Category: Christian politics

Are Christians as Scary as Muslims?

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

In the current issues of New Horizons, I ran across an editorial note about the Islamic presence in Britain. According to the Gatestone Institute, an international policy council:

. . . Sharia courts, which operate in mosques and houses across Britain, routinely issue rulings on domestic and marital issues according to Islamic Sharia law that are at odds with British law. Although Sharia rulings are not legally binding, those subject to the rulings often feel obliged to obey them as a matter of religious belief, or because of pressure from family and community members to do so.

I understand that Presbyterianism has never enjoyed a glowing reputation among the English — the 1640s and all that — but would it not be the case that Presbyterian courts also issue rulings on domestic and marital issues according to biblical teachings that are at odds with British law. For instance, Presbyterians likely believe that divorce is a sin. British law, I suspect, does not forbid divorce (even if it regulates it).

Same goes for here in the U.S. The OPC has a constitution that requires sessions, presbyteries, and assemblies to make rulings that do not follow the laws of individual states or federal law. So, part of the OPC’s constitution (Book of Church Order) reveals a way of thinking about marriage and its norms that is not the same as U.S. law:

Accordingly, God has designed marriage for the enrichment of the lives of those who enter into this estate, for the orderly propagation of the human race, for the generation of a holy seed, and for the avoidance of sexual immorality, all to the glory of the covenant God. Husbands and wives thus have responsibilities befitting God’s purposes for their relationship. The Holy Scripture says, “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for [her].” The husband is to love his wife as his own body, to care for her, and to cherish her. The Holy Scripture says also, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.” The wife is to submit to her husband, to respect him, and to entrust herself to his loving care. Both husbands and wives are to be faithful to each other, to assist each other in all good things, to heartily forgive each other their sins and shortcomings, and to love each other as themselves. Thus united in love, they will more and more reflect in their marriage the unity of Christ and his church.

The question, then, is whether Christians either are capable viewing themselves as outsiders under a secular government or recognizing Muslims as sharing a position similar to ours within a secular nation.

Show Me More of Ze Money, Lebowski

Published on by D. G. Hart6 Comments

The invocation offered at New York City Mayor de Blasio’s inauguration has generated a bit of a kerfuffle thanks to the prayer’s reference to the city as a plantation. Apparently, the chaplain was invoking more than God with his prayer. What has gone without comment is that the invocation was given by a chaplain from NYC’s Department of Sanitation. Can anyone possibly explain why any department of New York City’s government would have a chaplain? No TKNY RedeemerNYC triumphalism, please.

If the thought of paying a chaplain who prays for garbage persons doesn’t raise questions about fiscal responsibility, then perhaps this news story out of the Vatican will. It turns out the youth rally in Brazil last summer resulted in quite a bill. But Pope Francis has decided to assist with debt reduction:

The Rio de Janeiro archdiocese announced Saturday that Francis has pledged to donate $5 million to help cover an estimated $18 million debt left over from the July edition of World Youth Day. The debt was originally $38 million, according to the archdiocese, but has already been paid down by the sale of an archdiocesan building, sales of CD and DVDs from the event, and private donations. The Vatican did not specify where the $5 million would come from, although the pope has several funds at his disposal, including the annual “Peter’s Pence” collection that generally nets between $60 million and $70 million.

If only Francis had issued indulgences in the old-fashioned way, rather than doing them on the social media cheap, the Archbishop of Rio de Janeiro might not have creditors nipping at his episcopal heels.

Just In Time For Black Friday

Published on by D. G. Hart19 Comments

Pope Francis gums up the global economy. What are the faithful to do? Since Evangelii Gaudium is only an apostolic exhortation, I presume American Roman Catholics will be heading out to the malls today along with the rest of their fellow consumers. (For proof of how indistinguishable American Roman Catholics are from American Protestants, see this.)

The earliest debates among American Roman Catholics over the pope’s latest statement concern the poor and capitalism. Those Roman Catholics on the Left are using Francis to beat up on Roman Catholics on the Right. Sean Michael Winters writes:

Anyone who was still hoping to usefully deploy the concept of intrinsic evil as the touchstone for the Church’s engagement with politics must now overcome this paragraph. The pope is aware that negative proscriptions of the moral law – thou shalt not murder – have a precision that positive proscriptions – you must care for the poor – do not. By invoking the same “thou shalt not” language, he is raising the status of the admittedly non-intrinsic evil of poverty. And, this blunt talk about the economy makes me hope that Catholic University’s business school cashed that check from the Koch Brothers already! They gave the money to study “principled entrepreneurship,” but me thinks they will not be thrilled if the school is applying the principles Francis articulates here.

In the next paragraph, for the first time in a papal text, Pope Francis specifically names “trickle down economics” and condemns it. “This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system,” he writes. I made the exact same point, albeit less trenchantly, in my debate with Fr. Sirico last January. But, Francis goes even further in the next paragraph, #55, when he refers to the “new and ruthless” golden calf, and the “dictatorship of an impersonal economy.” Thank you Papa Francesco for stating this. I am reading Samuel Gregg’s “Tea Party Catholic” – a review of which is forthcoming – and he constantly derides the impersonal bureaucracy of government but fails to note the impersonal bureaucracy of the modern economy. Conservative Catholics warn darkly about government bureaucrats interfering with people’s health care due to Obamacare, but fail to mention that insurance company bureaucrats have been interfering with people’s health care for decades.

Meanwhile, the Acton Institute’s Samuel Gregg and his book, Father Sirico, try to explain basic economics to Pope Francis:

There are several problems with this line of reasoning. First, opening up markets throughout the world has helped to reduce poverty in many developing nations. East Asia is a living testimony to that reality — a testimony routinely ignored by many Catholics in Western Europe (who tend to complain rather self-centeredly about the competition it creates for protected Western European businesses and other recipients of corporate welfare) and a reality about which I have found many Latin American Catholics simply have nothing to say.

Second, it has never been the argument of most of those who favor markets that economic freedom and free exchange are somehow sufficient to reduce poverty. These things are certainly indispensable (witness the failure of planned economies to solve the problem of scarcity), but they’re not enough. Among other things, stable governments that provide infrastructure, property arrangements that identify clearly who owns what, and, above all, the rule of law are just as essential.

