Category: Old World Presbyterianism

When Dutch Calvinism was 2k — even Republican

Published on by D. G. Hart162 Comments

Bruce Fronen explains why Reformed Protestants oppose absolute monarchy both in the state and the church:

Calvinism generally is identified with the Swiss city state of Geneva. But that city existed, politically, as a kind of hothouse flower, protected for years by the presence of Calvin himself (though that did not prevent significant problems) and, more important, the strength and isolation of the Swiss confederation. The Netherlands, on the other hand, was a nation born in the crucible of sustained conflict. The Dutch people over generations developed a pluralist society and a kind of federal government sufficient to win independence from the Spanish monarch while retaining local freedoms and significantly divergent, traditional ways of life.

The Dutch republic had only a relatively short time as a major power and example of good government, before descending for some time into a rather petty empire seemingly motivated only by greed. But beginning in the 16th and going into the early 18th century, the Netherlands provided examples of ordered liberty, as well as practically-grounded theories underlying good government. Here a people numerous and organized enough to constitute a nation gave perhaps the first viable alternative to the centralizing monarchies then solidifying power throughout Europe. Here an early modern people came to grips with the intrinsically plural structure of society in such a way as to win their independence as a nation without losing their religious identities or local rights of self-government.

The great theorist of this time and place was Johannes Althusius. Born in what is now Germany, Althusius identified closely with his fellow Calvinists in the Netherlands. He understood, in part from simple observation of lived examples all around him that people do not exist as individuals. We all are, in our essence, members of various communities. Where in most early modern states monarchs had set about destroying most of the communities in which people become fully human and live out their lives, the Dutch never fully succumbed to the power of any single monarch. Their “petty” republics and principalities hung on tenaciously to their particular liberties and ways of life. Split by religious differences, the Dutch developed somewhat (note the lack of emphasis, here) more toleration of religious dissent than most other countries. But where they truly showed their strength was in their recognition and practice of what Calvinists in the New World would term “federal liberty.”

This piece of Dutch Calvinist history often goes overlooked by transformers of every square inch, even though Abraham Kuyper himself capitalized on Dutch pluralism to recognize a variety of groups in Dutch life in ways that would drive American Protestants of Anglo backgrounds batty. The odd thing about Dutch Calvinism is that it was far more tolerant than those whom today it inspires. I can’t help but blame w-w, which drives a wedge between believers and unbelievers in totalizing ways and animates the bejeebies about secularization.

The European Roots of American Christianity

Published on by D. G. Hart184 Comments

As I walked around Rome this morning I could well understand the appeal of Roman Catholicism to Christians in the U.S. who desire a faith more profound than James Dobson’s or even Tim Keller’s. (TKNY’s historical vibe does not seem to be any older than 1990s New York, despite the comparisons of him to C. S. Lewis.) Heck, part of the appeal to me of Reformed Protestantism was that it situated me in a set of debates and a system of Christian reflection and ministry that went well beyond 1938 — the year my parents’ Baptist congregation started (we had no clue about Roger William and Rhode Island). So with Zwingli and Bucer I get almost five hundred years of tradition (or records, anyway). And for a U.S. Presbyterian who just spent a week in Edinburgh, arguably one of the most beautiful cities in the world with a population of less than 600,000, to walk through the streets and read through the archives and be reminded of arguments and assertions that still hold sway in some American communions sure beats following a trail that ends in some recent odd American locale.

Even so, with Rome, you get a lot more and a lot more grandeur, and if you are simply in the who’s-got-the-oldest-church-cornerstone mode, Rome beats Geneva and Edinburgh (though the latter has more polish than Rome which seems to suffer, along with Istanbul, from being too old; when you get used to having ruins around, you may also become accustomed to a place being a tad disheveled). Still, I’m not sure how Rome beats Jerusalem or Antakya except that western Europe has more cultural cache in the U.S. than Asia Minor (Turkey).

Amid these reflections on Europhilia, David Robertson came to the rescue to keep European Christianity real:

Put any group of Christians together and you will get a wide variety of opinions – some of them contradictory. That is particularly true when we are trying to assess the state of the Church in Europe today. On the one hand there are the doom and gloom merchants, the Jeremiahs, full of facts and figures about numbers and visions of the past, pointing out that the church is dying and we are all “doomed, doomed”. On the other there are the “God is doing a new and greater thing” brigade, the revivalists who are also full of facts and figures but their visions are visions of the future. They assure us on the basis of what is happening in a couple of churches, and a dream that they had that victory is just around the corner, revival is on its way and all we have to do is help their ministry. Isn’t it strange how both the “realists” and the “revivalists” seem to be able to justify their own ministeries because of their prophecies? We are told that we need to support the realists because only in that way will the remnant hang on until the Lord returns. On the other hand we had better support the revivalists because we don’t want to miss out on the revival.

