Category: Confessionalism

Comparing Christian Liberal Arts Colleges (part two)

Published on by D. G. Hart1 Comment

The first of these posts compared Hillsdale College and Covenant College as Christian liberal arts colleges by their course requirements in each respective institution’s core curriculum. This follow up calls attention to Professor Jay Green’s initial suspicions about Hillsdale calling itself a Christian college because its mission is more civilizational than confessional.

Any two-kingdom confessional Protestant who read Dr. Green’s first column had to be amused if not frustrated by the way he positioned Covenant College along with its peer institutions in the Coalition for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). Evangelical colleges (some of them turned universities) have for almost forty years marched under the banner of the integration of faith and learning. They converted to the Neo-Calvinist cause somewhere around the time that Francis Schaeffer popularized Abraham Kuyper among American evangelicals. This was also around the time that evangelical faculty and students began to read The Reformed Journal and discovered how darned smart Calvin College (now university) professors were (sometimes they were even funny). With the integration of faith and learning came the elixir of w(orld-and-life-vie)w. In that intellectually pietistic hothouse, faculty and students attempted to bring every square inch of the arts and sciences under the Lordship of Christ. One goal of these institutions was to redeem or transform the culture, and a primary way to do that was to bring a Christian perspective to every single human activity — from goat breeding to Division III men’s football. If you think that sounds sort of civilizational, you’re right.

Reformed confessionalists of the two-kingdom type pushed back against the line blurring that such w(orld-vie)w thinking encouraged. The church and the world were separate categories, just as were general and special revelation. Christianity might require a definite perspective on Christ’s deity or the place of the Hebrew monarchy in the plan of redemption. But on matters of interpreting Andrew Jackson’s electoral victory in 1828, Christians had liberty to come to differing conclusions, most of which would depend on the best scholarship produced overwhelmingly by unregenerate scholars who had no trace of a Christian w(orld-and-life-vie)w.

In other words, confessional Protestantism, not the kind to which Dr. Green appeals, produced critics of the confessional-non-civilizational-but-nevertheless-cultural-integration of faith and learning or transformation of culture that institutions like Covenant College promoted. From a truly confessional Reformed perspective, the mission of many evangelical colleges was civilizational. And that transformationalist outlook and mission undermined a churchly or confessional understanding of Christianity irrespective of what it meant for higher education.

But now Dr. Green has tried to use confessionalism to undermine Hillsdale’s claims to be a Christian college. Again, he has largely recanted his original piece. But the argument he initially made is useful for gaining clarity about confessional Protestantism.

One point in particular bears mentioning. In his first piece about Hillsdale, Dr. Green worried that civilizational Christian colleges would make the work of confessional Christian colleges more difficult:

As Christian nationalism grows more attractive and widely accepted, some colleges are feeling pressure to shift toward defining themselves by their civilizational rather than their confessional priorities. I’m guessing that development offices find it easier to raise money for a college actively committed to saving Western Civilization than for one that promises only to walk in the way of Jesus.

Claiming to be taking the high ground where Jesus walked over against those in the ditches of saving Western Civilization has an inspiring WWJD-feel, but it does not actually describe well “the way of Jesus” in which evangelical colleges that are part of the CCCU execute their Christian mission. Dr. Green said specifically that institutions that belong to the CCCU are “‘Christian’ in the sense that their faculty (and sometimes their students) submit to clear statements of faith.”

But when you look at the CCCU website, here‘s what you will find in reply to the question, “What is Christian Higher Education?”

First, we integrate biblical truth not just into “spiritual” aspects of the institution but throughout the academic enterprise. Our professors pursue academic excellence because they are committed to God as the author of truth, and that truth has implications for every academic discipline. The classroom and the laboratory are just as much arenas of Christian integration as the college chapel.

There is the classic Neo-Calvinist move of blurring the spiritual and temporal, sacred and secular. All of life is religious and so all of religion is civilizational or cultural

Second, we are committed to the moral and spiritual formation of students. Education that instructs the mind without deepening the soul is not true learning. Our schools seek to develop students who, in the words of the Old Testament prophet, “act justly and love mercy and walk humbly with their God” (Micah 6:8). . . . This task gives meaning and coherence to every part of the academy, from the classroom to the fine arts studio, from the internship placement to the residence hall and the athletic field.

Again, in the Neo-Calvinist world of higher education, it’s hard to see where civilization begins and confessional ends because an activist, civilizational Christianity is co-extensive with confession — though so far the confession of faith has little theology (but lots of justice).

Third, we are committed to graduating students who make a difference for the common good as redemptive voices in the world. Our schools offer a wide variety of academic programs because we believe that Christians are called to use their vocations as vehicles to bring the good news of Jesus Christ to a fallen world. Our graduates . . . play a redemptive and restorative role in the world as doctors, teachers, marketers, engineers, parents, soccer coaches, and in a host of other ways. In other words, we are private religious institutions that exist for the public good and contribute to human flourishing. 

So integration of faith and learning extends across the curriculum to redeem and transform the world, one that has many civilizations in need of redemption. One has to suppose that if successful, graduates will build redeemed civilizations that could well qualify as Christian. And how is such a transformationalist understanding of Christian education any less civilizational than Hillsdale College’s self-professed Christian identity?

To Dr. Green’s credit, he does acknowledge that CCCU institutions might do better at being explicitly Christian in their mission.

To hear a call for confessional Christianity is encouraging. But in Dr. Green’s case, his brief for confessional Christian colleges needs the clarity that comes from distinguishing the arts, sciences, and theology as separate branches of learning, the way Protestants did before Kuyper.

Mere Confessionalism

Published on by D. G. Hart5 Comments

From the Archives: Nicotine Theological Journal, January 1999

Mere Confessionalism

“In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.” This is the motto of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. (The expression itself is of some antiquity, and it may date back as early as St. Augustine.) At its founding in 1981 the EPC adopted a modern language version of the Westminster Confession of Faith as its doctrinal standard. At the same time it also adopted an eight- point “Essentials of our Faith” summary statement. The latter contains boiler-plate evangelical affirmations on the Bible, God, Christ, sin, salvation, and eschatology, in language that is mildly and non-militantly Calvinistic.

Are these two documents competing doctrinal standards? An interesting debate is playing out in the EPC now regarding what confessional status, if any, its “Essentials” possess and how they relate to the Westminster Confession. The “Essentials” themselves end this way: “These Essentials are set forth in greater detail in the Westminster Confession of Faith.” But rather than solve the question, that ambiguous language only heightens the confusion. Does it mean that the WCF itself – taken as a whole – is the “Essentials” in fuller form, or merely that these eight affirmations can each be found there as well? Are the “Essentials,” in other words, what the church really believes? Should the emphasis fall on the first or second word in the denomination’s name, “Evangelical Presbyterian Church”?

MOST CONSERVATIVE Presbyterians would likely contend that the EPC has misidentified the essentials of the faith. After all, it is open to women in church office and the ongoing exercise of the charismatic gifts. At the same time, the EPC debate is instructive, because its conservative Presbyterian critics also tend to employ some form of what can be called the hermeneutic of essentials, of identifying what the church may or may not tolerate. Presbyterian theologian, John Frame, for example, in urging the creation of leg room within the confessions, laments that “the whole question of what is and what is not tolerable within the church has not been systematically analyzed.”

