Category: Christ and culture

Neo-Calvinists, New Calvinists, and Roman Catholics Together?

Published on by D. G. Hart23 Comments

Both have trouble thinking about Christianity apart from culture.

Drawing together this vision of Scripture we see that God intends us to have dominion over the earth and the rest of creation – which means we must care for it and shape it. This is the foundation of culture, rooted in the land, which we cultivate and use to produce the material elements of culture. In the New Testament we see that culture from a higher perspective is way of life, which embodies the teaching of Christ and the will of the Father in our lives. This is a new dominion of holiness, which sanctifies the world. Both visions are united by seeking to enact on earth what God has made known to us and commanded. A striking image of this comes from Exodus: “According to all that I show you concerning the pattern of the tabernacle, and of all its furniture, so you shall make it” (25:9). Christian culture makes according to the pattern revealed to us by God. . . .

Pope John Paul II knew personally the power of culture as he sought to preserve his nation’s identity in the midst of Nazism and Communism. Through his trials, he became convinced that “the strength of the Gospel is capable of transforming the cultures of our times by its leaven of justice and of charity in truth and solidarity. Faith which becomes culture is the source of hope” (“The World’s Changing Cultural Horizons,” §7). He may also have given us the strongest statement on the necessary interconnection of faith and culture: “The synthesis between culture and faith is not only a demand of culture, but also of faith … A faith that does not become culture is not fully accepted, not entirely thought out, not faithfully lived” (“Address to the Italian National Congress of the Ecclesial Movement for Cultural Commitment,” Jan. 16, 1982). So, yes, faith does need culture so that it may be lived out in the world in a coherent and complete way.

As a 2ker, Stellman might not have used the gateway drug of transformationalism. Then again . . .

Golden Oldie (part one)

Published on by D. G. Hart3 Comments

From the archives of Modern Reformation, excerpt from “The Incarnation and Multiculturalism“:

One of the ways, however, where the church has become conformed to the world concerns this very notion of how Christ is like us. One of the assumptions which governs so much of our lives is the idea that it is impossible for an individual of a particular race, gender, or sexual orientation to understand the experience of someone different. Or put differently, that people from one kind of background cannot identify with someone from a different background. This perspective tells us that the conditions of knowledge change according to differences in gender, race, ethnicity and whatever else distinguishes individuals in the census data. This is the outlook behind various political initiatives to affirm the rights and livelihoods of various minorities, advertisements which portray living white European men as little more than unthinking, uncaring louses, and various efforts in the academic and artistic worlds to include the expressions of oppressed outsiders and demonize the expressions of dead white, European men. Conversely, the idea that the experience of a particular human being is somehow universal or representative is increasinly regarded as arguable if not downright foolish.

That followers of Jesus Christ would capitulate to such thinking is well nigh remarkable. Yet, evidence continues to mount which shows that Christians are more and more faithful to the dogma of multiculturalism than to orthodox Christian teaching. Mainline Protestants have been at this game the longest. When those communions embraced the idea that Protestant orthodoxy was the product of a bygone age with little relevance for the knowledge and social arrangements of the modern world, mainstream Protestantism opened the door of the household of faith to arguments which deny that theological truth, religious practice, and ecclesiastical office transcend the time and place. Still, conservative Protestants, even conservative Presbyterians have made up for lost time. At many conservative colleges and seminaries one hears an increasing number of calls for greater racial and gender diversity within the faculty, student body and curriculum. White male professors and the traditional theological curriculum, it is said, are neither representative nor affirming of the peoples to whom the church is called to minister. Along the same lines run some of the arguments for home missions and church growth. If we try to establish churches among either urban minorities or suburban baby boomers, can we really expect the truths of the Westminster Confession of Faith or the piety of seventeenth century Puritans to make any sense? Don’t we need to contextualize the gospel in a way that makes the gospel relevant to the problems which confront African Americans, Hispanics and unchurched Harry and his wife? So many church planting experts devise strategies for establishing churches that will appeal to different age or ethnic groups. Then there is the steady stream of study Bibles which evangelical publishers continue to produce, the woman’s study Bible, the men’s study Bible, the Bible for teens, and the Bible for seniors. So too does worship suffer at the hands of multiculturalism. Advocates of contemporary worship forms insist that older patterns and forms of corporate worship are meaningless and hence oppressive to younger believers who have grown up with television and rock ‘n roll. And to take but one more example, the debates in some Reformed denominations about the ordination of women follows from the logic that human experience is not universal but rather partial or specific to different kinds of people. So many who favor women’s ordination argue that women clergy are much better equipped to address the needs of the church’s largest constituency, other women because they, and only they know what it is like to be a woman. So, if you think that the question of cultural diversity is only one for the politicians in Washington or the professors at our leading universities, think again. More and more God’s people are succumbing to the notion that men and women, African-Americans and whites, young and old, and urbanites and suburbanites are fundamentally different, with little in human experience binding them together or giving them a common frame of reference.

