Category: Confessionalism

Getting over the Puritans, Say Hello to the Huguenots

Published on by D. G. Hart5 Comments

I cannot say enough good things about Philip Benedict’s Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (Yale University Press, 2002). Among the reasons for recommending the book, aside from careful scholarship and judicious conclusions, is Benedict’s attention to the variety of Reformed expressions as they took shape in diverse cultural and political contexts. This is what historians do and Benedict does it greatly.

One of the arresting parts of Benedict’s narrative is his account of the French Reformation. Obviously, the politics of France never cooperated with the aims of church reform (as if they did in England). As a result, the Huguenots failed to institutionalize a reformed church in ways that could be sustained in France, or that served as the inspiration for colonial churches in the New World where Calvinism of British descent would dominate the Reformed experience. Even so, his comments about the French Reformed church prior to St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre are music to Reformed confessionalist’s ears:

The achievements of the Reformed by early 1562 were little short of remarkable. Within just a few years, hundreds of congregations had assembled across the kingdom. A set of national church institutions had been defined that would endure for more than a century with only minor modifications. Reformed worship had obtained legal toleration. In a few locales, it had even displaced Catholicism. . . .

. . . [T]he wars of Religion taught the churches to rely on their own resources to survive. At successive national synods, they increasingly marked their distance from the secular authorities. Synodal decrees warned against selecting magistrates to serve as elders, forbade consistories to denounce church members discovered to be guilty of heinous crimes to the secular judges, and declared all consistory proceedings secret, even those in which consistory members were insulted in manners that might be actionable before the secular courts. All this was a far cry from the sort of defense of consistorial authority that Calvin sought and obtained from the Genevan magistracy. The French Reformed churches thus became the enduring model of a network of churches that maintained purity of doctrine, quality control over local clergy, ecclesiastical discipline, and reasonable uniformity of practice with a minimum of reliance on secular authorities. (pp. 144, 148)

Not to mention that the Gallican Confession wasn’t too shabby.

If only the Huguenots were more the model for American Reformed church life than the Puritans.

If Only Kuyperians Were As Reasonable as Godfrey

Published on by D. G. Hart53 Comments

Over at Confessional Outhouse, RubeRad (what’s up with those names?) has a quotation from Bob Godfrey’s address at the Westminster California conference on Christ and culture. Here it is:

As is often true in the history of the church, we [Kuyperians and 2K-ers] may not all perfectly agree what the Bible says, but I think we’re all agreed with the principle…The Bible is authoritative in everything that it says, about everything that it talks about. But I think we are also all agreed that the Bible, while authoritative in everything that it talks about, is not exhaustive in everything it talks about. The Bible tells us some things about history, but it doesn’t tell us everything about history. I believe it tell us some things about geology, but I don’t think it tells us everything about geology. I would suggest that it’s really only in three areas that we can say … it also speaks comprehensively, or completely, or exhaustively; we as Reformed Christians are committed to the proposition that that everything we need to know about doctrine and salvation is told to us completely in the Bible. … Secondly, we would say that the Bible is exhaustive in what it teaches us about worship. … And thirdly, the Bible tells us all we need to know about the Church and its government. … But I think we can probably agree as well, whatever our approach to Christ and culture, that the Bible does not speak exhaustively about politics. It says a lot of things about politics, it says a lot of things that are relevant to politics, but I don’t think any of us would want to argue that the Bible tells us absolutely everything we need to know about politics. Does the Bible even indisputably teach us whether we ought to have a democracy, or an aristocracy, or a monarchy? John Calvin says it doesn’t. … I don’t think anybody … would want to argue that every aspect of a platform proposed for a civil election could be derived from the Bible; I don’t think anyone would argue that. … So the Bible is authoritative in all that it says, but it doesn’t say everything about anything except salvation, worship, and church government.

I for one do not know a single advocate of two kingdom theology who would not affirm this. And the good thing about this statement is that it keeps first things first — doctrine, worship, and polity — while allowing for differences on other matters because the Bible itself does not pin down those other areas of human endeavor.

