Category: Christian politics

Do Tim Keller and Norman Shepherd Live in the Same Neighborhood?

Published on by D. G. Hart38 Comments

galatia Well, the island of Manhattan is about one thousand miles from South Holland, and of course the cultures are universes apart. But harmonic convergence happens.

With apologies to Nick Batzig who pointed this out to me, Tim Keller has an essay on the gospel and the poor at Themelios that echoes Shepherd’s attempt to bring faith and obedience closer together.

Keller writes:

We all know the dictum: “we are saved by faith alone, but not by faith that is alone.” Faith is what saves us, and yet faith is inseparably connected with good works. We saw in Jas 2 that this is also the case with the gospel of justification by faith and mercy to the poor. The gospel of justification has the priority; it is what saves us. But just as good works are inseparable from faith in the life of the believer, so caring for the poor is inseparable from the work of evangelism and the ministry of the Word. . . . We cannot be faithful to the words of Jesus if our deeds do not reflect the compassion of His ministry. Kingdom evangelism is therefore holistic as it transmits by word and deed the promise of Christ for body and soul as well as the demand of Christ for body and soul.

Several times Acts makes a very close connection between economic sharing of possessions with those in need and the multiplication of converts through the preaching of the Word. The descent of the Holy Spirit and an explosive growth in numbers (Acts 2:41) is connected to radical sharing with the needy (2:44–45). Acts 4 is a recapitulation: after the filling of the Spirit, the economic sharing of the people inside the church accompanies the preaching of the resurrection with great power (4:32–35). After the ministry of diakonia is more firmly established, Luke adds, “so the word of God spread. The number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly” (6:7). Luke is again pointing out the extremely close connection between deed-ministry and word-ministry.

Arguments like this show that the spirituality of the church depends on maintaining the centrality of justification by faith alone, with the call for good works, obedience, or personal righteousness kept at a safe distance from the human propensity for works righteousness. David VanDrunen makes that case about the close ties between the priority of justification to sanctification and two-kingdoms theology particularly well in his recent inaugural lecture, “The Two Kingdoms and the Ordo Salutis: Life Beyond Judgment and the Question of a Dual Ethic,” (WTJ 70 [2008] 207-24). But Keller supplies unintended support because the effort to join faith and obedience in the individual seems inevitably to slide into linking word and deed in the church.

All the more reason why the words of Peter Berger, a secular Lutheran, are worth hearing again:

Any cultural or political agenda embellished with such authority is a manifestation of “works righteousness” and ipso facto an act of apostasy. This theological proposition, over and beyond all prudential moral judgments, “hits” in all directions of the ideological spectrum; it “hits” the center as much as the left or the right. “Different gospels” lurk all across the spectrum. No value or institutional system, past or present or future, is to be identified with the gospel. The mission of the church is not to legitimate any status quo or any putative alteration of the status quo. The “okay world” of bourgeois America stands under judgment, in the light of the gospel, as does every other human society. Democracy or capitalism or the particular family arrangements of middle-class culture are not to be identified with the Christian life, and neither is any alternative political, economic, or cultural system. The vocation of the church is to proclaim the gospel, not to defend the American way of life, not to “build socialism,” not even to “build a just society” – because, quite apart from the fact that we don’t really know what this is, all our notions of justice are fallible and finally marred by sin. The “works righteousness” in all these “different gospels” lies precisely in the insinuation that, if only we do this or refrain from doing that, we will be saved, “justified.” But, as Paul tells us, “by works of the law shall no one be justified.” [Berger, “Different Gospels: The Social Sources of Apostasy,” Erasmus Lecture, January 22, 1987]

The Ecumenicity of American Civil Religion

Published on by D. G. Hart2 Comments

us papal flagsHere is proof of civil religion’s appeal to both sides of the Reformation. What is surprising is that American civil religion was anti-Catholic. Amazing how the culture wars make the anathemas of Trent vanish.

(Thanks to DL for the link.)