Frame’s quest is not new. Efforts to isolate the “essentials” within the confession are almost as old as Presbyterianism itself. Frequently, it has been the progressives who have been eager to speak of a “system of doctrine,” in order to permit their deviation from the Confession and catechisms of the church. By “system” they mean the Confession “in-as-much” as what the Confession teaches is biblical. In this fashion, Presbyterian officers hold line-item vetoes to the church’s Constitution, and the church had erected a Confession-within-the-Confession.

But it is not only progressives who speak this language. In efforts earlier in this century by conservative Presbyterians to preserve the essence of historic Christian orthodoxy, some upheld the minimal necessity of the “five fundamentals” of the faith. The unintended effect was to reduce the “essential and necessary” articles of the church’s constitution to just five.

Especially of late the rhetoric of essentials is invoked in order to separate the Bible from the Confession in the name of the Reformation principle of sola scriptura. (Indeed, often it is phrased in the language of liberating the Bible from the confession.) Increasingly Presbyterian officers seem to be declaring, “never mind the Confession, show me where that is taught in Scripture.” But for Presbyterians, an officer is committed to sola scriptura precisely to the extent that he is a Confessionalist. Confessionalism does not eclipse the doctrine of sola scriptura. Rather, a confession is the necessary means for the church to uphold Biblical authority. The Presbyterian way to point to the doctrine of Scripture is to refer to the Confession.

FRAME DESCRIBES THIS VIEW AS chauvinistic. “Although I am a Presbyterian,” he writes, “I confess that I do not share [the] desire for us always to ‘look like Presbyterians’ before the watching world.” In context, Frame’s concern is specifically about worship, but by implication his views bear upon the relationship between The Nicotine Theological Journal will likely be published four times a year. It is sponsored by the Old Life Theological Society, an association dedicated to recovering the riches of confessional Presbyterianism.

IN DESCRIBING HIS STUDENT days at Westminster Seminary (in the early 1960s), Frame recalls two features of that course of instruction: it lacked an overt “confessional or traditional focus” and there was a spirit of creativity and openness in theological reflection. He goes on to make a startling admission: “After graduation I became ordained in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and I confess I was rather surprised at the seriousness with which my fellow ministers took the confessional standards and the Presbyterian tradition. Eventually I became more like my fellow Orthodox Presbyterian . . . elders, but not without some nostalgia for the openness of theological discussion during my seminary years.”

Our point is not to critique WTS or any other seminary. And whether Frame has described with accuracy the curriculum of WTS in the 1960s is not our concern either. But what is revealing is the dichotomy that Frame creates between “perpetuat[ing] and recommend[ing] the confessional traditions” on the one hand (which is where he finds WTS’s education flawed), and a “flourishing of original and impressive theological thought” on the other (where he thinks WTS excelled). This difference he goes on to attribute to Westminster’s understanding of sola Scriptura, which liberated the school from traditionalism and confessionalism.

BUT FRAME’S DICHOTOMY WAS unknown to previous generations of Reformed theologians. Calvin Seminary’s Richard Muller writes the following on the harmony of Scripture and confession: “We need creeds and confessions so that we, as individuals, can approach Scripture in the context of the community of belief.” Confessions function as mediating structures, standing between Scripture and the “potentially idiosyncratic individual” as “churchly statements concerning the meaning of Scripture.” They are “normative declarations spoken from within by the church itself . . . as the expression of our corporate faith and corporate identity.”

Muller’s work on Reformed scholasticism reminds us that there was a time when confessional integrity did not compete with sola scriptura, nor did it impede theological creativity. For the scholastic mindset, Muller notes, “Once a churchly confession is accepted as a doctrinal norm, it provides boundaries for theological and religious expression, but it also offers considerable latitude for the development of varied theological and religious expressions within those boundaries.” According to the Reformers, there is no churchman and there is no theologian where there is no confession. Why is that so unimaginable today? Why has the Reformation confidence in the creeds of the church vanished?

AS WE PREVIOUSLY ARGUED (“Sectarians All,” NTJ 2.2), such anti-traditionalism only serves to locate one within a specific tradition, namely the Enlightenment, and its false claim that an individual Christian, armed with autonomous rationality can approach Scripture from a traditionless perspective. The Reformers, Muller claims, refused to approach Scripture with the false dilemma forced upon the church by its adoption of categories of Enlightenment thought.

Muller goes on to describe other pressures that our age brings to confessional integrity. He refers to the “noncredal, nonconfessional, and sometimes even anticonfessional and antitraditional biblicism of conservative American religion.” Enlightenment rationality and democratic populism combine to create what Robert Godfrey has diagnosed as the evangelical impulse toward theological minimalism. This minimalism seeks to get as many people to express everything they agree on, and preferrably on one side of one sheet of paper. These affirmations become the truly “essential truths,” and the hills for evangelicals to die on. Godfrey is echoing the thoughts of J. Gresham Machen, who in his essay, “The Creeds and Doctrinal Advance,” described this impulse in the following way:

There are entirely too many denominations in this country, says the modern ecclesiastical efficiency expert. Obviously, many of them have to be merged. But the trouble is, they have different creeds. Here is one church, for example, that has a clearly Calvinistic creed; here is another whose creed is just as clearly Arminian, let us say, and anti-Calvinistic. How in the world are we going to get them together? Why, obviously, says the ecclesiastical efficiency expert, the thing to do is to tone down that Calvinistic creed; just smooth off its sharp angles, until Arminians will be able to accept it. Or else we can do something better still. We can write an entirely new creed that will contain only what Arminianism and Calvinism have in common, so that it can serve as the basis for some proposed new “United Church” . . . . Such are the methods of modern church unionism.

This impulse stands in sharp contrast to what Godfrey calls the theological maximalism of the Reformed, which sought at least in the past to extend the boundaries of the church’s confession in pursuit of the “whole counsel of God.” Moreover, Reformed maximalism and evangelical minimalism differ not only in the size of their creeds but in the very purpose of their creeds. To quote Machen again:

These modern statements are intended to show how little of truth we can get along with and still be Christians, whereas the great creeds of the church are intended to show much of the truth God has revealed to us in His Word. Let us sink our differences, say the authors of these modern statements, and get back to a few bare essentials; let us open our Bibles, say the authors of the great Christian creeds, and seek to unfold the full richness of truth that the Bible contains. Let us be careful, say the authors of these modern statements, not to discourage any of the various tendencies of thought that find a lodgment in the church; let us give all diligence, say the authors of the great Christian creeds, to exclude deadly error from the official teaching of the church, in order that thus the Church may be a faithful steward of the mysteries of God.

BUT IS ALL OF THIS FAIR TO evangelicalism? After all, no less an evangelical icon than C. S. Lewis contended for a “mere Christianity.” Yet Lewis himself was not confused about his beliefs, which he said were found in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. His search for a “mere” Christianity was not an alternative to the creeds of the church. Rather, he likened it to the difference between the halls and rooms of a mansion. “Mere” Christianity may bring one into the hall. “But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals.” The “worst of the rooms,” he went on to stress (perhaps thinking of a dimly lit and drearily decorated attic of Calvinistic horrors), is to be preferred over the hall.

