Category: Neo-Calvinism

The Latest Nicotine Theological Journal

Published on by D. G. Hart1 Comment

The October 2023 issue just went out to “subscribers.” The issue will be posted at this website in three months — but the way the editors keep schedules, don’t hold your breath.

For now, here’s a taste of the really late latest:

Celebrity Pastors Think, We Don’t Have To

Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind came out in 1994 about midway in the era of peak evangelical intellectualism. This was a period, 1980 to 2010, when evangelicals embraced the scholarly task with a zeal not before evident among born-again Protestants. The former date – 1980 – marked the founding of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals (ISAE) at Wheaton College. Launched by Mark Noll and Nathan Hatch, with inspiration from George Marsden, at the Harvard of the Bible belt, the ISAE sponsored important scholarship from historians who studied American Protestantism. The center of energy at Wheaton became a path for evangelical colleges (most notably Calvin College – now University) to receive grants from foundations in support a variety of research projects from scholars across the disciplines. The year 2010 is notable for the cover story in The Atlantic, “The Opening of the Evangelical Mind,” by the Jewish-American sociologist, Alan Wolfe, that highlighted the strides evangelicals had made in the corridors of American higher education.

Coming mid-way in this golden age of evangelical scholarly output, Noll’s Scandal warned about not going back to old ways of thinking. The old evangelical habits – perhaps characterized as hyper-spiritualized or biblicistic – led to fundamentalist fears of theological compromise, revivalist fixation on soul-winning, and premillennialist obsession with Christ’s immanent return. Each of these intellectual tics and spiritual instincts undermined the mental discipline required for genuine scholarship. At the same time that Noll was warning about the past, he was also cheering on contemporary evangelical scholars and hoping college and seminary administrators would nurture even more scholarship. It did not hurt that this was a period when foundations like Pew and Lilly were bankrolling evangelical institutions. Pew was the most significant and reflected an effort to move beyond theological education into the arts and sciences. The Lilly Endowment’s support, typically reserved for mainline Protestants, was a recognition that evangelical scholars were catching up to scholars within the network of established Protestant institutions.

Since 2010 the evangelical mind has been buffering (like when your web browser has too many cookies). The closing of the ISAE in 2014 was one indication that either evangelicals did not have scholars to carry on what Noll and Hatch had started or that leaders of evangelical colleges no longer thought scholarship was sufficiently important for Christian higher education. Christianity Today’s decision to cease publishing Books & Culture, was another indication of evangelical mental fatigue. The magazine had aspired to be evangelicalism’s New York Review of Books. Even so, Books & Culture had always depended on subsidies from its parent company or from foundations. By 2016 the heads of Christianity Today gave up on the dream of a heady evangelical publication that monitored books and ideas.

After all of this thinking, did evangelical scholarship prevail over the scandal about which Noll warned? Do evangelicals think about the world and their faith better now than they did before the evangelical renaissance? One test is to see whether evangelicals read non-evangelicals for insights into the world. After all, evangelical scholars, if they are doing good scholarship need to keep abreast of the best scholars in their field – most of whom are not Christian. If evangelical scholars know how to use and evaluate the work of non-Christians, can ordinary Protestants in a similar way take counsel and instruction from pundits and observers who make no profession of faith?

Tim Keller may have benefitted as much as any pastor from the flowering of the evangelical mind. His ties to the seminary world (Gordon-Conwell, Westminster, Reformed) prevented his easy circulation among the historians and philosophers at colleges who were at the forefront of the evangelical mind. But Keller’s years of greatest influence coincided with those of peak evangelical mind. The atmosphere of evangelical scholarship made plausible a pastor in the wealthiest and most influential city in the world conducting a ministry that made Christianity seemingly plausible to secular elites. Evangelical minds also encouraged pastors to have a take on contemporary affairs and to do so in a distinctly Christian voice.

In 2020, the most recent Year Zero, Keller wrote a series of articles on the current things that were agitating the American people and the rest of the world (thanks in part to a global obsession with Donald Trump). The topics that absorbed Keller’s attention were Race, Racism, and Justice. The last article in the group – the big finish – was “A Biblical Critique of Secular Justice and Critical Theory.” This was precisely the sort of thinking the evangelical mind was supposed to produce. Keller spent 6,900 words – the average length of the NTJ – showing how he evaluated social justice as a Christian thinker. . . .