It hardly need be said that rule of law (mentioned not once in Evangelii Gaudium) is, to put it mildly, a “challenge” in most developing nations. The lack of rule of law not only ranks among the biggest obstacles to their ability to generate wealth on a sustainable basis, but also hampers their capacity to address economic issues in a just manner. Instead, what one finds is crony capitalism, rampant protectionism, and the corruption that has become a way of life in much of Africa and Latin America.

(No doubt, the lead singer of Jason and the Callers is delighted with the pope, given his anti-globalization views, though why economic globalization is bad but spiritual globalization is good, is one of those mysteries that even development of doctrine won’t ‘splain. At the same time, Jason might find appealing papal authority that allows lots of contrary opinions to thrive within his communion.)

Arguably the best piece written so far comes from John Allen who sees a tension between evangelism and the Social Gospel:

That combination between proclaiming the faith and living it out may seem natural and compelling, but it’s often not how things really work at the Catholic grass roots.

From personal experience, I can say that one can spend a lot of time at conferences and symposia on the new evangelization without hearing much about, say, the war in Syria, the human costs of the Eurozone crisis, or the impact of global warming. Similarly, one can attend a truckload of “social ministry” gatherings without getting much on the sacraments, the life of prayer, Marian devotions or growth in personal holiness.

That’s an overgeneralization, but anybody who’s been around the block in the Catholic church will recognize the scent of truth.

Protagonists in both the contemporary Catholic renaissance in apologetics and evangelization and in the church’s social activism sometimes regard what the other party is up to as a distraction. Evangelizers sometimes say that a nongovernmental organization or a political party can fight unemployment, but only the church can preach Christ. Social activists reply by insisting that rhetoric about a loving God means little to people whose lives are broken by misery and injustice.

From the point of view of Catholic teaching, both are absolutely right, which leads one to wonder what they might be able to accomplish by working together. Promoting that spirit of common cause, one could argue, is the beating heart of “Joy of the Gospel.” . . .

The deepest ambition of “Joy of the Gospel” lies in Francis’ dream of a church that breathes with both lungs regarding mission and justice, uniting its concern for poverty of both the spiritual and the flesh-and-blood sort. The drama of his papacy, in a sense, lies in how well he may be able to pull it off.

Maybe if Vatican City would imitate the evangelicals in New York City who have figure out the third way between conservative Protestantism’s convictions about the sole importance of the gospel and liberal Protestantism’s social ministry, Pope Francis could follow Tim Keller and find his way.

Or perhaps Christians could turn to the actual words of God’s inspired and infallible word and let the apostle Paul have more authority than either Rome’s or New York City’s pope. “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” (2 Cor 4:16-18) I understand it sounds fundamentalist (even Platonist) to insist on the priority of the spiritual and eternal to the physical and the temporal. But given what we know about human physical existence, Paul only makes sense. Our conditions here do not correlate to our existence in the world to come. Jesus himself said something about the poor being blessed and inheriting the earth. I don’t think he was saying that his kingdom came with running water, internet access, or a credit card. As convenient as those conveniences are, I sure hope that the new heavens and new earth bring comforts that last longer and that make Black Friday look like the passing affliction that it is.

Culture Redeemed

Published on by D. G. Hart22 Comments

I find it odd that the books on Christ and culture (which may not be legion but are numerous) pay almost no attention to Old Testament Israel. If you wanted to find a case where God (in good sufficiency of Scripture fashion) specifies what a saved, holy, or transformed culture is supposed to look like, you can’t find a better example than what the Israelites received in the pages of the Pentateuch. Here is a sampling of OT laws governing the culture of the saved (borrowed from here):

Times and Seasons

That the new month shall be solemnly proclaimed as holy, and the months and years shall be calculated by the Supreme Court only (Ex. 12:2) (affirmative) (the authority to declare months is inferred from the use of the word “unto you”).
Not to travel on Shabbat outside the limits of one’s place of residence (Ex. 16:29) (CCN7). See Shabbat.
To sanctify Shabbat (Ex. 20:8) (CCA19). See Shabbat.
Not to do work on Shabbat (Ex. 20:10) (CCN6). See Shabbat.
To rest on Shabbat (Ex. 23:12; 34:21) (CCA20). See Shabbat.
To celebrate the festivals [Passover, Shavu’ot and Sukkot] (Ex. 23:14) (affirmative).
To rejoice on the festivals (Deut. 16:14) (CCA21).
To appear in the Sanctuary on the festivals (Deut. 16:16) (affirmative).
To remove chametz on the Eve of Passover (Ex. 12:15) (CCA22). See Passover.
To rest on the first day of Passover (Ex. 12:16; Lev. 23:7) (CCA25). See Passover.
Not to do work on the first day of Passover (Ex. 12:16; Lev. 23:6-7) (CCN147). See Passover.
To rest on the seventh day of Passover (Ex. 12:16; Lev. 23:8) (CCA27). See Passover.
Not to do work on the seventh day of Passover (Ex. 12:16; Lev. 23:8) (CCN148). See Passover.
To eat matzah on the first night of Passover (Ex. 12:18) (CCA23). See Passover.
That no chametz be in the Israelite’s possession during Passover (Ex. 12:19) (CCN3). See Passover.
Not to eat any food containing chametz on Passover (Ex. 12:20) (CCN5). See Passover.
Not to eat chametz on Passover (Ex. 13:3) (CCN4). See Passover.
That chametz shall not be seen in an Israelite’s home during Passover (Ex. 13:7) (CCN2). See Passover.
To discuss the departure from Egypt on the first night of Passover (Ex. 13:8) (CCA24). See The Passover Seder.
Not to eat chametz after mid-day on the fourteenth of Nissan (Deut. 16:3) (CCN104). See Passover.
To count forty-nine days from the time of the cutting of the Omer (first sheaves of the barley harvest) (Lev. 23:15) (CCA26). See The Counting of the Omer.
To rest on Shavu’ot (Lev. 23:21) (CCA28). See Shavu’ot.
Not to do work on the Shavu’ot (Lev. 23:21) (CCN149). See Shavu’ot.
To rest on Rosh Hashanah (Lev. 23:24) (CCA29). See Rosh Hashanah.
Not to do work on Rosh Hashanah (Lev. 23:25) (CCN150). See Rosh Hashanah.
To hear the sound of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah (Num. 29:1) (CCA30). See Rosh Hashanah.
To fast on Yom Kippur (Lev. 23:27) (CCA32). See Yom Kippur.
Not to eat or drink on Yom Kippur (Lev. 23:29) (CCN152). See Yom Kippur.
Not to do work on Yom Kippur (Lev. 23:31) (CCN151). See Yom Kippur.
To rest on the Yom Kippur (Lev. 23:32) (CCA31). See Yom Kippur.
To rest on the first day of Sukkot (Lev. 23:35) (CCA34). See Sukkot.
Not to do work on the first day of Sukkot (Lev. 23:35) (CCN153). See Sukkot.
To rest on the eighth day of Sukkot (Shemini Atzeret) (Lev. 23:36) (CCA37). See Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah.
Not to do work on the eighth day of Sukkot (Shemini Atzeret) (Lev. 23:36) (CCN154). See Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah.
To take during Sukkot a palm branch and the other three plants (Lev. 23:40) (CCA36). See Sukkot.
To dwell in booths seven days during Sukkot (Lev. 23:42) (CCA35). See Sukkot.