Whatever Lewis intended, his words have been hijacked to serve unhealthy purposes. The ambiguities of the expression, “Mere Christianity,” can be found in many of Lewis’ disciples. And when it meets contemporary evangelicalism, there is a volatile mix that may prove lethal to the theological reflection and confessional identity of the church.

CONSIDER TOUCHSTONE magazine, which had recently changed its subtitle from “A Journal of Ecumenical Orthodoxy” to “A Journal of Mere Christianity.” Its editorial purpose is to “subordinate disagreements to the common agreement” because the crisis of our day is so grave. Here we must recognize the debilitating effects of the so-called culture wars on the confessional identity of the church. Abortion, Gay rights, women’s rights, funding for and legal protection of pornographic artists, evolution in the public schools — all of these are battle fronts in the increasingly rancorous struggle over the meaning and purpose of America. And these are the causes to which Christians should devote their energy.

“We need to identify the ‘real enemy’,” urges Touchstone, and that enemy is without, not within. What is said moderately in Touchstone can be found in more virulent form in Peter Kreeft’s Ecumenical Jihad. For Kreeft, mere Christianity may not even be recognizably Christian. The moral decay of America, with all of its leading indicators of spiritual decline, is creating new alliances, even among those of differing religious convictions. The old fashioned Protestant v. Catholic v. Jewish warfare is passe. So great is the threat of secular humanism and so united are we with former antagonists on the really crucial issues, that even evangelical Christians, Kreeft predicts, will eventually arrive at the conclusion that Muslims are on the right side. They may be murdering Christians in Sudan, but at least they are not massacring unborn children. Given the real crisis of our time – the decline of Western Civilization – this is “no time for family squabbles.” This is not merely cultural warfare but spiritual warfare that will unite Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and maybe even an occasional natural-law-advocating atheist.

(Don’t be too alarmed by all this. The Holy Spirit is at work among pious Muslims, Kreeft assures Christian skeptics, and in heaven these Muslims will come to learn that the Allah they served was the God of the Scriptures. What is more, Kreeft goes on to comfort Catholics that Protestants will ultimately come to venerate the blessed Virgin Mary, if not in this life then in the next. So the very ecumenical Kreeft eventually emerges from the closet and is outed by the end of his own book as a good, confessional Catholic.)

TOUCHSTONE MAGAZINE ultimately appeals to experience over doctrine. “Mere Christianity,” it states, is found ultimately not in doctrine but lies in “the character of a man.” Similarly, Kreeft argues that beyond theological differences, we find mere Christianity where there is love. This privileging of experience over doctrine prompts us to wonder whether efforts to arrive at evangelical essentials owe less to C.S. Lewis than to Friedrich Schleiermacher, the 19th-century father of modern theological liberalism.

Fundamental to Schleiermacher’s method was his division between the kernel and husk of the Christian faith. The latter is the practice of Christianity, that which is culturally conditioned, and the former is the “essence of the Christian faith,” stripped of these acculturated accretions. It was this non-negotiable kernel that Schleiermacher desperately sought to preserve. The husk is what is offensive to unbelievers, specifically, 19th-century elites of Protestant Europe. The task of the church, therefore, is to remove the objectionable and make Christianity attractive and relevant.

SCHLEIERMACHER IS NOT alone in this methodology. In our century, Tillich’s “method of correlation” and Bultmann’s program of demythologization likewise restated biblical message in language free from pre-modern superstitions and categories more friendly to modernity. A little closer to home, seeker-sensitive worship owes much to 19th-century liberalism, in order to make church accommodating to unchurched Harry and Sally. All of these are efforts to repackage the Christian faith.

In his book, Rumor of Angels, sociologist Peter Berger says that whenever one engages in this method, one is making a cognitive adjustment to the worldview of modernity. In the case of liberalism, the result can be “a profound erosion of the traditional religious content, in extreme cases to the point where nothing is left but hollow rhetoric.” But however practiced, this adjustment or “bargaining” is always a process of “cultural contamination,” because in the encounter between the church and modernity, modernity always wins.

Berger’s point, of course, is that you cannot adjust the wrappings and leave the core unaffected. But is it a stretch to link contemporary evangelicals with a Schleiermacher? We may not see language like kernel or husk, much less something as ominous as demythologization. But substitute “message” and “method,” and it begins to sound familiar. How many times have you heard it said that we must maintain our message but we must change our method, because the world is changing, and at a dizzying pace at that. Or think about the churches that describe their “philosophy of ministry” in brochures for first-time visitors without reference to their theological standards. And then there is “worship style.” How is it that churches can offer two morning services that are “identical” except for the music? Let us not forget that Friedrich Schleiermacher was as desperate as Bill Hybels to present Christianity in relevant and meaningful ways to a skeptical culture.

IN DAVID WELLS’ TERMS theological liberalism and contemporary evangelicalism both quarantine theology from ministry. By dividing message from method, both permit theological convictions to play a diminishing role in the life of the church. On more and more matters, evangelicals are suggesting that theological considerations are irrelevant, overshadowed by the more urgent need for cultural relevance or evangelistic effectiveness. According to Wells,

It is not that the elements of the evangelical credo have vanished; they have not. The fact that they are professed, however, does not necessarily mean that the structure of the historic Protestant faith is still intact. The reason, quite simply, is that while these items of belief are professed, they are increasingly being removed from the center of evangelical life where they defined what that life was, and they are now being relegated to the periphery where their power to define what evangelical life should be is lost.

SCHLEIERMACHER’S METHOD should serve as ample warning that theological minimalism is a false messiah. It is sure to destroy what it claims to preserve, not only when it is in the hands of liberals, but also when it is practiced mildly by conservative evangelicals. A lowest common denominator is an ecumenical dead end. A Reformed church whose worship disguises its Reformed identity is simply not reformed.

Presbyterians would do better to affirm a “mere” Confessionalism, and regard, along with our ancestors, the standards of the church as liberating and not constrictive. Further, Presbyterians might want to acknowledge, however humbling it might be, that they stand to learn something here from the Lutherans. Our Lutheran counterparts seem far more vigilant in their confessional identity than Calvinists. At a recent gathering of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Missouri Synod theologian, David P. Scaer, struck at the heart of the evangelical dilemma:

Any survival and recovery of Reformation theology cannot be made to depend on a further compromise which identifies an essential core of agreement in order to save it. . . . This kind of agreement immediately puts Lutherans at a disadvantage, since they must concede what makes them Lutherans.

In observing the eager participation of the Reformed in such holy grail pursuits of essentials, Scaer wonders whether the Reformed have made such a suicidal concession. We can hardly improve on Scaer’s conclusion: “Distinctions between essential and non-essential do not belong in the confessional vocabulary.”

