Category: Piety with Excitement

If the Gospel Coalition Embraces It, Will 2k Lose Its Edge?

Published on by D. G. Hart2 Comments

One of the smarter moves by 2k proponents was David VanDrunen’s to publish his sequel to Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms with Crossway, the firm with the most direct ties to the Gospel Coalition, thanks to Justin Taylor’s footprint in both organizations. So far 2k has come into print through outlier publishers, such as Jason Stellman’s Dual Citizens with Reformation Trust, an up-and-comer but not yet on a par with the Grand Rapids and Wheaton publishers; VanDrunen first published his Biblical Case for Natural Law with the Acton Institute and then his book on two kingdoms with Eerdmans – a publisher no longer regarded by sideline Presbyterians as safely orthodox; in my own case, I went to the independent trade publisher, Ivan R. Dee to produce A Secular Faith. With Living in God’s Two Kingdoms, VanDrunen has put 2k theology, with all of its initial oddities and counter-biblicist notions, squarely before the Tim-Keller loving, and John-Piper convicting masses.

Will 2k ever be the same?

Early returns suggest, yes. Here are a few of the responses to Taylor’s recent post on VanDrunen’s latest:

I’ve read VanDrunen’s book and I am surprised that you came to such positive conclusions about it. He makes a few valuable critiques of those who disagree with him, but the overall thrust of his thesis is, quite frankly, unbiblical. His exegesis is shoddy and he makes very dramatic assumptions about his theology’s continuity with historical figures. VanDrunen’s (and to a greater extent, D.G. Hart’s) iteration of two-kingdom theology does not cooperate well with Augustine’s, Calvin’s, or even Luther’s understanding of the Church’s call in the world. Reading this book can be valuable for a number of reasons, but please exercise careful discernment and wisdom before taking his claims too seriously.

John Frame’s book review on his prior book seems to suggest VanDrunen’s 2 kingdom view is unbiblical. I am thinking this book might be a waste of time.

I’m not sure which is worse. Unbiblical or waste of time. But acquiring a taste for 2k will clearly take some work.

I don’t actually believe VanDrunen will be visiting a Gospel Coalition conference soon as a plenary speaker. His arguments about “redeeming culture” and the nature of redemption will not go down easily with word-and-deed-based ministries or churches in pursuit of social justice (no matter how generous). But he has moved 2k from the sidelines to a seat at the mainstream born-again Baptyterian table. Maybe this book will turn out to be as momentous as the original Super Bowl, which brought the AFL and the NFL together for an annual game that led to the joining-and-receiving of leagues that had been previously at odds. Maybe too, in reverse of professional football’s expansion, VanDrunen’s sighting on the Gospel Coalition’s radar will prompt the allies in the Gospel Coalition to go back to church on Sunday evenings for a second service.

What's A Lay Person To Do?

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

One of the problems that Protestantism addressed at the beginning of the sixteenth century was the gap between monastic piety and the lives of ordinary Christians. The expectations in the Roman church were for the laity, without the support or environment of a monastic order, to maintain levels of holiness that monks and clergy supposedly embodied. So what Lutherans and Reformed did was to devise a piety for the laity that did not bind them to artificial and unbiblical priestly standards. An important piece of this new lay piety was the doctrine of vocation – the idea that secular work was valuable for serving God.

Later in the sixteenth century came a body of practical divinity that appears at times to micro-manage the life of the ordinary Christian. Folks like Lewis Bayly and William Ames and Richard Baxter wrote guides for holy living (available on line at Calvin College’s ethereal library) that walk lay folk through the ordinary parts of daily life and infuse these activities with religious significance. It is not unlike the efforts of neo-Calvinists, under the banner of world-and-life-views, drenching every thought with sacred purpose.

