Jerry Sandusky’s conviction for child molestation has some Christians beating their breasts over their faith’s influence on western civilization. Joe Carter, one of TGC’s aggregators, has a quotation from a piece at the Catholic World Reporter that argues Sandusky would not have been found guilty in the ancient worlds of Greece or Rome:

If Sandusky would have lived 2000 years ago, he would not have been found guilty of anything. He would not even have been noticed. His actions would have been entirely unremarkable. There would have been no disgust, no anger. The verdict would have been innocent, and in fact, the notion that he was guilty of anything would have been unintelligible.

Carter jumps on the bandwagon:

For 2,000 years, the influence of Christ has had a profound—yet underestimated—influence on all aspects of Western culture. We often take for granted that without the “salt and light” of Christianity, behaviors that we consider disgusting and taboo would be accepted and commonplace. But what will happen if the influence of Christ and his followers continues to wane?

Discerning which is more remarkable here — the bad taste or the theological blunder — is difficult to say. Why would someone use this occasion to boast about the cultural effects of one’s faith? Why not show a little humility, mixed in with a dose of compassion for both Sandusky’s family, not to mention the victims (and their families), and back away from exploiting this story in the culture wars? Is this really going to persuade anyone on the other side or will it confirm the Religious Right’s reputation for self-congratulatory righteousness (and thus inspiring the faithful)?

At the same time, I thought the gospel was not about punishment for sin but forgiveness from its guilt and penalty. If the Gospel Coalition is going to stand up for the gospel, wouldn’t a fitting perspective here be to suggest that Christ might forgive even a sinner like Jerry Sandusky (if he repents and trusts in Christ)? But that kind of message doesn’t play so well in the culture wars where Christians invariably want more law and less forgiveness. Mind you, this is not a plea for anarchy or libertinism, not even a return to Rome or Athens. It is simply to show that the way of the gospel and the church’s ministry is distinct from the sword of the magistrate and the justice it wields.

This kind of historical credit-taking is downright unbecoming since it seems to attribute to Christianity (in a very whiggish way — how Roman Catholics go whiggy is another matter) all the blessings of modern society. To keep modern historical advances in perspective, a recent piece by Diedre N. McCloskey in The New Republic on happiness may bring these cultural warriors back down to a complicated earth. Here is an important excerpt that suggests Christianity did not give us all the benefits that some would have us think. The Enlightenment deserves a little credit (or blame depending on how you interpret the turn from otherworldliness to worldly preoccupations:

On a long view, understand, it is only recently that we have been guiltlessly obsessed with either pleasure or happiness. In secular traditions, such as the Greek or the Chinese, a pleasuring version of happiness is downplayed, at any rate in high theory, in favor of political or philosophical insight. The ancient Chinese sage Zhuangzi observed of some goldfish in a pond, “See how happy they are!” A companion replied, “How do you know they are happy?” Zhuangzi: “How do you know I don’t know?” In Christianity, for most of its history, the treasure, not pleasure, was to be stored up in heaven, not down here where thieves break in. After all, as a pre-eighteenth-century theologian would put it—or as a modern and mathematical economist would, too—an infinite afterlife was infinitely to be preferred to any finite pleasure attainable in earthly life.

The un-happiness doctrine made it seem pointless to attempt to abolish poverty or slavery or wife-beating. A coin given to the beggar rewarded the giver with a leg-up to heaven, a mitzvah, a hasanaat; but the ancient praise for charity implied no plan to adopt welfare programs or to grant rights of personal liberty or to favor a larger national income. A life of sitting by the West Gate with a bowl to beg was, after all, an infinitesimally small share of one’s life to come. Get used to it: For now and for the rest of your life down here, it’s your place in the great chain of being. Take up your cross, and quit whining. What does it matter how miserable you are in this life if you’ll get pie in the sky when you die? Such fatalism in many religions—“God willing,” we say, “im yirtzeh hashem,” “insh’Allah,” “deo volente”—precluded idle talk of earthly happiness.

Then, in the eighteenth century, our earthly happiness became important to us, in high intellectual fashion. By 1776, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” was an unoriginal formulation of what we all, of course, now admitted that we chiefly wanted. John Locke had taught, in 1677, that “the business of men [is] to be happy in this world by the enjoyment of the things of nature subservient to life, health, ease, and pleasure”—though he added piously, “and by the comfortable [that is, comforting] hopes of another life when this is ended.” By 1738, the Comte de Mirabeau wrote to a friend, recommending simply, “[W]hat should be our only goal: happiness.”

