Category: New World Presbyterianism

Speaking of New York City Circa When Harry Met Sally

Published on by D. G. Hart29 Comments

Sam Desocio thinks the shelf life of Tim Keller and urban ministry may have expired. For one thing, the reasons for doing urban ministry that motivated Keller in the 1990s are now mainstream, tired and maybe even trite:

As a church planter I often have the opportunity to spend time with other ministry leaders and church planters. Among most of them I don’t see the assumed disgust for the city which Dr. Keller uses as a sparring partner. While many of them are in rural or suburban locations, almost all see urban ministry as vital. In fact, When I talk to current or hopeful church planters, urban ministry is undeniably given preeminence. I was once meeting with a church planter making plans for a move to a new city. He shared with me that he had a small scattering of people interested in working alongside him. Some of these folks were in the suburbs on one side of town, while others, were in the suburbs on the other side of the town. So, I asked him what area he was considering, (someplace close to one of those two areas I assumed). He answered that he was “called to the city”, and so the folks in both areas would have to be willing to move or come closer to him. I really liked this guy, but he had recently moved to his city, and –from what I could tell–expected longstanding residents to move away from existing relationships to pursue his vision of relevancy (maybe it was Christianity’s relevancy, but maybe it was his own).

Of course this is a subjective estimate of the prioritization of urban planting. So lets look at the stats coming from within the PCA. Six of the ten churches organized in the PCA in 2012(the most recent stats) were in cities with populations over 100,000. Of the over 40 church planters placed on the field by the PCA in that same year: 21 were in cities of over 100,000. Nine were in cities between 100,000 and 50,000. Only 12 were in cities below 50,000. A glance at the Acts 29 Network (also admittedly influenced by Dr. Keller) shows that only one of the last ten churches in that network where planted in cities with populations less than 100,000.

For another, Keller’s call to urban ministry may distort Scripture:

Dr. Keller’s argument for cities pushes too much of the Bible through an artificial urban rubric. This rubric down plays Paul’s ministry in the country side of Lycaonia. It tables Jesus’s pursuit of the one at the expense of the 99. I don’t bring this up to argue that Jesus didn’t care about Jerusalem, of course he wept over that city. Its clear that Paul care about major cities in the Roman empire, but it is impossible to boil down the locations of Paul’s ministry to one easy framework. We could ask: if Paul’s strategy was to go “into the largest cities of the region”, then why did he travel to Lystra several times, while there is no mention of any time spent in Smyrna (Population 90,000) or the even larger Sardis (Population 100,000).

Dr. Keller’s prioritization of important places, potential swells beyond population and ends up reinforcing a view of the world which esteems significance as the highest good.

Instead of challenging the cultures views of importance, Dr. Keller seems to be reinforcing them.

Good thing Sam doesn’t blog at Gospel Coalition.

Whose Calvinism, Which Presbyterianism

Published on by D. G. Hart29 Comments

I continue to be fascinated by the idea of Scottish independence. In Prospect Magazine this morning I read this account of Scottish Calvinism in David Marquand’s case for a federalist solution to the United Kingdom’s discomfort:

. . . the Scottish government is — implicitly at least — social-democratic. It seeks independence to protect Scottish social democracy against the market fundamentalism of the London government, both within the UK and in its dealings with the EU. The roots of Scottish social democracy go deep. The political cultures of all the non-English nations of Great Britain are very different from their English counterparts. As a civil servant in the Welsh education department put it in my hearing not long ago, the overarching theme of UK governance can be summed up as “choice, competition, customer.” The Welsh equivalent is: “voice, cooperation, citizen.” . . . But ever since Mrs Thatcher crossed the threshold of No 10 all UK governments, irrespective of party, have been in thrall to the imperatives of what Philip Bobbitt, the legal historian and philosopher, has called the “market state.” These imperatives have not only violated the underlying assumptions of Scotland’s political culture; they have also trampled on the religious traditions with which that culture is intertwined. Scotland’s religious traditions are Roman Catholic and Calvinist. Both reject the Hayekian market individualism of Thatcher and the watered down version of it that prevailed under Blair and Brow. Two particularly egregious Thatcherisms stank in Scottish nostrils: her dictum that no one would remember the Good Samaritan if he hadn’t had the money to give effect to his good intentions; and her notorious “sermon on the mound,” in which she insisted that since Christ chose to lay down his life, freedom of choice was the essence of Christianity.

I have no quarrel with Scottish social democrats, nor with the parish ideals that inspired the Free Church of Scotland in the days of Thomas Chalmers. Let Scottish Presbyterians be Scottish Presbyterians. But why Calvinism is responsible for this social outlook when we on the other side of the Atlantic regularly hear about Calvinism’s market friendly and individualistic ways, I don’t understand. Could it be that Calvinism is just as plastic as evangelicalism? The seer sees what she wants to see.