The reason for going on at such length about this is not the problem it poses for public life. To be sure this is a problem. But the church has a different task than to make the United States a harmonious place to live. Rather, the danger of such thinking is that it flies in the face of the gospel. It directly contradicts what our text here teaches, that is, that Jesus is like us.

If we were to capitulate entirely to the habits of our culture about personal identity, that we are merely products of our various physical traits such as skin color, family background, sex, socio-economic status, or career, then we would be people of little hope. For we would not be able to identify with Jesus or he with us. The Christ whom we worship, who calls us into his presence and makes it possible because of his sacrifice for us to enter into the holy of holies surrounded though invisible by the saints and angels, is really very different from according to the contemporary mindset. This Christ, who is supposed to belike us in all things, except for sin, is far removed from us. After all, he was and in some sense still is in his glorified body a single, male, Jew who lived in first-century Palestine and worked throughout most of his life as a carpenter. All that he has in common with Americans living in the late twentieth-century is not much more than a pulse. And this is the real danger of such ways of thinking. Because if Christ is so different from us, then he really could not have identified with us and cannot set us free from our guilt and misery.

The way Americans commonly identify themselves has little to do with what the Bible teaches. The incarnation, the truth that the second person of the trinity took to himself a true body and a reasonable soul, teaches that what matters most in human experience is not what physical characteristics divide us but rather it teaches what is universal to the human condition. Our physical traits may matter to the world and so hurt or help our chances of find a job and living a well-adjusted life. But these concerns are insignificant in the light of eternity. What matters most men and women is that they are created in God’s image and for the purpose of having fellowship with him. Of course the possibilities for that fellowship have been ruptured by sin. That is why Christ took human form, why he assumed the image of God given to humanity, that he might restore his beloved to fellowship with God. This is the real significance of the human form that Jesus took, that it was a form given for the purpose of glorifying and enjoying God, not for the purpose of wielding power over others or proving our standing as victims of oppression. Jesus was and is like us in his humanity despite his being a Jewish, male heterosexual bachelor from working class background. And his similarity to us is crucial to our salvation.

If Christian America is a Problem, Why not Christian Scholarship?

Published on by D. G. Hart16 Comments

Tracy McKenzie makes sense in his build up to criticism of David Barton:

. . . when the debate that we’re drawn into concerns the nature of the religious beliefs of the nation’s founders, there is something more important at stake than historical accuracy or our personal character. In assessing whether our nation’s founders were Christian, we’re inevitably saying something as well about the Christian faith and Christ himself. Stephen Nichols makes this point marvelously in his book Jesus: Made in America. As Nichols puts it, when we exaggerate the degree to which the founders were Christian, we not only “do injustice to the past and to the true thought of the founders,” but we also do “injustice to Christianity and the true picture of Jesus.”

I have long thought that the same point applies to those who promote Christian scholarship (and this has cost me in certain Christian scholarly circles where neo-Calvinists were once legion). Rightly construed, you can plausibly argue that scholars who study Scripture or dogma are doing something Christian because their very subject is Christ and because to understand the claims of their subjects properly they need the illumination of the Holy Spirit. But why is the study of U.S. history Christian? Because the scholar is Christian? Because the institution that employs her is Christian? Because the U.S. is Christian?

The U.S. and the scholars who study the nation are part of general revelation. They don’t rely upon the Bible, Christ, the work of the Holy Spirit (in a gracious way) or the church to do their work.

