Category: Novus Ordo Seclorum

Does It Fall Short of Objectionable While Also Qualifying as Inspiring?

Published on by D. G. Hart13 Comments

Wilbur Cross issued the following Thanksgiving Day proclamation in 1936 as Governor of Connecticut (thanks to Michael Sean Winters):

Time out of mind at this turn of the seasons when the hardy oak leaves rustle in the wind and the frost gives a tang to the air and the dusk falls early and the friendly evenings lengthen under the heel of Orion, it has seemed good to our people to join together in praising the Creator and Preserver, who has brought us by a way that we did not know to the end of another year. In observance of this custom, I appoint Thursday, the twenty-sixth of November, as a day of Public Thanksgiving for the blessings that have been our common lot and have placed our beloved State with the favored regions of earth – for all the creature comforts: the yield of the soil that has fed us and the richer yield from labor of every kind that has sustained our lives – and for all those things, as dear as breath to the body, that quicken man’s faith in his manhood, that nourish and strengthen his spirit to do the great work still before him: for the brotherly word and act; for honor held above price; for steadfast courage and zeal in the long, long search after truth; for liberty and for justice freely granted by each to his fellow and so as freely enjoyed; and for the crowning glory and mercy of peace upon our land; – that we may humbly take heart of these blessings as we gather once again with solemn and festive rites to keep our Harvest Home.

I myself (all about me) like this because Cross, who held a Ph.D. in English from Yale and was dean of the University’s graduate school for almost 15 years, used imagery that maybe doesn’t soar but does turn down a road generally not taken in expressions of civil religion. I also prefer such proclamations to come from state governments rather than the Feds.

But I do wonder if such an expression of thanksgiving to the divine would be sufficiently devout for the BeeBees, for instance. At the same time, I can’t help but think of Jewish Americans, like the ones portrayed in Avalon and Annie Hall, who could never figure out why they needed to eat Turkey once a year.

Why Not Reformed Anabaptists?

Published on by D. G. Hart99 Comments

One of the inexplicable aspects of contemporary Reformed Protestantism is the indifference if not ridicule that some Vossians show for two-kingdom theology. This is odd because if any of the current options for living in this world capture the Vossian eschatology than 2k — with a sharp rejection of any immanentization of the eschaton — I have yet to see it. Neo-Calvinists don’t (even if Geerhardus Vos himself leaned neo-Cal). Theonomists? Are you kidding me? Transformationalists of whatever stripe abuse Christianity all the time to add a holy and spiritual lift to any number of earthly and temporal activities.

Nevertheless, 2k continues to fall well short of Vossianism’s stringent standards. Hence, the recent review of David VanDrunen’s Natural Law and Two Kingdoms by William Dennison in the current issue of the Westminster Theological Journal (75: 349-70). I will leave readers to find the rhetoric that surely pushes the plausibility envelope. But Dennison’s conclusion is downright odd:

. . . a number of Reformed and evangelical Christians will champion VanDrunen’s thesis since they continue to loiter in a consciousness shaped by the Holy Roman Empire when the institutions of church and state defined the core of Western human existence as one of the most persistent problems. For them, such a paradigm provides justification for their daily captivation with politico-cultural issues without acknowledging how they may be jeopardizing or compromising their Christian identity. Sadly, in this condition they refuse to deal honestly with the full-orbed eschatological fabric of biblical revelation that has now reached the “fullness of time” . . . . Instead, these believers are paralyzed as they hold on to the “flesh” (in this case, a fixation upon the political nature of a State outside the doman of Christ as mediator of redemption) while trying to live out of the “Spirit.” In other words, VanDrunen’s NL2K model gives a rationale for having one foot solidly in place in the civil culture, and the ohter foot solidly in place in the kingdom of heaven. . . . (369)

Unless I am mistaken, the Augustinian construction of the heavenly and earthly cities is about the only option for Christians who want to avoid the Federal Vision error of imitating Eusebius’ man crush on Constantine, the Benedictine option of leaving civil society for the monastery, or the Anabaptist path of renouncing the magistrate, the sword, and self-defense even as worthy of Christians. As long as the Lord tarries, human beings (saved and unsaved) will live on planet earth and need the magistrate to supply a modicum of social order — that’s why Paul wrote about magistrates being ordained by God. If Dennison wants us to live in the full-orbed eschatology of Scripture, where exactly should we tell the movers to put our stuff or where should we cook our meals? Apparently, behind the pearly gates.

VanDrunen has essentially removed the weapons of spiritual warfare out of the hands of the church with a passion upon the temporal order of two governments and, thus, constructed for believers a provisional model as the dominant paradigm to transport them as a pilgrim people. After all, it is no small task to call the Reformed and broader Christian world to face up to the essential character of biblical eschatology, to ask that all ministers and person in the pew, surrender, think, and live in the christocentric eschatological nature of biblical revelation. So instead of living out the full-orbed conditions of biblical eschatology seated with Christ in the heavenly places, VanDrunen’s NL2K paradigm has surrendered the essential eternal character of the progressive post-fall revelation of God — the seed of the woman versus the seed of the serpent — to focus the believer’s attention upon living in the realm of “commonality” that exists in the civitas permixta. Following such a path, however will only mean that the obsessions with politics which has crippled much of the history of the church will never find resolution, and, even more impoprtant, that believers will ignore their true eschatological freedom from bondage in the present and eternal reign of Christ.

Reading this makes me think we need to talk less about Reformed Baptists and more about Reformed Anabaptists since Dennison sure sounds a lot like the peasants who interpreted the gospel freedom declared by Luther (via Paul) to mean they should be liberated from their social rank as serfs. Would Dennison tell a Christian civil magistrate he is being worldly to think about local laws or policy proposals, that he should as a follower of Christ leave his day job? Does he even suggest that Christian parents are guilty of fleshly concerns to think about sending their children to a Christian college? (The New Testament does seem to have some instruction about life in this world, but maybe I too force a 2k reading on Scripture.)