What experimental Protestants sometimes forget is that Roman Catholics and pietist Lutherans were engaged in similar enterprises at roughly the same time – endeavors to make Christianity practical and to make ordinary life extraordinarily devout. According to Philip Benedict, “the tradition of practical divinity . . . may be seen, as it has been by German historians of spirituality, as simply the Reformed manifestation of a larger phenomenon of these years: a ‘new piety’ illustrated as well by the vogue for Granada and de Sales in Catholic lands and by the publication in 1605 of Johann Arndt’s True Christianity, a staple of Lutheran devotion for centuries to come.” (Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed, p. 319)

When you compare these manuals of devotion to biblical teaching on the ordinary life of believers the differences are stunning. Here for instance are the final instructions (ch. 13) to lay folk from the author of Hebrews:

1Keep on loving each other as brothers.

2Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it.

3Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.

4Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.

5Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said,
“Never will I leave you;
never will I forsake you.”

6So we say with confidence,
“The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid.
What can man do to me?”

7Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.

8Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

9Do not be carried away by all kinds of strange teachings. It is good for our hearts to be strengthened by grace, not by ceremonial foods, which are of no value to those who eat them.

10We have an altar from which those who minister at the tabernacle have no right to eat.

I submit it is hard to find here (or in similar passages in the New Testament) walking papers for the kind of comprehensive piety or outlook that experimental and neo- Calvinists promote. The authors of Scripture seemed to be content with covering the important parts of faith and practice, and let the laity make the rest up as they went along. (A similar pattern seems to exist in the Old Testament which goes into great detail about religious practices but says almost nothing about how pottery or bread signify the creator of the universe, or how the choice produce bespeaks God’s electing purposes, or how the best practices for managing sewage say something about holiness and profanity – let alone how to think Judaically about math or grammar.)

I will also admit that I like order and instructions for achieving it as much as the next anal person. I understand that some of the instruction for piety and thinking is appealing to people who want to know how to serve God. The motives are indeed usually wholesome. But the question is whether they are necessary (or biblical). If you judge by the New Testament writers, they are willing to allow for great freedom in ordinary life without micro-managing the saints.

Is Creation for Evangelicals and Neo-Reformed what Donuts Are for Homer Simpson?

Published on by D. G. Hart15 Comments

I am noticing a trend, trend-spotters that historians are, and it does not appear to be promising.

Over at Christianity Today, Scott Sabin, author of Tending to Eden, connects the dots among – hold on to your baseball cap – evangelism, “compassionate justice ministry,” and earth care.

On a global scale, restoration is a monumental task. We are unlikely to achieve it this side of Christ’s return, any more than we are likely to bring about world peace by turning the other cheek. However, kingdom thinking can serve to guide our planning and our individual choices. At Plant with Purpose, we have seen restoration happen. Rivers and streams that had withered have begun to flow again due to upstream solutions. They have become powerful illustrations of God’s ability to redeem and restore, both for us and for the farmers with whom we are striving to share Christ’s love. . . .

Much of the world is either directly suffering as a result of environmental degradation or reacting in numb despair to gloomy predictions. Both groups desperately need the hope of Jesus Christ. It is the hope they long for, a hope that speaks directly to the redemption of all creation and reminds them that God loves the cosmos.

The gospel is for everyone—from dirt farmers to environmental activists. It is good news that God cares about all that he has created.

Pete Enns picks up on those same connections between creation and redemption in a piece for Biologos.

Psalm 136:1-9 is similar. The psalmist praises Yahweh for creating the cosmos using language reminiscent of Genesis 1. But in v. 10, without missing a beat, this “creation psalm,” brings up the exodus. Then in v. 13 we read that Yahweh “divided the Red Sea asunder.” Again, this calls to mind Genesis 1:6-8, where, in creating the world, God divided the water above from the water below (see also Psalm 74:12-17 where God “split open the sea”). “Dividing” the sea is a theme the Old Testament shares with other ancient creation texts, as can be seen in the link above.

Creation and exodus are intertwined. The creator was active again in delivering Israel from Egypt. . . .

What we see in the Old Testament is raised to a higher level in the New. God’s redemptive act in Christ is so thoroughly transformative that creation language is needed to describe it.