Putting Christ's Righteousness in a Lock Box

Published on by D. G. Hart6 Comments

presidentronaldreagan Adult Sunday school students at Calvary OPC (Glenside) had the privilege of hearing Richard M. Gamble, an Orthodox Presbyterian elder at Hillsdale OPC and historian at Hillsdale College speak on the appeal of the “city on a hill” in American civil religion. Lest some think the lesson promoted mixing biblical metaphors with America’s civic faith, Gamble indicated his own discomfort with efforts to underwrite earthly powers with a redemptive purpose. For those who missed the lecture, the following is a quotation from Gamble’s book, War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation:

America’s anointment as the world’s political messiah did not end when demobilized troops returned from Europe in 1919. It did not end with America’s opposition to the Treaty of Versailles, nor with America’s refusal to join the League of Nations. The cumulative product of generations of reflection, experience, and anticipation, the American identity reached too deep and far to have been uprooted in a moment of supposed renunciation. Transcending party politics and most ideological boundaries, nearly all of the language of universality and emancipation, of the “city on a hill” and the world’s rebirth, of light and dark, Messiah and Armageddon, reverberates down to the present moment. Like Woodrow Wilson before them, few modern presidents have been able to resist the allure of America’s global redemptive consciousness. In the 1940s, Franklin Roosevelt planned for a future refounded on four freedoms, freedoms that would prevail “everywhere in the world.” In the fourth of these universal freedoms, freedom from fear, he anticipated a day when “no nation will be in a position to commit and act of physical aggression against any neighbor – anywhere in the world.” In countless speeches from the 1960s through the 1980s, moreover, Ronald Reagan reached back to the earliest metaphors of America’s divine destiny” to reaffirm the nation’s special calling as a “city on a hill.” Combining the Puritan errand with the Enlightenment dream of earthly regeneration, he also embraced Tom Pain’s longing to “begin the world over again.” And on September 11, 2002, George W. Bush, speaking with the colossus of the Statue of Liberty behind him, called America the “hope of all mankind” and appropriated the world of John 1:5 as if they described not just the Incarnation of Christ but the mission of the United States: “And the light shines in the darkness; and the darkness will not overcome it.” To one degree or another and with varying motives and consequences, each of these men continued to speak of the United States as if it were the Salvator Mundi, following a pattern of thought that has endured for more than four centuries.

The Bible against the Gospel?

Published on by D. G. Hart2 Comments

How could that be? Well, one answer is that it happens whenever you read the Bible through the lens of politics, whether conservative, liberal, or the make-believe category of independent. We first noted the appearance of The American Patriots’ Bible here. Now Richard Gamble, the OPC elder who teaches American history at Hillsdale College and is not to be confused with Richard C. Gamble, the Covenanter pastor, has reviewed the patriotic scriptures for The American Conservative magazine. The entire review is worth reading, but this is a particularly apt section:

A nationalized Bible would seem in effect to reverse the story of redemption. At the core of Christianity is a message that the gospel of salvation is flung wide open to all peoples regardless of nationality, race, or language. The day of Pentecost made that truth clear. While Christianity has inevitably taken on national accents as it has encountered culture after culture over the past 2,000 years, it is a universal faith. Why, then, take that transnational faith and fuse it with an earthly Caesar and empire by setting it side by side in pages of Holy Writ with a particular nation’s history and identity, as if Christianity belonged to Americans in a special and intimate way not true of other people? This Bible by its very existence distorts the gospel. As Augustine says in The City of God, the “heavenly city, while it sojourns on earth, calls citizens out of all nations, and gathers together a society of pilgrims of all languages…”

Beyond what the editor and the publisher intended, The American Patriot’s Bible is deeply American. It takes to a new level the remaking of Scripture into a marketable consumer good, a trend underway in the United States since at least the invention of the modern steam press in the early 19th century. (See R. Lawrence Moore’s Selling God.) It also exemplifies the irony of American Protestants, who adhere to the sufficiency of Scripture for faith and life yet find the unadorned text of that Word not so sufficient after all. And finally, it provides further evidence of how theologically ill-equipped one dominant strand of American Christianity has been over the past few hundred years to know how to sojourn in America, how to conceive of the United States as part of the City of Man and of the church as a stranger in a strange land.