Still, when Dennison faults VanDrunen for constructing “believers a provisional model as the dominant paradigm to transport them as a pilgrim people” because it is “no small task” to call Christians to live in the light of biblical eschatology, can’t Dennison see that 2k does better than any other option — aside from Reformed Anabaptist — to encourage Christians to live as pilgrim people who know that the affairs of the state are inconsequential compared to those of the kingdom of Christ. My favorite example of this rearrangement of priorities is to try to convince Orthodox Presbyterians that the news in New Horizons is really way more important than what the New York Times’ reporters cover. Most people chuckle because the notion seems absurd. But it is true and that is one of the major points of 2k — the church matters more than politics. Dennison, however, refuses to give credit to 2kers. He only sees threat.

So to show the advantages of 2k and that 2kers themselves may be doing more along the lines of the eschatology that Dennison promotes, here is one example of the two-kingdom doctrine applied to St. Abe, that is, Abraham Lincoln, the president whom most U.S. Protestants regard as the embodiment of Christian and American ideals:

In 1967, sociologist Robert Bellah launched the modern career of “civil religion” as a concept, a way to examine how, on the one hand, the state adopts religious language, ritual, holidays, and symbolism to bind a nation together and how, on the other hand, it elevates its own values and ideas to the status of holy doctrine. Regarding the first type, University of Toronto political theorist Ronald Beiner recently defined civil religion as “the appropriation of religion by politics for its purposes.” Lincoln had been doing this to the Bible since at least 1838. He ended his Lyceum Address by applying Matthew 16:18 to American liberty: “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” More famously, in 1858 he quoted Matthew 12:25 to characterize the precarious state of the Union: “A house divided against itself shall not stand.”

Such an appropriation of Christianity for politics dominates the Gettysburg Address, from its opening “four score” to its closing “shall not perish.” In the 1970s, literary scholar M.E. Bradford, in his essay, “The Rhetoric for Continuing Revolution,” identified the Gettysburg Address’s “biblical language” as the speech’s “most important formal property.” That is undoubtedly so. Lincoln drew from the King James Version’s archaic words and cadences, as he opened with the biblical-sounding “four score,” an echo of the Psalmist’s “three score and ten” years allotted to man on this earth. He continued with “brought forth,” the words in the Gospel of Luke that describe Mary’s delivery of Jesus—the first instance of what turns out to be a repeated image of conception, birth, life, death, and new birth, culminating in the promise of eternal life in the words “shall not perish”—a startling echo of Jesus’ words to Nicodemus in John 3:16 (“whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life”).

Lincoln’s speech also engages the other side of civil religion—not the appropriation of the sacred for the purposes of the state but the elevation of the secular into a political religion. Early in his career, Lincoln had explicitly promoted this kind of civil religion. Again in his 1838 Lyceum address, he called for fidelity to “the blood of the Revolution” and the Declaration, the Constitution, and the laws to serve as America’s sustaining “political religion” now that the founding generation was passing away. In 1863, Lincoln filled the Gettysburg Address with the words “dedicated,” “consecrated,” and “hallow.” The cumulative effect of this sacred language was to set the American Founding, the suffering of the Civil War, and the national mission apart from the mundane world and transport the war dead and their task into a transcendent realm.

Evangelicals Used to Be Transformationists Over This

Published on by D. G. Hart3 Comments

But now, not so much. (Thanks to Jonathan Coppage)

Giant online retailer Amazon.com Inc. is turning up the heat on rivals this holiday season and beyond under a new deal with the U.S. Postal Service for delivering packages on Sundays.

Starting this week, the postal service will bring Amazon packages on Sundays to shoppers’ doors in the Los Angeles and New York metropolitan areas at no extra charge. Next year, it plans to roll out year-round Sunday delivery to Dallas, New Orleans, Phoenix and other cities.

Getting packages on Sundays normally is expensive for customers. United Parcel Service Inc. doesn’t deliver on Sundays, according to a spokeswoman. And FedEx Corp. said Sunday “is not a regular delivery day,” though limited options are available.

The deal could be a boon for the postal service, which has been struggling with mounting financial losses and has been pushing to limit general letter mail delivery to five days a week.

Spokeswoman Sue Brennan said that letter mail volume is declining “so extremely,” yet package volume is “increasing in double-digit percentages.”

The postal service’s Sunday package delivery business has been very small, but the arrangement with Amazon for two of the retailer’s larger markets, Los Angeles and New York, should boost work considerably.

If You're the One Throwing Stones, Can You Still be a Martyr?

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

The BeeBee’s latest swipe at 2k involves a couple of oddities. The first is their identification with Deacon Stephen, arguably the first Christian martyr:

Hart and VanDrunnen are identical in their commitment to avoid the slightest appearance of triumphalism. You need know nothing more about the R2K error than that. And nothing more about true Christian faith than that, in the pursuit of the triumph of the Cross of Jesus Christ, millions of men and women of God across two millenia have been martyred for their public witness to the holiness of God, the conviction of sin and righteousness and judgment of the Holy Spirit, and the universal Lordship of Jesus Christ.

Starting with our beloved Deacon, Stephen.

It sure seems to me that Tim Bee is doing a better impersonation of the persecutor Saul than Stephen. I mean, the aggression he dishes out is always going in one direction, with sweeping condemnations not only of 2k ideas but also of 2kers’ character and motives. Tim and David are hardly suffering from 2kers attacking them. And if Tim Bee wants to identify with triumphalism, then he has not listened very carefully to the guy who went from Saul, the guy holding the coats of stone throwers, to Paul, the martyr:

For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. (1 Cor 1:22-25)

The BeeBees seem to think that public life, where the power is, is also a sign of the gospel’s power. No Christian witness before the magistrate, no triumph. It does explain their fondness for Doug Wilson who pines for a Christian society (Constantinianism) where faith came by conquest. I wonder if the Bee Bees are Christian enough to call for another round of Crusades.