Christian Historians Are more like John MacArthur Than They Admit

Published on by D. G. Hart1 Comment

A couple of recent posts by historians that identify with the work of doing Christian history leads to the excerpt below which is a critique of trying to follow scholarly standards while believing you are doing so in the name of Jesus.

The first complained about Christian academics failing to come to the defense of a fellow Christian professor (historian) after the latter had criticized both moderate evangelicals and Christian nationalists for “[craving] genocidal rage against Palestinians” and “[wishing] to turn the Gaza Strip into a ‘parking lot.'” Some with less zeal could imagine why defending that opinion might not be a high priority. Instead, the historian feared for his and his family’s lives when the reaction of Andrew Walker at Southern Seminary “set in motion the ire of a cadre of critics, including Mollie Hemingway, William Wolfe, Tom Ascol, and Meghan Basham.”

This post led to another that praised Christian historians for a critical perspective on U.S. history too often lacking in popular evangelical pundits (think the difference between George Marsden and Francis Schaeffer). Historians add value by recognizing that “history must be critical, even prophetic” as opposed to popular leaders who “have seen long-term political goals as more important than the truth of history.”

Thinking that the current generation (or even previous ones) were innocent of politics is fairly remarkable.

All of this wind-up leads to the pitch which is that evangelical historians can come in for criticism too because they mix advocacy (political, theological, moral) with scholarly inquiry just like pastors do. What follows is part of a chapter that faults evangelical historians for having their cake – scholarship – and eating it too – adding Christian faith. They may have better credentials that Francis Schaeffer or John MacArthur, but at some level within the academy their religiously inflected scholarship looks odd, maybe not as odd as non-academic evangelicals, but still strange. (This essay was published in History and the Christian Historian, edited by Ronald A. Wells, under the title “History in Search of Meaning: The Conference on Faith and History.”)

Do Christian historians have a particular perspective or share a set of assumptions that make their writing and teaching different from that of their non-believing colleagues? Though many factors led to the founding of the Conference on Faith in History in 1967, the conviction that the faith of the Christian historian set his or her scholarship apart from that produced by the rest of the profession was probably the greatest reason for organizing the Conference almost thirty years ago and has sustained its meetings and publications ever since. According to Charles Miller, the group who met to begin the CFH came up with three qualifications for a Christian historian: a “profound faith in the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ”; an “understanding through revelation of “the nature of man, of time, and of the universe”; and a “mastery of the craft and of the art of historian.”

What happens, then, when one of the Conference’s more accomplished members publishes a book on a significant epoch in the history of American Christianity that according to church leaders not only falls well short of demonstrating a Christian philosophy of history but also appears to deny the hand of God in the development of the evangelical movement? This is precisely what happened when Harry S. Stout, Yale University’s Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Christianity, published his study of George Whitefield, entitled The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism. This book, which linked the revivalist’s success in part to his theatrics and business acumen, and revealed the less sanctified aspects of Whitefield’s pilgrimage, caused something of a stir among those English-speaking evangelicals of a Calvinistic persuasion who read the Banner of Truth magazine and its publisher’s many reprints of Puritan and Presbyterian pastors and theologians. Not only had Stout presented the English revivalist warts and all. But worse was the implicit conclusion that human techniques, sometimes overtly manipulative, not the work of the third person of the trinity, had been responsible for the many conversions that followed Whitefield’s itinerant preaching throughout the colonies and British isles.

The cries of “say it ain’t so, Skip, say it ain’t so,” first came in a Banner of Truth review of Stout’s biography. The portrait of Whitefield that emerged, a “bombast and showman” guilty of “shameless egocentricity,” was “barely recognisable” to readers long accustomed to Whitefield as the last Calvinistic revivalist. According to David White, the reviewer, “[i]t is fallacious and absurd to trace the origins of modern campaign evangelicalism, with its expensive publicity, deliberate conditioning by a highly charged musical atmosphere and the manipulation of massed choirs, to the straightforward proclamation of a Whitefield who stood in the best tradition of the Puritans.” Iain H. Murray, the editorial director of the Banner of Truth Trust, biographer of Jonathan Edwards and also a historian of Anglo-American revivalism, kept up the attack, using the publication of the papers from an Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals conference on trans-Atlantic evangelicalism in which Stout had a chapter as the occasion for offering his estimate of the new Whitefield. What is lacking in Stout’s handling of Whitefield, as well as in the “new approach to evangelical history,” according to Murray, is a failure to write history from “the standpoint of supernaturalism.” In fact, the whole tone of this history left Murray wondering what these so-called evangelical historians would do to the book of Acts “if they determined to re-interpret its events without reference to God.”