John’s Gospel famously begins “In the beginning was the Word….” The echo of Genesis 1:1 is intentional and unmistakable. Jesus’ entire redemptive ministry means there is now a new beginning, a starting over—a new creation. This Jesus, who is the Word, who was with God at the very beginning, through whom all things were made, is now walking among us as redeemer (John 1:1-5). Those who believe in him are no longer born of earthly parents but “born of God” (vv. 12-13). They start over. The language of “born again” later in John (3:3) points in the same direction. . . .

Redemption is not simply for people; Jesus’ redemptive program is cosmic, as we can see in Romans 8:19-21. Creation itself awaits its chance to start over, its “liberation from bondage.” Cosmic re-creation finds its final expression in Revelation 22:1-5. In the beautifully symbolic language that characterizes the entire book, we read that the cosmos has become the new Garden, complete with not one but two trees of life, where there is no longer any curse.

The Bible ends where it begins, at creation. The goal of redemption all along has been to get us back to the Garden, back to the original plan of the created order. To be redeemed means to take part in the creative work of God. The hints are there in the Old Testament, and the final reality of it is ultimately accomplished through the resurrection of the Son of God.

To round out the redeeming creation line-up, David Koyzis yields the especially helpful service not only of connecting creation and redemption but also neo-Calvinism and Roman Catholicism.

Perhaps readers of Evangel also read On the Square, but if not, permit me to direct your attention to a wonderful article by Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver, which, but for a few sentences here and there, could easily have been written by an evangelical Christian of the Reformed persuasion: Fire On The Earth: God’s New Creation and the Meaning of Our Lives. I am struck by his redemptive-historical reading of scripture, which many of us may tend to think is the exclusive preserve of the Reformed tradition. Archbishop Chaput is to be commended for disabusing us of this misconception. Here’s an excerpt:

A simple way of understanding God’s Word is to see that the beginning, middle and end of Scripture correspond to man’s creation, fall, and redemption. Creation opens Scripture, followed by the sin of Adam and the infidelity of Israel. This drama takes up the bulk of the biblical story until we reach a climax in the birth of Jesus and the redemption he brings. Thus, creation, fall, and redemption make up the three key acts of Scripture’s story, and they embody God’s plan for each of us.

To be sure, the God who creates is the deity who redeems. But to miss the difference between creation and redemption, and to rush to identify them with a Homeric blessing – “mmmmmmmm redeemed creationnnnnn” – is to miss the import of this little thing we call sin. The creation was and is good. It did not fall. It does not need to be redeemed. Only fallen creatures need redemption. In which case, to miss the ways that creation and redemption differ is to repeat the same collapsing of categories that Protestant progressives effected one hundred years ago when they threw out the distinctions between natural and supernatural, divine and human, sacred and secular, to brew an ideology that would save the world.

For that reason, two-kingdom and spirituality of the church advocates are eager to either warn evangelicals and progressive Reformed types about the danger of their view, not only because confusing the creational and redemptive functions of Christ blurs a category that has been crucial to the Reformed tradition. It is also because such confusion inevitably mistakes improvements in standard of living for the fruit of the Spirit.

How Can We Make the Pagans Conform to Our Rules When We Won’t Play By Our Rules?

Published on by D. G. Hart49 Comments

I have made this point several times, but I think it bears repeating. Evangelicals and cultural transformers spend a lot (inordinate, in my estimation) telling the wider culture how it needs to follow God’s law. Much of this activity happens during the ordinary days of the week. When James Dobson calls for a Justice Sunday or some such, it also happens on the faithful’s lone holiday.

But when many evangelicals and culture transformers gather for worship (or for church business – namely, ordination, instruction of the youth, Bible studies, etc.) they do not do as they say – they don’t follow God’s word but they follow their own rules. An obvious example is contemporary worship led by non-ordained church members. Another example is the Reformed or Presbyterian congregation that follows the praise & worship methods of charismatics and Pentecostals. Such Reformed Christians are awfully serious about husbands and wives respecting their marriage vows. Do they actually worry about the vows their pastors and elders make to uphold Reformed teaching and practice?