The American Jesus on the Un-American Calvin

Published on by D. G. Hart4 Comments

Zach Hunt has read Calvin and he is disgusted. Here’s part of what he has to say to Calvin himself:

[Quotations from Calvin on predestination and human wickedness] are, as you demonstrate so well, the logical conclusions of your theology of divine sovereignty and, therefore, at the very heart of what you believe about God. Worse, this isn’t a case of you overstating without thinking through the conclusions. You’re clear that this sort of God who ordains genocide, murder, rape, children abuse, and every other conceivable horrendous act is the God you worship. . . .

The bigger issue I have, John, is that you have a tendency (cause I’ll be the first to admit they’re not all like this) to create incredibly arrogant and sometimes hateful followers who are just as cold, calculating, and callous in their theology and selective in their use of scripture as you are. Just like you, too many of your prominent followers today denounce their critics as heretics while praising God for a whole host of evil things that happen in the world from earthquakes and tornadoes to the marginalization, oppression, and destruction of people made in the image of God.

John, I don’t know how to say it any other way – you’ve got a bad habit of making disciples that aren’t very christlike in their love, mercy, compassion, and grace towards others.

This may or may not be a fair reading of Calvin, but it does do justice to those parts that are hard to square with modern notions about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And yet Americans continue to think that Calvinism bears some special and positive relationship to a political order committed to freedom, equality, and tolerance. In most narratives of American origins, the lines between John Winthrop’s Massachusetts and George Washington’s Philadelphia are smooth, straight, and easy to follow.

Could it be that Americans need to take a page from the Turks who seem to know that the caliph Suleyman the Great was not a forerunner of Ataturk? Consider, for instance, what ??? had to say about the current Turkish television sensation, “Magnificent Century”? Here is an interesting bit from Elif Batuman’s Feb. 17, 2014 piece on the series, “Ottomania: A Hit TV Show Reimagines Turkey’s Imperial Past.”

The debate over “Magnificent Century” touches on one of the key issues in Turkish politics: the question of national identity. Who were the Ottomans – enlightened cosmopolitans or decadent sociopaths? Who was Suleyman? Who are the Turks? For the first eighty years of the republic, national identity was defined largely by the figure of Kemal Ataturk, with his tailored suits, his commitment to scientific positivism and ballroom dancing, his devotion to an adopted daughter who became Turkey’s first female fighter pilot, and his emphatic rejection of all things Ottoman. Ataturk’s picture is on every denomination of Turkish currency, and hangs on the wall of every public building. It is a crime to insult his memory. . . .

The Ottoman revival has its roots in the Cold War, when the main political polarity in Turkey wasn’t Islamist versus secularist but pro-Communist versus anti-Communist. In Turkey, a NATO member and a U.S ally, widespread internal violence between leftist and rightist groups culminated in a military coup, in 1980. The new government addressed the threat of leftism by opening the Turkish market to global competition, and by promoting Islam as an ideological alternative to Communism. One result of these measure was the rise of a new class of observant Muslim businessmen – entrepreneurs who described themselves as “Islamic Calvinists,” characterized Muhammad as a merchant, and cited the Koran as an authority on limiting economic intervention by the government. Where Kemalism had its basis in economic isolationism and cultural Westernization, these businessmen wanted just the opposite: Western-style capitalism and a Turkish culture. In the Ottomans, they found the ready-made idea of a prosperous Muslim elite, trading on an equal footing with Europe but preferring halvah to profiteroles.

In some ways Turkish developments parable simultaneous U.S. history. During the Cold War, especially before 1965 when race, sex, gender, and war divided Americans, Calvinism and the Reformation became a bus stop on the modern ride from the Dark Ages to Enlightenment and the United States’ new order for the ages. In other words, religious roots became useful to both the Turks and Americans to justify national involvements. You can even compare the Religious Right to the Islamo-Calvinists – Americans who refashioned their religious and national heritages to concoct a national identity that made secular humanism illegitimate.

But unlike Turkey where the contrast between republican progress and religious past was always stark under Ataturk’s unruly eyebrows, in the United States the tension between the Puritans and the Founders was glossed or ignored. Americans, from Julia Ward Howe and Perry Miller to Rick Santorum, have rarely if ever been willing to acknowledge that Winthrop’s communitarian, religiously demanding, and exclusive Massachusetts was not what Ben Franklin, James Madison or even John Witherspoon had in mind for the United States (whether confederated or federated).

That dishonesty may be responsible for the secularist and atheistical reaction against the faith-based exceptionalism of the last four decades. It doesn’t make it pleasant or civil, but when you constantly hear about America’s Christian origins as a later iteration of the Puritans errand into the wilderness, you may want to push back.