What is odd about RubeRad’s post is that he follows up Godfrey’s quotation with one from John Frame, that RubeRad regards as compatible:

Christians sometimes say that Scripture is sufficient for religion, or preaching, or theology, but not for auto repairs, plumbing, animal husbandry, dentistry, and so forth. And of course many argue that it is not sufficient for science, philosophy, or even ethics. That is to miss an important point. Certainly Scripture contains more specific information relevant to theology than to dentistry. But sufficiency in the present context is not sufficiency of specific information but sufficiency of divine words. Scripture contains divine words sufficient for all of life. It has all the divine words that the plumber needs, and all the divine words that the theologian needs. So it is just as sufficient for plumbing as it is for theology. And in that sense it is sufficient for science and ethics as well.

This strikes me as the typical Frame theological method of taking an inch and turning it into a mile. So people will agree with the idea that divine words are sufficient, some divine words apply to plumbing, and — voila — the Bible becomes as sufficient for plumbing as for theology. Hello!??! Do plumbers really need to study the Bible to plumb the way that theologians do to understand God and his revelation? As Fred Willard’s character in Waiting for Guffman said, “I don’t think sooooo.”

Either way, if more Reformed folks would follow Godfrey’s counsel than Frame’s logic, we might actually find that two-kingdom theology is not radical and that Kuyperian rhetoric is often bloated. Can we get a little reason around here?

Why the PCA Needs the Spirituality of the Church

Published on by D. G. Hart69 Comments

Regular readers of Oldlife know about the imbroglio between the Brothers Bayly and those who hold two-kingdoms and the spirituality of the church. The major objection apparently is that these doctrines won’t let the church do what activists on certain moral issues want the church to do in the public square (you know, bad ju ju versus do do). In which case, the spirituality of the church is offensive because it restrains the spiritual and moral dynamic necessary for fighting the culture wars over sex and its illegitimate consequences.

But the Baylys are not alone in wanting the church to be a culture-shaping institution. Tim Keller has recently written (thanks to oldlife reader Zeke Zekowski for the link) at his blog about the need for the church to be engaged in culture making. He writes:

Most of the young evangelicals interested in integrating their faith with film-making, journalism, corporate finance, etc, are getting their support and mentoring from informal networks or para-church groups. Michael Lindsay’s book Faith in the Halls of Power shows that many Christians in places of influence in the culture are alienated from the church, because they get, at best, no church support for living their faith out in the public spheres, and, at worst, opposition.

(A minor quibble here is that I’m not sure Lindsay shows any such thing in a work of sociology that shakes the pom-poms for evangelicals rising in elite sectors without the slightest sense of ambivalence about the theology of glory deeply embedded in [and should be haunting] the evangelical quest for greatness.)

A major kvetch is this: why do Christians pursuing communications and the arts need the church to have their hand held more than plumbers, bakers, farmers, Home Depot check-out clerks, and subway train engineers? How much does the church support the work of the average Mary or Joe? And do these modest workers complain about the church not affirming them? One would think that the perks that come with putting your name on a piece of art or a newspaper column might make up for the lack of gratification that comes with changing the filters in the boiler room of the twelve-floor apartment building.

Keller continues:

At the theological level, the church needs to gain more consensus on how the church and Christian faith relate to culture. There is still a lot of conflict between those who want to disciple Christians for public life, and those who think all “engagement of culture” ultimately leads to compromise and distraction from the preaching of the gospel. What makes this debate difficult is that both sides make good points and have good arguments.

I remain baffled why cultural engagement is a pressing need for the church. I would think it pretty important to shepherd members of Christ’s body in the notion that they are a royal priesthood, a holy nation, whose identity in Christ far transcends the work they do no matter how creative or dull. The church, it seems, has plenty of work to do to confirm Christians in the truth that even when they cease being culture makers or low-level grunts, they are still priests and citizens of a heavenly kingdom with all the affirmation that comes with belonging to Christ, in body and soul, in life and in death. Instead of taking on the task writing a confession for cultural engagement or policy prescription, better is the work of catechizing the faithful in the truths of God, man, sin, salvation, and the church. Those teachings are more important and lasting, even if they do not produce great art or Christian manuals of plumbing.