Dietary Laws

To examine the marks in cattle (so as to distinguish the clean from the unclean) (Lev. 11:2) (affirmative). See Animals that may not be eaten.
Not to eat the flesh of unclean beasts (Lev. 11:4) (CCN93). See Animals that may not be eaten.
To examine the marks in fishes (so as to distinguish the clean from the unclean (Lev. 11:9) (affirmative). See Animals that may not be eaten.
Not to eat unclean fish (Lev. 11:11) (CCN95). See Animals that may not be eaten.
To examine the marks in fowl, so as to distinguish the clean from the unclean (Deut. 14:11) (affirmative). See Animals that may not be eaten.
Not to eat unclean fowl (Lev. 11:13) (CCN94). See Animals that may not be eaten.
To examine the marks in locusts, so as to distinguish the clean from the unclean (Lev. 11:21) (affirmative). See Animals that may not be eaten.
Not to eat a worm found in fruit (Lev. 11:41) (CCN98). See Animals that may not be eaten.
Not to eat of things that creep upon the earth (Lev. 11:41-42) (CCN97). See Animals that may not be eaten.
Not to eat any vermin of the earth (Lev. 11:44) (CCN100). See Animals that may not be eaten.
Not to eat things that swarm in the water (Lev. 11:43 and 46) (CCN99). See Animals that may not be eaten.
Not to eat of winged insects (Deut. 14:19) (CCN96). See Animals that may not be eaten.
Not to eat the flesh of a beast that is terefah (lit torn) (Ex. 22:30) (CCN87). See Kosher slaughtering.
Not to eat the flesh of a beast that died of itself (Deut. 14:21) (CCN86). See Kosher slaughtering.
To slay cattle, deer and fowl according to the laws of shechitah if their flesh is to be eaten (Deut. 12:21) (“as I have commanded” in this verse refers to the technique) (CCA48). See Kosher slaughtering.
Not to eat a limb removed from a living beast (Deut. 12:23) (CCN90). See Kosher slaughtering.
Not to slaughter an animal and its young on the same day (Lev. 22:28) (CCN108).
Not to take the mother-bird with the young (Deut. 22:6) (CCN189). See Treatment of Animals.
To set the mother-bird free when taking the nest (Deut. 22:6-7) (CCA74). See Treatment of Animals.
Not to eat the flesh of an ox that was condemned to be stoned (Ex. 21:28) (negative).
Not to boil meat with milk (Ex. 23:19) (CCN91). See Separation of Meat and Dairy.
Not to eat flesh with milk (Ex. 34:26) (according to the Talmud, this passage is a distinct prohibition from the one in Ex. 23:19) (CCN92). See Separation of Meat and Dairy.
Not to eat the of the thigh-vein which shrank (Gen. 32:33) (CCN1). See Forbidden Fats and Nerves.
Not to eat chelev (tallow-fat) (Lev. 7:23) (CCN88). See Forbidden Fats and Nerves.
Not to eat blood (Lev. 7:26) (CCN89). See Draining of Blood.
To cover the blood of undomesticated animals (deer, etc.) and of fowl that have been killed (Lev. 17:13) (CCA49).
Not to eat or drink like a glutton or a drunkard (not to rebel against father or mother) (Lev. 19:26; Deut. 21:20) (CCN106).

Business Practices

Not to do wrong in buying or selling (Lev. 25:14) (CCN47).
Not to make a loan to an Israelite on interest (Lev. 25:37) (CCN54).
Not to borrow on interest (Deut. 23:20) (because this would cause the lender to sin) (CCN55).
Not to take part in any usurious transaction between borrower and lender, neither as a surety, nor as a witness, nor as a writer of the bond for them (Ex. 22:24) (CCN53).
To lend to a poor person (Ex. 22:24) (even though the passage says “if you lend” it is understood as obligatory) (CCA62).
Not to demand from a poor man repayment of his debt, when the creditor knows that he cannot pay, nor press him (Ex. 22:24) (CCN52).
Not to take in pledge utensils used in preparing food (Deut. 24:6) (CCN58).
Not to exact a pledge from a debtor by force (Deut. 24:10) (CCN59).
Not to keep the pledge from its owner at the time when he needs it (Deut. 24:12) (CCN61).
To return a pledge to its owner (Deut. 24:13) (CCA63).
Not to take a pledge from a widow (Deut. 24:17) (CCN60).
Not to commit fraud in measuring (Lev. 19:35) (CCN83).
To ensure that scales and weights are correct (Lev. 19:36) (affirmative).
Not to possess inaccurate measures and weights (Deut. 25:13-14) (CCN84).