Which leads to the unpleasant conclusion that a “confessing evangelical” is a contradiction in terms. Perhaps then Reformed need to cultivate among themselves the same dis-ease for the term “evangelical” as Machen had for “fundamentalist” in his day. Although he reluctantly accepted the term, he couldn’t abide the artificial reduction of a full-orbed Calvinism into a list of fundamentals. So instead of asking what church officers can get away with and how churches can be innovative, Reformed should second Machen: “isn’t the Reformed faith grand!”

“IN ESSENTIALS UNITY; IN NON-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.” This is a motto that the Presbyterians can embrace. We need not concede it either to charismatic Presbyterians or broad evangelicals, but only if we define essentials in a confessionally self-conscious way. In our standards, there is unity – mere confessionalism. The search for essentials ends when the church adopts her standards. Beyond our confession, there is liberty, and with it openness and even diversity, in theology, worship, and life. And what about charity? By worldly standards, confessionalism does not permit a hermeneutic of charity, for that is a charity of indifference and tolerance. But confessionalism does cultivate a biblical charity that rejoices in the truth, and believes all things.

JRM

Machen Day 2023

Published on by D. G. HartLeave a comment

From the book that kind of made him famous, the reason for being worried about liberal Protestantism:

The plain fact is that liberalism, whether it be true or false, is no mere “heresy”–no mere divergence at isolated points from Christian teaching. On the contrary it proceeds from a totally different root, and it constitutes, in essentials, a unitary system of its own. That does not mean that all liberals hold all parts of the system, or that Christians who have been affected by liberal teaching at one point have been affected at all points. There is sometimes a salutary lack of logic which prevents the whole of a man’s faith being destroyed when he has given up a part. But the true way in which to examine a spiritual movement is in its logical relations; logic is the great dynamic, and the logical implications of any way of thinking are sooner or later certain to be worked out. And taken as a whole, even as it actually exists today, naturalistic liberalism is a fairly unitary phenomenon; it is tending more and more to eliminate from itself illogical remnants of Christian belief. It differs from Christianity in its view of God, of man, of the seat of authority and of the way of salvation. And it differs from Christianity not only in theology but in the whole of life. It is indeed sometimes said that there can be communion in feeling where communion in thinking is gone, a communion of the heart as distinguished from a communion of the head. But with respect to the present controversy, such a distinction certainly does not apply. On the contrary, in reading the books and listening to the sermons of recent liberal teachers–so untroubled by the problem of sin, so devoid of all sympathy for guilty humanity, so prone to abuse and ridicule the things dearest to the heart of every Christian man–one can only confess that if liberalism is to return into the Christian communion there must be a change of heart fully as much as a change of mind. God grant that such a change of heart may come! But meanwhile the present situation must not be ignored but faced.

Christianity is being attacked from within by a movement which is anti-Christian to the core. (Christianity and Liberalism, 160)

Why Bavinck?

Published on by D. G. HartLeave a comment

Would readers exist for Herman Bavinck’s writing, increasingly available thanks to the good work of translators, without the ground already fertilized by evangelicals trying to overcome “the scandal of the evangelical mind” through w-w? James Eglington’s biography prompted a think:

The much more common Dutch theological heavyweights were Abraham Kuyper (positive estimate), Klaus Schilder (negative), and G. K. Berkhower (mixed but mainly positive). Then came the names, much more widely known, of Dutch-American scholars at Westminster and Calvin seminaries, such as Cornelius Van Til and Louis Berkhof (respectively), and before them, the one blazing the trail between Dutch and American theological circles, Geerhardus Vos, the biblical theologian at Princeton Seminary from the 1890s to the 1930s.

Many of these names, however, will be unfamiliar to pastors and church members without some link to the Christian Reformed Church or the United Reformed Churches. This is only to say that the main thread of Anglo-American theology largely runs through New England and Presbyterian sources, beginning with the Puritans and Jonathan Edwards, through to Old Princeton (from Charles Hodge to J. Gresham Machen), and down to professors who taught at Westminster, Fuller, Gordon-Conwell, and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. To that lineage, adding another Dutch theologian is a stretch.

But this does not mean Bavinck’s time in any way has passed. As Eglinton explains in answer to his own question, Bavinck, who was “brilliant theologian” and “household name” in the Netherlands, taught at Kampen Theological School and the Free University in Amsterdam, wrote a four-volume dogmatic theology in addition to books on child education, psychology, women’s rights, and a host of ethical topics.

Bavinck was also known in the United States. He gave the Stone Lectures at Princeton Seminary in 1908 ten years after Abraham Kuyper had given them, and on his visit to the States president Theodore Roosevelt, a Dutch-American of some remove from colonial migration, welcomed the Free University theologian to the White House.

That may sound like old news and readers may be wondering what Bavinck has done for American readers lately. The answer here is a lot of thanks to the efforts of the Bavinck Institute which over the past decade sponsored the translation of Bavinck’s corpus in English, such as God and Creation (2004); Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation (2008); Reformed Dogmatics, 4 volumes (2004-2008); Essays on Religion, Science, and Society (2008); The Christian Family (2012).

Eglinton himself, a lecturer in theology at the University of Edinburgh, has overseen dissertations by several graduate students on aspects of Bavinck’s thought. In some ways, the answer to Eglinton’s question – why a Bavinck biography – owes as much to the recent output of Bavinck’s writings as to the circumstances that made Bavinck one of the Netherland’s greatest theologians of the first half of the twentieth century.

Another reason for appreciating Bavinck and Eglinton’s biography is the importance of neo-Calvinism among American evangelicals for at least the last fifty years. For doctrinal and devotional inspiration evangelicals have drawn heavily from usual suspects like the Banner of Truth, seminaries like Westminster, Gordon-Conwell, and TEDS, and popularizers like R. C. Sproul and John Piper.

At the same time, evangelicals have also undertaken what may be called worldview analysis. That inelegant phrase stands for trying to understand all of creation, not just redemption, from a perspective informed by biblical teaching and theological fundamentals. This way of thinking has inspired Protestants to venture into fields in the humanities and sciences in the name of Christ. Sometimes they even repeat Kuyper’s famous phrase, that Christ claims “every-square inch” as his own. Francis Schaeffer may have first made this outlook popular, with help later from Chuck Colson. But even more important were scholars at Calvin College and Calvin Seminary who set the bar high for professors at many evangelical colleges and attempted to pursue scholarship from a Christian outlook.

Bavinck fits in this line of endeavor since he himself wrote on political and cultural topics from a Reformed perspective. But what is often missing from the American Protestant appropriation of neo-Calvinism is the serious theological underpinning on which it rested. Bavinck is as good an example of serious theological investigation in the neo-Calvinist tradition as anyone can find. Eglinton’s biography in turn may be news to many readers that the neo-Calvinists were no slouches when it came to doctrine, worship, and the church.

Broadening Churches Break, Will the PCA?

Published on by D. G. Hart4 Comments

The Broadening Church was the word the title of Lefferts Loetscher’s book about the Presbyterian controversy of the 1920s and 1930s. It was not the epithet of conservatives like J. Gresham Machen. The question was whether a church should attempt to be broad. Perhaps, the better way to put it is whether the church should oppose breadth. Breadth happens. It may be tolerable (Loetscher’s position), it may be objectionable (Machen’s), or it may be welcome (various modernists’). Whatever you think of a broad church, it pretty much goes without saying that conservatives seek communions that maintain doctrinal, liturgical, and ecclesiastical standards, a desire that generally does not go with breadth. On the other hand, those who either accept passively or celebrate broad communions are not conservative.