Summer Reading

Published on by D. G. Hart3 Comments

“I don’t read books, I write them.” The first time I said that I knew it didn’t sound good. And that was the point because it was actually more a joke on me than on those who haven’t written books. Historians do not write because they are necessarily wise. And the way historians write means that they have less time to read books they would prefer to ponder. Too often I’ve spent an evening with an Edwards, Buswell, Bushnell, or Beecher and had to pass on Epstein, Berry, Machen or Meilaender. Even worse, sometimes I’ve had to read what I’ve written.

Current duties – a volume on the history of the OPC to commemorate the denomination’s 75th anniversary – forced me to take a look at a piece written about a decade ago on Orthodox Presbyterians and secularization. It was entitled, “Reconciling Two Kingdoms and One Lord: Twentieth-Century Conservative Presbyterians and Political Liberalism in the United States,” and presented at a conference at the Vrijgemaakt seminary in Kampen sponsored by the Archives of the Free University.

The conclusion is reprinted below may complicate perceptions that the editors of the NTJ are not sufficiently on board with Vos and Van Til. What is even more interesting than the views of the editors is that Vos and Van Til can be read against each other, at least when it comes to understanding the saeculum.

<p

>. . . the OPC relied upon three separate doctrinal strands to maintain the integrity of the church and her witness in the face of political liberalism and its secularizing effects. First, J. Gresham Machen bequeathed to the OPC the Southern Presbyterian tradition of the spirituality of the church which put limits on church power while also preventing it from intervention in spheres beyond its domain, such as politics. Second, John Murray outlined the implications of divine sovereignty for public life when he affirmed the church’s duty to speak on civic affairs because God had ordained both the church and the magistrate and so ruled over each. Finally, Cornelius Van Til worked out the inferences of the sufficiency of Scripture when he asserted that Christ’s lordship over all things made the Bible relevant for all walks of life. These three doctrines have greatly shaped the way that American Calvinists have reacted to the de-Christianization of American society, as the example of the OPC demonstrates. Furthermore, the way Orthodox Presbyterians applied these doctrines appeared to vary according to whose interests or territory were at stake. When they needed to defend the prerogatives of the church or the independence of Christian schools, Orthodox Presbyterians have relied upon the sort of logic that undergirded Machen’s defense of the church’s spiritual mission. But when American society appeared to be growing more tolerant of immorality, usually defined on pietist terms that sees godlessness in certain forms of immoral behavior, then Orthodox Presbyterians turned to notions about God’s sovereignty or the Bible’s relevance to all walks of life for the work of the church and also for the regulation of public life.

This explanation of the theology at work in Orthodox Presbyterian responses to the secularization of American politics reveals that Reformed teaching on politics as it played out among conservative Presbyterians has not been sorted through systematically. Although political liberalism represents a tradition of state craft quite compatible with the separation of religious and public spheres implied by sphere sovereignty — a notion very similar to the spirituality of the church — American Calvinists have generally regarded the reduction of religious references in public life and the prevalence of certain kinds of worldliness in society as a betrayal of both divine sovereignty and biblical authority. Although God was still sovereign and the Bible was still true when Christ suffered the unjust penalty of dying on the cross, for the Orthodox Presbyterian sampled here the proof of God’s rule and biblical authority is only substantially compelling when righteousness and divine truth prevail in civic life. In other words, despite knowing cognitively that different standards apply for the city of God, i.e., the church, and the city of man, i.e., the state, the doctrines of divine sovereignty and biblical sufficiency have tended to take precedence over sphere sovereignty and the spirituality of the church. As such, conservative North American Calvinists like those in the OPC have often demanded from the state the same kind of obedience and truthfulness that Christ requires of his bride. . . .