Employees, Servants and Slaves

Not to delay payment of a hired man’s wages (Lev. 19:13) (CCN38).
That the hired laborer shall be permitted to eat of the produce he is reaping (Deut. 23:25-26) (CCA65).
That the hired laborer shall not take more than he can eat (Deut. 23:25) (CCN187).
That a hired laborer shall not eat produce that is not being harvested (Deut. 23:26) (CCN186).
To pay wages to the hired man at the due time (Deut. 24:15) (CCA66).
To deal judicially with the Hebrew bondman in accordance with the laws appertaining to him (Ex. 21:2-6) (affirmative).
Not to compel the Hebrew servant to do the work of a slave (Lev. 25:39) (negative).
Not to sell a Hebrew servant as a slave (Lev. 25:42) (negative).
Not to treat a Hebrew servant rigorously (Lev. 25:43) (negative).
Not to permit a gentile to treat harshly a Hebrew bondman sold to him (Lev. 25:53) (negative).
Not to send away a Hebrew bondman servant empty handed, when he is freed from service (Deut. 15:13) (negative).
To bestow liberal gifts upon the Hebrew bondsman (at the end of his term of service), and the same should be done to a Hebrew bondwoman (Deut. 15:14) (affirmative).
To redeem a Hebrew maid-servant (Ex. 21:8) (affirmative).
Not to sell a Hebrew maid-servant to another person (Ex. 21:8) (negative).
To espouse a Hebrew maid-servant (Ex. 21:8-9) (affirmative).
To keep the Canaanite slave forever (Lev. 25:46) (affirmative).
Not to surrender a slave, who has fled to the land of Israel, to his owner who lives outside Palestine (Deut. 23:16) (negative).
Not to wrong such a slave (Deut. 23:17) (negative).
Not to muzzle a beast, while it is working in produce which it can eat and enjoy (Deut. 25:4) (CCN188).

Agriculture and Animal Husbandry

Not to cross-breed cattle of different species (Lev. 19:19) (according to the Talmud, this also applies to birds) (CCN142).
Not to sow different kinds of seed together in one field (Lev. 19:19) (CCN107).
Not to eat the fruit of a tree for three years from the time it was planted (Lev. 19:23) (CCN105). See Tu B’Shevat.
That the fruit of fruit-bearing trees in the fourth year of their planting shall be sacred like the second tithe and eaten in Jerusalem (Lev. 19:24) (affirmative) (CCI16). See Tu B’Shevat.
Not to sow grain or herbs in a vineyard (Deut. 22:9) (negative).
Not to eat the produce of diverse seeds sown in a vineyard (Deut. 22:9) (negative).
Not to work with beasts of different species, yoked together (Deut. 22:10) (CCN180).

Clothing

That a man shall not wear women’s clothing (Deut. 22:5) (CCN179).
That a woman should not wear men’s clothing (Deut. 22:5) (CCN178).
Not to wear garments made of wool and linen mixed together (Deut. 22:11) (CCN181).

Of course, good reasons exist for not following the Old Testament in the creation of redeemed or holy culture (which I assume would be transformed). One is that little delicacy of theonomy. If we follow OT laws, are we not obligated to keep all of them, including the ones about monarchy and slavery? The way around this theological riddle is to distinguish among the ceremonial, judicial, and moral laws of the Israelites, with the moral law still in effect but the judicial and ceremonial nonbinding because of Christ’s fulfilling them. This is why the Confession of Faith says:

3. Beside this law, commonly called moral, God was pleased to give to the people of Israel, as a church under age, ceremonial laws, containing several typical ordinances, partly of worship, prefiguring Christ, his graces, actions, sufferings, and benefits; and partly, holding forth divers instructions of moral duties. All which ceremonial laws are now abrogated, under the new testament.

4. To them also, as a body politic, he gave sundry judicial laws, which expired together with the State of that people; not obliging any other now, further than the general equity thereof may require. (ch. 19)

The other way around using these laws as the model for redeeming culture is to go to Paul who says in Romans 14 that for Christians, for instance, no food is unclean. Again, the sufficiency of Scripture comes to the rescue and tells Christians that they don’t have to follow all the restrictions that determined a “Christian” or redeemed culture before Christ.

But if Scripture says that Christians no longer have rules governing business, agriculture, food, or slaves, why do some Christians want to establish rules independent of Scripture for transforming culture? If this question suggests that transformationalists are the contemporary equivalent of the Judaizers, then wear the shoe comfortably. For those on the 2k side of the aisle, transformationalism has always seemed to be essentially theonomic with a progressive facade.

What if We Thought about Marriage the Way We Think about Driving?

Published on by D. G. Hart75 Comments

The fallout from the Supreme Court’s ruling on DOMA and California’s Proposition 8 continues to pile up. But even before the justices tallied their votes and wrote contrary opinions, some could see that the debate over gay marriage had lost its way and that marriage in the United States was in bad shape. For instance, in the same issue of The New Republic came two pieces that indicate why the current debates over marriage are missing the civil (as opposed to religious) point.

Michael Kinsley, who edited the magazine when Andrew Sullivan first tried the idea of gay marriage (1989), believes that Ben Carson’s remarks about homosexuality (on Hannity and Andrea Mitchell) revealed an orthodoxy on the left every bit as powerful (probably more) than most Christian communions:

There are those who would have you think that gays and liberals are conducting some sort of jihad against organized Christianity and that gay marriage is one of the battlefields. That is a tremendous exaggeration. But it’s not a complete fantasy. And for every mouth that opens, a dozen stay clamped shut. In the state of Washington, a florist refused to do the wedding of a long-time customer “because of my relationship with Jesus Christ.” Note that “long-time customer.” This woman had been happily selling flowers to the groom. She just didn’t want to be associated with the wedding. Now she is being sued by the state attorney general. DC Comics dropped writer Orson Scott Card’s planned Superman book when thousands signed a petition demanding it because of his many homophobic remarks.

Thought experiment: If you were up for tenure at a top university, or up for a starring role in a big movie, or running for office in large swaths of the country, would it hurt your chances more to announce that you are gay or to announce that you’ve become head of an anti-gay organization? The answer seems obvious. So the good guys have won. Why do they now want to become the bad guys?

In other words, gay marriage advocates are no more tolerant than their opponents who don’t tolerate gay marriage.