Stout’s response to these charges, printed in both the Banner of Truth and the Evangelical Studies Bulletin, raised and answered important questions about the nature of believers practicing the craft of history. He wrote that “professional” historians “agree to settle for something less that ultimate explanations,” and that academic “canons of evidence and interpretation” leave “off the field” notions of providence and the work of the Holy Spirit. Still, the damage had been done. A member of a body whose purpose was to reflect upon the significance of Christian teachings about creation, providence and salvation for doing history was guilty of saying that in good history, that is, history practiced by university professors, such questions did not matter.

Not being the Evangelical Theological Society which has purged from its membership scholars who appeared to deny the divine origins of Scripture, the Conference on Faith and History took no formal action against the highly regarded Yale professor. Moreover, some of its members have undoubtedly sided in this debate with Stout, in part because they agree with his assessment of the role of faith in the practice of history and also because, remembering the historic warfare between science and theology, they fear the restrictions of church dogma upon the pursuit of historical truth. But despite the tendency of CFH members as academics to prefer the cultural capital offered by Yale University over that available through the Banner of Truth Trust, Iain Murray’s defense of neo-providentialism and the supernatural in the writing of history are much closer than Stout’s critical history to the purposes and contributions of the Conference on Faith and History. Writers for Fides et Historia as well as historians who have presented at the conference’s meetings have argued overwhelmingly against a secular reading of history and have attempted in a variety of ways to articulate a Christian philosophy not just of history but also of historical research and writing.

Pointing out the resemblance between Murray’s charges and the Conference on Faith and History’s mission does not mean that Stout should be banned from the conference or prohibited from attending all conference gatherings. But his biography of Whitefield and subsequent exchange with Murray cast the aims and purposes of the Conference on Faith and History in a different light, one which reveals the difficult terrain the conference has tried to circumnavigate by promoting scholarship of the highest caliber that springs from Christian convictions. What I plan to do in this paper, then, is point out some of these connections between the Conference on Faith and History and the Banner of Truth Trust. In a nutshell, my argument will be that the writings sponsored by the conference and produced by its members show that the kind of history Iain Murray wants has not been that far removed from the kind of history the conference has tried to provide even if a little light on the Calvinism.

Comparing Christian Liberal Arts Colleges (part two)

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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.

Should a Reformed Protestant Receive Treatment at a Roman Catholic Hospital?

Published on by D. G. Hart2 Comments

(From the Winter 2010 Nicotine Theological Journal)

After a visit to my father at his local hospital, I had a worldview moment. What should have alerted me from the outset was the name of the place – St. Mary’s. But then I noticed that the spiritual services wing of the hospital had dropped off for him a brochure about their activities which was included with information about television channels and daily menus – talk about trivializing the eschaton. But the kicker was the crucifix in my dad’s ICU room. Shazzam!!! That’s a whole lot of idolatry for a man who is on a heart monitor.

But is Roman Catholic medicine really any different from Reformed medicine or even – dare I say – secular medicine. If worldviews go all the way down to the very tips of our toes, and if we can’t escape the claims of Christ in any parts of our lives, can I really look the other way in good conscience when entering a hospital room that displays an image of Christ on a cross?

And then there is the concern for quality of health care. If Abraham Kuyper was right that Roman Catholicism “represents an older and lower stage of development in the history of mankind” and if Protestantism occupies a “higher standpoint,” shouldn’t my dad try to find treatment at a Protestant hospital? Kuyper, by the way, wasn’t real complimentary of Roman Catholicism on science either.