I wrote these paragraphs even before reading a juicy example of this very inconsistency at the blog of the Brothers Bayly. Pastors Tim and David are apparently big fans of contemporary Christian music in public worship. I cannot tell what their services are like entirely but I have seen clips of worship bands in their services and have followed links to the Good Shepherd Band’s page at Myspace. (Church of the Good Shepherd, by the way, is the name of Pastor Tim’s congregation in Bloomington, In.) So readers of their blog naturally receive the sense that services in the Baylys’ congregations is up-tempo.

The Baylys left no one to wonder about their worship preferences when this past week they posted a piece in which they divided the world between the effeminate traditionalists/classicalists and the manly singers and performers of contemporary Christian music. In particular, Tim faults Reformed Protestantism for simply being a stop on the ladder of upward mobility:

The Wesleyan or Southern Baptist moves up to Presbyterian. And there in his new Presbyterian church, our convert finds the accoutrements of his new social class wonderfully reassuring. It’s the church’s zip code, the minister’s Genevan gown or collar, the frequent repetition of those peaceful words ‘providence’ and ‘sovereignty,’ the high priority placed on the education of the congregation’s Covenant children, the preacher’s thoughtful message and splendid vocabulary, and of course the high classical style of music.

Musical style is simply an expression of socio-economic status. Could the Marxists teaching down the road at Indiana University have said it any better? This led to remarks, one part anti-intellectual, one part anti-elitist (and therefore egalitarian), that contrasted the snobbery of Reformed upper-middle classness with the poor and uneducated apostles whom Christ turned into fishers of men. “ Our converts don’t take pride in the foolishness of the Cross,” Tim writes, “so much as the wisdom of Calvin and their senior pastor’s earned doctorate from somewhere across the pond.”

This standard leftist cultural analysis in turn led to a brief on behalf of contemporary Christian music:

Speaking specifically of the music of our worship, Reformed pastors would do well to consider whether it isn’t time to stop despising the musical vernacular of our own day. There may be some congregations where musical archaisms have put down such deep roots that it would split the church to turn the clock forward, embracing the musical vernacular. But I’m betting use of the amplified instruments, tunes, and vocabulary of the common man in worship won’t happen in most of our Reformed churches for the same reason preaching against the heresy of egalitarian feminism doesn’t happen. Elisabeth Elliot put it well some years back when she said the problem with the church today is that “it’s filled with emasculated men who can’t bring themselves to say ‘no’ to a woman.”

Thus, when we set the musical forms and instrumentation of our other six days a week beside the musical forms and instrumentation of our Sunday worship, we find our Sunday worship to be cloyingly feminine, an historic specimen best suited to be trotted out by the curator for occasional museum exhibits.

So important is the fork in the liturgical road prompted by contemporary Christian music that Tim thinks fidelity to the gospel is at stake:

We must stop trying to kill two birds with one stone. Either we seek to make men into disciples of this Jesus Who chose tax collectors and fishermen to be His Apostles, or we make men into disciples of these archaic liturgies and exquisite musical forms that have evolved across centuries of Western culture. Yes, they’re true and good and beautiful. But what is the cost of making them the focus of our churches’ culture?

Somehow, the Baylys think the only alternatives are the praise band or the robed (see, they really are effeminate) four-part choir accompanied by an organ. They don’t seem to know or allow for the cultural idiom between high-brow and mass culture which is folk or common. (Ken Myers is brilliant on this point in his book, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes.) And if Reformed have a folk culture certainly one part of it psalm singing (another is the high-carb, low ruffage, pot luck supper). As Shaker furniture can well teach us, simplicity and order can reveal treasures of great beauty, and clearly the Reformed are on the side of decency and order and should be seeking simplicity.