The second oddity involves the Moscow Muhammad himself. I did listen to Doug Wilson and Dave VanDrunen’s lectures from last weekend at Covenant Presbyterian Church on Christ and culture. I was disappointed that recordings of the question and answer session were not available. But Wilson out of the blue in an entirely unrelated kerfuffle reported on a part of those exchanges which became fodder for the BeeBees:

This last weekend… I asked David VanDrunen …what God would think of a nation whose magistrate and people had become overwhelmingly (and sincerely) Christian, and who decided to confess Christ in the common realm, in the formerly secular realm. I asked if God would be displeased with that, and VanDrunen said yes, he thought God would be displeased with that.

When asked about VanDrunen’s follow up, Wilson replied:

. . . he said that it was because he wanted minorities (in this case, non-believers) to not be mistreated. The assumption behind that is that the secular state is more to be trusted with treating people right than Christians would be. But of course, Christians were the ones who invented civil liberties for all.

And with that, BeeBees and their minions are satisfied with Christian superiority, 2ker cluselessness, and the world’s debauchery. Never once did they consider, or Wilson with them, how silly such triumphalism is. I understand Wilson is a bit touchy about slavery, but he did bring the subject up once. At the conference in Vandalia, OH he also brought up segregation and how Christians were wrong to accept or defend the division of the races into separate public schools under Jim Crow. Perhaps he also knows something of the way that European Christians treated Jews, what Protestant magistrates did to Anabaptists, or what Constantine’s enforcers did to Arians. All of that goes away with an assertion that Christians invented civil rights? Did he learn nothing about rhetorical excess from his debates with Chris Hitchens?

Such dishonesty seems to go with the territory of thinking yourself a victim when you are really a bully.

The Third Sacrament (or 8th depending on your Western Christianity)

Published on by D. G. Hart1 Comment

Doug Sikkema follows up on his previous post about the earth as a sacrament, with acknowledgement to Wendell Berry. He explains why the language of sacramentalism is good for promoting care of creation:

I like this word, sacrament, because it demands a certain seriousness towards the necessity of death through which we have our life—a truth as physical as it is metaphysical. I also like its suggestion that there are not really sacred and unsacred places; rather, there are only sacred and desecrated places. There are places where we have abused water with toxic chemicals and waste; places where the air is so polluted we now have smog advisories to warn us to remain indoors; places where topsoil depletion, extreme deforestation, and mountain-top removal irrevocably alter—and diminish—landscapes for future generations. Such desecration is sickness. It’s a working “against the grain” of the natural processes of the created world within which we were made to move and have our being. It’s a breakdown of shalom.

And yet, he concludes this post with a point about the importance of language:

. . . language is important, and if we were to look back at the older meanings of certain words being tossed around, it might shape how we interact with our places today and change the landscape we pass on to those of tomorrow.

For starters, economy, from oikos (house) – nomos (law), is rooted in an understanding of household management. It’s a word rooted in local community, devotion to place, and the long labour of properly caring for a home that is passed down for future generations. Because of this, economics has always been tied to resources, much like it still is today. However, from the Latin resurgere (to rise again), resources are not simply commodities—although they must be used as such. Resources are meant to be replenished, to be a source we can return to repeatedly and, given the proper care, last as long as the sun gives us energy. Yet both words are tied together to sustainable home building.

If the industrialization of everything first ushered people off the land, the commodification of everything is keeping people off, to the land’s—and, subsequently, our—detriment. Yet if we are interested in our place, economics and resources might be the very new language we need. For if we will buy the lie of consumerist monoculture that we can be at home anywhere, one day we might realize, too late, we’ve been sold a bill of goods.

So if language is important, then perhaps someone with Sikkema’s last name should be careful about words like sacrament. I may be presumptuous in thinking Sikkema from a Dutch Calvinist background, but the name and the operation fit. In which case, he should need no reminder about what sacrament means:

We believe that our good God, mindful of our crudeness and weakness, has ordained sacraments for us to seal his promises in us, to pledge his good will and grace toward us, and also to nourish and sustain our faith.

He has added these to the Word of the gospel to represent better to our external senses both what he enables us to understand by his Word and what he does inwardly in our hearts, confirming in us the salvation he imparts to us.

For they are visible signs and seals of something internal and invisible, by means of which God works in us through the power of the Holy Spirit. So they are not empty and hollow signs to fool and deceive us, for their truth is Jesus Christ, without whom they would be nothing.

Moreover, we are satisfied with the number of sacraments that Christ our Master has ordained for us. There are only two: the sacrament of baptism and the Holy Supper of Jesus Christ. (Belgic, Art. 33)

Again, I have no objections to looking to Wendell Berry for instruction about the dangers — even evils — of industrialization, nor do I believe Sikkema’s concerns about the environment are off. I just don’t know why he needs to import the language of redemption to justify an earthly conviction that generally makes sense to most creatures. We don’t like it when people dump trash on our front lawns or in the hallway outside our front door. Why would the inhabitants of a region or the God who providentially (not redemptively) put them there object to people exporting waste to these inhabitants’ homeland? I don’t know why you need to gussy this up as some kind of gracious or salvation activity, unless, that is, if you’re used to blurring the temporal and the heavenly as so many neo-Calvinists are.

Who's Afraid of Distinguishing the Temporal from the Eternal?

Published on by D. G. Hart42 Comments

Neo-Calvinists are, is the short answer. Even James Bratt’s kvetch about the abuse of every-square-inch language, offered this resistance to hierarchical distinctions between the world and the spirit:

Over against any kind of body-soul, nature-grace, fulltimeChristianservicevs.secularwork dualism, Kuyper’s words insist that God can—must—be served anywhere and everywhere. No better jobs or worse jobs before the Lord by how “spiritual” they are. No writing off whole sectors of culture or society as inherently worldly, or privileging others as inherently good. No more traditional pietist (Victorian?) hierarchies. I get it, and endorse it.