So, when scholars who study general revelation try to call their scholarship Christian, are they not guilty of doing precisely what McKenzie sees in David Barton?

How Can A Tranformationalist Be Pauline?

Published on by D. G. Hart57 Comments

Family worship this morning took us into the tall grass of 1 Cor 15 where Paul expresses thoughts that should give cultural transformationalists the willies:

But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” You foolish person! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. For not all flesh is the same, but there is one kind for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish. There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is of one kind, and the glory of the earthly is of another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory.

So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.
Mystery and Victory

I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. (1 Corinthians 15:35-50, ESV)

There you have it once again, a fundamental distinction between the temporal and the eternal, between earthly and heavenly glory, between what is corruptible and incorruptible. (Breaking Bad is clearly perishable. But my inner Paul forces me to say that The Wire is also perishable.) Paul also makes a clear affirmation that something as mysterious and as powerful as the resurrection is the only way to take something from this world and have it endure into the next.

Sometime ago, Keith Mathison raised questions about Dave VanDrunen’s two-kingdom theology by suggesting that a view that stressed discontinuity between this world and the world to come leaned more in the direction of annihilation of the present world than previous Reformed authors (mainly neo-Calvinist) have:

VanDrunen claims that his view entails “destruction” of the natural order, not its “annihilation” (p. 66). He makes this assertion because he believes, rightly, that “our earthly bodies will be transformed into resurrected bodies.” He continues, “It is precisely this—the resurrection of believers’ bodies—that the created order is now longing for.” What does this mean? “Our earthly bodies are the only part of the present world that Scripture says will be transformed and taken up into the world-to-come” (p. 66). The entire paragraph in which these comments are found is somewhat confusing. Why? The argument between those who advocate annihilation of the present creation and those who advocate renewal is not about our resurrection bodies. It concerns the present creation that was affected by man’s sin. All orthodox Reformed Christians affirm that our present bodies will be transformed and that there is continuity between this present body and the resurrection body (e.g. Belgic Confession, Art. 37; WCF 32:2). Some of these Reformed Christians, however, affirm that the present heavens and earth will be annihilated and that the new heavens and earth are a completely new creation. This is what VanDrunen argues throughout this book, so for him to say that he believes the natural order will be “destroyed” but not “annihilated” only muddies the water because it misses the main point under consideration.

VanDrunen’s preference for destruction over annihilation may not be as clear as is should be. But how can anyone who reads Paul’s letter to the Corinthians possibly argue for continuity between this world and the next? Whether its destruction, annihilation, death, a sown seed, or Walter White, a reader of Paul would be hard pressed to think that cultural accomplishments here can in any way compare with the glory to be revealed.

I understand that such a reading of Paul is not inspiring. It does not lead me to think that each day I am changing the world in my work and recreations. But isn’t that Paul’s point in so many places, like setting our minds on things above?

More Ambivalence, Less Schizophrenia

Published on by D. G. Hart22 Comments

A couple of stories caught my eye last week about evangelicals and the academy. On the one hand, evangelicals rock:

The media often portrays scientists and Christians as incapable of peaceful coexistence. But results from a recent survey suggest the two are not as incompatible as one might think. In fact, 2 million out of nearly 12 million scientists are evangelical Christians. If you were to bring all the evangelical scientists together, they could populate the city of Houston, Texas.

Sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund and her colleagues at Rice University and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) reported results from the largest study of American views on science and religion at the association’s annual conference in Chicago on Sunday, February 16. More than 10,000 people, including 574 self-identified as scientists, responded to the 75-question survey. Among the scientists, 17 percent said the term “evangelical” describes them “somewhat” or “very well,” compared to 23 percent of all respondents.

On the other hand, evangelicals fear rocks:

For years, Christians have complained that academia has been an unwelcoming place for them. They’re probably right. While the evidence about whether colleges and universities are encouraging Christians to lose their faith is mixed, the anti-Christian humanist bias within academia is relatively clear—both to the disproportionately low number of Christians within the academy and to researchers, like me, who’ve taken the time to study them.

Given the hostility towards Christians, we’re left asking how Christians should approach higher education. Do they belong in academia at all?