But what would the debate look like if we lowered the stakes from “I’m right, you’re a cretin,” to what is actually good for the righteous and cretins who have to live together and increasingly support each other through government programs, insurance, and other forms of imposed solidarity? In the same issue of TNR, for instance, came a story about the consequences of loneliness and an implicit brief for more and stronger marriages:

If we now know that loneliness, a social emotion, can reach into our bodies and rearrange our cells and genes, what should we do about it? We should change the way we think about health. James Heckman, a Nobel Prize–winning economist at the University of Chicago who tabulates the costs of early childhood deprivation, speaks bitterly of “silos” in health policy, meaning that we see crime and low educational achievement as distinct from medical problems like obesity or heart disease. As far as he’s concerned, these are, in too many cases, symptoms of the same social disorder: the failure to help families raise their children. . . . As nearly half of all marriages continue to end in divorce, as marriage itself floats further out of reach for the undereducated and financially strapped, childhood has become a more solitary and chaotic experience. Single mothers don’t have a lot of time to spend with their children, nor, in most cases, money for emotionally enriching social activities.

“As inequality has increased, childhood inequality has increased,” Heckman said, “So has inequality of parenting.” For the first time in 30 years, mental health disabilities such as ADHD outrank physical ones among American children. Heckman doesn’t think that’s only because parents seek out attention-deficit diagnoses when their children don’t come home with A’s. He thinks it’s also because emotional impoverishment embeds itself in the body. “Mothers matter,” he says, “and mothering is in short supply.”

Heckman has been analyzing data from two famous early-childhood intervention programs, the Abecedarian Project of the ’70s and the Perry Preschool project of the ’60s. Both have furnished ample evidence that, if you enroll very young children from poor families in programs that give both them and their parents an extra boost, then they grow up to be wealthier and healthier than their counterparts—less fat, less sick, better educated, and, for men, more likely to hold down a job. In the case of the Perry Preschool, Heckman estimated that each dollar invested yielded $7 to $12 in savings over the span of decades. One of the most effective economic and social policies, he told me, would be “supplementing the parenting environment of disadvantaged young children.”

I suspect that the author, Judith Shulevitz, TNR’s science editor, is in favor of gay marriage, given her status at TNR. But aside from the politics of homosexuality, folks who live in the United States actually care about the health of marriages and families. And I suppose that if people like Ms. Shulevitz understood that anti-gay marriage folks also care about the health of marriages and families and the well-being of their society, they might have a profitable conversation about what kind of policies states and the feds should have to bolster the family.

I understand that marriage is more basic or primal than car driving, but I do wonder if the Christian approach to gay marriage debates should have been more akin to the kind of reaction that would greet a proposal to allow drivers to use both the left and right side of the road. We could marshal statistics about the dangers of auto-driving that exist now when everyone already drives on the right side of the road. That might be enough to say, “you know, we have enough accidents already without throwing another wrinkle into navigating big pieces of machinery on wheels around our fair land.” We could also project what kind of fatalities and injuries might result from allowing driving on both sides of the road. This would likely close the debate. No reason to get huffy about the sin of driving on the left side (since the Brits already do). Just think about the temporal realities of driving and how to make it as safe as possible. Why not do the same with marriage as a civil (not religious) institution?

Van Der Molen Pulls Up and Chats A While

Published on by D. G. Hart292 Comments

Our typical interactions with the Indiana attorney and URC elder, who appears to be anti-2k all the time, have been of the drive-by variety in comm boxes at various blogs. But now Mark Van Der Molen has outdone himself and provided a substantial rendering of the history of the revision of the Belgic Confession, Article 36, on the civil magistrate. Particularly intriguing are the revisions’ emergence in the context of the Reformed Ecumenical Synod, an international Reformed ecumenical body that offered to churches like the Orthodox Presbyterian Church a “conservative” alternative to either Carl McIntire’s International Council of Christian Churches or the liberal Protestant World Council of Churches. Readers should check Van Der Molen’s account on their own. They should also be aware of the debate over whether confessional subscription to the revised Belgic extends to footnotes.

Instead of weighing in on another communion’s internal debates, I want to challenge several implications that follow Van Der Molen’s narrative:

First, he claims that 2k advocates have used the revision of Belgic 36 to:

1. remove the magistrate’s concern with the first table of the Law,

2. remove the magistrate’s subjection to the authority of the Word of God, and

3. remove the magistrate’s purpose in the advancement of Christ’s kingdom.

I can’t speak for all 2kers (particularly Scott Clark and Mike Horton, who have subscribed the Three Forms of Unity), but I am not sure that Van Der Molen describes accurately their motives or the consequences of their position. This construction is again a common tactic among 2k’s critics, that somehow 2kers want to see God’s word flouted, and Christ’s kingdom reduced, and the gospel denied. In point of fact, and an attorney should know this, the arguments of 2kers do not prove what their motives are. Also, important to note, is that 2kers have denied explicitly having such anti-biblical, antinomian, and anti-kingdom motivations. Instead, they have repeatedly affirmed that they promote 2k for the good of the church, the defense of the gospel, and the rule of Christ among his people. Doesn’t such testimony count for anything with an officer of the court (I guess not when he is prosecuting alleged offenders)? Of course, 2kers could be confused, foolish, or simply wrong about the effects of 2k. But Van Der Molen once again engages in the overreach common among 2k’s critics (not to mention Rush Limbaugh or Fox News).

Second, Van Der Molen has a Netherlands-centric reading of Reformed history. For instance, he accuses 2kers of re-writing history to make it fit their view (meanwhile he does not notice how 2kers have written a great deal about the larger history of Reformed Protestantism than his narrow topic of revising Belgic 36):

What is not legitimate is a “two kingdoms” re-writing of history to suggest the entire first table has been entirely removed from the magistrate’s purview. Kuyper did not argue for a “table 1-ectomy”. More importantly, neither did our Reformed forbears when they revised the confession. Until we see a “two kingdoms” proponent successfully overture for a second-table-only revision, our confessional subscription today yet stands with the churchmen who adopted the RES Declaration and the revised Belgic 36 which retains the principle that the magistrate’s tasks are subject to both tables of God’s law.