Lots to unpack there and not enough space in a post to do it. A lot of the spade work needs to go in the direction of “pietist” and “Victorian” as code for some sort of objectionable distinction between the realms of religion and common life. At the same time, the entire history of the West, philosophy, and liberal education makes no sense without some kind of distinction between what Greeks, Romans, and Christians deemed were higher aspects of human existence (the realm of the spirit or philosophy or reason or language) and the lower (eating or sex or wealth). In fact, what continues to bedevil me about neo-Calvinism is this Turrets Syndrome like reaction to binary distinctions. It is as if the West was swimming along sorting out and thriving on the distinctions between spiritual/intellectual and temporal/physical spheres and along came Kuyper and said, “we will have none of it” or “this is all fault of the French Revolution.” And he might have added “we will not pay any attention to similar distinctions between flesh and spirit, or Caesar and God, in Scripture.” “Dualism is bad because all of life, the cosmos (do we hear an echo of Carl Sagan?) needs to be integrated.” So writes Kuyper in his famous Lectures:

. . . wherever two elements appear, as in this case the sinner and the saint, the temporal and the eternal, the terrestrial and the heavenly life, there is always danger of losing sight of their interconnection and of falsifying both by error or onesidedness. Christendom, it must be confessed, did not escape this error. A dualistic conception of regeneration was the cause of the rupture between the life of nature and the life of grace. It has, on account of its too intense contemplation of celestial things, neglected to give due attention to the world of God’s creation. It has, on account of its exclusive love of things eternal, been backward in the fulfilment of its temporal duties. It has neglected the care of the body because it cared too exclusively for the soul. And this one-sided, inharmonious conception in the course of time has led more than one sect to a mystic worshipping of Christ alone, to the exclusion of God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. Christ was conceived exclusively as the Savior, and His cosmological significance was lost out of sight.

This dualism, however, is by no means countenanced by the Holy Scriptures. (118)

What is particularly troubling about Kuyper’s disregard for distinguishing the temporal from the eternal is that paleo-Calvinism used this distinction for making sense of Christianity and the work of the church. For instance, here is the very confession and Kuyper subscribed on the Lord’s Supper:

We believe and confess that our Savior Jesus Christ has ordained and instituted the sacrament of the Holy Supper to nourish and sustain those who are already born again and ingrafted into his family: his church.

Now those who are born again have two lives in them. The one is physical and temporal– they have it from the moment of their first birth, and it is common to all. The other is spiritual and heavenly, and is given them in their second birth; it comes through the Word of the gospel in the communion of the body of Christ; and this life is common to God’s elect only.

Thus, to support the physical and earthly life God has prescribed for us an appropriate earthly and material bread, which is as common to all as life itself also is. But to maintain the spiritual and heavenly life that belongs to believers he has sent a living bread that came down from heaven: namely Jesus Christ, who nourishes and maintains the spiritual life of believers when eaten– that is, when appropriated and received spiritually by faith.
To represent to us this spiritual and heavenly bread Christ has instituted an earthly and visible bread as the sacrament of his body and wine as the sacrament of his blood. He did this to testify to us that just as truly as we take and hold the sacraments in our hands and eat and drink it in our mouths, by which our life is then sustained, so truly we receive into our souls, for our spiritual life, the true body and true blood of Christ, our only Savior. We receive these by faith, which is the hand and mouth of our souls. (Belgic Confession, Art. 35)

Parenthetically, if you apply this distinction then you might distinguish between the eternal words of Holy Writ and the temporal words of Shakespeare, which would in turn shape the way you understand the task of Christian education and the relationship between the humanities and divinity.

But if neo-Calvinists have their way, then Belgic makes a distinction that partakes too much of a pietistic or Roman Catholic or Greco-Roman view of the sacrament.

Meanwhile, Calvin himself relied on this very distinction between the temporal and eternal when trying to understand the relation of church, state, and the heavenly kingdom:

Having shown above that there is a twofold government in man, and having fully considered the one which, placed in the soul or inward man, relates to eternal life, we are here called to say something of the other, which pertains only to civil institutions and the external regulation of manners. For although this subject seems from its nature to be unconnected with the spiritual doctrine of faith, which I have undertaken to treat, it will appear as we proceed, that I have properly connected them, nay, that I am under the necessity of doing so, especially while, on the one hand, frantic and barbarous men are furiously endeavouring to overturn the order established by God, and, on the other, the flatterers of princes, extolling their power without measure, hesitate not to oppose it to the government of God. Unless we meet both extremes, the purity of the faith will perish. We may add, that it in no small degree concerns us to know how kindly God has here consulted for the human race, that pious zeal may the more strongly urge us to testify our gratitude. And first, before entering on the subject itself, it is necessary to attend to the distinction which we formerly laid down (Book 3 Chap. 19 sec. 16, et supra, Chap. 10), lest, as often happens to many, we imprudently confound these two things, the nature of which is altogether different. For some, on hearing that liberty is promised in the gospel, a liberty which acknowledges no king and no magistrate among men, but looks to Christ alone, think that they can receive no benefit from their liberty so long as they see any power placed over them. Accordingly, they think that nothing will be safe until the whole world is changed into a new form, when there will be neither courts, nor laws, nor magistrates, nor anything of the kind to interfere, as they suppose, with their liberty. But he who knows to distinguish between the body and the soul, between the present fleeting life and that which is future and eternal, will have no difficulty in understanding that the spiritual kingdom of Christ and civil government are things very widely separated. Seeing, therefore, it is a Jewish vanity to seek and include the kingdom of Christ under the elements of this world, let us, considering, as Scripture clearly teaches, that the blessings which we derive from Christ are spiritual, remember to confine the liberty which is promised and offered to us in him within its proper limits. (Institutes IV.20.1)

None of this means necessarily that neo-Calvinists are wrong and 2kers are right. Maybe Kuyper came along and corrected a deep flaw within both Reformed Protestantism and the West more generally. But since distinctions between spiritual and worldly affairs haunt the pages of Scripture, not to mention the leading texts of Western civilization, neo-Calvinists have some obligation to explain why they reject (or appear to) the categories that practically all Europeans and their offspring have used to make sense of the world and Christianity.

And People Wonder Why 2Kers Worry about Mixing Religion and Politics

Published on by D. G. Hart39 Comments

Daniel McCarthy explains why people (Christians included) should be skeptical of all parties and politicians, especially the GOP:

The story that voters are told today, both by Republicans themselves and by a mainstream media that views Republicans in general as extremely anti-government, is that the party has changed over the last five years. Whatever a Republican House may have done in 2003 just isn’t relevant to what a different Republican House wants in 2013.