At the very least, this dishonesty helps to explain why an HBO television series on Massachusetts Bay’s pastors’ wives will not becoming to Netflix soon. Not even the producers of Christian sentimental entertainment could turn those godly women into a series, say “Sectarians in the City,” where the distaff side of the Gospel Coalition could feel good about their small group Bible studies, enjoyment of sex, and cosmetic choices. Although, if someone could provoke the female allies to get their hubbies to read Anne Bradstreet, maybe the New Calvinists would stop being so d—d nice.

When Biblicism Fails

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

Back in the day before Bryan Cross I was debating John Frame on worship. His tack was to say that his brief for contemporary worship was biblical while those who criticized Praise & Worship worship (note redundantly the redundancy) were simply historical or traditional. The innuendo was that Frame’s critics were in the position of Rome’s defenders of tradition while he was the one continuing the reformation of the church.

The trouble was that Frame rarely did exegesis. He could put biblical references in parentheses, but I took enough Greek and Hebrew to know that an open and closed parenthesis does not exegesis make.

Turns out that Mark Jones agrees in his review of Frames ginormous Systematic Theology:

It almost appears as though the “Bible-alone” approach handicaps Frame in places where he needs the Reformed tradition most. John Murray was radically biblical, but he was also vigorously exegetical, and did not simply engage in proof-texting. Frame is radically biblical, but not (in this volume, at least) vigorously exegetical – something he needs to be if he is not going to engage in serious historical-theological analysis where he departs from his own tradition on important doctrines.

That observation makes it hard to understand how Jones could also write this:

No one can ever accuse Frame of not loving his Bible, and making it pre-eminent in his theological discourse. For that I am grateful. No wonder his writings have been hugely beneficial to the Reformed, evangelical world. This work has, as its crown jewel, much of Frame’s thought in one volume.

Where Did He Learn that Evangelicalism Is the Same as Presbyterianism?

Published on by D. G. Hart6 Comments

When I read Pete Enns on evangelicalism, I sense that he thinks of it as if it were the PCA (or the OPC), that these are really “evangelical” denominations. That is, he sees in evangelicalism a narrowness and uniformity that would make sense if, as Roger Olson sees the world, Reformed Protestants really did dominate evangelical institutions or as if Edwards and Whitefield were still the dominant flavor and Finney, New School Presbyterians, Wesleyans, Baptists, dispensationalists, charismatics, and even Mennonites, Brethren, and Quakers never happened. Enns also seems to think that evangelicalism actually has mechanisms admission and discipline (though he’s not in favor of the latter) that denominations have. He reflects an attitude that was dominant at Westminster Seminary in the 1980s and 1990s when administrators and faculty were in active pursuit of an evangelical niche in the seminary market. (How exactly Westminster, the seminary that Machen the separatist founded, was going to compete either with Gordon-Conwell or Fuller was a mystery.) That attitude took a significant turn during the Enns controversy. But Enns himself does not seem to have abandoned it. He recently wrote:

A common characteristic of Evangelical ecclesiology is the view, either explicit or implicit, that Evangelicalism is in some meaningful sense the clearest and most faithful expression of the Christian faith—which implies it is the version God most approves of. Other traditions are often looked down upon as either compromising “the clear teaching of Scripture” or lacking in some other crucial way.

The challenge to maintain some sort of Evangelical identity amid ecumenical discussions is a real one, but not necessarily impossible to pull off. How that might work itself out is not for me to say, but, in our ever-shrinking world, Evangelicalism cannot afford to be seen as anything other than in serious dialogue with other Christians communions. The global Christian faith must work toward a deep unity in basics amid diversity of various local and ecclesiastical traditions.

Evangelicalism is not a church and has no ecclesiology. Hello. And that is both its genius and its curse. It can keep an institution like Wheaton College going even while its boundaries ever shift to incorporate those who have Jesus in their hearts. It’s experience, not Scripture; it’s experience period. What’s the church?

This means that evangelicalism is precisely the ecumenical conversation for which Enns longs. He has found his home. The dialogue and openness are happening all around him. And yet, he keeps thinking that evangelicals are out to get him in the same way that conservative Presbyterians took issue with his views on Scripture.

His desire for “Openness to Different Ecclesiastical Traditions” should include a willingness on his part to let Presbyterian Church Americans or Orthodox Presbyterians to be exactly what they are — communions of Reformed Protestants. If he’d regard evangelicalism as loose and conservative Presbyterians as narrow, he could revel in the melting pot that evangelicalism is. And if he did that, he might understand that the OPC and the PCA are not really evangelical (since they cannot incorporate evangelicalism’s girth). And that might also allow Enns to recognize that he was always an evangelical who was not a good fit at an institution founded (even if confused about) to be Reformed.