This is a questionable reading of history on several grounds. First, Van Der Molen shows no awareness of the revisions that American Presbyterians made to their confession 150 years before the Belgic revisions. Last I checked, Presbyterians were part of the Reformed churches. The American revision includes this language, which I admit is different from the Belgic revisions:

Civil magistrates may not assume to themselves the administration of the Word and sacraments; or the power of the keys of the kingdom of heaven; or, in the least, interfere in matters of faith. Yet, as nursing fathers, it is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the church of our common Lord, without giving the preference to any denomination of Christians above the rest, in such a manner that all ecclesiastical persons whatever shall enjoy the full, free, and unquestioned liberty of discharging every part of their sacred functions, without violence or danger. And, as Jesus Christ hath appointed a regular government and discipline in his church, no law of any commonwealth should interfere with, let, or hinder, the due exercise thereof, among the voluntary members of any denomination of Christians, according to their own profession and belief. It is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the person and good name of all their people, in such an effectual manner as that no person be suffered, either upon pretense of religion or of infidelity, to offer any indignity, violence, abuse, or injury to any other person whatsoever: and to take order, that all religious and ecclesiastical assemblies be held without molestation or disturbance. (23.4, emphasis added)

But in narrowing his historical analysis to the Belgic’s revision, Van Der Molen gives the impression that the Presbyterians don’t count (or that when he cites VanDrunen or me, Orthodox Presbyterians are not bound by Belgic as church officers).

Also troubling about Van Der Molen’s references to the Belgic’s revision’s context is a complete disregard for what happened to the RES or its member churches. The GKN, one of the big players in establishing the RES, no longer exists, having run out of confessional steam in 2004 to join the national generically Protestant church of the Dutch monarchy. Nor does Van Der Molen observe that the RES itself no longer exists, having in2006 voted itself out of existence when it joined the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, a body dominated by liberal Reformed and Presbyterian communions. So if Van Der Molen wants his church brethren to respect their forefathers, he may want to specify which forefathers they might be. The GKN? The CRC? The RES? Is Van Der Molen really pinning his hopes on that group of Reformed churches? Talk about re-writing history.

Third, and relatedly, Van Der Molen ignores the ecumenical relations that governed the churches that revised the Belgic Confession. He concludes by stating it is time now “for the Reformed churches to recover the Reformed confessions, Belgic 36 incuded.” Well, how about the American revisions to the Westminster Confession? Does Van Der Molen really want to recover that confession? Or how about the ecumenical relations that may bring tensions between the existing Belgic 36 and OP Confession 23? Did the CRC or GKN (or the Covenanters, for that matter) ever make teaching on the civil magistrate the basis for fraternal relations? Have the URC and OPC objected to the other communion’s teachings on the civil magistrate in attempting to produce a psalter-hymnal? Has Westminster California or Mid-America Seminary ever required its Orthodox Presbyterian ministers to own the Belgic’s teaching on the magistrate and forsake their own communion’s confession?

To my knowledge, the answer is no. But Van Der Molen seems to think that Belgic 36 now needs to govern all the Reformed believers. Why? Three syllables, two words: culture wars. Theonomy, the religious right, and certain varieties of neo-Calvinism (including the Federal Vision) are all reactions to the perceived secularization of the United States in a period known as “Post-Protestant America.” Conversely, 2k is a set of arguments with the aim of steering the churches away from “putting their trust in princes.” Both have developed at the same cultural moment. One has a very narrow reading of Reformed history. The other does not.

Did Evangelical or Liberal Protestants Have a Better Week?

Published on by D. G. Hart52 Comments

First came the news of Mark Sanford’s victory in South Carolina’s First District to Congress. For anyone who remembers Sanford’s well publicized marital infidelity, it must have struck many observers as strange that evangelical Protestants — I hear South Carolina is thick with them — would return Sanford to public office. But they also had no problem with Newt Gingrich in the 2012 Republican presidential primaries:

This wasn’t the first time the Republican voters of South Carolina put fidelity to party over fidelity to fidelity. In the 2012 Republican primary, voters were reminded of Newt Gingrich’s admitted adultery and three marriages. His second wife spoke out just days before the vote. Gingrich won by 12.5 percentage points over the morally pure Mitt Romney. He won 45 percent of the evangelical vote, a group that has at times shown more than a passing interest in the morality of public officials. He won 46 percent of those who said that the religious beliefs of a candidate were very or somewhat important.

South Carolina conservatives may still say a candidate’s sins matter, but they aren’t voting that way. In fact, if you weren’t privy to the state’s strong social conservative history, you could almost mistake South Carolinians for city folk—people who vote for experience, policy, and political leanings and show a sophisticate’s relativism toward personal moral failings. These days, South Carolinians seem almost Parisian when they enter the voting booth.

Ross Douthat is having none of Sanford’s theological interpretation of his victory, nor is the columnist optimistic about what this election means for “family values,” once the brand of evangelical Protestant politics:

I’m not particularly surprised by that outcome: Sanford was the G.O.P. candidate in a conservative district, and voting on party rather than character is usually the path of least resistance for partisans on both sides. But the fact that South Carolina Republicans took that path, and made his swift and shameless comeback a success, is still a useful indicator of where the energy is on the right — and it emphatically isn’t with people who see the decline of marriage as a bigger issue for conservatism and America than the precise balance of power in the House of Representatives. Again, the preference among conservatives is obviously for stable marriages and family values and so forth — for the example set by the figures McArdle lists, rather than for Sanford-style shenanigans. But there apparently isn’t enough passion behind that preference at the moment to induce Republican voters to sacrifice even a single House seat on its behalf.

At the same time, this was not a complete win-win for evangelicals since it seems that Sanford himself is an Episcopalian (which suggests that evangelical Protestants are truly ecumenical and likely clueless when they vote according to their w-w, that is, if the lines between evangelicals and mainline Protestants still matter).

And then came yesterday’s news about Martha Mullen, the Virginia Methodist who found a place for Tamerlan Tsarnaev to be buried. When I heard her interview on NPR I could not believe — it moved me to tears (Edwardseans should be happy) — how Christian her motivation (but I’m not an Edwardsean and can’t see her heart) was. Here’s part of the transcript:

CORNISH: Now, you took it upon yourself to find a cemetery that would bury his body, and you don’t have a connection to his family, so why get involved?