There are two problems with that storyline. First, the 2003 Republican House was a continuation of the 1990s Republican House, which also shut down the government in a spending battle with a Democratic president. Something must have happened between 1995 and 2003 that led the Republican House to change its philosophy. In fact, several things happened, but the most important was the election of a Republican president in 2000. A Republican House would not have been eager to pass something like Medicare Part D under a Democratic president.

So if the small-government 1995 Republicans became the big-spending 2003 Republicans, what reason is there to believe that small-government 2013 Republicans won’t become big-spending 2017 or 2021 Republicans?

The second problem with the story that says Republicans have changed is that for all the new blood that has come into the congressional GOP, the party’s leaders—elected by its members, of course—are much the same people responsible for the 2003 Republican Party. John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Mitch McConnell, and Paul Ryan—the GOP’s present House and Senate leaders and its 2012 vice presidential nominee—all voted for Medicare Part D. The party’s 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney, instituted his own Obamacare-like system as governor of Massachusetts. This is a surprising leadership cadre for a party that’s supposed to be radically different in 2013 from what it was in 2003.

Instead of “Republicans have really changed,” a more plausible story is, “Republicans are pretty much the same,” both in key personnel and in principle. The principle the party has lived by in 1995, in 2003, and in 2013 is that Republican presidents and their policies are good, Democratic presidents and their policies are bad. The size of government or the national debt is a secondary concern, if that. The real test is what a party does when it holds power, not how desperately it struggles when the other party has power.

Rebellions, Good and Bad

Published on by D. G. Hart31 Comments

While Rush Hannivine (a conglomeration of Rush, Sean, and Mark) bemoan the federal government’s shut down of war memorials (and closing them to veterans), John Judis likens the Shutdown to one of the worst crises in American history. Since (all about) I am in the middle of a course on the Civil War and how Americans remember it and conjure its meaning, I was taken aback by any comparison of the current dysfunction in Washington (though it is constitutional dysfunction since the Constitution was designed with built-in dysfunction) to a war that took 640,000 lives and that forever underscores the dysfunctions of the founding (as in states vs. federal prerogatives or the legality of slavery). For all of the memorials that Americans have funded, built, and maintained, they don’t seem to be very adept at remembering arguably the bleakest part of U.S. history.

But Judis sticks to his comparison:

There is no simple explanation for why this is happening now, but there are precedents in American history for the kind of assault on government that the Republicans are mounting. First, there is the South of John Calhoun, which Sam Tannenhaus wrote about in The New Republic. Calhoun developed the doctrine of nullification—that states, claiming a higher Constitutional authority, could refuse to obey federal laws—in order to justify South Carolina’s opposition to tariffs adopted in 1828 and 1832. Calhoun’s doctrine became the basis of the state’s rights argument against attempts by the federal government to limit the expansion of slavery and a century later to enforce racial desegregation.

Secondly, there is the rise in 1937 of a conservative coalition of conservative Southern Democrats and rural Midwestern Republicans to block and repeal the New Deal through parliamentary maneuvers and investigations, which I wrote about two years ago. Calhounist nullification anticipates the anti-federal tactics of today’s Republican right. The conservative coalition of the late 1930s anticipates the composition of today’s Republican coalition and its grievance: the expansion of the federal safety net. Both of these older movements cited the United States Constitution as their authority for attempting to defy or dismantle the federal government. Like today’s Republican rightists, both older movements claimed to represent tradition and morality against a decadent modernity. They looked backwards. They were reactionary rather than conservative movements.

What happened to these movements gives some indication of what could happen to today’s Republican intransigents. The Calhounists precipitated a civil war, in which over 600,000 Americans died. The conservative coalition, on the other hand, faded temporarily from view and only reemerged in the last decades. That was because in 1941 Americans went to war against Nazi Germany and Japan. World War II unified Americans. In modern wars, the national government has to call upon all its citizens to do their part and to submerge their differences. Business made peace with labor; blacks served alongside whites. And that spirit of national unification lasted for 15 years after the war. It helped to give rise—although not without conflict—to a social compact between business and labor, an end to racial segregation and the preservation and expansion of New Deal programs like social security. If World War II had not intervened, it’s very likely that the conservative coalition would have grown stronger, and would have been able to stop the expansion of, if not undermine, social security.

Dismissing these rebellious Americans as reactionary is one way to make sense of U.S. history, but it stumbles and breaks its neck when U.S. administration after U.S. administration supports rebel groups in places like Syria and Egypt. Had a U.S. administration in 1861, say, opted for a two-state solution to the U.S. — which is what many Americans support in Israel — the South may have had the U.S.’s blessing in secession. In other words, Americans on both the left and the right are remarkably selective in how they celebrate freedom fighters, independence, and resistance to tyranny. What is still lacking is some kind of metric that says Muslim rebels are better than Christian southern rebels who are both inferior to deist Tea Party (original) rebels. Don’t get me wrong. I’m no advocate of rebellion at all times and in all places. But I do tire of making the South the whipping boy for defenders of the federal government when America has a long tradition of resisting the consolidation of power in the hands of centralized (national) authorities. If folks like Judis can seen the problem with Hitler or Assad, how about the NSA under Bush and Obama?

The other annoying part of Judis’ comparison is to suggest that the Shutdown may turn the U.S. into the Weimar Republic.

The civil war, as Marx once wrote, was a revolutionary clash that pitted one mode of production against another. Nothing so momentous is at stake today. It also pitted one region against another, and it was fought with rifles and men on horseback. The largest effect is likely to be continued dysfunction in Washington, which if it continues over a decade or so, will threaten economic growth and America’s standing in the world, undermine social programs like the Affordable Care Act, and probably encourage more radical movements on the right and the left. Think of Italy, Greece, or Weimar Germany. Or think about what the United States would have been like if World War II had not occurred, and if Europe, the United States, and Japan had failed to pull themselves out of the Great Depression.

