Category: Nicotine Theological Journal

One Size Doesn't Fit All Christians

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

More archived issues of the Nicotine Theological Journal have been uploaded to the Back Issues page. One of those (April 1998) includes a piece entitled “Sectarians All.” (Again, beware the anomalies included in transferring from WordPerfect to PDF.) Herewith an excerpt:

SUPPOSE A HISTORY PROFESSOR at an evangelical liberal arts college were teaching a course on American church history. His course did not follow the world religions approach but instead covered the religious traditions most numerous and most influential in America (though those are not synonymous) and so slanted the course to Protestants, Catholics and Jews. For the final exam the professor asked students to describe the teaching and practice of the average observant Catholic before Vatican II. If a student answered the question by ignoring Roman Catholic worship (the Mass), customs (fish on Fridays) , institutions (parochial schools), and teaching on justification, but answered instead with a description of an Irish immigrant in Boston who bucked the repressive pedagogy of local nuns, complained about never understanding the Mass, then went to Boston University, joined InterVarsity, attended Park Street Church, and read his Protestant Bible daily during his “quiet time,” should the professor give the student a passing grade? Such an answer would not be surprising given the historic anti-Catholic bias among Anglo-American Protestants. But wouldn’t the professor be delinquent in his duties as a professor of history to approve such an answer? In other words, is it possible for a Protestant to hold that a Catholic is “good” even if he believes his practices idolatrous?

LET’S TAKE ANOTHER EXAMPLE. This one from real life. J.I. Packer was one of the original Protestant signers of “Evangelicals and Catholics Together,” the first statement (1994) that called for a joint mission of Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants in a limited number of endeavors. In an article he wrote explaining his decision (Christianity Today, Dec. 12, 1994), Packer applied the very language of “good Catholic” to those with whom Protestants ought to cooperate. Now Packer does not spell out exactly what such a good Catholic looks like. But the reasons he gives for not being able to become a Roman Catholic are helpful. For instance, Rome has a “flawed” understanding of the church, its sacramental theology “cuts across” the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith, the “Mary cult,” the doctrine of purgatory, and the “disbursing” of indulgences all “damp down” biblical teaching about assurance of salvation. What is more, papal claims to infallibility make the “self-correction” of the church impossible. So the communion of Rome is still “unacceptable” to Packer. But the Catholics who are willing to sign a declaration with Packer, despite his reservations and objections, are “good” Catholics. These Catholics most likely are ones who do not observe the faith in ways that Packer deems flawed or, at least, are not strict about them. Ironically, then, Packer’s assessment of Catholicism should fail to earn an A-grade on an undergraduate American church history final exam but is supposed to be persuasive to evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics as the first step in ecumenicity.

WHY DOESN’T SUCH AN understanding of Roman Catholicism earn the strong rebukes of condescension and paternalism? Isn’t Packer saying, in effect, that a good Catholic is one who has given up distinctively Catholic teachings and practice? What is more, why isn’t Packer criticized for harboring the kind of anti-Catholic sentiments that used to inform America’s progressive reformers who desired the assimilation of all immigrants to the United States into WASP culture? Liberal Protestants have a long history of including Roman Catholics at their gatherings and institutions who resemble themselves, that is, believers who have given up the more particular aspects of their tradition in order to fit in to American Protestant norms. That kind of treatment used to be called “illiberal” by Roman Catholics, such as when John Gilmary Shea in the 1880s accused the Puritan tradition of being “narrow-minded, tyrannical, and intolerant” of those who “refused to submit to their ruling.” But now, thanks to the wonders of modern ecumenism, Roman Catholics who are not concerned about Rome’s historic teachings and practices are considered “good.”

Still Smokin'

Published on by D. G. Hart25 Comments

In an effort to make back issues of the Nicotine Theological Journal available on-line, readers may be interested to see that volume one of the journal glorified newsletter has been added to our page of back issues. (Please beware that the PDF versions will not capture the original layout in WordPerfect.) To tempt readers to take a gander, here is an excerpt from the lead article, “Calvinism, Ethnicity, and Smoke,” from issue number 2.