But without such a consensus on the spirituality of the church and the Christian’s otherworldly identity, communions like the PCA are in danger of becoming balkanized into either the arts-and-culture congregations, or the culture-war churches. Not only are the arts and the politics of nation-states not taught in the PCA’s confessional standards, but very difficult is the task of finding a “thus, sayeth the Lord” for such cultural ambitions.

So irony of ironies, the Baylys and Keller are on the same page in rejecting the spirituality of the church for the culturality of the church. And in so conceiving the church, pastors in the same communion end up driving each other bonkers. Keller doesn’t want the Baylys’ crusading activism and the Baylys don’t want Keller’s urban-chic programming. Wouldn’t the spirituality of the church put an end to these squabbles and make the PCA even more effective than it apparently already is?

Postscript: a good question related to this post is why the OPC does not appear to suffer from the culturality of the church, at least not in the same degree. Maybe it is because the OPC is so small we have enough sense not to beat our breasts about being change agents in the culture. We have enough trouble paying the bills of our standing committees, presbytery committees, and struggling congregations to take on the planet’s policies and art. But it could also be that the spirituality of the church that Machen taught the first generation of the OPC, leavened with the potent supplement of amillennialism taught by Vos, Murray, and Kline, has made Orthodox Presbyterians less impressed with the good, but ultimately fading, culture of this world.

Where's Waldo Wednesday

Published on by D. G. Hart30 Comments


As part of oldlife’s continuing effort to assist in clarifying the Reformed faith and overcoming unnecessary disagreements, we will be featuring a number of quotations on the application of redemption from noted Reformed theologians. What drives this series is an effort to understand how the doctrine of union with Christ has or has not functioned in discussions of the ordo salutis and the benefits that believers receive through Christ’s mediatorial work. If we feature quotations where the discussion of union is absent, we are confident that others will see union even where we don’t.

The following comes from B. B. Warfield’s article on sanctification:

The evangelical doctrine of salvation common to the Lutheran and Reformed Churches includes the following points: 1) The soul after regeneration continues dependent upon the constant gracious operations of the Holy Spirit, but is through grace, able to co-operate with them. 2) The sanctifying operations of the Spirit are supernatural, and yet effected in connection with and through the instrumentality of means: the means of sanctification being either internal, such as faith and the co-operation of the regenerated will with grace, or external, such as the word of God, sacraments, prayer, Christian fellowship, and the providential discipline of our heavenly Father. 3) In this process the Spirit gradually completes the work of moral purification commenced in regeneration. The works has two sides: a) the cleansing of the soul from sin and emancipation from its power, and b) the development of the implanted principle of spiritual life and infused habits of grace, until the subject comes to the stature of perfect manhood in Christ. Its effect is spiritually and morally to transform the whole man, intellect, affections, and will, soul, and body. 4) The work proceeds with various degrees of thoroughness during life, but is never consummated in absolute moral perfection until the subject passes into glory. (Selected Shorter Writings – II, pp. 327-28)

Why Proponents of Christian America Need to Read John Frame

Published on by D. G. Hart52 Comments

As part of his commitment to speaking the truth at length in love, John Frame has written a review of Scott Clark’s, Recovering the Reformed Confession for his website. (How long, O Lord, how long? Over 17,500 words not including 60 [!!] notes. Let me help with the math. At 250 words per page, that’s 70 [a lot of] pages.)

The review reveals a very interesting difference between Clark and Frame on the Reformed tradition. For Clark, the Reformed faith has an objective standard, found in the churches’ creeds and confessions. He concedes diversity as the churches emerged in such diverse settings as Scotland and Transylvania. But Clark (like me) finds these confessions the best way to understand what Reformed Protestantism stood for, while also providing a good deal of uniformity on what it means to be Reformed.