To look for parallels between the PCUSA and the PCA and raise the question of whether PCA is following a similar set of trajectories as did the PCUSA during the so-called fundamentalist controversy is to assume that the PCA itself is a broad church. If someone leads with the idea that broad and trending liberal go together throughout church history, then some PCA folk who have spoken positively about the denomination’s breadth may pause their identification with a broad church. They want to be conservative. They also want to be broad. So how do you square breadth with conservatism? Maybe the best you can do is Tim Keller‘s “Why I Like the PCA,” an essay which concedes that the New York City pastor’s communion is broad:

I believe that the only way for the PCA to be a place where we own each other is for us to re-affirrm the original boundary markers that the founders set up.

The founders’ drew very specific boundaries at certain points. One that has always been very important has been a high view of Scripture, with a robust, traditional belief in inerrancy. Another has to do with the core of Reformed theology and soteriology—there are to be no “four point Calvinists” in our church. In many other areas where some Reformed denominations have drawn narrower lines—Sabbath observance, worship (e.g. Psalms-only,) eschatology—the founders left room for diversity.

That sounds very different from what happened in the PCUSA where the church actually tried to do an end run around the PCUSA’s boundary markers. Here it may be useful to recall that the controversy started in 1920 with a plan to unite all Protestant denominations into one American church, like the model that informed the formation of the Presbyterian Church of Canada (1925). The president of Princeton Seminary, J. Ross Stevenson, chaired the committee of Presbyterians who approved the plan Stevenson’s faculty opposed the plan strenuously (including B. B. Warfield during the last year of his life). It was a classic instance of “we should be broad” vs. “we want to maintain Presbyterian standards.”

The next phase of the controversy played out in 1922 when congregations in New York City were behaving very broadly. This became common knowledge when Harry Emerson Fosdick, a liberal Baptist preaching as stated supply in a Presbyterian pulpit, gave his famous sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” For Fosdick, the church was divided between those who wanted the church to be narrow and intolerant and those who like himself wanted it to be broad and open to all good souls. Fosdick’s sermon launched judicial proceedings that forced Fosdick out of the Presbyterian pulpit and the New York Presbyterian to explain the anomaly of a Baptist pastor functioning as pulpit supply as a misunderstanding.

Meanwhile, that same presbytery was ordaining ministers would not affirm (nor did the reject) the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. New York’s breadth prompted overwhelming support from officers at the 1923 General Assembly to reaffirm the famous five points of essential and necessary doctrines — which included the virgin birth (which had been affirmed in 1910 and 1916). Some might construe them as boundary markers. But liberals in New York countered with the Auburn Affirmation, which was a plea for liberty in the church (breadth), an interpretation of the essential doctrines in a less than literal manner, and an assertion that the General Assembly lacked power to insist on essential doctrines.

From there it was largely downhill for liberals. The Special Commission of 1925, which had the task of explaining the tensions in the church, blamed conservatives for making unfounded assertions outside the orderly mechanisms of Presbyterian church government. Those un-Presbyterian activities included (by implication) writing books like Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism. The General Assembly followed up with an investigation of Princeton Seminary, again to discover the source of the controversy between Stevenson and his faculty, and between Charles Erdman and Machen. That committee found again that conservatives were the problem and in effect issued a warning that if conservatives continued to criticize liberalism in the denomination those critics could face church discipline. The committee also recommended administrative changes at Princeton that diluted conservative voices (which had been in the majority). Readers should remember that PTS was and remains an agency of the General Assembly (as opposed to independent ones like Westminster, Fuller, and Reformed, or Union Richmond which I believe was founded by a Synod).

Seven years later Machen led in the founding of an orthodox, narrow, and tiny church, the OPC (name to come in 1939). Meanwhile, the PCUSA had managed to remain unified even as it encompassed a spectrum of positions in the church.

Here is how the contemporary broadening of the PCA differs from the PCUSA. You could argue it begins with Good Faith Subscription. According to “Looking Forward – Together,” the determination of the General Assembly twenty years ago was pivotal:

Good Faith Subscription (GFS) was formalized into our Constitution almost twenty years ago to put an end to such unfounded assertions. Two back-to-back General Assemblies and two-thirds of our presbyteries came to a previously and since-unprecedented level of unity to make this Constitutional formulation that allows for meaningful and biblical adherence to our Standards (acknowledging where the Bible allows good men to differ according to a very careful system of checks and balances, where every difference is recorded, approved by entire presbyteries, and submitted for examination to the General Assembly)! The adoption of GFS made recording confessional exceptions mandatory for presbyteries, and has been extraordinarily effective in strengthening our confessional commitments.

Somehow this revision in church life allowed the PCA to do exactly what the denomination had done twenty-five years earlier without the advantages of GFS: “The latitude that our denomination has allowed for, within the bounds of our orthodoxy, protects us from the kind of centralized control or hidden compromise that brought peril to the denomination the PCA left in 1973.”

In other words, GFS accomplished what the PCA had always stood for — latitude (which is synonymous with breadth) even though the PCA in 1973 was formed precisely because the sort of broad church that the PCUSA had achieved in the 1930s was also occurring within the PCUS.

GFS is not what the Auburn Affirmation was. But it is a form of subscribing that is compatible with breadth. GFS is also an action of a General Assembly. The Auburn Affirmation was merely a statement in search of signatures. That is why “Faithfully” can sound sort of threatening to conservatives the way that PCUSA turned out to be with Machen and other critics of liberalism.

Online blogs, Facebook posts, online news agencies, and emails have generally been the modes of much attack, innuendo, and ridicule, with little or no personal interaction with those attacked and cited. In the process, specific brothers in good standing have been labeled – and hurt, but even more frequently, “straw men” are erected without proof. These communications assert that large segments of our church are abandoning Scripture and our Confessional standards. Every sin does violence to God’s world and forsakes his Word, whether the sin of homosexuality, the sin of slander, the sin of compromise, or the sin of divisiveness.

In fact, “Faithfully” implies that conservatives in the PCA are engaged in a power play:

We disagree with digital and social media characterizations that turn suspicions into speculations that become accusations without proof – to achieve political ends within our church. Where compromise or sin is true and can be proven, we have sessions, presbyteries, and judicial processes to engage. We are wrong to presume that all of these are populated by brothers who are less committed to our faith than those ringing alarm bells in internet discussions and news agencies.

That explains why this letter’s appeal to GFS is an important part of the argument. GFS is the law of the church. Anyone who challenges it is running contrary to the settled practice of the PCA. In which case, while the Auburn Affirmation was a plea for liberty in the church, “Faithfully” is a threat against those who challenge the existing breadth in the PCA.