“Our only goal.” To see how strange such a remark is, consider whether it could have been uttered by a leader of opinion in 1538. Martin Luther? Michelangelo? Charles V? No. They sought heavenly, artistic, or political glory—not something so domestic as happiness. Yet, in the late seventeenth century, even Anglican priests commenced preaching that God wanted us to be happy as much as holy. They called it “eudaemonism.” Anglicans and, astonishingly, some New England Congregationalists turned against the old, harsh, Augustinian-Calvinist line. We are not, declared the eudaemonists, mere sinners in the hands of an angry God, worms unworthy of grace. We are God’s beloved creatures, his pets.

The eudaemonistic turn was a Very Good Thing, resulting in fresh projects to better our stay here on Earth, some of them remarkably successful. Democracy was one, since, if you followed the fashion for universal happiness, it became impossible to go on insisting that what really mattered was the pleasure of the Duke or the Lord Bishop. Enlightened despots of the era claimed to seek the good of all, which paradoxically gave the populace the idea that maybe they themselves could do it.

Parallel with the stirrings of democracy and its accompanying welfarism, advocating for hospitals and free public education, was a new bourgeois dignity and liberty. Starting in Holland and England, and in the North American colonies of the English, the paired bourgeois revaluations combined to cause modern enrichment. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1835 that “all the English colonies [in North America] at the time of their birth … seemed destined to present the development of … the bourgeois and democratic liberty of which the history of the world did not yet offer a complete model.” Or again about the first industrial nation: “Looking at the turn given to the human spirit in England by political life; seeing the Englishman … inspired by the sense that he can do anything. … I am in no hurry to inquire whether nature has scooped out ports for him, and given him coal and iron.”

Psychological Disorder or Simply Bad Manners?

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

Here is a plea to Kevin C. Rhoades, bishop of the Roman Catholic parish of Ft. Wayne/South Bend: call off Christian Smith! Please!!

Apparently, Smith is so caught up in his conversion to Rome that he has failed to join his fellow communicants in their Fortnight for Freedom. As many may know, Smith has not only joined the Roman Catholic Church, but the distinguished sociologist of American religion has also written two books that justify his move. One takes on the problems of sola scriptura, the other explains how evangelicals can become Roman Catholic. Why those books were not enough is a mystery. But here we are, smack dab in the Freedom Fortnight, and Smith has posted through Pete Enns a piece about the narcissism of conservative Presbyterians:

But for present purposes, what the narcissism of small differences very powerfully explains, I think, is the prevailing tendency among conservative Reformed and Presbyterian Christians in the U.S. to spend so much time, energy, and attention arguing over and policing and prosecuting what in reality are relatively minor—sometimes absolutely obscure—matters of doctrine.

It is not just that they were traumatized by losing Princeton to the liberals and so always feel on edge. Those who sustain the entertainments of doctrinal and biblical legalisms are also in fact so darn similar to each other, and that theological and organizational proximity makes what are often really only very small differences seem life shaking.

If you look at the fine print of this piece you will find no examples of such mountain-out-of-mole-hill making. (But even uninformed readers might connect the dots to Enns, Westminster, and the controversy over inerrancy a few years ago.)

I do not doubt that conservative Presbyterians do this, though whether we need to invoke Freud is another matter. As John Muether pointed out in a comment to Smith’s post:

This is what Neuhaus called the law of theological propinquity — one reserves most strident criticism for those closest, in part as an effort at boundary maintenance. It seems to apply to sociological theory as much as reformed doctrine.

I suspect that even in Roman Catholic circles, if Smith looked hard enough, he might find such forms of boundary maintenance, like those distinguishing Opus Dei from Call to Action. In fact, the United States is thriving on differences that might look to Turks or Japanese like small differences. Do Republicans and Democrats really differ on the economy and national defense? Do Irish-Americans really look at the world differently from Swedish-Americans?

So why would Smith go out of his way to reduce the convictions of his former friends, communicants, and family members to psychological malfunctioning? One explanation might be narcissism itself. Smith is so caught up with his own pilgrimage that he needs to justify it. As his own definition of narcissism attests:

It is narcissistic because it is driven by a quest, very real even if unacknowledged, to feed the importance of one’s own identity even at the expense of others and the church.

