Category: Christian politics

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.

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>. . . 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.

Carl Gets the Last Word?

Published on by D. G. Hart31 Comments

And makes a very good point about ecclesiology, as opposed to sexual misconduct, along the way.

No presbytery just wakes up one morning and, out of the blue, declares `I’m going to ordain a practising homosexual today.’  As every presbyterian knows, our church courts change very, very slowly.  So the question to ask is: how did the C of S come to such a pass?  The answer, in part (and I stress ‘in part’ — I am interested here only in the evangelical dimension), lies with the policy of William Still and his followers, which was essentially built on the notion that the courts of the church could be conceded to the liberals as long as the evangelicals were allowed to keep preaching the gospel from their own pulpits.  This was the very antithesis of the Southern Baptist policy and ironically, meant that, while the baptists acted like quasi-presbyterians, the Stillites acted like Independents.

The policy worked well for the big C of S churches — e.g. the Tron, Gilcomston South, Holyrood — who were large enough to keep the hawks from George Street at bay; what it meant, however, was that the smaller churches, the anonymous evangelical pastors, and the lowly ministerial students candidates frequently came under huge pressure from presbyteries.  Since my first post, I have heard from one old friend who, as a student, was roasted in a presbytery on the gay issue while the evangelicals present literally sat in silence; another who was told by an evangelical leader to ordain a woman elder against his conscience because women’s ordination was not the hill to die on.  Both have since left the C of S, at considerable personal hardship.

Ref21 Food Fight

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

Carl Trueman continues to wonder about the advisability of singling out homosexuality in the Church of Scotland.   “Apparently, this man left his wife and children to pursue his homosexual relationship.  If true, he is an adulterer. That he is a gay adulterer compounds the issue but does not define it. Again, like a one string banjo, I hit the same note: if the church is to avoid simply looking (and, frankly, being) homophobic, then it cannot afford to single out homosexuality as the key sin above all sins, while turning a blind eye to other matters. ”

Phil Ryken wonders about the wisdom of Carl’s wondering.   Among the reasons he gives, Ryken worries about the effects of a defeat in Scotland for churches elsewhere.  “I  also believe that a defeat on this issue in the Church of Scotland inevitably weakens the hand of other churches in other countries that will seek in coming years to defend biblical standards of sexuality from a secular political onslaught.  Only today the Associated Press is reporting that growing support for gay unions is changing the political landscape in America.  I expect that in time this change will lead to hardship and persecution for Christian churches and schools across America.  Thus it is important for evangelicals to stand together on homosexuality and everything else associated with a consistently biblical ethic for human sexuality.” Continue reading “Ref21 Food Fight” →

Trotter is Funny, Trueman Isn't

Published on by D. G. Hart2 Comments

If the Reformation 21 Blog were a blog, this conversation could go on over there. But seeing how its authors have chosen only to mix it up among themselves, reactions to their posts turn into posts on other blogs.

So Carl Trueman makes a good point about the inconsistency of evangelicals in the Church of Scotland objecting to the ordination of a gay minister but being fairly silent about the ordination and ministry of liberals. Trueman wrote, “Evangelicals who have not fought denials of the resurrection among office bearers — and some of whom stood by in silence as fellow evangelicals were beaten up by the church courts over refusals to ordain women — should not fight homosexuality. Indeed, they have absolutely no grounds upon which so to do; and it just looks like bigotry to the onlooking world. Too little, too late.”

This is a legitimate point and one the NTJ has made often about evangelicals in the PCUSA. It seems that mainline Presbyterian evangelicals get worked up on matters of sex, but matters of orthodoxy do not receive the same sort of diligence, as if the second table of the law were really the first.

In response, Michael Bird, says that Trueman doesn’t know the true state of evangelicalism in the Church of Scotland (thanks to Art Boulet for the link).   For instance, Trueman doesn’t give any credit to groups like Forward Together that are fighting the good fight in the Church of Scotland.  Nor does Trueman apparently know the wisdom of Kenny Rogers who sung about knowing when to call your opponents’ bluff in a poker game.  Bird also accuses Trueman of inconsistency himself.  It’s one thing to see the problems on the left when conservatives have plenty of problems to their right.  According to Bird, “those who hold to a KJV-onlyism, mandate that unaccompanied metrical psalms (sometimes it is exclusively the Scottish Psalter and not the modern Sing Psalms) is the only form of acceptable worship, those who won’t let women pray in church, professors who teach that ‘God has a covenant with America’, or those who treat the Westminster Confession with a greater authority than Scripture.”

Bird’s list of whacky right-wingers is curious, since something like the Westminster Confession is (or used to be) one of the standards in the Church of Scotland and the KJV and Christian America were not.   Could it be that if the Church of Scotland actually upheld Reformed, as opposed to evangelical standards, the ordination of gay ministers would not be an issue for the Kirk?  In fact, would Bird really turn away from the Church of Scotland men who affirmed the Westminster Confession, preached from the King James Version, chose to sing only psalms from the hymnal, and opposed women’s ordination?  It would appear that Trueman really does have a point about the incoherence of evangelicals in the Church of Scotland.  Do the folks at Forward Together really welcome only those ministers who have Jesus in their heart but then will ordain people that fall outside the qualifications Jesus revealed?  Is working with a psalm singer really as bad as working with a homosexual?  That’s a pretty arbitrary call, not to mention a much narrower standard than the apparently exclusive terrain on the Right.  In fact, the folks who oppose women’s ordination, who preach from the KJV, and who adhere closely to the Westminster Standards are capable of rallying behind Reformed orthodoxy.  It remains clear whether evangelicals in the Kirk are or ever will be.

Of course, that raises another question, one that boomerangs back on Trueman.  Why do some conservative Presbyterians continue to defend evangelicalism and at the same time voice some of the most telling criticisms of born-again Protestantism all the while maintaining a reputation as a good evangelical?  If Ref 21 would ever open itself up for comments, we might get an answer.

Update: the plot thickens.  Trueman calls attention to a petition on behalf of the evangelical position on homosexuality within the Church of Scotland.  He then appropriately has reservations about making homosexuality rather adultery the defining issue in the case before the Kirk.   Phil Ryken then takes Trueman mildly to task and explains why he signed the petition.   I guess that’s why they call it an Alliance.