If You Needed More Reasons to Resent New York City

Published on by D. G. Hart63 Comments

Upstate New York is lovely. Long Island has its charms. Even New York City has appeal — until the boosters start whooping. Christian boosters are even tougher to take because of that little matter of pride. This leaves me wondering if New York exceptionalism is worse than American exceptionalism. For the history of Presbyterianism, New York wins hands down. All of American Presbyterianism’s major controversies started over New York’s excesses — Old Side-New Side (Edwards and Tennent), Old School-New School (Barnes), fundamentalist-modernist (Fosdick), Old Life-New Life (Keller).

But now we hear that New York is experiencing a spiritual renaissance:

As the 80’s came to a close, a man considered by many to be one of the most influential pastors of our time answered a call to New York City to start a church: Tim Keller planted Redeemer Presbyterian, hailed as one of the most vital congregations in New York City.

By that time, the abortion rate in New York City had skyrocketed. Through the planting of Redeemer, a need for a crisis pregnancy center was identified. Subsequently, Midtown Pregnancy Support Center was founded. Other Redeemer members saw the need for a classical Christian school in New York City. So, the Geneva School was formed. That brought families into the city that wanted their children to attend that school.

As the year 2000 neared, New Yorkers saw more than the turn of a new century; they found ways to intellectually examine faith.

The King’s College opened its doors in a 34,000 square foot space the Empire State Building—after a short period of closure—in 1999 (the school is now located in the financial district). This placed the next generation of Christian thinkers in the hub of New York—and American—culture. Because of the placement of The King’s College, hundreds of young people are flooding the churches in the Big Apple.

In 2000, Metaxas started Socrates In the City, a monthly forum that facilitates discussion around “the bigger questions in life.” This event has seen growth over the 13 years in existence, and consistently attracts what Metaxas calls “The cultural elite.” Topics covered at these forums include: the existence of evil, the implications of science in faith, and the role of suffering.

In 2001, New Yorkers saw the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center. “These events focused hearts on New York City,” said Metaxas. “This caused a lot of people to move to the city and start churches and other ministries.”

A post-September 11 New York City would see the emergence of many new churches, such as Journey in 2002, Trinity Grace in 2006, and Hillsong NYC in 2011—representing a wide variety of theological and worship styles. More parachurch organizations, like Q, have popped up. Founded by Gabe Lyons in 2007, Q exists to help church and cultural leaders engage the Gospel in public life.

“Now, there are so many churches in town, I don’t know the names of all of them. I know that the Lord is in all of this,” said Metaxas. “I am convinced we are on the verge of some kind of faith renaissance in New York City that will blow a lot of minds.”

A curious feature of this story is that the writer is Joy Allmond, “a web writer for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and a freelance writer. She lives in Charlotte, N.C., with her husband, two teenage stepsons and two dogs.”

No offense to Ms. Allmond, but I’d take her piece a little more seriously (though mainstream journalists usually put religion stories in the features sections where tough questions seldom go) if she actually lived and breathed in New York. On the ground in the Big Apple, the story is not Christianity but the new mayor, the Democrat, Bill deBlasio, and there the story even has a religious dimension, though Keller, Metaxas, and Thornbury are nowhere to be found. (Parenthetically, World magazine did report on the Republican loser, Joe Lohta, and his meeting with Tim Keller in September.)

First the numbers:

Protestants were the largest religious segment of voters in the Democratic primary, making up 31% of the voters. Because evangelicals make up the great majority of Protestants in the city, most likely the large majority of the Protestant Democratic voters are evangelical Protestants. Over two-thirds of evangelical Protestants are African American or Hispanic. Over one-third of evangelical Protestants reside in Brooklyn.

Catholic voters were the next largest religious segment of voters in the Democratic primary, making up 25% of the voters. The Catholic voters were less likely to vote in the primary elections. Most surveys have found that Catholics make up around 40-44% of the city’s population. Catholic charismatics, who were endorsed by Pope Paul II, are similar to Pentecostal Protestants in their values and voting behavior.

Jews were the third largest segment. Although Jews make up perhaps 10% of NYC’s population, 19% of the Democratic primary voters identified themselves as Jewish. The proportion of Jews who vote is significantly higher than that for the other main religious groups.

Was it a decisive turn to the left?

So de Blasio did not win the votes of unprecedented number of New Yorkers. And many of those who did vote for him also supported Bloomberg. That doesn’t mean that they like everything Bloomberg did. But there’s no evidence here of a progressive tsunami.