So maybe European Christianity isn’t all that we Europhilic Christians in the U.S. make it out to be. It sure has more history, better architecture, and civilizational presence. But freed from all the baggage of Christendom, perhaps Christianity is better off. That’s not an expression of American Christian exceptionalism. Nor is it an assertion that American Christianity is somehow independent from Europe’s churches. Unmoored from Europe’s tragedies and buoyed by America’s can-do (Pelagian) spirit, mixed with a blasphemous belief in the nation’s divine purpose, American Christianity (Protestant and Roman Catholic) has no room to gloat (even though we usually gloat in spades). At the same time, returning to Europe and its Christian ways won’t do either.

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.

Celtic Coincidence?

Published on by D. G. Hart13 Comments

Last night I attended a wonderful concert of Scottish folk music, performed by Julie Fowlis and her accompanying band of fiddle, guitar, and bouzouki. Ms. Fowlis plays the whistles as well as she sings. It was a glorious testimony to the creativity and endurance of the folk who live, work, and play in Scotland’s Western Isles (where I hear the whiskey is almost as good as the song).

Yesterday morning on my way to class I was reading a review in The New Republic of a new book on W. B. Yeats by R. F. Foster. As many know, Yeats had one foot in the occult and the other on planet earth. What I did not know, though I have heard various assertions about Celtic spirituality over the years, was that Yeats may have picked up an interest in the occult and supernatural from Irish Protestant culture. According to the review:

As far back as 1989, Foster was publishing arresting reflectiosn on the role of the occult in Irish Protestant culture, and this subject generatesthe most original chapter in his new book, tracking the Irish sources of Yeats’s interest in magic, secret socities, seances, and the supernatural.

“Twenty years ago,” Foster writes, “I suggested some patterns behind the atttraction of the occult for Irish Protestant writers,” ascribing that attraction in part to “Protestant insecurity and self-interrogation” in a country where elaborate Catholic and folk supernatural beliefs dominated. Foster’s chapter takes the reader on a rapid ride from stories of the supernatural to Swedenborg to the (adult) Irish fairies, establishing the theme of “a parallel world which can be entered by concentrated mental and spiritual exercise, and whose denizens engage in activities which both mirror and illuminate our own — and affect our destinies.”

So, to all of those Celtic Protestant readers out there, how much is there to this observation about Irish Protestantism? I don’t ask this to wind anyone up. When would I ever do that? I am genuinely curious and Foster’s hunch about the dominant Roman Catholic presence in Ireland makes sense. I should also mention that Foster’s book seems fairly responsible in its judgments. In Foster’s own words:

Current criticism tends to read the effusive literary productions of this era through theses such as the picaresque, or racial “othering,” or a colonized discourse which can be paralleled elsewhere in the British Empire. It might be more profitable to look at what the Irish Romantics wanted to do, what they thought they were doing, whom they admired, and how they expressed their nationalism, or sense of nationality . . . And these texts, written by Protestant Unionists determined to claim an Irish identity, were key influences on the young Yeats.

(Thus, ends my Facebook moment.)

A Reformed Protestant by Any Other Name Has to Be Shorter

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From my trip to Geneva last summer for the festivities to celebrate John Calvin’s 500th birthday I still recall the indignation of a professor from the University of Zurich during his plenary presentation. He complained about Calvinism as the designation for Protestants who come from the Swiss Reformation. Obviously, he has a point since the Reformed churches started well before Calvin was a Protestant. What is more, Geneva was a bit of an outlier in the Swiss Confederation, not joining until the 19th century (though it was an ally of Bern which brought Geneva in closer relationship to Switzerland). And during the Reformation itself, Geneva and Zurich were not always on the best of terms. The Consensus Tigurinus (1549) is one indication of an effort by Calvin and Bullinger to bury the butter knife.

The primacy of Zurich to Geneva and of Zwingli to Calvin means that Calvinism is a misnomer. Should the better name be Zwinglian? Well, the Lutherans might find that agreeable – as in the Reformed finally own up to their real convictions on the Lord’s Supper. But Zwingli died in 1531 and hardly spoke for a body of churches that were just emerging (Geneva had yet to reform its church).

Another disadvantage of Calvinism is that it abstracts a doctrine of salvation from the church and sacraments – as in John Piper is a Calvinist. Piper may share Calvin’s view of the five points, but does he follow Calvin on church polity or the Lord’s Supper? And why would the doctrines of grace determine the nature of Calvinism more than worship or the church?

Of course the advantage of Calvinist is that it is shorter than Reformed Protestant. At three syllables, Calvinist weighs in right there with Lutheran and Anglican, meaning you don’t have to exert yourself to identify as a Calvinist. Reformed Protestant is a five-syllable mouthful; Reformed Protestantism is no quicker to say. RP might work but the Covenanters already have that moniker cornered.