It could be that I have once again misunderstood the claims of neo-Calvinism and that some algorithm exists for taking the gold of scientific advances from the dross of defective worldviews. But it could also be that the language of worldviews and the difference they make for every aspect of human existence is overdone, simply a rallying cry for inspiring the faithful, but not anything that would prevent my father from receiving treatment from unbelieving nurses employed by Roman Catholic administrators. Then again, the power of modernity is stunning, making all of those religious claims about connections between spiritual and physical reality look fairly foolish – as if a creed actually produces better medicine.

I mean no disrespect to the neo- Calvinists and their epistemological purity. But if they could help me out on this one, I’d be grateful. Does a Reformed worldview really make a difference for modern medicine and the ordinary decisions a sick believer must make in seeking a physician or hospital – under the oversight, of course, not of the elders but the insurance company?

Why Bavinck?

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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.

Here’s A Test for Cons and Progs in the PCA

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What is wrong with this understanding of all-of-life Christianity if anything? What does it leave out? Where do you draw the line at some forms of lumping and the need for certain kinds of splitting?

. . . emphasize the wholeness and the unity of life, and protest by implication against “Sunday Christians” and “pulpit ministers.” Christianity being involved in the whole of life, it was important to break down artificial sacred and secular distinctions. From there it was a natural step to break down a distinction between secular and sacred teaching, and even between secular and sacred writings. A series of lectures on modern poets supported the conclusion that God, revealing himself in many ways, might Queen’s speak through the modern poet as well as through the Bible and that too sharp University a distinction between sacred writings and others might be harmful. There was a tendency also to break down the sharp distinction between the “Christian” and the “non-Christian” and therefore to challenge the traditional concepts of “conversion” and “the new birth.” There was an inclination to shift from the assumption of man’s inherent wickedness to the assumption of the Enlightenment that most men wish to be good and that the task of the church was to get them more and more involved in doing good. There was a shift away from the assumption that the kingdom of heaven must come through spiritual change in the individual, to the suggestion that the millenium could be approached, at least, by voluntary social work and also by legislation promoted by men of goodwill. This concept appeared very early in the proceedings of the conference, and was developed throughout the years when eminent Canadians. . . came to lecture on “The New Nation,” the nation in which intellectual enlightenment would be matched by social righteousness.

Where do you draw the line?

  1. The Unity of the Christian life
  2. Sacred-Secular distinction
  3. Bible and non-canonical books
  4. Believer-non-believer distinction
  5. Human nature (inherent goodness vs. the fall)
  6. The advance of the kingdom through spiritual ministry and social activity
  7. Social (or national) righteousness

You may not draw it between the US and Canada.

What Could Have Gone Wrong?

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Has American evangelicals’ love affair with Dutch Calvinism (in its w-w forms) finally run out of steam?

Remember back to Francis Schaeffer who popularized Kuyperianism for figures like Jerry Falwell (the elder) and Tim LaHaye. In Christian Manifesto (1981), Schaeffer wrote:

The basic problem of the Christians in this country in the last eighty years or so, in regard
to society and in regard to government, is that they have seen things in bits and pieces
instead of totals. They have very gradually become disturbed over permissiveness,
pornography, the public schools, the breakdown of the family, and finally abortion. But
they have not seen this as a totality—each thing being a part, a symptom, of a much
larger problem. They have failed to see that all of this has come about due to a shift in
world view—that is, through a fundamental change in the overall way people think and
view the world and life as a whole. The shift has been away from a world view that was
at least vaguely Christian in people’s memory (even if they were not individually
Christian) toward something completely different—impersonal matter or energy shaped
into its present form by impersonal chance.

W(orld)-(vie)w analysis basically had free reign among evangelicals for the next thirty-five years thanks to its comprehensiveness. Everything became spiritual or religiously meaningful because everything was under the Lordship of Christ. Even if you raised questions about the differences between the spiritual and the temporal, or the ecclesiastical and civil, such “dualism” was in denial of Christ’s sovereignty.