Old School Presbyterians who grew up within or on the edges of American evangelicalism — we write autobiographically — generally came to regard the Christian Reformed Church with awe for her robust expressions of Reformed piety. To be sure, Dutch-American Calvinists were never completely spared the piety of fundamentalism. But it was always a fundamentalism with a difference. While they may have frowned on such worldly amusements as card-playing or the theater or the dance hall, they continued to drink and smoke. “Sin came from the heart, not the environment,” they generally insisted, and they were usually right. So when you walked into the Calvin College coffee shop twenty years ago, it was not coffee that you smelled, but the pervasive scent of burning tobacco. Then there was the habit of the elders of the Wheaton CRC who smoked on the church lawn after Sunday morning worship, conveniently applying a jolt of nicotine to bus loads of stunned evangelical college students who were returning from church and knew next to nothing about Dutch ways, let alone Calvinism.

This brazen dismissal of artificial morality seemed so, well, healthy. For between puffs these elders could readily produce sound and sophisticated theological arguments on Christian liberty, the true nature of Christian virtue, and serving God in all walks of life. Yes, healthy, and more than a bit intimidating. Mark Noll well described the shock of seeing professing Christians smoke for the first time in his life, when he traveled to Calvin College as a Wheaton basketball player for his team’s annual “ritualistic slaughter.”

SUCH NICOTINE-STAINED PIETY, however, rapidly seems to be becoming a thing of the past. Visiting teams no longer suffer the effects of second-hand smoke on their travels to Grand Rapids. Recently the oldest college of the CRC held a “Great Calvin Smoke-Out.” Anti-smoking support groups have been launched, and smoking is now prohibited in all buildings on campus. (Though our spies report that some faculty are quietly practicing civil disobedience in the privacy of their offices.)

The new CRC morality was on graphic display in the January 6, 1997 issue of the Banner. In its “Worldwide” news column, the Banner reported on the combined efforts of the American Cancer Society and the National Jewish Outreach Program to encourage Jews in converting Saturdays into “Smoke-Free Sabbaths.” We are not persuaded that the pleasures of smoking are forbidden on the Lord’s Day. Still we would pause to commend the Banner at least for recognizing the increasingly quaint principle that some things are inappropriate on the Sabbath.

Winter 2012 NTJ

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

The print publication that preceded Oldlife.org has been out of circulation for some time. But the Nicotine Theological Journal returns to the world of the living with the Winter 2012 issue. If features two separate reflections by Baptist-turned-Presbyterian baby boomers on their parents and church life of their youth, an assessment of Presbyterian church growth, a review of Carl Trueman’s Republocrat, and a reprint of an post at Oldlife about the development of doctrine.

This issue also explains plans for future publication. The idea is that existing subscribers will receive hard copies for the next year by mail. All others will have access to Portable Document Formats of the NTJ through Oldlife.org. Once the next issue is out (Summer 2013), the NTJ will be available only on-line as a pdf. All readers will be able to access these files for a modest price through PayPal.

This material is too good to give away. At least, that was the consensus of the editors at our last meeting.

Muslims Have Their Scarves, Christians Their Sandwiches

Published on by D. G. Hart23 Comments

Political religion takes different forms. For political Islam, a women wearing a head scarf is a symbol of devotion and of defiance against western secularism. For American Christians, it looks like eating a chicken sandwich is a signal of a citizen’s belief, morality, and politics.

All of a sudden, biting into a fried chicken sandwich has become a political statement.

Chick-fil-A, the fast-food chain known for putting faith ahead of profits by closing on Sundays, is standing firm in its opposition to gay marriage after touching off a furor earlier this month.