Frame, however, thinks this is a narrow way of understanding the Reformed tradition and suggests an alternative: “I think it better to regard anyone as Reformed who is a member in good standing of a Reformed church. I realize there is some ambiguity here, for we must then ask, what is a really Reformed church? Different people will give different answers. But, as I said above, I don’t think that the definition has to be, or can be, absolutely precise. The concept, frankly, has ‘fuzzy boundaries,’ as some linguists and philosophers say.”

What would such different approaches to defining Reformed Protestantism mean for understanding the meaning and identity of the United States? This is no idle question since Frame draws on this analogy to identify his differences with Clark. For Frame, Clark is one of those originalists who puts much stock in the founders and the Constitution. But for Frame, the United States cannot be held to such a definite and time-bound standard. He writes:

Imagine someone saying, “if you want to know what ‘American’ means, look at the founding documents of the United States: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the writings of the founders like The Federalist Papers.” There is a certain amount of truth in that. Certainly these documents tell us much of what makes the United States different from other nations. But these documents presuppose an already existing community of ideas. For example, although they mention religion rarely, they cannot be rightly understood apart from the history of New England Puritanism, Dutch Reformed Christianity in New York, Quakerism in Pennsylvania, Anglicanism in Virginia, and so on.

And the history of America subsequent to these documents is also important. Many claim that these documents are largely neglected and/or contradicted today. There is a large disconnect between what America was at its founding and what it is today. Defining America by the founding documents, and defining it as an empirical community, lead to two different and inconsistent conceptions. People who define America only by its founding documents are likely to say that subsequent developments are “unamerican.” But so say that is merely to express a preference. That preference may be a good one. But merely to express it is not likely to persuade anyone to share that preference. This case is similar to the attempt to define “Reformed.”

On the view I advocate, it is not possible to state in precise detail what constitutes Reformed theology and church life. But one can describe historical backgrounds and linkages, as I have done above in the example of the United States. And there are some general common characteristics, a kind of “family resemblance,” among the various bodies of the last five centuries that have called themselves Reformed. The idea that “Reformed” should be defined as a changing community is not congenial to Clark’s view. But it seems to me to be more accurate and more helpful.

A number of arresting implications follow from Frame’s analogy between the Reformed and American traditions.

One that stands out is who qualifies as a good American. If someone is Reformed because they belong to a Reformed church, then someone is a good American if they belong to the United States. That means that the liberals writing for the New York Times and the atheists writing books against Christianity are as much Americans as the U.S. faithful attending church each Sunday. In other words, the United States is what it is; it has no objective norms for determining what the nation means or who belongs to it. No matter your beliefs, you belong to the United States if you are American.

Another implication that stands out like low-hanging fruit is what Frame appears to be saying to those who spend much time appealing to the nation’s Christian founding for understanding what the nation should be today. As Frame writes above, “People who define America only by its founding documents are likely to say that subsequent developments are ‘unamerican.’ But to say that is merely to express a preference.” Likewise, to say that America was founded as a Christian nation and that the United States needs to return to its Christian heritage is, according to Frame’s argument, not objective reality but a “preference” with as much force as an opinion from Scott Clark.

I myself tend to be an originalist all the way down. I regard the Constitution to be important for understanding the United States then and now, the Reformed creeds important for understanding Reformed history then and now, and even the Bible important for understanding God’s plan of salvation then and now. Maybe this is the hobgobblin of a small mind, though I think it also has something to do with the way we read law, whether for the state or the church.

Still, Frame’s argument would appear to cut off at the knees those folks who think the American nation’s Christian origins are relevant for today. The message seems to be, “just say goodbye to ‘in God we trust.’”

Postscript: for some reason the Bayly Brothers seemed to miss this feature of Frame’s review when they recommended it.