MULLEN: Well, I was listening to NPR and I heard the story ongoing that he was unable to be buried and that people are protesting him. And it made me think of Jesus’ words: Love your enemies. I felt that, also, he was being maligned probably because he was Muslim.

And Jesus tells us to – in the parable of the Good Samaritan – to love your neighbor as yourself. And your neighbor is not just someone you belong with but someone who is alien to you. That was the biggest motivation, is that, you know, if I’m going to live my faith, then I’m going to do that which is uncomfortable and not necessarily that’s what comfortable. . . .

CORNISH: Martha, you heard about the story because of the protests. And did you have concerns about making this move that you would become the target of protests or people would have a real problem with what you were doing?

MULLEN: Well, I thought about that, but there’s a line in the Scripture that says whether we live or whether we die, we’re the Lord’s. And I feel like – I don’t think anything really horrible is going to happen to me. I think people are probably going to be upset and irritated and disagree with what this interfaith group has decided to go forward with, but I feel like it was the right thing and it’s important to be true to the principle of your faith.

Now words like these may be cheap, and Jesus’ words are certainly not obscure. But that it took a mainline Methodist to undertake what strikes me strikes me as something so obviously right was amazing, especially considering how many Americans (including Protestants of all kinds) were opposed to letting this terrorist be returned to dust. We do not refuse to bury persons our law enforcement system sentences to execution. So why we should try to prevent Tamerlan Tsarnaev from being buried, or even be suspicious of Martha Mullen or the owners of the cemetery that received the body, is dumbfounding. I know I may be naive about Islam thanks to a trip to Turkey, which is hardly the most representative of Muslim societies. But if conservative Presbyterians think that Paul Hill is not representative of strict Reformed Protestantism, is it not possible for Americans to imagine that Tamerlan Tsarnaev is not your average Muslim?

Then again, the United States has a tradition of moralism that insists, one strike and you’re in hell. The Boston bombings were truly heinous. But a civilized (even Christian) society refuses to abandon conventions like burial of dead bodies even for murderers. The lesson of Joe Paterno, who simply did not do enough to turn in a pederast and for that misdeed lost a chance to be considered one of the greatest coaches of all time, is a reminder of that moral standard. Who indeed can stand in that great day?

This Guy Needs His Own Blog – Part 1

Published on by D. G. Hart19 Comments

As astute as these two critiques of Reagan’s civil theology are, they fail to consider one widely neglected but critical question: whether Reagan, or any American leader for that matter, should ever have called the United States the ‘city on a hill’ in the first place. Americans need not choose from among an anti-religious secularism that is deaf and blind to theology, or a low-voltage populist civil religion, or even a more chastened Puritan or Edwardsian sense of national election that keeps a place for divine judgment. The Christians among them can instead reserve divine election and the ‘city on a hill’ for the Christian church alone. Christians in the United States can think of themselves from an Augustinian perspective as, first and foremost, citizens of the City of God, living in tension with the world, and sojourning as pilgrims for a time within the current manifestation of the City of Man called ‘America’. Keeping their eternal citizenship in mind, they can object when either Democrats or Republicans co-opt any part of the church’s identity for their own use, no matter how good their intentions. They can live much of day-to-day life in common with their neighbours, but in the matter of worship, as Augustine wrote in the City of God, they must dissent. Part of that dissent means guarding the church’s unique identity and calling. (Richard M. Gamble, In Search of the City on a Hill, 161)

If presidents shouldn’t use the Bible to speak about the identity of the United States, how much more should ministers — specialists in the Bible — avoid identifying a nation with the city on a hill? And this is why the all-of-life Christianity that w-wists promote inevitably leads to identifying the nation in which 24-7 Christians live with the City of God. If my everyday activities are simply an extension of my spiritual duties, then everyday life in the United States must be an extension of God’s kingdom.

Augustinians are a rare breed.

Defining Idolatry Down

Published on by D. G. Hart43 Comments

Now that Roman Catholics have a pope, attention has turned to Washington D.C. and arguments before the Supreme Court over the Defense of Marriage Act. A couple of posts by the Allies caught (all about) my eye. The first came from Joe Carter who went all in by tying Christian tolerance of gay marriage to idolatry (I haven’t even seen the Baylys try this one):

The idolatry of Christian same-sex marriage advocates takes two general forms. The first group still recognizes the authority of God’s Word, or at least still believes in the general concept of “sin.” They will freely admit that, like other types of fornication, same-gender sex is forbidden in the Bible, and even excluded by Jesus’ clear and concise definition of marriage. Yet despite this understanding they still choose to embrace same-sex marriage because they have made an idol of American libertarian freedom. They have replaced Jesus’ commandment—”You shall love your neighbor as yourself”—with the guiding motto of the neopagan religion of Wicca, “Do what you will, so long as it harms none.”

In endorsing laws based solely on the secular liberal-libertarian conception of freedom (at least those that produce no obvious self-harm), they are doing the very opposite of what Jesus called them to do: They are hating their neighbors, including their gay and lesbian neighbors. You do not love your neighbor by encouraging them to engage in actions that invoke God’s wrath (Psalm 5:4-5; Romans 1:18). As Christians we may be required to tolerate ungodly behavior, but the moment we begin to endorse the same then we too have become suppressers of the truth. You cannot love your neighbor and want to see them excluded from the kingdom of Christ (Eph. 5:5).

The libertarian-freedom idol (LFI) has not been manufactured entirely by millennials, the generation of Protestants who seem most comfortable with laws that allow gay marriage. LFI was at least a factor in the baby-boomers implementation of worship forms that entirely capitulated to the aesthetics and impulses of music that these adolescents and young adults were listening to on the radio (music that was celebrating sex and drugs no less). In other words, Protestants outside the mainline churches (sometimes called evangelical) abandoned the restraints of Scripture when they turned to praise bands and 30 minutes of swaying and singing before the motivational speech (that used to be called a sermon). If they want the rest of the culture to resist the temptation of freedom, they might actually start to reflect such resistance in their own worship services, a branch of human activity that has much more to do with the first four commandments of the Decalogue than the seventh (sixth for Roman Catholics) that pertains directly to sex and marriage.