This is not meant to be merely an echo response. Smith’s books deserve more comment than this post, and his arguments will receive scrutiny in the forthcoming book that Muether and I are writing. What is meant here is that a smart guy like Smith should have enough intelligence to consider his own posture in these debates, not to mention the manners of an assured convert who doesn’t need to wear his faith on his sleeve and make others feel uncomfortable. Could it be that Smith is still suffering from the evangelical piety he used to defend?

Know Your Presbyterians: Charles G. Finney

Published on by D. G. Hart21 Comments

Why you should know him: Finney has been described by Michael Horton as “the tallest marker in the shift from Reformation orthodoxy, evident in the Great Awakening (under Edwards and Whitefield) to Arminian (indeed, even Pelagian) revivalism. evident from the Second Great Awakening to the present. To demonstrate the debt of modern evangelicalism to Finney, we must first notice his theological departures. From these departures, Finney became the father of the antecedents to some of today’s greatest challenges within evangelical churches, namely, the church growth movement, Pentecostalism and political revivalism.

Positions: evangelist, Presbytery of St. Lawrence, professor of theology and moral philosophy, and president of Oberlin College.

Education: no degrees.

Areas of interest/expertise: science of revival; moral philosophy, ethical perfection

Associations: abolitionism, temperance, feminism.

Books: Lectures on Revivals (1835); Lectures to Professing Christians (1838); Lectures on Systematic Theology (1846).

Unlike some, Old Lifers do not rely upon celebrities to boost their image, nor do they deny the less wholesome aspects of their past (or present) to root, root, root for the home team.

Snarky Saturday (Which It Still Is on the West Coast)

Published on by D. G. Hart41 Comments

So here I was, opening up my browser with a beautiful view of the Rogue River Valley in southern Oregon overlooking a pear orchard (where I am speaking), with a cup of java, and lo I behold two blog posts that didn’t cause me to wretch (so I wasn’t drunk) but did force me to double down on my objections to transformationalism in its various guises. Turns out both posts were responding to Ross Douthat’s new book, Bad Religion.

The first was Peter Leithart’s defense of worldliness. In an interview with Ken Myers, Douthat talks about worldliness in the church and how “A lot of the most influential theologies in American life today are theologies that take various worldly ends as their primary end.” Leithart agrees that the church should not capitulate to earthly powers. But then he offers a reading of redemptive history in which God identifies with the world in such a way that orthodox Christianity is worldly. Toward the end Leithart concludes:

The great Reformed theologian Karl Barth pushed the point back to the pre-dawn of the world. In his stirring re-envisioning of the Reformed doctrine of election, Barth emphasized that election is not only God’s decision concerning human beings and the world but his decision concerning himself. By election, God chooses what kind of God he will be in relation to the world he creates in freedom. He wills to be God only by being God-for-us and God-with-us. He refuses to be God-without-us or God-without-world.

What Barth says about God’s choice before the beginning is consistent with what Christians believe about the end. Christians don’t expect to leave the world behind when history reaches its consummation. Scripture holds out the promise of a new heavens and a new earth, this world transfigured into the kingdom. Christians hope for the resurrection of the body, this flesh transfigured by the Spirit.

I’ll let the praise of Barth go — ahem, but I sure do which guys like Leithart, when thet go on riffs like this, would try to do justice to remarks by Christ like “my kingdom is not of this world,” or Paul like “flesh and blood will not inherit the kingdom.” In fact, the New Testament is rife with an anti-worldiness theme that doesn’t quite dovetail with the remark that Christians do not expect to leave the world behind. Anyone who wants to claim that anti-worldliness is gnostic will have to deal with Paul who was anti-gnostic and otherworldly. So can we at least acknowledge a paradox here? Or do we simply ignore the Bible’s talk of not being conformed to this world (or by implication expect the new heavens and new earth to be like this one)? Whatever the answer, it sure makes sense that neo-Calvinism’s baptism of the world and efforts to make it ours (in the name of Christ, of course) appeals to baby boomers getting over their fundamentalist upbringing. It may make sense, but it is not right.