This is the Chamber-of-Commerce take on the Shutdown — it’s bad for business and all those programs that the economy funds through taxation and regulation. What Judis seems to forget (again) is that if you want economic growth, at least the kind we now “enjoy” with a stock market that rises seemingly independent of employment rates, property values, manufacturing, or agricultural output, a civil war may be what the Chamber ordered. Here is a reminder from Allen Guelzo:

Northern financiers benefited in even more remarkable ways [from the Civil War]. The seven Democratic administrations that straddled the first six decades of the nineteenth century gave little if any encouragement to the development of American finance by holding the government’s role in the economy strictly to exchanges of specie. A good deal of the capitalization of American industry in the 1820s and 1830s had to be imported from abroad. But the war and the Republicans changed that: First, the threat of the civil war drove foreign investors off the American securities market, drove down demand, and allowed American investors to step into the vacuum; then, the Republicans dismissed the Democrats’ abiding suspicion of the financial markets and took the nation off the gold standard; finally, the immense amounts of money needed to carry on the war crated a new class of financiers — bankers, insurers and brokers such as Jay Cooke — who dealt in unprecedented volumes of cash and securities. The creation of the national banking system in 1863, and the subsequent disappearance of state bank currencies from Northern circulation, helped to further shift massive new amounts of financial power in the hands of financiers.

But there was a downside, one that may still be fresh in our memory:

Northern finance quickly outstripped the capacity of the Federal government to oversee and regulate it, and the financial community soon found itself agitating for a return to the gold standard, to to restrain the freewheeling dealings of the financial markets, but to slow down currency inflation and attach the markets to a standard independent of federal control. This meant, in effect, returning the United States to its dependence on the international flow of specie, especially through the hands of British financiers, and when the British financial markets failed in 1873, they carried Jay Cooke and other American financiers down with them.

Guelzo continues:

The most important change in the shape of the postwar American economy was organizational rather than industrial or agricultural; . . . Before the Civil War, only about 7 percent of American manufacturing was organized in corporations. . . . By 1900 corporations accounted for 69 percent of all manufacturing. . . “Now,” warned James A. Garfield in 1874, “a class of corporations unknown to the early law writers has arisen, and to them have been committed the vast powers of the railroad and the telegraph, the great instruments by which modern communities live, move, and have their being.” (Fateful Lightning, 519-21)

The lesson very could well be that original notion of too big to fail came with a refusal to allow the South to secede and thereby reduce the size of the U.S. By insisting on perpetual union and continuing to mock those who dissent from the federal government’s demands for uniformity and standardization, the U.S. has become the sort of imperial power against which its founders rebelled.

Differentiation of Ecclesiastical and Civil, Differentiation of Ecclesiastical and Civil (rinse, chant, and repeat)!

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

Tim Bayly is at it again with a post containing his talk at a CREC gathering. It is another instance of that Framean habit of mind which blurs categories simply because topics sort of sound or look alike. In this case, he is for integration — as in integrating faith and politics, faith and learning. But he also believes he can score points against 2kers by upholding the integration of races. So bringing up the racism of Southern Presbyterians who affirmed and taught the spirituality of the church is another way of making the point that 2kers are against integration — that is, we split church and state, faith and learning, whites and blacks.

The problem is that Tim can’t quite stay on track. He brings up his father’s decision to start a Christian school in the 1940s located in the suburbs of Philadelphia. The integration here is faith and learning, and racial, since well before the Civil Rights movement Tim’s dad founded a school that welcomed blacks and whites. But what proves integration also proves separation. The Baylys school was not part of the public school system. It segregated Christians from non-Christians (and even other Christians) in the public schools. You can’t have integration all the time in a neo-Calvinist world that runs on the fuel of anti-thesis. In fact, the Bayly’s MO is largely one of underscoring the difference between true Christians and fake ones, between people who are good for America (Christians) and those who aren’t (professors at Covenant Seminary and gays). Integration can’t quite circle the square. But that’s okay. It allows Tim to feel superior in an integrated way.

The difficulties in Tim’s assessment also lead to such woppers as this:

Who is the Reformed group who is whole-hog into patriotism today? Which men are wrapping themselves in the flag, crying out “my country, right or wrong?” Who are the Reformed men who are zealous to gag God’s prophets of righteousness, instead casting their lot in with the ACLU, the powers that be inside the Beltway, and the chattering classes up and down the seaboards, Eastern and Western as they all chant: “Separation of church and state! Separation of church and state!”

I think the answer is supposed to be 2kers, but last time I checked, it was 2kers who actually wonder out loud about the propriety of patriotism in Christian circles, such as the display of the U.S. flag in churches. 2kers have also been known to avoid commenting on politics, thus leaving the subject to the deliriums of folks like the Baylys and other neo-Calvinists. Try telling these guys that Christ’s kingdom transcends the politics of any nation and see who starts bellyaching about “my country.”

Even so, Tim goes to Cornel Venema for apparent help to undermine any sense that the 2k position enjoys some kind of standing historically among the Reformed churches:

…the two kingdoms doctrine is alleged to be the venerable, original position of the Reformed churches. …(This) historical claim on the part of two kingdoms advocates… represents a tendentious reading of the historical record.

The difficulty for Venema and Bayly is that the Reformed churches have historically affirmed a differentiation between the civil and ecclesiastical spheres.

God, the supreme Lord and King of all the world, hath ordained civil magistrates, to be, under him, over the people, for his own glory, and the public good: and, to this end, hath armed them with the power of the sword, for the defense and encouragement of them that are good, and for the punishment of evildoers. (WCF 23.1)

That’s the magistrate’s duty. It is hardly the same or comparable to the church’s:

Unto this catholic visible church Christ hath given the ministry, oracles, and ordinances of God, for the gathering and perfecting of the saints, in this life, to the end of the world: and doth, by his own presence and Spirit, according to his promise, make them effectual thereunto. (25.3)

And that has something to do with what synods may or may not do:

Synods and councils are to handle, or conclude nothing, but that which is ecclesiastical: and are not to intermeddle with civil affairs which concern the commonwealth, unless by way of humble petition in cases extraordinary; or, by way of advice, for satisfaction of conscience, if they be thereunto required by the civil magistrate. (31.4)

This may not be exactly an endorsement of the separation of church and state, but the distinction between civil and ecclesiastical spheres is certainly more in the 2k ballpark than one where integration rules, which means it is far more venerable and original that Venema indicates. I mean, if you want the integration of church and state, you likely don’t distinguish overly precisely the work of the church from the task of the magistrate, which is exactly what is missing in those who advocate a Christian America or Christian schools. Introduce the distinction between the civil/temporal and ecclesiastical/heavenly and these folks think you are a bastard child of Thomas Jefferson.