So we may be stuck with Calvinism. But all Reformed Protestants, that is, those Protestants different from Lutherans and the Church of England, who identify with like-minded saints in places like Hungary, Poland, France, Scotland, the Netherlands, and the Palatinate, should feel a pang of remorse when identifying their ecclesial heritage as Calvinist – sort of the way readers of Wendell Berry feel guilty when turning the ignition of their car and burning more fossil fuel.

If Reformed Needs To Be Distinguished from Puritan, Why Not Presbyterian?

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

Some historians of seventeenth-century British Protestantism are dismissive of attempts to distinguish between Puritans and Presbyterians. Part of the problem, of course, involves definitions and categories. When it comes to politics, differences between Presbyterians and Puritans do not become clear until the 1650s with the regime of Oliver Cromwell since Puritans in Parliament joined forces with Presbyterians to do battle with the Stuart monarchy partly on the basis of the Solemn League and Covenant. When it comes to religion, Puritans and Presbyterians shared an intense and introspective piety that again makes differentiating them seemingly pointless.

I was surprised to read, then, in his treatment of John Owen Carl Trueman’s distinction between Puritan and Reformed. On the one hand, he argues that Puritan, at least with reference to Owen, is an unhelpful category.

First, . . . there is little consensus on exactly what constitutes a Puritan, let alone the reification of that elusive essence in the phenomenon known as Puritanism. Second, whatever else Puritanism is, it is fairly minimalist in terms of theological content – if John Milton, the quasi-Arian counts as a Puritan, for example, we can scarcely include even that most basic of Christian distinctives, the doctrine of the Trinity, in our definition. Third, Puritanism has, on the whole, far too parochial a range to allow us to see the full context of Owen’s thinking. . . . Thus, the use of a category like “Puritanism,” which brings with it all manner of narrowly parochial connotations, really needs to be deployed very carefully and in very specific contexts if it is to be at all helpful in our understanding of [Owen’s] thought.

The category that Trueman prefers to apply to Owen is Reformed Orthodoxy since it “is at once both more easily defined and less limiting that the category of Puritanism.” By Reformed Orthodoxy Trueman means:

. . . the tradition of Protestant thought which found its creedal expression on the continent in such documents, as, among others, the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism and the Canons of Dort, and in Britain in the Westminster Assembly’s Confession of Faith and Larger and Shorter Catechisms. Historically speaking, the immediate roots of this tradition are to be found in the work of Reformers such as Huldrych Zwingli, Johannes Oecolampadius, Martin Bucer and, a generation later, such men as John Calvin, Heinrich Bullinger, Peter Martyr and Pierre Viret. (Trueman, John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man, pp. 6-7)

This is helpful, but it does raise a couple questions. First, since the Parliament that called the Westminster Assembly was dominated by Puritans, is it so easy to distinguish the Puritanism of Parliament from the Reformed orthodoxy of the Westminster Assembly, especially since Puritans were not in short supply at the Assembly?

The other questions concerns the original oldlife effort to distinguish Presbyterianism from Puritanism. If Presbyterians adopted the Westminster Standards as their church’s confession, then that would appear, following Trueman, to make them not Puritan but part of Reformed Orthodoxy. In which case, if Puritanism lacks substantial theological content and is not synonymous with the work of the Westminster Assembly, is distinguishing Presbyterianism from Puritanism really so peculiar?

Muslims and Protestants Together?

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Among the many juicy bits of history packed into Philip Benedict’s Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed comes the item about the Ottoman insurgence into the Holy Roman Empire. Turns out the influx of Muslims into formerly Roman Catholic territories was a boon to the Reformed faith, especially in Hungary which gave us the Magyar Reformed Church.

Not only was the church largely decapitated in the central portions of the kingdom (i.e., Hungary), much of the parish clergy fled before the Ottoman onslaught, leaving nearly four-fifths of the localities in Ottoman-controlled regions without parish priests. Finally, the new rulers of the portions of the kingdom had neither the liberty nor the inclination to pursue the campaign against heresy. Ferdinand (Roman Catholic and from the Habsburg dynasty) was so busy with his military campaigns that he had little time to concentrate on the problem of heresy within his lands. Furthermore, he depended heavily on Protestant support within the empire for tax revenue to help fight the Ottomans, which prompted him to favor negotiation over repression in dealing with the problem. The Ottoman authorities looked for religious leaders who might cooperate with them as they strove to organize their control over their recently conquered territories and stem the flight of the population from the region. They were thus prepared to give evangelical preachers a free hand to proselytize so long as they respected Ottoman authority.

. . . . In the Ottoman-controlled regions, wandering preachers had a free hand. Mihaly Sztairai (d. 1575), a Paduan-educated ex-Franciscan who was the chief evangelist of the western portion of Ottoman Hungary, reported to a Viennese correspondent in 1551 that he had been able to preaching throughout the region for the previous seven years. In the process, he claimed, he and his fellows had founded some 120 congregations. (pp. 274, 275)

Now that’s church growth.