The other post came from Tim Keller, again in response to Douthat. According to Keller (I haven’t read Douthat’s book yet), the New York Times columnist says that the kind of church that may respond well to the current world’s needs is one that has the following attributes:

First, it would have to be political without being partisan. That is, it would have to equip all its members to be culturally engaged through vocation and civic involvement without identifying corporately with one political party. Second, it would have to be confessional yet ecumenical. That is, the church would have to be fully orthodox within its theological and ecclesiastical tradition yet not narrow and harsh toward other kinds of Christians. It should be especially desirous of cooperation with non-Western Christian leaders and churches. Third, the church would not only have to preach the Word faithfully, but also be committed to beauty and sanctity, the arts, and human rights for all. In this brief section he sounds a lot like Lesslie Newbigin and James Hunter, who have described a church that can have a “missionary encounter with Western culture.”

Again, according to Keller, Douthat mentions Redeemer Big Apple as an example of this kind of church. Maybe. But New York, I understand, is a big city, and Douthat who at least works there may not know all the goings on at Redeemer or what his recommendation involves. At the risk of disagreeing with Douthat and in the hopes of keeping Redeemer honest, his point about ecumenism is a poignant one. A church has to do justice to its own tradition while not being mean or harsh to other Christians.

The problem here is how well Redeemer and Keller honor their own tradition or the churches that share the Reformed heritage. For instance, I recently learned that Keller is starting a Sunday school series to be published by Zondervan. It’s a free country and anyone can publish anything they want is such a land of free milk and democratic honey. But Douthat may want to consider that Redeemer belongs to the Presbyterian Church of America, a denomination that co-owns (with the OPC) Great Commission Publications. And GCP already publishes a Sunday school curriculum that is Reformed, covenantal, and Presbyterian. It may not have the urban bells and cosmopolitan whistles that hipster Presbyterians desire. But it is decent curriculum. To my knowledge, Redeemer has not contacted the publisher to talk about how the material might be improved so that Redeemer can use it (whether they can sell it is another matter). But if Keller and Redeemer wanted to do justice to their tradition and communion, they could show a little of the team player spirit that is supposed to characterize a Presbyterian communion.

Ross Douthat can’t be blamed for not knowing the inner workings of Reformed Protestantism in the United States. Then again, journalists are known to have some awareness of fact checking.

By the way, the idea that churches should equip members to be culturally engaged is remarkable. As it stands, churches have all they can do simply to catechize members and disciple them in the ordinary aspects of church life. To add yet another task to the church is to make ministry well nigh impossible. Not to mention that asking pastors — no offense — whose cultural standards may not be up to part with the grandeur of Western Civilization to school their members on the glories of Shakespeare, Homer, and Percy is borderline laughable. In fact, I don’t know of any church, mainline or sideline, whose cultural instincts I would trust. Thankfully, the Lord doesn’t add cultural engagement to the Great Commission.

Despite the rocky start to the morning, I had a delightful time with the saints here in Medford, contemplating the other world that transcends this one, our reminder of that world on Sundays when we ascend Mt. Zion with all the saints and angels, and enjoying the delightful weather and produce of this world available to the residents and visitors of southern Oregon.

Being Reformed and Avoiding Landmines

Published on by D. G. Hart18 Comments

I don’t want to discourage the young and restless from growing in their understanding of Reformed Protestantism but sometimes even the best of intentions cannot prevent stepping in it. Over at the allies blog John Starke encourages readers to spend more time with Cornelius Van Til — The Most Important Boring Thinker You Should Read (whose birthday happens to be today tomorrow). Starke goes on to ask three leading apologists to recommend sources for readers who know not presuppositionalism — Mike Horton, Scott Oliphint, and John Frame, in that order.

Is it impolite to notice that hard core Van Tillians would likely take umbrage at this order since I’ve often heard comments that Horton is light in his presuppositional loafers? And what would John Frame think to read that he comes in third behind Horton and Oliphint? Maybe Horton’s recommendation of Frame’s Apologetics to the Glory of God as “a readable apologetic from Van Til’s perspective” will take some of the sting away. Also, since the critics of 2k often invoke Van Til against the likes of VanDrunen and Horton, and since VanDrunen and Horton appear to have more of a following among the young and restless than the hard core Van Tillians (despite the congenital defect of transformationalism that afflicts the Gospel Coalition), Starke may have unwittingly aggravated those who invoke the antithesis to divide the world between 2k and R2k.

Sometimes you need a score card to keep track of all the players.

Update: and sometimes you need a clue and can’t take TGC’s word on dates. My comrade in arms informs me that Cornelius Van Til’s birthday is tomorrow. That gives me time to stock up.