And then if you question whether the church or Christians or both should be inaugurating God’s kingdom, the way Calvin did, then you are definitely a blasphemer. And yet, those early Reformed Protestants seemed to be able to keep their wits about the direction of history and not trying to associate cultural or political advances or set backs with God’s divine plan:

THE SECTS. We therefore condemn all who deny a real resurrection of the flesh (II Tim. 2:18), or who with John of Jerusalem, against whom Jerome wrote, do not have a correct view of the glorification of bodies. We also condemn those who thought that the devil and all the ungodly would at some time be saved, and that there would be an end to punishments. For the Lord has plainly declared: “Their fire is not quenched, and their worm does not die” (Mark 9:44). We further condemn Jewish dreams that there will be a golden age on earth before the Day of Judgment, and that the pious, having subdued all their godless enemies, will possess all the kingdoms of the earth. For evangelical truth in Matt., chs. 24 and 25, and Luke, ch. 18, and apostolic teaching in II Thess., ch. 2, and II Tim., chs. 3 and 4, present something quite different.

I have no doubt that being a confessional Reformed Protestant is hard. It is easier to look at big churches, celebrity pastors, and religiously boisterous politicos as bearing the marks of the coming kingdom. Seeing the world through the eyes of faith, and not being duped by externals or cultural decay requires sobriety, restraint, and patience in ways that conflict with our own desire for either justice to prevail or self to be vindicated. But if Calvin could summon up such discipline even in the glory days of Reformed Geneva, surely Tim Bayly can do the same in the face of Obamacare:

We must, therefore, know that the happiness which is promised to us in Christ does not consist in external advantages—such as leading a joyful and tranquil life, abounding in wealth, being secure against all injury, and having an affluence of delights, such as the flesh is wont to long for—but properly belongs to the heavenly life. As in the world the prosperous and desirable condition of a people consists partly in the abundance of temporal good and domestic peace, and partly in the strong protection which gives security against external violence; so Christ also enriches his people with all things necessary to the eternal salvation of their souls and fortifies them with courage to stand unassailable by all the attacks of spiritual foes. Whence we infer, that he reigns more for us than for himself, and that both within us and without us; that being replenished, in so far as God knows to be expedient, with the gifts of the Spirit, of which we are naturally destitute, we may feel from their first fruits, that we are truly united to God for perfect blessedness; and then trusting to the power of the same Spirit, may not doubt that we shall always be victorious against the devil, the world, and every thing that can do us harm. To this effect was our Saviour’s reply to the Pharisees, “The kingdom of God is within you.” “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation,” (Luke 17:21, 22). It is probable that on his declaring himself to be that King under whom the highest blessing of God was to be expected, they had in derision asked him to produce his insignia. But to prevent those who were already more than enough inclined to the earth from dwelling on its pomp, he bids them enter into their consciences, for “the kingdom of God” is “righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost,” (Rom. 14:17). These words briefly teach what the kingdom of Christ bestows upon us. Not being earthly or carnal, and so subject to corruption, but spiritual, it raises us even to eternal life, so that we can patiently live at present under toil, hunger, cold, contempt, disgrace, and other annoyances; contented with this, that our King will never abandon us, but will supply our necessities until our warfare is ended, and we are called to triumph: such being the nature of his kingdom, that he communicates to us whatever he received of his Father. Since then he arms and equips us by his power, adorns us with splendour and magnificence, enriches us with wealth, we here find most abundant cause of glorying, and also are inspired with boldness, so that we can contend intrepidly with the devil, sin, and death. In fine, clothed with his righteousness, we can bravely surmount all the insults of the world: and as he replenishes us liberally with his gifts, so we can in our turn bring forth fruit unto his glory. (Institutes, II.15.4)

What Machen Should Have Said

Published on by D. G. Hart4 Comments

About the value of Christian education (if he were a neo-Calvinist):

This, then, is the point. The war between Christ and Satan is a global war. It is carried on, first, in the hearts of men for the hearts of men. Through preaching and teaching in the church and in the home, through the witness borne individual men everywhere, the allegiance of men is turned away from Satan to Christ. But the warfare is also carried on where you might least expect it. It is carried on in the field of reading and writing and arithmetic, in the field of nature study and history. At every point Satan seeks boys and girls, as well as men and women to take the attitude that he got Eve and Adam to take at the beginning of history. Everywhere and at every point Satan’s theme-song is: “Let’s be broad-minded; at the beginning of our research your hypothesis about God’s creating and directing the course of history is as good as mine and mine is as good as yours. Now let’s
be open-minded and find out from the facts, whose hypothesis fits reality.”

And now the reason why we are willing as Christian believers in general, and as Christian parents in particular, to sacrifice so largely for the sake of having Christian schools is that we want our children with us to see the vision of the all-conquering Christ as he wrests the culture of mankind away from Satan and brings it to its consummation when the new heavens and the new earth on which righteousness shall dwell, at last appears.

We would have our young men and women become true soldiers under Christ as with him they go conquering and to conquer every domain of life for Christ. When they thus become good soldiers of Christ, they will be free and be truly themselves. They will share in the trophies which Christ wrests from Satan’s power: “For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death, or the present or the future, all are yours; and you are Christ’s and Christ is God’s” (1 Cor 3:22) (Cornelius Van Til, Essays on Christian Education)

Well, maybe Van Til would not have been so antithetical in testimony before Congress. But since neo-Calvinists keep telling us that religion must not be cordoned off behind the church parking lot fence, that dualism is anathema, that we need more religion in public, I wonder why it would wrong to think that Van Til would have said this in Congress. Not that there is anything with saying this in Congress. It is a free country. But this is clearly not the way Machen chose to address matters of public life, whether education or the Sabbath.