That explains why even Baptist English professors drank Kuyper with gusto:

Within the North American context, Mouw explains, these core points can be boiled down to “an appreciation for the ‘not-one-square-inch’ manifesto regarding the kingship of Jesus, a broad acceptance of the idea of sphere sovereignty, and a commitment to the integration of faith and learning.” Mouw’s examination of these essentials—fleshed out and applied with varying levels of specificity within the thirteen essays which cover topics including public theology, education, and baptism, as well as more esoteric intra-reformed issues—reveal just how great an influence Kuyper has wielded, even among those of us caught unaware. The reading leaves me with awe and gratitude in the recognition that even my own quintessentially Baptist and evangelical educational institution would not be what it is without Kuyper and his fellows. After all, our university catalog promises in its “Statement on Worldview” that students will “receive an education that integrates [a] Christian and biblical worldview,” and the institution increasingly equips, expects, and holds accountable faculty for doing just that—even more noteworthy considering that the memory of a time when “Christian education” was understood there and elsewhere to consist of opening class in prayer has not quite faded into the past.

Even as late as two years ago, Kuyper drew appreciation from the likes of the Muslim-American political theorist, Shadi Hamid, though a non-Christian appropriation of the Dutch statesman would lean toward the pluralism (and the pillarization that went along with it in twentieth-century Dutch society) in Kuyper’s thought:

Christian pluralism sees the city of man as inherently broken and fallen from sin, which, in turn, means that politics must be acknowledged as a site of uncertainty, rather than certainty. The solution, then, wouldn’t be walling off one’s Christianity from the domain of Caesar, but rather applying it in a more self-conscious manner.

That was not how evangelicals read Kuyper. Pluralism went with secular humanism and watch out if you have a diversity of views among Christians about the actual structures of Christ’s Lordship.

But now that many know (what they always knew) about the true nature of Donald Trump and now that the likes of Betsy De Vos and Josh Hawley, Trump supporters of different degrees, have made positive references to Kuyper — now, Trump has finally revealed the problems of Kuyperianism:

we who inherit the legacies of white Christianity are called to acknowledge and seek to repair harm that has been committed on behalf of our traditions. Kuyper’s notion of the lordship of Jesus, articulated in the famous “square inch” quote, has more problems than it being used to baptize a wide range of questionable endeavors or to convey that Christians are the arbiters of the kingdom of God. The very notion of Jesus’ ownership of all things has imperialistic overtones, reflecting Kuyper’s Victorian-era white/European Protestant Christian triumphalism. While Kuyper celebrated cultural “pluriformity,” he maintained that outside of Europe and North America, most cultures had not benefited humanity as a whole. . . .

Even when taken on his own terms, there is much in Kuyper’s legacy to repudiate. And while it would be unfair to label Kuyper a white Christian nationalist, it is easy to see how his ideas could be employed in the service of white Christian nationalism, with its grievance ethos, its “color blindness” as a cover for its racism, its paternalism, its patriarchy, and its “populism” favoring white working-class interests.

What I don’t understand, once again, is why the flip-flops among evangelical scholars — evangelicalism used to be good but now its bad, Kuyper used to inspire but now he’s troubling — don’t raise more questions about the flops. Isn’t it obvious that the change of perception is largely a function of opposition to Donald Trump? If part of the Protestant world showed an attachment to Trump and we are dissecting those Protestants to see what ideas they held so we can purge those notions (and Trump) from our midst, is this really very deep? Isn’t it just another indication of the hold that Trump has on the minds of his biggest foes (and supporters)?

But if not for Trump, evangelicalism and Kuyper would be salvageable, right?

Thompson to Dreher: “Say it Better”

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Greg Thompson’s review of Rod Dreher’s new book in the Neo-Calvinist publication, Comment, should be good news to those worried about progressive PCA pastors (if Thompson fairly qualifies as such). Thompson agrees with Dreher that America is undergoing a disturbing number of changes:

[Dreher’s] argument is this: The liberal order of America and of the West is currently under attack from a progressive, illiberal, and anti-religious ideology rooted in the Marxist tradition. While the core claims of this ideology have long menaced American culture, it is currently taking on a new and more dangerous shape. Cultivated in the classrooms of our universities, embraced by the elites of our institutions, enabled by the moral malaise of our therapeutic culture, and empowered by the technological ubiquity of surveillance capitalism, this ideology will harden—indeed has already begun to harden—into an entire cultural order. In this cultural order, best understood as “soft totalitarianism,” liberal ideals of individual freedom will give way to tribal collectivism, cultural memory will be replaced by utopian dogma, and civic dissent will be met with firm reprisal. Indeed, the evidence that this has already begun is everywhere around us, and of all citizens swept up into these waves of illiberalism, faithful Christians are among those most at risk. 