What about de Blasio’s career? The tabloid press paid a great deal of attention to de Blasio’s visits to communist Nicaragua and the Soviet Union as a young man. More recently, however, de Blasio worked as a HUD staffer under Andrew Cuomo, and as campaign manager for Hillary Clinton. De Blasio took liberal positions during his tenure on the city council, particularly on symbolic issues involving gay rights. But this is not the resume of a professional radical.

It’s true that de Blasio made “a tale of two cities” the central theme of his campaign. As many observers have pointed out, however, he lacks the authority to enact his signature proposals: a tax increase on high earners, to be used to fund universal pre-K. Nothing’s impossible, but the chances of the state legislature approving such a tax hike are slim. The same goes for several of de Blasio’s other ideas, including a city-only minimum wage higher than the state’s minimum and the issuance of driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.

The real issues under the de Blasio’s administration will be matters over which the mayor has some direct control. That means, above all, contracts with city workers, and policing. Will de Blasio blow the budget to satisfy public employee unions? And will he keep crime under control after eliminating stop-and-frisk ?

Where is New York City’s spiritual renaissance in all this?

For one thing, Keller focused his church plant on the city’s urban professionals, a class of people who, by definition, don’t necessarily mesh well with either the city’s dwindling stock of middle-class earners, or its increasing number of people of even lowlier social standing. If de Blasio is going to start playing class warfare, Redeemer’s target demographic may tire of being perceived as an economic liability.

For another, ministry in urban markets already struggles with the intense impermanence of career-chasing members who transition into and out of cities at the behest of job opportunities. Should de Blasio give New York’s corporate citizens a cold shoulder, there’s little keeping many companies in the city other than the recruiting edge they get from Gotham’s hedonistic urban allure. Such intangibles could become prohibitive quickly if companies are forced to re-evaluate their balance sheets.

Plus, socially liberal urban politicians are not known for embracing quality-of-life issues as much as their suburban counterparts are, or for their crime-fighting discipline, or their concern for traditional, proven educational practices in public schools. As it is, private schools in New York can cost more than $40,000 per year per pupil, demand is so great.

Indeed, you’d have to be an exceptionally devoted – and brazenly idealistic – New Yorker to not be concerned that the Big Apple’s rewards risk renewed marginalization under de Blasio’s management.

Although it’s not exactly a sin to increase taxes to pay for pre-K programs, or lawyers for renters going to Housing Court, such tactics do not represent a mindset of thrift, expediency, and personal responsibility when a city’s budget already requires astoundingly high tax rates. Such proposals by de Blasio indicate that just as Giulianni and Bloomberg might have given too much leeway to certain business leaders, a renewed emphasis on social liberalism may undermine the city’s economic vitality and endorse certain lifestyles that pose an economic liability for taxpayers.

There’s little in de Blasio’s manifesto that doesn’t presume individual citizens to be more righteous than those they may be accusing of wrongdoing. If equity is something voters thought was missing in the way Giulianni and Bloomberg governed, de Blasio is simply turning the tables towards a different sort of inequity. An inequity that likely will be much more expensive to maintain.

It’s an inequity that could also validate the suspicions that New York’s native poor have towards interloping rich whites, the type of people attending Keller’s various congregations throughout Manhattan. It’s also an inequity that banks on charity not as an opportunity for advancement, but as simply another enabler for attitudes and lifestyles that perpetuate poverty cycles instead of break them.

None of this adds up to a decisive point about urban ministry or the alleged renaissance in Gotham. It does indicate that the hype surrounding Christians in New York City is far removed from the realities of the very city for which they perform cartwheels. If they were spirituality of the church guys, then being silent about the city’s politics and economics in cheers for the revival might make sense. Even then, just as Charles Finney figured, we have natural ways of explaining what appears to be spiritual vitality. Reporters from North Carolina, however, aren’t going to help with those explanations.

Why the "Calvinist" Resurgence is Troubling

Published on by D. G. Hart42 Comments

Mark Dever has tried to account for the prominence recently of Calvinism among Baptists and independents. Coming in at #6 out of 10 influences is the Presbyterian Church in America:

Born out of theological controversy in 1973, this denomination’s official doctrinal standard is a revision of the Westminster Confession of Faith—a document “so associated with the history of Calvinism,” Dever suggests, “it could almost be said to define it in the English-speaking world.”

“By the late 1990s,” he recalls, you could virtually assume the “most seriously Bible-preaching and evangelistic congregations near major university campuses would not be Bible churches or Baptist churches, but PCA congregations.” From the success of various seminaries to the influence of Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) on campuses to Tim Keller’s ministry in New York City, it’s clear the “organizing and growth” of the PCA has been a major contributing factor to the Reformed resurgence.