But what may be most troubling about the Bayly post is how much they imitate the academic left that they believe has led the culture astray. The Baylys reduce culture to socio-economic and gender categories. They are as egalitarian and radical as the lefties they oppose. And just as these sorts of arguments have ruined the study of the liberal arts in universities and colleges, so they are also responsible for ruining our churches and undermining any credibility about the church as pilgrim people set apart from the world. In fact, if you see the embarrassing antics of worship leaders and praise bands you have all reasons you need for Keller’s arguments for using professional musicians in services. Again, the choice isn’t between the dudes and the pro’s; the psalter or hymnal accompanied by one instrument or sung acapella depends neither on the failed rock star or the conservatory student.

Which leads to the following excerpt from a piece written fifteen years ago that still seems as fresh as it was then pungent:

Why is it, then, that when evangelicals retreat from the public square into their houses of worship they manifest the same hostility to tradition, intellectual standards, and good taste they find so deplorable in their opponents in the culture wars? Anyone familiar with the so-called “Praise & Worship” phenomenon (so named, supposedly, to remind participants of what they are doing) would be hard pressed to identify these believers as the party of memory or the defenders of cultural conservatism. P&W has become the dominant mode of expression within evangelical churches, from conservative Presbyterian denominations to low church independent congregations. What characterizes this “style” of worship is the praise song (“four words, three notes and two hours”) with its mantra-like repetition of phrases from Scripture, displayed on an overhead projector or video monitors (for those churches with bigger budgets), and accompanied by the standard pieces in a rock band.

Gone are the hymnals which keep the faithful in touch with previous generations of saints. They have been abandoned, in many cases, because they are filled with music and texts considered too boring, too doctrinal, and too restrained. What boomers and busters need instead, according to the liturgy of P&W, are a steady diet of religious ballads most of which date from the 1970s, the decade of disco, leisure suits, and long hair. Gone too are the traditional elements of Protestant worship, the invocation,confession of sins, the creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the doxology, and the Gloria Patri. Again, these elements are not sufficiently celebrative or “dynamic,” the favorite word used to describe the new worship. And while P&W has retained the talking head in the sermon, probably the most boring element of Protestant worship, the substance of much preaching turns out to be more therapeutic than theological.

Of course, evangelicals are not the only ones guilty of abandoning the treasures of historic Protestant worship. Various churches in the ELCA and Missouri Synod have begun to experiment with contemporary worship. The traditionalists in Reformed circles, if the periodical Reformed Worship, is any indication, have also begun to incorporate P&W in their services. And Roman Catholics, one of the genuine conservative constituencies throughout American history, have contributed to the mix with the now infamous guitar and polka mass. Yet, judging on the basis of worship practices, evangelicals look the most hypocritical. For six days a week they trumpet traditional values and the heritage of the West, but on Sunday they turn out to be the most novel. Indeed, the patterns of worship that prevail in most evangelical congregations suggest that these Protestants are no more interested in tradition than their arch-enemies in the academy.

A variety of factors, many of which stem from developments in post-1960s American popular culture, unite evangelicalism and the cultural left. In both movements, we see a form of anti-elitism that questions any distinction between good and bad (or even not so good), or between what is appropriate and inappropriate. Professors of literature have long been saying that the traditional literary canon was the product, or better, the social construction of a particular period in intellectual life which preserved the hegemony of white men, but which had no intrinsic merit. In other words, because aesthetic and intellectual standards turn out to be means of sustaining power, there is no legitimate criteria for including some works and excluding others.

The same sort of logic can be found across the country at week-night worship planning committee meetings. It is virtually impossible to make the case — without having your hearers go glassy-eyed — that “Of the Father’s Love Begotten” is a better text and tune than “Shine, Jesus, Shine,” and, therefore, that the former is fitting for corporate worship while the latter should remain confined to Christian radio. In the case of evangelicals, the inability to make distinctions between good and bad poetry and music does not stem so much from political ideology (though it ends up abetting the cause) as from the deeply ingrained instinct that worship is simply a matter of evangelism. Thus, in order to reach the unchurched the churched have to use the former’s idiom and style. What is wrong with this picture?