. . . perhaps the most significant doctrine in the OPC’s theological arsenal for coping with secularization and political liberalism may be the Vossian one that teaches about the gradual and varied unfolding of redemptive history. If, as biblical theologians have argued, the church in the period between Christ’s first and second advents is a pilgrim people, wandering in the wilderness until Christ leads them upon his return into the promised land of the new heavens and the new earth, then Orthodox Presbyterians like pastor Davison could legitimately have thought about his life in places like New Jersey more like Midge Decter thought of hers in St. Paul. In his comments on the epistle to the Hebrews, Orthodox Presbyterian theologian, Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., builds upon the insights of Geerhardus Vos to argue that the eschatology of the New Testament implies that “there is no ‘golden’ age coming that is going to replace or even ameliorate these desert conditions of testing and suffering.” Gaffin adds that “no success of the Gospel, however great, will bring the church into a position of earthly prosperity and dominion such that the wilderness with its persecutions and temptations will be eliminated or marginalized.” This eschatological reality means that as long as Christ is absent from the church, her “final rest” cannot be located in temporal or earthly conditions. For this reason, the situation of Protestants in the United States is actually more similar to that of Jewish Americans than that of the founding fathers or the Puritans who set out to make America a “city on a hill.” In which case, if Orthodox Presbyterians had reflected on and followed the insights of Vos for public life, they might have come to evaluate political liberalism and secular society less like nativist Americans and more like immigrants to the United States.

Can an Endorsement from WTS Be Far Away?

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

The reasons for thinking so are more than plausible.   But on the upside, this may pull the plug on using “Redeemer” when naming congregations.

Who said Christian America was dead?

Outside of Which No Ordinary Possibility of Salvation

Published on by D. G. Hart54 Comments

Maybe it’s me, but I don’t understand the point of an organization that is not a church whose purpose is to gather pastors, who are in churches that already promote the gospel, for an undertaking called Gospel Coalition. What were the members of GC doing before when they were merely pastors preaching week-in and week-out, sometimes in independent congregations, sometimes in denominations? Were they Gospel Cobelligerents? Or by not being co-aligned were they not as much for the gospel as when belonging to GC? Is the import of GC that it is a cooperative endeavor or that it is promoting the gospel? But are people who don’t join GC guilty of being uncooperative or of not being sufficiently committed to the gospel?  Maybe both?

These were questions that came to mind when reading D. A. Carson’s attempt to clarify GC for the editors of Christianity Today. For instance, when Carson explained, “In some ways we’re almost a coalition of coalitions. Tim represents a whole network. John Piper represents a whole network. And because we share a common vision of what the gospel is and common aims and so on, it’s not, in some sense, just individual churches. It’s all the networks that are linked with that,” I wondered if the real entree into GC was being a fan of Carson, Keller, or Piper. In which case, should it be called, “Coalition of Readers of Evangelical Popular Authors”?

Then when asked if GC purposefully shared the characteristics of a denomination, Carson responded:

It does, but it purposely disallows others. Sociologically, there is a lot less loyalty to denominations today than 20 years ago. In one sense we’re growing because of that. We are meeting a sense of dislocation. On the other hand, in a denomination there will also be, for example, means of ordering who is ordained and who is not. There are going to be agreed standards on who becomes a member or not. Whereas we’re a center-bounded set. We’re not a boundary-bounded set.

Tim Keller is a deeply committed PCA man. He’s a paedobaptist. My ordination is Baptist. And we’re not going to agree on everything. We’re happy to talk about anything, but we’re not going to make one standard or the other the touchstone for the organization.

That left me wondering if GC is really “Baptists and Presbyterian Coaligned for Parts But Not All of the Great Commission.” That’s a mouthful — BPCPBNAGC —  but the leaders of GC may be up to it since in addition to their day jobs as Baptists and Presbyterians they are leading a super-coalition.

One does wonder if church matters to coalition.

Winding the Theonomists Up

Published on by D. G. Hart17 Comments

Over at First Principles, Lynn Robinson has a good review essay of a new IVP book by Greg Foster, The Contested Public Square: The Crisis of Christianity and Politics.  Robinson quotes Foster to good effect about the political theology of the New Testament (or the lack thereof):

Almost the only political teaching it provides is that a person’s ordinary political duties (behaving peacefully, obeying the law, paying taxes, etc.) continue to apply when rulers deny God and persecute believers. . . . The New Testament’s silence on politics combined with the apostles’ setting aside the political order of the Old Testament leaves the faithful with no revelatory instruction as to how their political affairs are to be ordered.

Why is this so hard to understand? I guess the one consolation for theonomists, whether soft or hard, is the support they get from the good bishop Tom Wright who interprets the Lordship of Christ in ways remarkably similar to our politically challenged friends.