Gay rights groups have called for a boycott, the Jim Henson Co. pulled its Muppet toys from kids’ meals, and politicians in Boston and Chicago told the chain it is not welcome there.

Across the Bible Belt, where most of the 1,600 restaurants are situated, Christian conservatives have thrown their support behind the Atlanta-based company, promising to buy chicken sandwiches and waffle fries next week on “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day.”

The rest of the news story is here.

As theatrical as the controversy over Chick-fil-A may be (and the company may actually do well from the adverse publicity which is still publicity), one point stands out, though by now it may be a little stale. According to this news story, the mayors of Boston and Chicago have said that Chick-fil-A is unwelcome in those cities. According to Rahm Emanuel, “Chick-fil-A values are not Chicago values.” The mayor likely said this thinking that he was taking a courageous stand for diversity and tolerance. But he was also expressing great intolerance in the name of diversity and tolerance.

That may be the intellectual hobgoblin that haunts everyone living in a liberal democracy, though usually only libertarians see that tolerance means toleration even for groups or persons whose views are nutty or objectionable. But it is odd that bright people like Emanuel don’t see that they are erecting a form of intellectual orthodoxy that is just as inflexible as anything the Religious Right might construct.

What Emanuel also fails to see is truth that Thomas Jefferson recognized as basic to living in a free republic. The president’s line about the irrelevance of religion would seem to apply here: “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Does Chick-fil-A actually hurt Emanuel or other residents of Chicago just because the owner objects to gay marriage? Ideas are supposed to be freely held in America, as long as they don’t hurt others. (Hurt feelings don’t count since we all face people, ideas, and acts in the United States that don’t empower and affirm us.) Since Chick-fil-A provides a service that many use, and creates jobs that produce tax-payers, why does Emanuel actually care about Dan Cathy’s ideas?

Yes, liberals can be hypocritical. But so are conservatives. What’s surprising is that liberals can be as dumb as (they think) their political opposition.

Postscript: Matthew Lee Anderson makes a good point when he distinguishes “tolerant” (i.e., liberal) from “intolerant” (i.e. Religious Right) consumer boycotts. The latter objects to specific products, the former to ideas. So it’s not the chicken sandwich that offends, but the ideas of the guy who makes it. Perfectionism lives.

Of Choice Meats and Good Cigars

Published on by D. G. Hart24 Comments

Our friendly interlocutor, Zrim, took a dose of exception to the recent post here about drinking and smoking with Mike Horton – not with Mark Dever. He makes the plausible point that many Reformed types have graduated from a fundamentalist piety to the full-orbed one of smoking, drinking, and maybe even cussing, as part of the cage-phase of becoming Reformed.

He writes:

I have found it crowded with more or less two types: ascetic legalists and sophomoric libertarians who used to be ascetic legalists. . . . Then there is the liberty camp. Blowing smoke into the faces of their past, these find true piety to be measured by relative consumption. There seems always something to prove to some phantom somewhere in the individual or collective self, real or imagined. The way an adolescent speaks a bit higher on the phone so her parents know she is fraternizing with the neighborhood bad boy, certain libertarians want the details of their consumption known to their phantoms.

As I have admitted, this is a point that all Reformed Protestants who revel in the strong consciences need to consider.

But from the other side of the aisle comes the Reformed tradition itself. One of the more puzzling features of the original Protestant movement was a concern for eating meat – an act that hardly anyone but the most world-and-life view crazed would regard as essentially religious.. In one of the earliest Reformed creeds, Zwingli’s “Sixty-Seven Articles,” we read that the Christian “is free to eat all foods at any time.” This stemmed from the first outbreak of Protestantism in Zurich, eating sausage on Friday, a day on which Roman Catholics fasted by abstaining from meat. And not very long after Zwingli’s creed came the Tetrapolitan Confession which devoted four chapter to eating – or more precisely, to eating in contrast to fasting. One of the chapters was “Of the Choice of Meats.” The chapter on fasting has this:

When, therefore, we saw very evidently that the chief men in the Church beyond the authority of Scripture assumed this authority so to enjoin fasts as to bind men’s consciences, we allowed consciences to be freed from these snares, but by the Scriptures, and especially Paul’s writings, which with singular earnestness removes these rudiments of the world from the necks of Christians. . . . For if St. Paul (than whom no man at any time taught Christ more certainly) maintains that through Christ we have obtained such liberty in external things that he not only allows no creature the right to burden those who believe in Christ, even with those ceremonies and observances which God himself appointed, and wished in their own time to be profitable, but also denounces as having fallen away from Christ, and that Christ is of none effect to those who suffer themselves to be made servant thereto, what verdict do we think should be passed on those commandments which men have devised of themselves, not only without any oracle, but also without any example worthy of being followed, and which, therefore, are unto most not only beggarly and weak, but also hurtful; not elements – i.e., rudiments of holy discipline – but impediments of true godliness? (Ch. VIII)

One possible point to draw from this difficult prose, as sophomoric as it might appear, is that to have a theological journal, the NTJ, dedicated to the chemical found in tobacco is to bear witness to a prominent streak in the Reformed tradition about the importance of proclaiming and demonstrating Christian liberty. If meat on Friday was the way to expose the tyranny of man-made rules and false teaching in the sixteenth-century church, how much more is tobacco today a way to expose the sacred cows of both believers and citizens in the greatest smoke-free nation on God’s green earth?

Ad Hominem or, How to Read Criticism

Published on by D. G. Hart18 Comments

Here are a couple hypotheticals. Both have to do with the ways people may take offense selectively.

First, say I am a political theorist who greatly admires the Federalist Papers (which I am not) and the arguments found there about the need for a Constitution that specifies the branches of a new federal government and their powers. If someone came along and said that federalism was the most wicked political notion ever known to man because it violated the divinely ordained rule of monarchs, would I not object because of my federalist convictions? In other words, would it matter to my federalist convictions that the attacker of federalism did not name John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, or James Madison explicitly? Wouldn’t I understand an attack on federalism to include those figures most identified with developing federalist thought (at least in the United States)?

Second, say I am a huge fan of the Coen Brothers’ movies (which I am) and someone comes along and tells me that the Coen brother’s are some of the least gifted and most adolescent of indie American directors who dabble merely in fashionable postmodernism, would I not feel my aesthetic toes trod upon even if this critic of the Coens did not mention their two best movies by name, “Miller’s Crossing” and “Hudsucker Proxy”? I mean, is a general put-down of the Coen brothers easier to take simply because it is general and lacks specifics? Or is the general rejection more sweeping because it lacks specifics that might provide wiggle room for hurt feelings? Continue reading “Ad Hominem or, How to Read Criticism” →

The Great Debate Concluded

Published on by D. G. Hart2 Comments

(Reprinted from NTJ, April 1997)

From: Glenn Morangie

To: T. Glen Livet

Date: 9/23/96 5:03pm

Subject: Re: Psalmody -Reply -Reply -Reply -Reply

Glen,

I have been so long in responding because they actually want me to do work here. Go figure.

I also couldn’t help but revel in your remark that I was “right on target.” Letting that go on the superhighway for two or so weeks was about as much delight as I have had in a long time. Yes, I do lead a sheltered life.