Thompson is also concerned:

I am, for instance, concerned about the illiberal ways in which cultural and political perspectives increasingly serve as justification for dehumanization and malice. I am concerned about our increasing default to exclusively identitarian accounts of ourselves and our neighbours, and the potent tribalism this nurtures. I am concerned about a preening civic moralism that feels more performative than principled, and for the plague of self-righteousness that blooms around it. I am concerned about the contradictions of a therapeutic culture that venerates self-expression even as it normalizes self-harm. I am concerned about the ways in which our extraordinary technologies invite exploitation and obstruct wisdom. I am concerned about economic and cultural actors whose power places them beyond the reach of any practicable form of accountability. I am concerned by the ubiquity with which each one of these tendencies manifests itself on both the cultural left and the cultural right and in so doing threatens the health, indeed the very possibility, of our common life.

So why does Thompson write that Dreher’s book is “egregious” and “dangerous”? The reason has to do with the way Dreher expresses his alarms:

While in the world of entertainment punditry such a transparently reductive manner of speaking about one’s cultural enemies may be indulged and even celebrated, in a work that claims the intellectual mantle of liberalism and the moral mantle of the Christian church, such an account is a disgrace. Why? Because in characterizing progressivism in this way, Dreher tacitly claims the powerful heritage of liberalism for himself and places his cultural enemies outside of it, all while either unaware of or indifferent to both the moral incoherence and social consequences of doing so.

Sweeping claims about good guys and bad guys may not be the first strike against a writer for anyone ministering in a communion that has some regard and attachment to Francis Schaeffer.

Observing the deficiency of Dreher’s (he is a journalist, after all) prose may also prompt a writer to think about lines like this:

Dreher’s gauzy invocation of liberalism is reflective not of the rigorous complexities of history but of the simplistic nostalgia of Cracker Barrel.

“Simplistic,” “nostalgia,” or “Cracker Barrel,” each on their own would have made the point. Throwing them all into the sentence is either redundant or piling on.

This Would be Transformationalist(izational)

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Imagine if Christmas songs started this way in the eighteenth century:

Oh, the weather outside is frightful
But the fire is so delightful
And since we’ve no place to go
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

Man it doesn’t show signs of stoppin’
And I brought me some corn for poppin’
The lights are turned way down low
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

When we finally kiss good-night
How I’ll hate going out in the storm
But if you really hold me tight
All the way home I’ll be warm

And the fire is slowly dying
And, my dear, we’re still good-bye-ing
But as long as you’d love me so
Let it snow, let it snow, and snow

When we finally kiss good-night
How I’ll hate going out in the storm
But if you’d really grab me tight
All the way home I’ll be warm

Oh the fire is slowly dying
And, my dear, we’re still goodbye-ing
But as long as you’d love me so
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

Then, two hundred years later, most English-speakers were singing (or hearing in the convenience story, for example) this:

Come, Thou long expected Jesus
Born to set Thy people free;
From our fears and sins release us,
Let us find our rest in Thee.
Israel’s strength and consolation,
Hope of all the earth Thou art;
Dear desire of every nation,
Joy of every longing heart.

Born Thy people to deliver,
Born a child and yet a King,
Born to reign in us forever,
Now Thy gracious kingdom bring.
By Thine own eternal Spirit
Rule in all our hearts alone;
By Thine all sufficient merit,
Raise us to Thy glorious throne.

By Thine all sufficient merit,
Raise us to Thy glorious throne.

That would be something on the order of taking a song with reference only to the affects of a holiday and giving them serious Christian significance.