Evangelicals follow the lead of Americans who generally sense that they are either in the mainstream or part of the aggrieved, excluded from a place at the table. The former could do their neighbors an immeasurable favor if they learned (and taught others) to live without a desire for acceptance or dominance but simply conceded that no group is in control, or conversely, that every group feels beleaguered. And if James Madison was right, that the key to a constitutional republic was the more factions the better, then the less Americans or evangelicals identify either as a dominant majority or a persecuted minority, the more likely they might be to accept that all positions are contested, that few agreements are possible, and that we walk on egg shells out there in public.

Of course, it’s more comfortable (as some less formal folks count comfort) to walk around in your underwear, as if you owned the joint. But if everyone lived like they were renters and had to worry about music being too loud or unwelcome cooking odors, the United States might be as hospitable a place as is possible this side of the ultimate Downton Abbey in the sky.

Would the Papal States Have Fielded a Bobsled Team?

Published on by D. G. Hart12 Comments

The question is of course anachronistic since the International Olympic Committee did not start until 1894, a good quarter of a century after the papacy lost its temporal powers. Even so, if ever Christians had wanted to root for a Christian team in the Olympics, the Papal States would have come the closest to integrating faith, politics, and sport since in that context the church was running things.

The reason for this little venture in wonderment was a recent story at Christianity Today about God and country at the Olympics in Sochi (in contrast, this one avoids nationalism):

It’s nice to find fellow Christians among the 230 men and women who make up the 2014 Team USA delegation to Sochi, Russia. We don’t root for them because they’re on “Team Jesus,” but all the same it’s nice to see people at the peak of their field, on the world’s biggest athletic stage, turn the credit back to the One who gave us bodies to run and jump and spin on ice and imaginations to push the limits of those bodies to run faster, jump higher, and spin faster than we ever thought possible.

Here are a few Christians to watch as they compete for Team USA in Sochi. Many of them are medal contenders; all of them know that no matter what happens over the next two weeks, God will still be good.

The question this article raises is the one that 2kers constantly ponder: to whom do I have a higher allegiance, the temporal city (Team U.S.A.) or the eternal city — no, not the Vatican — the church? It may be a two-fer to have an American and a Christian on one of the Olympic teams. But why would American Christians be more interested in U.S. Christian athletes than believers on Team France, Team China, or Team Brazil? And how about Reformed Protestants pulling especially hard for the nations that gave us the Reformed churches — Team Switzerland, Team Netherlands, and Team United Kingdom?

At the same time, since God has little to do with the Olympics, since the teams arise from temporal polities not from spiritual ones, why should U.S. Christians root any harder for believers on Team U.S.A. than for the non-believing team members? The answer is, there is no reason, unless you think — like the transformers, theonomists, and neo-Calvinists — that “neutral” realms may not exist and religion needs to be part of everything. Oh, the inhumanity of the IOC and Russian officials not acknowledging God (and for shame on the BBs and Rabbi Bret for not raising a ruckus about the secular Olympics)! If realms like the Olympics need religion, then Christianity Today’s article makes perfect sense. But then so does reducing the kingdom of God to the earthly, fleeting, and spurious politics of the IOC and the U.S. Olympic Committee.

Imagine if You Were Orthodox Presbyterian

Published on by D. G. Hart54 Comments

John Zmirak is back to pester (unintentionally) Jason and the Callers with an explanation for what conservative or traditionalist Roman Catholic culture is so weird. He thinks the problem is numerical. Not as many good Roman Catholics exist as “Sunday Catholics”:

How many people in America actually believe all the central truths of the Catholic Catechism? Public opinion surveys have revealed that high percentages of Sunday Mass-goers do not hold, or perhaps never learned about, transubstantiation (the change of bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist). Depending on which faction of the Catholic fragment you belong to, you can chalk up that ignorance to either the collapse of Catholic schooling, the dumbing down of the liturgy, or even to the suppression during the 1970s of the “unconscious catechesis” that used to occur every time the most unlettered peasant knelt for the Host and reverently took it on his tongue from the blessed hands of a priest.