Finally, you didn’t write anything with which I disagree. I believe we have come to about as good a resolution as possible — which is, I think, 1) that the case for exclusive psalmody is not tight, 2) that the direction of redemptive history indicates that other songs reflecting later acts of God are worthwhile, if not necessary, 3) but that the theological insights which informed the case for psalms are pretty good, and 4) that our tradition was appropriately suspicious of hymns. Continue reading “The Great Debate Concluded” →

We Apologize

Published on by D. G. Hart4 Comments

Because some readers of the NTJ took exception to a recent article, and because we had no intention of giving offense, we offer the following apology:

With reference to the article “Priorities” in the last NTJ (Winter 2009), the editors unreservedly apologize for implying that there is any tension between the position of Carl Trueman and Richard Gaffin on the matter of justification regarding the bounds of confessional orthodoxy; we also apologize for the fact that Dr. Gaffin was quoted out of context in the article in a manner that distorted his views, and we affirm that his recent response to John Fesko in Ordained Servant (March 2009) represents a satisfactory clarification of the comment we misquoted; we further apologize for implying that Dr. Gaffin’s views are contrary to the Protestant confessional consensus on justification and for writing that they constitute “a new perspective on Paul,” which uses eschatology to overturn the consensus of the Reformers and the Reformed creeds; and we acknowledge that the biblical notion of union with Christ does not contradict or contravene, directly or impliedly, anything taught in the Westminster Standards.

D. G. Hart and John R. Muether

Father Interlocutor

Published on by D. G. Hart2 Comments

Richard John Neuhaus, who died fairly suddenly on Jan. 8, 2009, was an inspiration for the NTJ, both as an editor and a critic of mainstream American Christianity (read: Protestantism). That is about where any comparison between this publication and his, First Things, begins and abruptly ends. Where Neuhaus rubbed shoulders with religious and political elites in New York City, Washington, D.C., and the Vatican, the editors of the NTJ occasionally run into faculty from other Reformed seminaries, mix with commissioners at the OPC’s General Assembly, and occasionally give a paper at a professional learned society. Where Neuhaus used those connections to raise funds for an intellectual journal of remarkable substance, the editors of the NTJ subsidize the publication of their “journal” by smoking pipes more than cigars. (As they say, “pennies a bowl.”) Where Neuhaus drew on a gifted set of writers and editors to produce a variety of strong articles and reviews, the editors of the NTJ rely on a handful of writers whose total is increased by sometimes employing pseudonyms.

If truth be told, the idea for the section of the NTJ called, “39 Alexander Hall,” was one part Machen, the other part Neuhaus. We not only wanted to use the space to editorialize in the royal we, we hoped to replicate in a small way Neuhaus’ combination of wit, sarcasm, nay-saying, and clarity of conviction in “The Public Square.”

Not so fast, pilgrim. To read this piece in its entirety, you need to subscribe to the NTJ.

It Can't Happen Here

Published on by D. G. Hart5 Comments

About twenty years ago, when George Marsden came out with his history of Fuller Seminary, Reforming Fundamentalism (1987), faculty, administrators, and board members at Westminster Seminary invited the author to talk to them about what the history of FTS might teach them. The general verdict of many who participated in that seminar with Marsden was that Fuller’s break with its founding faculty’s mission – especially on the doctrine of inerrancy – could not happen at WTS.

Sure, Fuller like Westminster had tried to replicate Old Princeton’s commitments to historic Protestantism and first-rate scholarship. But FTS received the Princeton tradition more awkwardly than WTS. Even if Westminster, like Fuller, was a parachurch institution and so free from the oversight of a governing church, WTS was so closely tied to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church – all its faculty were OP ministers – that Westminster is still often confused as the seminary of the OPC. In addition, WTS tried to perpetuate Old Princeton’s pursuit of polemical theology as part of its mission to maintain and defend the Reformed faith; Fuller by contrast hoped to achieve a kinder, gentler Old Princeton as part of its effort to wean fundamentalism from meanness. (Fuller’s kindness would eventually take the form of concluding that Machen too was mean and his polemics unnecessary.) Furthermore, Westminster’s faculty subscribed the Westminster Standards in their entirety – maybe the name was important, ya think? Fuller could only embrace a modified Calvinism through its own statement of faith. These differences led to the supposition that FTS could not happen to WTS.

(Not so fast, pilgrm.  To read the entire essay, you need to subscribe to the NTJ.  You don’t have to smoke to get it.)