What I'm Saying

Published on by D. G. Hart1 Comment

guinness-draft1Over at Evangel, one of First Things ‘ blogs, readers and contributors have been busy attempting to define that 600-pound object in the room that goes by the name evangelical but defies descriptions as either an elephant or gorilla. Paul McCain, the author of the post, is responding to an interview at Evangel with Os Guinness (yes, that Guinness – brilliant!). In the interview, Guinness makes the following distinction between evangelicalism and orthodoxy:

Interviewer: Evangelicalism is more of the foundation and Orthodoxy is built on top of that.

Guinness: Exactly, and that is why whenever there is corruption, deadness, formality, heresy, whatever in the church, there will always be the impulse to go back to Jesus which is the Evangelical impulse. That’s why I would insist that, understood historically, theologically, spiritually; it is deeper than the other impulses. So Evangelicals are embarrassed by the culture of Evangelicalism or the politics of Evangelicalism, but that’s just a call to reformation.

This indeed a curious riff on the form-content distinction that generally lets evangelicals do whatever in worship and evangelism for the sake of the content of saving souls or being led by the Spirit (as Luther would say, feathers and all). Guinness implies that evangelicalism is formless; it is almost a gnostic or docetic understanding of Christianity in which the relationship or loyalty or feeling about Jesus transcends any kind of embodiment, whether in thought, word, or practice. It also has the advantage of bestowing upon the lexicographer – in this case, Guinness – the privileged position of determining whatever belongs or doesn’t to evangelicalism.

But then comes an interesting exchange between McCain at his post with someone who chimes in that German pietism is the continental equivalent of the revivalism that Whitefield and Wesley spawned. Good Lutheran confessionalist that he is, McCain wants to clarify the relationship between German evangelicalism and historic Lutheranism:

“The Pietist streak runs deep within Lutheranism” needs some very serious qualification. In fact, Lutheran Pietism is responsible for nearly single-handedly destroying authentic confessing Lutheranism, since it eschewed dogmatics, doctrine, the means of grace, the office of the ministry, and so forth. It would be a very serious misinterpretation of Martin Luther to think that he was a Pietist.

To which the commenter responded:

my real point was to say that there is still an emphasis on experiential piety within Lutheranism. The Lutheran charismatics that I know draw on this stream and will even talk about the synergism of a Melanchthon. Most Lutherans will simply talk about the sacraments as encounters with God because of real presence.

All of this sort of reinforces the point that it’s easier to talk about Lutheran, Reformed, Pentecostal, than it is to talk about Evangelical, which is why I said it’s a spirituality.
(Lutheran charismatics – that’s a scary proposition!)

And McCain gives it back:

there is no “Lutheranism,” as it is properly understood and defined, apart from the confessions of the Lutheran Church, as contained in the Book of Concord. “Lutheran charismatics” is an oxymoron. It’s just a bunch of bored Lutherans dabbling with 20th century American Pentecostalism. The Lutheran Church firmly rejected Melanchthon’s errors on several key points.

Oh, for ten ounces of that confessional moxie among conservative Presbyterians.

And then along for the ride comes Francis Beckwith who proposes yet another reason for his belonging to the Evangelical Theological Society even after he went back into the Roman Catholic Church.

If the term “Evangelical” is broad enough to include high-church Anglicans, low-church anti-creedal Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, the Evangelical Free Church, Arminians, Calvinists, Disciples of Christ, Pentecostals, Seventh-Day Adventists, open theists, atemporal theists, social Trinitarians, substantial Trinitarians, nominalists, realists, eternal security supporters and opponents, temporal theists, dispensationalists, theonomists, church-state separationists, church-state accomodationists, cessationists, non-cessationists, kenotic theorists, covenant theologians, paedo-Baptists, and Dooweyerdians, there should be room for an Evangelical Catholic.

Why doesn’t occur to Beckwith that if evangelicalism is that broad, and if a besetting sin of Protestant liberalism was breadth (as in Lefferts Loetscher’s Broadening Church), then why is evangelical width a good thing? Why isn’t it actually a sign of incoherence and vacuity? Granted, born-again Protestantism could be Guinness’ warm feeling in my heart. But how do I tell the difference between the evangelical feeling and the one I receive after drinking several pints of Guinness?