I don’t know that public opinion surveys have asked “Sunday Catholics” what they believe about the physical resurrection of Christ, or the Immaculate Conception, but if average Catholics believe what I was taught in my Catholic high school, then they are heretics – and probably don’t even know or care.

Practice is not a perfect mirror of what we believe, but surely it tells us something that the rates of divorce, premarital sex, and cohabitation are not a whit lower (and in some cases higher) among Roman Catholics than among most churchgoing Protestants. The explosive growth of annulments is partly an outright abuse on the part of bishops, and partly a recognition that many Catholics enter the sacrament with “defective intent.” Remember that if either party going into a marriage considers divorce and remarriage a possible option it invalidates the marriage. So most of the annulments given out nowadays are quite likely valid – unlike too many Catholic weddings. . . .

The implication of this sad fact is clear: On a grave moral issue where several popes have invoked their full moral authority short of making an infallible declaration, 95 percent of U.S. Catholics (the number is surely higher in most of Europe) have rejected the guidance of Rome. They are not “bad Catholics” so much members of a new, dissenting sect – which happens to occupy most of the seats in most of the churches, and many of the pulpits and bishop’s offices, too.

This means that the market for serious Roman Catholic reflection and works is small:

A good friend of mine who works for a major Catholic publisher reported to me the results of some very pricey market research his company undertook, to turn up the actual size of the “orthodox Catholic market.” Many thousands of dollars later, his company learned that if you count Catholics who go to Mass more than once a week, or spend a single dollar on Catholic books or other media, or volunteer for any parish activity, the grand total for the United States of America is no higher than 1.2 million.

That is the whole Catholic market. No wonder there isn’t enough revenue to go around. All the quarrels between traditionalists and Novus Ordo conservatives, between the lovers of Dorothy Day and fans of John Courtney Murray, are fights for pieces of this tiny pie. A pop tart, really.

And pop tarts aren’t health food. It isn’t normal for the Church to consist just of saints and zealots, ascetical future “blesseds,” and Inquisition re-enactors. Faith is meant to be yeast that yields a hearty loaf of bread. But since 1968 there has been nothing left to leaven, and we find ourselves eating yeast. (My apologies to English readers who love their Marmite.) The last time I was at the Catholic Marketing Network, which includes all the leading companies in the orthodox Catholic market, most of the attendees seemed to be people who’d bought their own booths – so the whole day was spent watching vendors try to sell each other their stuff. (“I’ll trade you three copies of The Secret of the Rosary for one of those 3-D Divine Mercy holograms.”) . . .

The weirdness, bitterness, crankiness, and the general mediocrity that pervade the Catholic subculture – from its newspapers to its TV shows, from most of its tiny colleges to the poorly-penned books, and sloppy, sentimental blogs that flood the tiny market of conservative Catholic readers – is the direct result of having few people to choose from. Right off the bat, 95 percent of potential applicants for any position have disqualified themselves for doctrinal reasons.

Well, John should console himself. At least Roman Catholics have newspapers, tv-shows, and colleges even if it is weird. With only 30,000 in the OPC, the best we can do is a summer Family Bible Camp at some state park in need of serious renovations. And even if you are the much “bigger” PCA, at 300,000 large, the best you can do is one college and a magazine that is sometimes in print.

Even so, Zmirak makes a useful point. When your numbers are low, your options for communicating are meager. If you want to blame this on the free market system — maybe Pope Francis would — then consider how much you can subsidize with only 30,000 small donors. If a potential market of 30,000 doesn’t provide the kind of scale that makes modern media affordable or even conceivable, the potential giving of 30,000 will hardly allow you to subsidize a college or radio station.

So if conservative Roman Catholics feel marginal, try being a conservative Presbyterian.

Do I Need a Strategy for Dining on Sweetbreads?

Published on by D. G. Hart614 Comments

After having seen Inside Llewyn Davis for a second time — it is growing on the Harts — I am intrigued by the exchange between Trevin Wax and Alissa Wilkinson about Christians watching movies. Wilkinson advocates seeing movies, in part, as a way of knowing what our neighbors are talking about. This facility will allow us to love them better and perhaps even evangelize. Wax thinks the idea of watching The Wolf of Wall Street as either neighbor love or pre-evangelism is a stretch. In the narrow confines of this debate, Wax largely has a point, though his fears of “heading down a rocky terrain without any brake system working on our vehicle” is at odds with the no-brakes approach of the apostle Paul who said everything is lawful. (Paul’s brake was whether something was beneficial either for us or other believers — a pretty complicated question but not necessarily so if you’re not blogging about what movies you see.)