Why, though, does transformationalism so invariably go the other way? Leigh Schmidt had a theory. It was commerce and no one did it better than (sort of) New School Presbyterian, John Wanamaker, founder and owner of Philadelphia’s great department store, Wanamaker’s (now Macy’s):

The store’s holiday slogan in the 1950s was “Christmas Isn’t Christmas without a Day at Wanamaker’s,” and the slogan contained a grain of ethnographic description along with its advertising hype. A Catholic nun and schoolteacher, for example, wrote warmly to the store in 1950: “I made a special trip, as many of us do, just to ‘see Wanamaker’s.'” These excursions to behold the Grand Court each year at the holidays had become, she said, part of her “Christmas ritual.” (167)

Schmidt added:

For more than a century, the American marketplace has displayed a striking capacity for consecration at Christmas. Christian symbols have been repeatedly brought into the public square and made a matter of public recognition through commercial institutions. . . . At no other time in the year have the tensions over religious pluralism been more evident: Christmas has been set up as an all-embracing cultural celebration often with only passing sensitivity to those whom the holiday marginalizes. (169)

That was 1996.

Sight-Seeing with Kuyper at Hagia Sophia

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The idea that a building like Hagia Sophia, which had been a Christian cathedral, then became a mosque, and then under a secular state committed to neutrality became a museum — the idea that Hagia Sophia should remain a site free from religion seems odd for neo-Calvinists to embrace. David Koyzis, a political philosopher who identifies with Neo-Calvinism seems to be ambivalent about what’s happening to this ancient building:

Last month it was reported that a Turkish court has cleared the way for the historic Hagia Sophia, an ancient Roman church built by the Emperor Justinian in the 6th century, to return to its former use as a mosque. Known as Ayasofya to the Turks, it functioned as a Muslim place of worship between 1453, when the Ottoman armies of Mehmed II, the Conqueror, conquered Constantinople, and 1934, when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk turned it into a museum.

Since then this architectural wonder has seen millions of tourists file through its interior, which once echoed with the sounds of Byzantine chant and Muslim prayers but now houses the ancient artefacts of two civilizations and two religions. Because Islam prohibits the presence of images in worship, the status of the building’s Byzantine mosaics, uncovered in recent times, remains uncertain.

This development is consistent with the efforts of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to move his country away from the secularizing Kemalist legacy towards a more Islamic identity.

When Koyzis concludes that his hope is for the cathedral to return to Christian worship, he avoids having to side with either Ataturk or Erdogan:

It’s possible that the authorities will come up with a compromise for Hagia Sophia. The mosaics may be covered temporarily during the Muslim prayer hours but will be visible at all other times for the benefit of the tourists, whose preferences Turkey cannot afford to ignore. However, given my paternal Greek heritage and my Christian faith, I cannot but hope that one day the praises of the God who revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ might again echo through the cavernous space of what was once the largest church in Christendom.

What might help Koyzis and other Protestants (not to mention Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox) is to remember what Abraham Kuyper experienced when he visited Istanbul during the first decade of twentieth century. To introduce his series on the Lordship of Christ (published as Pro Rege), Kuyper invoked his time at Hagia Sophia, according to James Bratt:

Kuyper introduced [the Lordship of Christ] from his fresh memory of observing prayers in Hagia Sophia. A faithful Muslim venerated the Prophet about 10,000 times a year, he computed. To kindle a lie devotion among Christians, it was necessary for them to understand their Master anew. (339)

In other words, visiting Hagia Sophia as a mosque was not something of which Kuyper disapproved.

In fact, Kuyper had respect to the point of envy for Islamic civilization:

Islam was the object of his supreme envy — a faith that, adapting itself to every culture, steeped its adherents in the conviction that the will of God was supreme over everything from the personal to the political, from the deep roots of time into the everlasting future, and under that conviction had spread a common worldview [w-w] from Gibraltar to the Philippines. This was Kuyper’s dream for Calvinism, the Dutch Golden Age times ten. As to particulars, he admired Muslim achievements in architecture . . . and he rhapsodized about Al-Azhar University in Cairo, where progressive scholarship had once flourished for seven hundred years in organic connection with religion and life. He noted the rise of pan-Islamic consciousness as a kind of liberation theology against colonial rule. It grounded independence in religious unity and ethical purification. If the “fanaticism” this produced worried him as a European, it echoed all his tales of heroic Beggars in the Dutch war for independence. (332)

Anyone tempted by Kuyper’s thoughts on Islam should obtain a copy of On Islam.