One other important difference between the PCUSA’s becoming broad and the PCA’s current breadth is the degree to which the broadists talk about the relationship between church and society (or hint at a Social Gospel). The Auburn Affirmation was generally silent about society. Progressives in the PCUSA had to worry more about carving out space for themselves in the church than they did about their role in social reform. This is not the case for the PCA, at least by one reading of “Faithfully.” Here are some of the ways, according to the authors of the letter, the PCA has shown it’s commitment to “biblical integrity, ecclesiastical polity, and gospel focus” (none of which sounds very confessional or subscriptionist):

We are seeing a healthy, biblical consciousness for issues that were previously unaddressed in the denomination, including racial reconciliation, refugee care, domestic violence, the vital role of women in advancing the mission of the church, the gospel-centeredness of all Scripture, the importance of mercy ministries and crisis care in the advancement of Christ’s message of hope, and the precious power of God’s covenant care in a society of sexual and family brokenness. For example, without sacrificing our commitment to biblical integrity, the involvement of godly women has been sought for insight on difficult issues affecting children, churches, and families, as evidenced in the recent PCA study committees on the role of women and domestic violence.

Say what you will about those matters and whether the doctrine of the spirituality of the church, which is in the Westminster Confession (ch. 25), was part of the PCUS (and explains why it took until 1983 for the Southern and Northern churches to reunite), and was clearly part (not the whole) of the PCA’s founding, that is not a list of endeavors that would characterize a non-broad or strictly confessional Reformed church. For “Faithfully” to mention these as pretty much obvious signs of the PCA’s health is also to indicate a measure of confirmation bias that in turn construes one sector of a diverse church for the whole.

A similar confusion of broad consensus with actual disagreements is evident in “Faithfully”‘s discussion of the elephant in the PCA room — namely, Side B (or same-sex attracted) Christianity. To avoid that particular matter, “Faithfully” renders the issue as whether or not to ordain practicing homosexuals:

You may have heard that there are PCA pastors who desire to ordain practicing homosexuals – This could not be further from the truth, and is an example of using extremes to ignite alarm and enflame passions among brothers. We agree that any unrepentant sinner or sinful lifestyle makes ordination not only impossible, but also reprehensible. We know of no pastors or elders in the PCA who in any way desire for practicing homosexuals to be ordained.

Fine. But what about pastors who identify as homosexual (though non-practicing) Christians? Would anyone object to a pastor calling himself an adulterous Christian because he is sometimes attracted to women other than his wife? Are these questions ones that agreeing on a basic set of “gospel” commitments while allowing for diversity on variety of indifferent matters will be easily answered? What if basic gospel commitments about sin, human nature, repentance, regeneration — all matters covered under Pastor Keller’s “Reformed theology and soteriology” — actually bubble up into questions about church and society? And what if Side B Christianity is a way to project that the PCA is a tolerant sort of place for residents of large metropolitan areas where people are generally uncomfortable expressing opposition to homosexuality?

Again, breadth seems to be afflicting the PCA. The affliction is certainly different from the broadening of the PCUSA roughly one hundred years ago. But in one way it is similar. “Evangelicals” like Charles Erdman, professor of practical theology at Princeton and opponent of Machen within the seminary and the church, believed a denomination could be broad and committed to the essentials of the gospel. The progressives in the PCA seem to be in a similar position. They are not making the church safe for pastors who question the Virgin Birth. But they, like Erdman, want to avoid being part of a restrictive church.

“Presbyterian” by definition means not Lutheran, not Anglican, not Baptist, not Congregationalist, not Quaker, not Methodist. Of course, someone can be not a Baptist in a disagreeable manner. But if the metric for offensiveness is calibrated to the ethos of cosmopolitan urban centers, the bar for giving offense was just set really low.

Can The PCA Turn Back the Clock to 2001?

Published on by D. G. HartLeave a comment

James Kessler doesn’t think so:

The PCA is not going back to 2001. Rewriting our constitution is not going to happen, not only because no party has sufficient numbers to accomplish that, but also because there are too many men and women committed to a biblically defined Confession and the great commission who are located in contexts that are more diverse, more agnostic and apathetic, more questioning and less steeped in a church tradition while being more hospitable to Gospel conversations than ever. Every year we plant dozens of new churches in an age of de-churching. When I began in ordained ministry in 2006, in Columbus Ohio, outside the traditional region of the PCA, we had three churches in a city of more than two million. Now we have seven, with more on the way. Every year RUF takes on scores of campus ministry interns seeking to learn how to minister the Gospel in a pluralistic society. The Unity Fund produced 48 minority ordination scholarships last year. Even the places where the PCA was born have been changing, and there is no going back because the harvesters in the white fields are not who they once were. Friends, this PCA is not going away as long as you are on mission. But preserving it will not only require your good will, it will require your work.

The odd thing is, the group responsible for that change in the PCA, the Presbyterian Pastoral Leadership Network, doesn’t seem to exist. It has zero assets and zero income.

But PPLN was responsible for the shift in the PCA that Pastor Kessler celebrates. This is how the Nicotine Theological Journal (July 2002) rendered the 2002 PCA General Assembly:

The defection of the Briarwood associate pastor [to First Baptist Birmingham] hardly reduced the ranks of its delegates to the 30th General Assembly of the PCA. Briarwood sent 21 delegates to the GA that met in Birmingham last month, more than many presbyteries sent. These commissioners were not merely availing themselves of a home court advantage, but they were on a mission, representing a portion of the Presbyterian Pastoral Leadership Network’s effort to stack the Assembly with votes. The PPLN voter turnout drive proved enormously successful. Though we did not attend the PCA Assembly, we have struggled to read some reports about its deliberations. Our struggle has mainly to do with working through the awful “TE”/“RE” nomenclature. (A compelling case against the two office view can be made simply on the basis of English prose.)

REPORTS WE READ HAVE varied from denial – “things went much better than anyone had ever expected,” gushed Clair Davis in pcanews.com – to disaster – “we were more than just defeated, we were routed,” wept Andy Webb on his Warfield elist. Of course, post mortem rhetoric of this sort is typical, and we should forgive exhausted commissioners who lapse into hyperbole.

But there is one aspect of PCA analysis that we cannot abide. It is the recurring habit to link the denomination’s fragmentation with the struggles of youth. The PCA is a young church, so goes this line of thinking, and its indiscretions will naturally accompany the awkwardness of childhood. World magazine displays the most recent example of this reasoning. Its July-August 2002 issue euphemistically described the victory of PPLN juggernaut under the heading, “Growing Pains in the PCA.” This toddler of a denomination is still growing, and the PPLN initiatives were helpful means of promoting further growth in the young church. As the old commercials put it for Wonder Bread, PPLN builds strong bodies.

HOWEVER ONE INTERPRETS THE struggles in the PCA, one cannot distort them into the pains of youth. Rather, they more closely resemble the symptoms of an old and dying church. Pre-Assembly caucusing, bussing in votes, stifling the voice of the minority, establishing competing websites – these are not the indiscretions of the young and the naïve. Indeed the actions of the last Assembly have even prompted some TE’s and RE’s (see, now we’re doing it) to propose that PCA presbyteries redesign themselves along ideological rather than geographical lines. This is not a novel idea within American Presbyterianism. It is generally floated as the desperate attempt to maintain a semblance of unity in worn out and creaky denominations, and ideological presbyteries are often predecessors of church divisions.