What is missing from this classic evangelical approach to culture — either it helps with evangelism or it needs to bolster our moral posture — is (all about) I. What if I watch a movie simply because I like it, that is, I enjoy certain actors (George Clooney) or directors (Joel Coen) or writers (Ethan Coen) and I go out of my way to follow what they do. It is like acquiring a taste for a kind of food that some people might find objectionable — like sweetbreads (the thymus and pancreas of calves or lambs). If it’s on the menu, I generally order it. And if the Coens come out with a movie I see it. Why? A theological explanation could be that this is how God has providentially overseen my life so that I am predisposed to sweetbreads and the Coens.

That is way more theology than I think is necessary to justify such mundane affairs as food and movies. I understand that simply “enjoying” something can be a route to escapism or obesity — that is, not critically reflecting on what we watch or eat. But I see no reason why we can’t have a fuller account of enjoyment as a sufficient reason for seeing a film. If all things are lawful, maybe they are also enjoyable.

Why Religion Goes Private

Published on by D. G. Hart154 Comments

This story about religious dissenters at Ontario York University is one of those reality checks for 2k’s critics who say that the notion of faith being a private affair is audaciously perverse or perfidious:

J. Paul Grayson, a professor of sociology at Ontario’s York University, received what he described as an unusual request from a student in his online research methods class last fall. The student requested that he be exempt from an assignment requiring him to meet in-person with a group of his peers, writing to Grayson,

One of the main reasons that I have chosen internet courses to complete my BA is due to my firm religious beliefs, and part of that is the intermingling between men and women… It will not be possible for me to meet in public with a group of women (the majority of my group) to complete some of these tasks.

Grayson ultimately refused the student’s request for an accommodation, believing that to grant it would be to render him, and the university, “an accessory to sexism.” Grayson said that the student, whom he surmised is either Muslim or Orthodox Jewish – his identity has not been revealed for privacy reasons – graciously accepted the decision. He has since completed the assignment in question.

It would seem to be a case in which a sensitive situation was resolved satisfactorily enough. However, Grayson’s denial of the student’s request came over and above the objections of York administrators, including the dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, Martin Singer, who, in email correspondence shared by Grayson, said that the university had a legal obligation to accommodate the student’s religious beliefs and argued that to exempt him from group work would “in no way have ‘substantial impact’ on the experience or human rights of other students in the class.” Although, in what Grayson described as a tacit acknowledgement of a potential impact, the dean also wrote to Grayson, “It is particularly important, especially as you are concerned about the course experience of our female students, that other students in 2030.60B are not made aware of the accommodation” (a directive that Grayson said he is currently challenging through the York faculty union as a violation of his academic freedom).

Is it just (all about) me, or do believers, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Mormons, not have an obligation to accept the standards of an institution — such as religious pluralism and no religious tests for enrollment or teaching — when they decide to take courses and pay tuition? If a non-Christian enrolled at Moody Bible Institute and then complained that he was shocked, just shocked to find so much Bible and prayer in classrooms, wouldn’t Christians think the secularist should have known what he was in for? So why doesn’t this logic apply to believers at public institutions? Why do they think that when they arrive on campus, all of a sudden the place is going to turn faith-friendly or maybe even emulate the norms of their faith community?

So, when we have an institution — university or civil polity — that includes a diverse array of believers, believers have to figure out a way to distinguish their public conduct from their religious convictions. (What I say in my prayer closet is not what I say in the classroom.) One way to do that is to say that I am a Christian all the time but this religious identity is not going to be visible or public when participating in a community and abiding by a set of rules where Christianity is not the norm. Perhaps some forms of Christianity are incapable of making such a distinction. If so, then Christians should have nothing to do with religiously mixed polities or institutions. The Amish take that position (and I have great respect for it). But continuing to insist that public institutions comply with a person’s religious convictions when such an institution includes a variety of believers is either disingenuous or just plain recalcitrant.