If readers think the parallels between P&W (for the charismatic challenged, Praise & Worship worship) tolerance of gay marriage are far fetched, they may want to consider Kevin DeYoung’s post which echoes Carter’s complaint. DeYoung expands the list of cultural factors that have made it impossible for Christians to oppose gay marriage meaningfully: “Gay marriage is the logical conclusion to a long argument, which means convincing people it’s a bad idea requires overturning some of our most cherished values and most powerful ideologies.”

DeYoung lists five such values:

1. It’s about progress. Linking the pro-gay agenda with civil rights and women’s rights was very intentional, and it was a masterstroke. To be against gay marriage, therefore, is to be against enlightenment and progress. . . .

2. It’s about love. When gay marriage is presented as nothing but the open embrace of human love, it’s hard to mount a defense. Who could possibly be against love? But hidden in this simple reasoning is the cultural assumption that sexual intercourse is necessarily the highest, and perhaps the only truly fulfilling, expression of love. It’s assumed that love is always self-affirming and never self-denying. . . .

3. It’s about rights. It’s not by accident the movement is called the gay rights movement. And I don’t deny that many gays and lesbians feel their fundamental human rights are at stake in the controversy over marriage. But the lofty talk of rights blurs an important distinction. Do consenting adults have the right to enter a contract of their choosing? It depends. Businesses don’t have a right to contract for collusion. Adults don’t have a right to enter into a contract that harms the public good. . . .

4. It’s about equality. Recently, I saw a prominent Christian blogger tweet that she was for gay marriage because part of loving our neighbor is desiring they get equal justice under the law. Few words in the American lexicon elicit such broad support as “equality.” No one wants to be for unequal treatment under the law. But the issue before the Supreme Court is not equality, but whether two laws–one voted in by the people of California and the other approved by our democratically elected officials–should be struck down. Equal treatment under the law means the law is applied the same to everyone. Gay marriage proponents desire to change the law so that marriage becomes something entirely different. Surveys often pose the question “Should it be legal or illegal for gay and lesbian couples to marry?” That makes it sound like we are criminalizing people for commitments they make. The real issue, however, is whether the state has a vested interest in sanctioning, promoting, and privileging certain relational arrangements. . . .

5. It’s about tolerance. Increasingly, those who oppose gay marriage are not just considered wrong or mistaken or even benighted. They are anti-gay haters. As one minister put it, gay marriage will eventually triumph because love is stronger than hate. Another headline rang out that “discrimination is on trial” as the Supreme Court hears arguments on Proposition 8 and DOMA. The stark contrast is clear: either you support gay marriage or you are a bigot and a hater. It’s no wonder young people are tacking hard to left on this issue. They don’t want to be insensitive, close-minded, or intolerant. The notion that thoughtful, sincere, well-meaning, compassionate people might oppose gay marriage is a fleeting thought.

What is striking about this set of cultural assumptions is how much they were also part of the arguments for getting rid of “traditional” worship and ushering in the praise bands and worship leaders. With the exception of the notion of rights, contemporary worship was about updating the church (progress), reaching out to our children (love), a leveling of musical and aesthetic forms (equality, as in Shine Jesus Shine is as good as Of The Father’s Love Begotten), and making the church less elitist (tolerance). Even the notion of rights was evident in the arguments for contemporary worship even if the word did not show up in the sense that few critics of P&W argued that believers had no right to worship God contrary to Scripture or in ways that would harm the fellowship of Christians. Put another way, no one has a right to worship God irreverently, which is form of blasphemy. But whether contemporary worship triumphed or simply became a legitimate option along with older reverent forms, P&W opened up Protestants outside the mainline to levels of tolerance and related confusions that are also evident in the way that some Protestants make room for gay marriage.

DeYoung suggests several ways forward, though he rightly avoids the word solution. In effect, he says Christians need to be more thoughtful and less prone to employ ideas that dominate the culture. This is true. I suggest the way forward is to chant psalms. If Christians became accustomed to a different sensibility in worship on Sundays, if they saw a difference between what they do on the Lord’s Day and what they do during the rest of the week, if they got used to spiritually eating the religious equivalent of broccoli, they might have the stomach to resist trends in the wider culture. It won’t be effective before the Supreme Court rules, but it actually may be successful by 2040.

Postscript: Lest readers object that “traditional” worship was novel in its own right, they have a point. “Traditional” worship of the 1970s was largely the worship that prevailed from the 1920s. In other words, it was not the way that Calvin or Knox worshiped. But that so-called “traditional” worship did have a built-in sense that you didn’t not goof around in worship, and that frivolities of contemporary music and humor and this-worldiness were forbidden. Could that worship have been more biblical? Of course. Get rid of the choirs, the trumpets (which I sometimes played), and the observances of Mothers’ Day. But did those worshipers have a sense that they might offend God and should be careful not to? They did. That sense has vanished in most sectors of Protestantism in the U.S. thanks to contemporary worship.

How Protestants Read

Published on by D. G. Hart26 Comments

John Fea a while back posted this as his quote of the day:

“Good God! The People of Pennsylvania in seven years will be glad to petition the Crown of Britain for reconciliation in order to be delivered from the tyranny of their new Constitution.” John Adams on the democratic, unicameral 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution that gave all male taxpayers the right to vote. (Adams to Benjamin Rush, 12 October 1776).

I can imagine three major Protestant approaches to interpreting this remark.

1) The nationalist Protestant: “See? This proves the founders really were orthodox Christians.”

2) The experimental Protestant: “See? This proves the founders were not regenerate since they took the Lord’s name in vain.”

3) The two-kingdom Protestant: “See? This shows how fragile the American founding was (and what’s wrong with democracy).”

In other words, what is political should stay political. We don’t have to insert religion everywhere.

Of course, I left out the neo-Calvinist response: “See what happens when you legalize gay marriage? What’s that you say, gay marriage didn’t come along for another two centuries? Two centuries, two kingdoms, what’s the difference?”