The traditionalists are of no help here. Rather than trying to hold the line on what is appropriate and good in worship, most of those who are devoted full-time to thinking about liturgy and worship, the doorkeepers of the sanctuary as it were, have generally adopted a “united-colors-of-Benetton” approach to the challenge of contemporary worship. For instance, a recent editorial in a Reformed publication says that the old ways — the patterns which used Buxtehude rather than Bill Gaither, “Immortal, Invisible” rather than “Do Lord,” a Genevan gown instead of a polo shirt — have turned out to be too restrictive. Churches need to expand their worship “repertoire.” The older predilection was “white, European, adult, classical, with a strong resonance from the traditional concert hall.” But this was merely a preference and reflection of a specific “education, socio-economic status, ethnic background, and personality.” Heaven forbid that anyone should appear to be so elitist. For the traditional “worship idiom” can become “too refined, cultured, and bloodless. . . too arrogant.” Instead, we need to encourage the rainbow coalition — “of old and young, men and women, red and yellow, black and white, classical and contemporary.” And the reason for this need of diversity? It is simply because worship is the reflection of socio-economic status and culture. Gone is any conviction that one liturgy is better than another because it conforms to revealed truth and the order of creation, or that one order of worship is more appropriate than another for the theology which a congregation or denomination confesses. Worship, like food or clothes, is merely a matter of taste. Thus the logic of multi-culturalism has infected even those concerned to preserve traditional liturgy.

The Baylys would have us believe that 2k and the spirituality of the church are responsible for moving the church in radical and liberal directions. As Tom McGinnis would say, “Are you kidding me!?”

Moderation Coalition

Published on by D. G. Hart28 Comments

Is it just me, or has a pattern emerged among the leaders of the Gospel Coalition – namely, to regard Reformed Protestants as extreme?

First, Ray Ortlund compared TR’s to the Judaizers in Paul’s Galatia.

The Judaizers in Galatia did not see their distinctive – the rite of circumcision – as problematic. They could claim biblical authority for it in Genesis 17 and the Abrahamic covenant. But their distinctive functioned as an addition to the all-sufficiency of Jesus himself. Today the flash point is not circumcision. It can be Reformed theology. But no matter how well argued our position is biblically, if it functions in our hearts as an addition to Jesus, it ends up as a form of legalistic divisiveness.

Then came Tim Keller who riffed on Martin Lloyd Jones to warn against what Reformed Protestants are known for – arguing about doctrine:

However, whenever Lloyd-Jones takes up the importance of doctrine, he always points out that there is a danger on the other extreme. He speaks of some Christians and says “There is nothing they delight in more than arguing about theology” and they do this in “a party spirit” (p. 24). One of the signs of this group is that they are either dry and theoretical in their preaching, or they can be caustic and angry. They have “lost their tempers, forgetting that by so doing they were denying the very doctrine which they claimed to believe” (p. 24). In short, ministers who go to this extreme destroy the effectiveness of their preaching. What is the cause of this? Lloyd-Jones answers that they have made accurate doctrine an end in itself, instead of a means to honor God and grow in Christ-likeness. “Doctrine must never be considered in and of itself. Scripture must never be divorced from life” (p. 25).

And now John Piper warns against the tendencies of pride among the Reformed.

Reformed people tend to be thoughtful. That is, they come to the Bible and they want to use their minds to make sense of it. The best of them want to make sense of all of the Bible and do not pick and choose saying, “I don’t like that verse. That sounds like an Arminian verse, so we will set it aside.” No! Fix your brain, don’t fix the Bible.

The kind of person that is prone to systematize and fit things together, like me, is wired dangerously to begin to idolize the system. I don’t want to go here too much, because I think the whiplash starts to swing the other direction, and we minimize the system, thinking, and doctrine to the degree that we start to lose a foothold in the Bible. . . .