And thankfully, we have the apostle Paul and John Calvin to sort this out. In his comments on 1 Cor 5: 12-13 — “For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you” — Calvin writes:

There is nothing to hinder us from judging these also — nay more, even devils themselves are not exempt from the judgment of the word which is committed to us. But Paul is speaking here of the jurisdiction that belongs peculiarly to the Church. “The Lord has furnished us with this power, that we may exercise it upon those who belong to his household. For this chastisement is a part of discipline which is confined to the Church, and does not extend to strangers. We do not therefore pronounce upon them their condemnation, because the Lord has not subjected them to our cognizance and jurisdiction, in so far as that chastisement and censure are concerned. We are, therefore, constrained to leave them to the judgment of God.” It is in this sense that Paul says, that God will judge them, because he allows them to wander about unbridled like wild beasts, because there is no one that can restrain their wantonness.

By Implication

Published on by D. G. Hart26 Comments

A couple of posts by the Gospel Allies caught my eye this week. The first, by Trevin Wax, wonders in a John Piper like manner, about the worldliness of watching movies.

I never subscribed to the fundamentalist vision that saw holiness in terms of cultural retreat or worldliness as anything that smacked of cultural engagement. I don’t subscribe to that position today.

But sometimes I wonder if evangelicals have swung the pendulum too far to the other side, to the point where all sorts of entertainment choices are validated in the name of cultural engagement. . . .

So, please don’t hear me advocating for a simplistic denunciation of Hollywood films. I am not. But I am concerned that many evangelicals may be expending more energy in avoiding the appearance of being “holier-than-thou” than we do in avoiding evil itself.

Yes, Paul used a popular poet of his day in order to make a point in his gospel presentation. Cultural engagement is important and necessary. But church history shows us that for every culture-engager there’s also a Gregory of Nyssa type who saw the entertainment mindset as decadent and deserving of judgment.

Is there justification for viewing gratuitous violence or sexual content?

At what point does our cultural engagement become just a sophisticated way of being worldly?

So if Wax is willing to question a believer’s participation in Hollywood’s products, why not by extension wonder about baptizing the modern metropolis as evidence of God’s kingdom coming? After all, Paul says nothing is unclean. And U.S. laws instruct us that Hollywood’s movies are legal. So too is New York City not unclean (nor is it holy like Jerusalem was), and the city is legally part of New York State (though residents in upstate New York bemoan it) and also belongs the United States. If Christians are doing nothing inherently wrong by living, working, or visiting New York City and its attractions, why doesn’t the same apply to Hollywood’s movies? Even better, if God is making himself known through major metropolitan centers like New York City of Sao Paulo, why can’t we in good neo-Calvinist fashion say that God is revealing himself through motion pictures?

The second piece was by Kevin DeYoung on the dangers of antinomianism:

People like John Cotton and Anne Hutchinson were arguing that we should not look for evidences of grace in our lives as confirmation of our election and justification. The antinomian impulse was one which maintained that good works were not necessary for salvation, that God delights in all Christians in the same way, that God does not see sin in the believer, that the moral law is no longer binding for Christians, that law and gospel are diametrically opposed in every way, that to strive after holiness smacks of legalistic effort, that we should not speak of spiritual duties or spiritual progress, that the subject of spiritual activity is not the believer but Christ. Clearly, antinomianism was much more complicated and went much deeper than a simple indifference to sin.

. . . antinomianism is not a phantom, a straw man, or an unheard of error in our day. Throughout history we see that the recovery of grace and the triumph of gospel-centrality are often accompanied by confusion surrounding sanctification and less than careful statements about the nature of obedience, the love of God, and human exertion. We need to know our Bibles better, our history, and our confessions.

By implication, what does this mean for participating in a denomination or a parachurch organization that does not show itself to be disciplined, that is, a church or body that does not follow its confessional standards or even disregards them? Isn’t the lack of discipline that comes with a mainline denomination or with evangelical lowest-common-denominator cooperationism “for the sake of the gospel” a form of institutional antinomianism?

I’d like to see Gospel Allie videos address these topics.