Not to be too disrespectful of a communion of like faith and practice, but if I were looking for theological chutzpah in the last quarter of the twentieth-century, I would not be turning to the PCA precisely because of Keller. In fact, since 1986 when Joining and Receiving failed, the PCA has broadened and become flabby, while the OPC has become lean (many thought it was always mean). Does this mean that Dever should have mentioned the OPC? Of course, not. We are small, marginal, and can’t make it in NYC the way Keller has. (Whether the PCA has actually made it in NYC is another question.)

But this account of the PCA and Keller suggests that the new “Calvinists” don’t really get Reformed Protestantism. Inside confessional Presbyterian circles folks are worried about the PCA and wonder why folks like Keller don’t spend some of their considerable capital on trying to help the denomination recover its Reformed faith and practice. (Oh, that’s right, Keller has.) Imagine a Southern Baptist minister or seminary professor mixing it up with Episcopalians or United Methodists and you might have a parallel with Keller’s unwillingness to play within the confines of Presbyterian polity and Reformed teaching.

But if CG’s comment about Baptists needing to venture out on their own and lose their wanna-be-Presbyterian outlook is correct, then perhaps Dever’s estimate of the PCA is just one more version of Baptists, who are only a guhzillion times bigger than Presbyterians, turning their heads to follow a tall Presbyterian blonde. Why they don’t find Lutherans that attractive is a mystery, though it may be an indication of Baptist provincialism. Imagine what the young and restless would look like if they were reading Luther instead of Piper channeling Edwards. Then again, Luther’s theology of the cross might require having to give up Billy Graham.

Not Many Square Inches

Published on by D. G. Hart65 Comments

Is it media bias when Buzzfeed reports on the religious affiliation of U.S. Congress members and does not even have a category for Calvinism? Not really since no such communion and as the Calvinist Churches of Christ exists. As I tried to demonstrate in the big book of British smiles history of Calvinism, the institutional vehicles for exporting what we know as Calvinism around the world were the Reformed and Presbyterian churches. Unfortunately, Buzzfeed doesn’t include a category for Reformed Protestants. It does for Presbyterians and the result are not the basis for flag waving:

According to Buzzfeed, there are 31 religions represented in the House, including 26 denominations of Christianity. Here’s the breakdown of the top six faith backgrounds:

1. Catholics (31 percent with 135 members)
2. Baptists (15 percent with 66 members)
3. Methodists (10 percent with 45 members)
4. Anglicans/Episcopalians (8 percent with 35 members)
5. Presbyterians (6 percent with 28 members)
6. Jews (5 percent with 22 members)

Buzzfeed reports that the majority of Catholics and Jews are Democrats while the remaining religions on the top-six list tend to be represented by Republicans. Jews are listed as the most partisan — 21 out of 22 Jewish members are Democrats — while Mormons come in second, with seven out of eight members as Republicans. There is only one atheist in the House, and only Idaho and Utah are represented by exclusively one religion (barring states that have only a single seat)

The other discouraging news is that if Presbyterians want to consolidate their religious identity and build on top of square inches already captured, they will need to move to Montana. Mind you, I don’t have anything against Montana per se (but its bears do give me the willies). And Montana has accounted for a pretty good story about a Presbyterian pastor and his family, A River Runs Through It. Still, Montana is not what comes to mind when you think of Francis Makemie and John Witherspoon.

PCA Blues

Published on by D. G. Hart21 Comments

Maybe I can beat Aquila Report with the scoop on this one (thanks to our chortling correspondent). In response to Lane Keister’s post about how the Federal Visionaries won a rightful place within the PCA, Lee — a Pirates fan who pastors in Nebraska, so he must be reliable (whatever) — posits this (which is “what I’m sayin’” but better said):

Lane thinks the FV guys won and took over, and I think that a 3rd party took the opportunity run off the TR’s (for lack of a better term) and gain complete control. I think the “evangelical middle” as Lane refers to them has always had designs on running this denomination.

Let me take you back to the Presbyterian Pastors Leadership Network and 2002. They pushed Good Faith Subscription and a change in the way of GA taking original jurisdiction. Now the change to BCO 34-1 and original jurisdiction failed, but the PPLN won. 40 Presbyteries agreed, it just was short of the 2/3rds required. Thus the majority of the PCA thought Presbytery discipline was enough. Couple that with the Good Faith Subscription, which in my opinion gave more wiggle room to those who disagree with the confession, and the groundwork is set.