Curiously, Clair Davis argued, contrary to the claims of World magazine, that the PPLN initiatives were wise precisely because the PCA was not numerically growing. 80% of the PCA had not shown any growth during the previous year. Whether or not the church is growing numerically, at least this much is clear: the PCA is a thirty-something denomination that shows all the indications of premature aging.

Will the National Partnership to which Pastor Kessler belongs have a fait similar to PPLN? If the past is not as important as the current, if what Presbyterians used to fight about no longer make sense in pluralistic, urban, and socially aware settings, what will come of the National Partnership by 2040? Chances are they will be as relevant then as Charles Erdman is to the PCUSA today — not much.

That’s not the fault of Pastor Kessler or his colleagues. It is the function, though, of updating the church to contemporary developments. The flower fades. So do the headlines.

By the way, what does “good faith subscription” do to confessionalism? What is the point of having a long, scholastic, and elaborate confession when all you want are the fundamentals of the confession and catechisms? Why not switch from the Westminster Standards to the Gospel Coalition’s Confessional Statement? Presbyterian nostalgia?

Ecumenism Schmecuminism – This is A Podcast

Published on by D. G. Hart5 Comments

One of the many advantages of Hillsdale College is the diversity of Christians who work, study, and teach at the place. That reality means that Hillsdale has more confessional Protestants on campus than your ordinary evangelical college.

And those circumstances make possible a relatively new podcast that features Anglicans, Lutherans, and Presbyterians talking about being confessional Protestant in America. The main interlocutors are Miles Smith (Anglican Church in North America), Korey Maas (Lutheran Church Missouri Synod), and mmmeeeEEEEE (OPC). The idea for the podcast is to talk about differences among these communions that trace back through the history of the Reformation and its reception. But also the idea is to provide a forum for talking about church life and Christian witness that sounds different from either evangelical or mainline Protestantism.

The first episode introduced the participants and the podcast.

The second featured a discussion of seminaries and where confessional Protestant pastors receive their training.

The most recent, posted yesterday, asked the difficult question about what’s wrong with Lutherans?

If for some reason, you don’t have enough to listen to, you may want to check out the Paleo Protestant Pudcast.

The Steel Trap of the Liberal Presbyterian Mind

Published on by D. G. HartLeave a comment

Henry Sloane Coffin was a leading liberal minister in the Presbyterian Church USA during the 1920s. When the General Assembly of 1925 was ready once again to affirm the virgin birth as an essential doctrine of Christianity, Coffin threatened to lead an exodus of liberals (mainly from New York) outside the denomination. This vote was so threatening because the Presbytery of New York City had ordained two ministers (one of them Henry Pit Van Dusen, president of Union Theological Seminary during the Niebuhr era) who could not affirm the virgin birth.

A separation was what J. Gresham Machen had wanted because liberals and conservatives were in such conflict:

A separation between the two parties in the Church is the crying need of the hour. Many indeed are seeking to avoid the separation. Why, they say, may not brethren dwell together in unity? The Church, we are told, has room both for liberals and for conservatives. The conservatives may be allowed to remain if they will keep trifling matters in the background and attend chiefly to “the weightier matters of the law.” And among the things thus designated as “trifling” is found the Cross of Christ, as a really vicarious atonement for sin. (Christianity and Liberalism)

But Coffin’s reply was to stand upon “the constitution of the Church,” not the provisions that included an affirmation of the virgin birth in the Confession and Catechisms, but that part that prevented General Assemblies from changing or adding “to the conditions” for ordination.

Coffin, after all, was an liberal evangelical:

We are first and foremost evangelicals . . . to the core of our spiritual beings. Any attempt to belittle Jesus, to reduce Him to a mere Teacher, a sage superior to other sages, but one among many, not the unique Saviour of the world; to substitute any other standard for the Bible as the authoritative express of God’s life with men. . . is to depreciate the Christian religion and to rob it of its vital force. (quoted in Longfield, Presbyterian Controversy, 88)

That evangelicalism came with a catch. According to Longfield:

In the Presbyterian conflict Coffin would fight for doctrinal liberty in the church, for the freedom to rethink Christian convictions in present-day categories. This was essential if the church was to survive in the modern world. But beyond that, Coffin was fighting to preserve the hope of a social and economic order redeemed through the people of God. The church existed “to embody and create the world-wide community of God,” “to conquer all the kingdoms of this world — art, science, industry, education, politics — for God and for His Christ. . . . The attacks of fundamentalist like Machen and Macartney on liberal evangelicals therefore threatened both the freedom of Christians and the future of the world. Only a universal church, a “re-united world-wide Church of Christ, supernational,” could marshal the power to remake the world according to Christ’s mind. (Longfield, 99)

Twenty-five years later, William F. Buckley, Jr. ran up against that sort of progressive (and still evangelical?) Christianity when he published God and Man at Yale, a book that blew the whistle on the lack of Christianity and friendliness to collective economics in the instruction at the school from which Buckley had just graduated. The book created a great controversy and was arguably the first installment of the conservative movement that would soon make a dent on the Republican Party.

Yale appointed a committee (like the way Charles Erdman appointed the Special Commission of 1925 to investigate the Presbyterian conflict) and the chairman of the commission was Henry Sloane Coffin. In a letter to a Yale alumnus, a copy of which went to Buckley, Coffin wrote that the book’s author was “distorted by his Roman Catholic point of view.” Buckley should have known that Yale was a “Puritan and Protestant institution by its heritage.” He also should have “attended Fordham or some similar institution.”

So in 1925 Coffin rejected a separation in the Presbyterian Church. But for Yale, he had no problem thinking that Roman Catholics should take their endeavors elsewhere. The separation of the church? No. The separation of the university? No problem.

Machen may have been able to warn Buckley had he lived beyond 1937:

Such obscuration of the issue attests a really astonishing narrowness on the part of the liberal preacher. Narrowness does not consist in definite devotion to certain convictions or in definite rejection of others. But the narrow man is the man who rejects the other man’s convictions without first endeavoring to understand them, the man who makes no effort to look at things from the other man’s point of view. For example, it is not narrow to reject the Roman Catholic doctrine that there is no salvation outside the Church. It is not narrow to try to convince Roman Catholics that that doctrine is wrong. But it would be very narrow to say to a Roman Catholic: “You may go on holding your doctrine about the Church and I shall hold mine, but let us unite in our Christian work, since despite such trifling differences we are agreed about the matters that concern the welfare of the soul.” For of course such an utterance would simply beg the question; the Roman Catholic could not possibly both hold his doctrine of the Church and at the same time reject it, as would be required by the program of Church unity just suggested. A Protestant who would speak in that way would be narrow, because quite independent of the question whether he or the Roman Catholic is right about the Church he would show plainly that e had not made the slightest effort to understand the Roman Catholic point of view.

The case is similar with the liberal program for unity in the Church. It could never be advocated by anyone who had made the slightest effort to understand the point of view of his opponent in the controversy. (Christianity and Liberalism)

The lesson could very well be, beware the tranformationalists.