In which case, it is striking how Machen did address the Christian school teachers (in the quotation that neo-Calvinists love to cite). This is how the talk begins (no antithesis, just American politics):

The Christian school is to be favored for two reasons. In the first place, it is important for American liberty; in the second place, it is important for the propagation of the Christian religion. . . . In the first place, then, the Christian school is important for the maintenance of American liberty. We are witnessing in our day a world-wide attack upon the fundamental principles of civil and religious freedom. In some countries, such as Italy, the attack has been blatant and unashamed; Mussolini despises democracy and does not mind saying so. A similar despotism now prevails in Germany; and in Russia freedom is being crushed out by what is perhaps the most complete and systematic tyranny that the world has every seen.

But exactly the same tendency that is manifested in extreme form in those countries, is also being manifested, more slowly but none the less surely, in America. It has been given an enormous impetus first by the war and now by the economic depression; but aside form these external stimuli it has its roots in a fundamental deterioration of the American people. Gradually the people has come to value principle less and creature comfort more; increasingly it has come to prefer prosperity to freedom; and even in the field of prosperity it cannot be said that the effect is satisfactory.

The result of this decadence in the American people is seen in the rapid growth of a centralized bureaucracy which is the thing against which the Constitution of the United States was most clearly intended to guard.

Machen goes on for several pages to discuss various legislative initiatives at the state and federal level. Still no mention of God, theology, w-w, or the antithesis except the one between liberty and tyranny:

But someone will say, Congress will never in the world be so foolish as that; the amendment does give Congress that power, but the power will never be exercised. Now, my friends, I will just say this: when I listen to an argument like that, I sometimes wonder whether the person who advances it can possibly be convinced by it himself. If these stupendous powers are never to be exercised, why should they be granted? The zeal for the granting of them, the refusal of the framers of the amendment to word the amendment in any reasonably guarded way, show plainly that the powers are intended to be exercised; and certainly they will be exercised, whatever the intention of the framers of the amendment may be. I will tell you exactly what will happen if this amendment is adopted by the states. Congress will pass legislation which, in accordance with the plain meaning of the language, will be quite unenforceable. The exact degree of enforcement will be left to Washington bureaus, and the individual family will be left to the arbitrary decision of officials. It would be difficult to imagine anything more hostile to the decency of family life and to all the traditions of our people. If there ever was a measure that looked as though it were made in Russia, it is this falsely so-called “child-labor amendment” to the Constitution of the United States. In reality, it can hardly be called an amendment to the Constitution. Rather is it the complete destruction of the Constitution; for if human life in its formative period — up to eighteen years in the life of every youth — is to be given to Federal bureaucrats, we do not see what else of very great value can remain. The old principles of individual liberty and local self-government will simply have been wiped out. . . .

Against this soul-killing collectivism in education, the Christian school, like the private school, stands as an emphatic protest. In doing so, it is no real enemy of the public schools. On the contrary, the only way in which a state-controlled school can be kept even relatively healthy is through the absolutely free possibility of competition by private schools and church schools; if it once becomes monopolistic, it is the most effective engine of tyranny and intellectual stagnation that has yet been devised.

For Machen, education was primarily a family matter and it needed protection from the ever-reaching arm of the state:

I believe that the Christian school deserves to have a good report from those who are without; I believe that even those of our fellow citizens who are not Christians may, if they really love human freedom and the noble traditions of our people, be induced to defend the Christian school against the assaults of its adversaries and to cherish it as a true bulwark of the State. But for Christian people its appeal is far deeper. I can see little consistency in a type of Christian activity which preaches the gospel on the street corners and at the ends of the earth, but neglects the children of the covenant by abandoning them to a cold and unbelieving secularism. If, indeed, the Christian school were in any sort of competition with the Christian family, if it were trying to do what the home ought to do, then I could never favor it. But one of its marked characteristics, in sharp distinction from the secular education of today, is that it exalts the family as a blessed divine institution and treats the scholars in its classes as children of the covenant to be brought up above all things in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

Kuyper too feared state overreach and on this they agreed (though I don’t think Machen would have cared for Kuyper’s progressive reforms as prime minister). But when thinking about public life Machen did not wield the antithesis the way that Kuyper and neo-Calvinists do. I suspect that a major difference on this score is that Kuyper, being European and therefore much more philosophical than Americans like Machen, looked at most things philosophically, or he tried to see things whole. Machen, whose background both at home (legal) and in the church (Old School), thought about matters much more as an attorney and so what was legal according to the constitution of something. The U.S. Constitution secured religious freedom. The church had a definite constitution that prescribed its functions and defined its ministry. American constitutionalism may have had a weak philosophical basis (or so I’ve been told since my mind doesn’t really work philosophically). That didn’t trouble Machen. He tried to play by those rules and those rules governed both God’s friends and enemies, at least within the borders of the greatest nation on God’s green earth.

Postscript: for those wondering where Machen defended communists, they need look no farther than his essay, “The Relation between Christians and Jews”:

Tolerance, moreover, means not merely tolerance for that with which we are agreed but also tolerance for that to which we are most thoroughly opposed. A few years ago there was passed in New York the abominable Lusk Law requiring private teachers in any subjects whatever to obtain a state license. It was aimed, I believe, at the socialists, and primarily at the Rand School in New York City. Now certainly I have no sympathy with socialism. Because of its hostility to freedom, it seems to me to be just about the darkest thought that has ever entered the mind of man. But certainly such opposition to socialism did not temper in the slightest degree my opposition to that preposterous law. Tolerance, to me, does not mean merely tolerance for what I hold to be good, but also tolerance for what I hold to be abominably bad. (Selected Shorter Writings, 418-19)

Interesting to see that Machen’s reason for opposition socialism is not the law of God, w-w, the cosmic contest between God and Satan oozing out of 1789, but a love of freedom. But of course, Machen is no libertarian.