That lead nicely into Presbyterians and Presbyterians Together in 2006 (which is no longer on the internet but my summary is still up). This was a clear call from many men that prosecution of others would not be tolerated. This was not so much the FV men courting the evangelical middle, this was the establishment of the PCA saying they wanted the FV men and could do without the TR guys. Lots of Covenant Theological Seminary men signed this document. This is of course the same year that The Missouri Presbytery Report of FV came out, which was an attempt to split the middle, and would later serve as the basis for clearing Rev. Jeff Meyers, who was on the committee. So, too, by the way, were Bryan Chapell, C. John Collins, and David Chapman of Covenant Seminary.

Then comes the 2007 FV report at GA. Now this was heralded by the TRs as a great moment, but really it meant nothing. This is one reason it was able to get such a wide margin vote. The groundwork had been laid that Presbyteries could let in whoever with Good Faith and that the prosecutors in trials are the bad guys. And this report was in no way judicial so why fight it.

Then Lee goes through the case against Steve Wilkens and finally comes to TKNY:

Enter into the debate now the powerful Tim Keller. Published author, featured in magazines, and pastor of a huge church in New York City. Keller gives a speech in June of 2010 about what is so great about the PCA. While I disagree with a lot of Keller’s historical analysis, the main point of Keller’s paper/talk was to promote the idea that the PCA is a diverse body and should remain that way. Clearly then those who are trying to get rid of a subgroup are in the wrong. There was a lot that went into the Strategic Plan that the PCA bounced around and they did change some of it, but they still created “safe spaces” and they advanced their overall agenda of the PCA being a “big tent” denomination, a “big tent” that included the FV. Only those who do not want a “big tent” are not welcome.

The point Lee helpfully makes is that history rarely offers up watershed moments. Most historical episodes are part of developments that have long been percolating in seemingly insignificant acts or statements. It is only historians (and screenplay writers) who turn the ordinary into drama. (That’s why they pay one of us the big bucks.)

Love of Country

Published on by D. G. Hart63 Comments

I was glad to see Matt Holst challenge modestly Rick Phillips’ patriotic post about the need for Christians to love the United States. One of the best ways to register a 2k perspective is to ask whether Christianity has a special relationship with any particular nation, or whether Christians themselves have an obligation, no matter their citizenship, to the United States. Christians in the U.S. would not like instructions to love Mexico on the fifth day of May and would likely snicker at similar exhortations about a duty to love Canada on July 1. Why American Protestants don’t recognize the problem that Christian patriotism poses for Christians who are not citizens but reside LEGALLY in the U.S. is a riddle I am still trying to solve. But Charles Hodge’s argument in the context of the Civil War that the church supporting the Federal Government was akin to singing the Star Spangled Banner at the observance of the Lord’s Supper captures the 2k dynamic nicely. So does a Dutchman asking why a congregation has a U.S. flag at the front of its church.

Holst’s objection started with an acknowledgment that he is a “furr-ner,” an outsider:

It is always an interesting time of year for a foreigner to be in America. Every Fourth of July, I jest with our church members that the Sunday morning sermon closest to the Fourth will be on Romans 13 – submission to the civil magistrate. People laugh…usually. The obvious historical reasons aside, it is even more interesting for someone from Britain to be in the States on this date because Britain is a peculiarly unpatriotic place – nothing like America in that sense. I don’t recall ever seeing Union flags displayed on people’s houses, except in peculiar circumstances such as a royal birth or sporting achievement. The view of the armed forces in the UK has been nothing like that in America; it is much more low-key and much less admired, to be quite honest. To be clear, I am not saying that such is a good thing.

Moreover, Britain is itself a nation divided into four countries and four separate identities. When asked where I am from, my answer is Wales, not the UK. Speaking to most people over here, I inevitably have to explain where Wales is located. As an aside, I was once talking to a seminary student, who commented “You’re not from around here are you?”. I replied “No I’m from Wales”. To which he replied, in all seriousness, “Ah, a good Scotsman!” The conversation ended pretty quickly after that. My point is that the UK has multiple identities, with very few Welshmen being willing to accept the moniker “Scottish” and absolutely no Welshman willing to accept the label “English”. In spite of a rich and varied history, and maybe because of it, the UK does not have the same level or expressions of patriotism regularly evidenced on this side of the Atlantic.

In other words, Christianity transcends nations and so calling for Christian love of country only begins to make sense if you create space between country and faith, with patriotism being one form of affection, membership in the church another.