Pietism and Christian Alliances

Published on by D. G. HartLeave a comment

It might seem strange to describe something like the Gospel Coalition as confessional when its affect and substance is so much more pietist:

Pietist historians had narrated how much conflict and violence had been begotten by ecclesial differences. And while their hope for the future was to repristinate Christian faith and free it from the old animosities, their reading of the Christian past was one of chagrin and contrition. There were others, far less enthusiastic than they for Jesus, who looked over their shoulders at this same sad history and saw it as Europe’s folly. All those quarrels over the homoousios and homoiousios, Communion from the cup, predestination, apostolic succession, total depravity, infant baptism, and so much else, persuaded this generation that all the bickering had been no more important than the tithing of anise and cumin. . . .

A pietist directly address people who have inherited a confused tradition, and when he or she says that “all property is God’s,” or that “we are all brothers and sisters and call no man teacher,” and that “it is all summed up in love,” the short saying is like a single wink from Alec Guinness near the end of a complex film, a wink that suddenly makes sense of it all to the attentive viewer. But to a patron who walked into the theater in the midst of the final reel the wink might as well be a flirtatious come-on, for it is all the newcomer can see. . . . to someone whose head is so empty as to make confusion impossible, for someone who is starting from an intellectual ground zero, the toss-off could be a quip that becomes the cornerstone of a new and lethally naive Weltanschauung. This ability of the unformed addressee to receive what the pietist intended as a restorative insight, and to mistake it as a freestanding truth instead, and thereby to take in hand terribly less than was handed on, is what has made pietist reforms so powerfully cliched and unstable. (James Burtchaell, The Dying of the Light, 841, 840).

How Broad Can Confessional Presbyterians Be?

Published on by D. G. Hart6 Comments

The subject of confessionalism in relation to the Gospel Coalition has again come up, this time with a charitable defense of the organization from Ligon Duncan. The article that elicited this response is not at issue here.  I have not read it nor is that as pertinent as what Duncan says about confessionalism:

None of us are a part of TGC because we don’t care about our ministerial vows or because we don’t really believe our Confession.

We are a part of TGC because TGC beautifully promotes certain important things in the wider Christian and evangelical world that are needed, vital, true, good, right, timely, healthful, and which are also perfectly consistent with our own confessional theological commitments, so we want to be a part and a help. We also think that we have a thing or two to learn from our non-Presbyterian friends in TGC that “sweetly comport” with our vows and our church’s doctrine and practice. And we love the friendship and fellowship we enjoy with like-minded brethren from and ministering in settings denominationally different from our own, but committed to the same big things.

Just as Charles Hodge of Princeton (not one shy of his confessional Presbyterian commitments), for similar reasons, was happy to participate in the Evangelical Alliance in the nineteenth century, so also I am happy to participate in TGC.

This is an important historical matter that deserves more attention. What was the relationship of Hodge’s Old School Presbyterianism to interdenominational endeavors like the Evangelical Alliance? And how did Hodge’s own opposition to the 1869 reunion of the Old and New School churches relate to endeavors like the Evangelical Alliance?

One way of answering that question is to notice that the sorts of cooperation in which mainline Protestants engaged after the Civil War, with the 1869 Presbyterian reunion paving the way, fueled ecumenical and social gospel endeavors that produced conservative opposition in the 1920s and 1930s. The Evangelical Alliance was the Moral Majority of its day, wanting immigrants to conform to Protestant norms, opposed to Romanism and communism (for starters), and it provided the vehicle for Protestants to unite to defend a Christian America. Those ecumenical impulses eventually produced the Federal Council of Churches in 1908 and the Plan for Organic Union in 1920, a proposal that would have united all mainline Protestants into one national church — the way Canadian Protestants at roughly the same time formed the United Church of Canada (1925).

What the period of interdenominational cooperation meant for Presbyterians was a 1903 revision of the Confession of Faith. That revision enabled the PCUSA to receive the Cumberland Presbyterians. Revision softened the Confession’s Calvinism to make room for a body that had left the church almost one hundred years earlier over objections to election and limited atonement. Presbyterians going along for the ecumenical ride included the president of Princeton Theological Seminary, J. Ross Stevenson, who presented the Plan for Organic Union to the 1920 General Assembly. J. Gresham Machen was a first-time commissioner to that Assembly and Princeton’s faculty’s opposition to that plan was start of a denomination wide controversy that forced the 1929 reorganization of Princeton Seminary (to make it tolerant of diversity) and the simultaneous founding of Westminster Seminary.

According to Lefferts Loetscher, who wrote a book with a title that frightened conservatives in the PCUSA and the PCUS, The Broadening Church (1954), the reunion of Old and New School in 1869 touched off developments that saw the PCUSA recover its historic breadth:

Once again in 1869, as in 1758, the Presbyterian Church was restoring unity not by resolving its differences, but by ignoring and absorbing them. Men who had been denounced as “heretics” in 1837 and who had professed no change of theological viewpoint in the interim were welcomed in 1869 as honored brethren. The result was, of course, that the theological base of the Church (especially of the former Old School branch of the Church) was broadened and the meaning of its subscription formula further relaxed. The gentlemen’s agreement of 1869 to tolerate divergent types of Calvinism meant that clear-cut definitions of Calvinism would not be enforceable in the reunited Church, and that it would be increasingly difficult to protect historic Calvinism against variations that might undermine its essential character. (8)

No one actually doubts whether the Old and New Schools were liberal. By almost every measure, both sides would come out as evangelical today (especially if you don’t apply the category of confessionalism). And yet, the breadth necessary for combining both sides also made room for a range of theological ideas that spawned liberalism.

In other words, breadth is not a good thing. Broadening churches are usually ones that become liberal.

So why is an organization that tolerates a diversity of “evangelical” convictions going to avoid that problems that usually surface when you recognize you need to be broader than your own communion is? The answer is not that the Gospel Coalition is going liberal. But an objection to the Gospel Coalition is that it does not have built in transparent mechanisms for identifying and disciplining liberalism.

And here are a couple ways that the Coalition’s breadth could collide with my own Presbyterian confessionalism. If I am a member of the Council and an officer in a confessional Presbyterian church, and my communion has a controversy over someone ordained who does not affirm the doctrine of limited atonement, will I receive support for my opposition to this erroneous officer from my friends and colleagues at TGC? Or what about the Federal Vision? If my church decides that Federal Vision is a dangerous set of teachings that need to be opposed, will my friends and colleagues at TGC support my church in its decision? Will people who write for Gospel Coalition even be clear about the covenant theology that is clearly taught in the Confession of Faith? Or will some of them think that my communion is too narrow in its understanding of Reformed Protestantism? Will they think that the proper response should be one to include a breadth of views in denominations because that is the norm for the Coalition? I could well imagine feeling some pressure to weigh matters before a presbytery or Assembly with my peers in the Coalition in mind? Will I disappoint them? Maybe that’s the wrong way of asking the question. What if they don’t care about the affairs of my communion the way I do? (Why should they care since they are not members or officers of my denomination?)

These are real dilemmas for anyone who has subscribed the Confession and Catechisms and been ordained in a Presbyterian communion while also belonging to an evangelical organization with standards different from the church. They are concerns that have been around for almost 160 years. The Gospel Coalition has not brought an end to church history.