But Holst bring up some other matters that deserve comment, especially his contrast between the UK and the U.S. In fact, he touches on a subject that I am not sure Brits necessarily understand any better than Yanks, that is, the nature of British identity. Sports journalists needed to wrestle with this recently when Andrew Murray won at Wimbledon. Is Murray a Scot? A Brit? An Englishman? Some conjectured that whenever Murray lost he was a Scot, but when he won he was English. Indeed, among the three kingdoms that comprise the “United” Kingdom, national identity is anything but fixed, at least as J.C.D. Clark explains:

‘British” as a term in general usage has therefore had at least two senses. One was a spontaneous or encouraged Unionist identity allegedly felt equally by Scots, Irish, Welsh and English. This may indeed have been problematic. But another usage was more prevalent: as employed by the four groups, usually when abroad, ‘British’ was an official, political euphemism for one’s sectional identity, whether English, Welsh, Irish, or Scots: it was to a considerable degree synonymous with, and not a substitute for, sectional national identities. If so, it matters less that ‘British’ in the sense of the whig defenders of 1707 had shallow foundations: ‘Britishness’ in its prevalent sense rested in large part on the ancient and massive foundations of Englishness, and the equally ancient if differently formulated identities of England’s neighbours.

. . . . Britain was not invented; it developed. It was not devised by a small number of cultural entrepreneurs, acting like advertising executives to package and market a new product; it grew, the often unintended result of actions by men and women in many walks of life, often, too the result of conflicts and cross-purposes.

But contrary to Holst (and I am not criticizing as much as I am working out some of my own fascination with religious affiliations and national identities), a sense of Britishness did emerge, according to Clark, very much with the aid of Protestantism:

The ancient identity of the Ecclesia Anglicana meant that the Reformation did not at once create a unitary national identity. As a religious message of universal validity, Protestantism initially implied a reaction against the national subdivision of the universal church; only subsequently were some sections of ‘Protestantism’ identified with national churches and so with national identities. One strand of the Reformation stressed a pan-European solidarity between believers in the Reformed traditions, a shared sense of a supra-national destiny. Since the English had ‘a long-standing reputation for xenophobia’ even by 1500, it did not help that Protestant theology was originally associated with German reformers; not until the reign of Mary I (I553-8) were reformers ‘given the opportunity to sail for the first time under Protestant colours.’ Anti-popery, too, could be an international phenomenon, and not until Elizabeth’s reign did an assumption become prevalent that England had a special, or even the leading, role in that drama.125 The church in England only adopted the label ‘Protestant’ for itself in the first decade of the seventeenth century, and then in order to distinguish itself from both Rome and Geneva: Anglican Protestantism did not become pan-European. In Scotland and Northern Ireland the Reformation went much further: confessional differences have been basic to the emerging ‘three kingdoms’ explanation of the dynamics of state formation in the British Isles,” and when Wales acquired a distinct confessional identity from Protestant Dissent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, that principality took its place as a fourth component in the model.

So it is not the case that Americans are the exceptions who link their faith to their patriotism. They learned it from the Brits, or English, or Scots, or Welsh, or Irish. For a popular rendition of English conflation of faith and patriotism, see the third season of Downton Abbey where Lord Grantham cannot tolerate the idea that his granddaughter, who is the child of an Irish Roman Catholic — chauffeur no less, will be baptized a Roman Catholic. The English national identity was very much bound up with the Protestantism of the Church of England.

But if that little hiccup of British civil religion is so obvious to American viewers of Downton Abbey, why aren’t similar conflations of faith and nationalism obvious to Christians in the U.S.? One reason may be the very notion of love of country. Holst makes the useful point that such love is not commanded in Scripture:

. . . when I read that a Christian is to love his country, I’m left a little bit confused. What exactly am I to love? Presidents? Congressmen? Hills, valleys streams, lakes (I have no difficulty loving them)? The people? The armed forces? Government? I wonder if Rick’s advice, which I regularly find beneficial and prudent, has, on this matter, slipped into an amorphous Americanity – a more subtle form of “God and Country” which is so prevalent in certain areas of the church. Such is the kind of Christianity which has the American flag on one side of the pulpit and the Christian flag (wherever that came from?) on the other. America, like every other Western nation has had a remarkable yet chequered history – morally, economically and militarily. What are we to love, and what kind of love are we to show?

Holst may be confused because most modern citizens of nation-states are confused. A colleague tells me that the proper way to love the United States is to think of it as a people and a place. Loving the American people can be a challenge since it would mean having to love Alex Rodgriguez along with Phil Hendrie. But loving a place may be easier if we took a greater delight in the locales where we live. Certainly, though, if we identify the United States with its government (and a chief part of that government’s expenditure — the military and all those damned wars), we will have a different kind of love than the older variety of love of country.

I myself do not think it is wrong to love country as long as it is a love qualified by higher and holier affections (no, not those kind). I love my wife, for instance. The Bible tells me I have to. But I also love our surviving cat. The Bible doesn’t tell me to do that. Nor does it prohibit such love, which is one of those key points bound up with Christian liberty and two-kingdom theology. We are free to love a country (I think) and we are free not to love a country. We are not free to identify a country with the kingdom of Christ.