Hanging on with the danger I am speaking of is pride—a certain species of pride. There are many species of pride, and this is just one of them. You can call it intellectualism. There is also emotionalism, but that isn’t the danger we are talking about right now. Intellectualism is a species of pride, because we begin to prize our abilities to interpret the Bible over the God of the Bible or the Bible itself.

This is a strange tendency with the Gospel Coalition since in the evangelical world, GC draws much more from the Reformed than the Wesleyan side of adherents. The only explanation can be that hanging around with Reformed-leaning types the way that Ortlund, Keller, and Piper do, they apparently do not want to be confused with the mean, proud, or idolatrous type of Reformed Protestant. This explanation gains plausibility when you consider that Lutherans and Dispensationalists are not too shabby when it comes to doctrine and intellectualism. And yet, no one seems to bring these Protestants up, even though the United States has many more Lutherans and Dispensationalists than it does Reformed Protestants. (Compare the enrollment at Dallas Seminary to both Westminsters, or membership in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod to the PCA and the OPC combined!!!)

What is bothersome about this constant refrain of “Reformed meanies” is the failure of Ortlund, Keller, and Piper to acknowledge that the Reformed faith came to these men and their libraries (not to mention their communions in the case of Keller), not through avoiding extremes but by way of contending militantly for the faith. If we didn’t have belligerents like Bullinger, Ursinus, Knox, Erskine, Hodge, or Van Til, we would not have a Reformed faith from which to draw, no matter how moderately we try to do it. And the reverse is also true: when Reformed Protestants are not militant, that faith withers and eventually dies.

In which case, when will the Gospel Coalition folks understand that moderation leads to equivocation?

Duty-Sensitive Churches

Published on by D. G. Hart3 Comments

What do men want?

That’s not a question you want to pose to the demographic that listens to sports-talk-radio. If the ads are any indication, men want babes, beer, wings, and victories. Throw in discounts on diamond rings for their ladies and on the meals where young men bestow such rings, and you have pretty much met the wants of the average American male, between 25 and 54.

What if you put the question to Christian men? When I heard the question this was exactly the intended audience since the inquirer was an associate pastor who had the responsibility for attracting the adult males of his congregation to a Friday night activity at church. The answers that followed were not that far from sports-talk-radio, though certainly more sanctified (see, at old we do affirm sanctification even if it comes less swiftly). No mention of women, but food and games were high on the list. If the event were not at church and a little more Calvinistic, I suspect that tobacco would have also been an incentive for Reformed men. (At which point the fundamentalists accuse Calvinists of looking as sanctified as Lutherans.)

So the pastor’s plan seemed to be to concoct a program and circumstances that would appeal to men to give up their Friday night and do something spiritually useful – an appetizer of ribs followed by the main course of inspiration. Chances are the portions would have been vastly uneven and inappropriate for their place on the church program menu.

It struck me that this pastor’s question is what must constantly challenge the minds of most seeker-sensitive church leaders. We need to persuade people to go contrary to their wants when it comes to religion by giving them something that they really do want as a way to switch them to what they don’t really want. Of course, the church’s package can never be as enticing as the world’s – that is why Christian radio differs from sports-talk-radio. Still, the idea is to get people to consider the difficult matters of life and death by pleasing them with goods and services that they really enjoy.

This might work for non-believers, but how it could possibly function for Christians is beyond me. For someone who has never been to church, going to a place less removed from the “regular” world might help overcome the initial hurdle. So if the service feels more like a variety show than a worship service, a non-churched person might go. But for church members who have already experienced the bait-and-switch, who have become accustomed to the inferiority of the pastor’s jokes compared to those of Stephen Colbert, will they really consider going to the church’s Friday night entertainment or meal instead of a ball game, meal, or party?

What dawned on me while considering the difficulty this pastor faced was a solution that modern church experts seldom try. They would find that if they looked at the mom-and-pop churches, the ones far away from the Walmarts of Saddle Back and Willow Creek, churches get people to go to events like a men’s meeting not on the basis of want but of duty. This is a form of motivation that certainly works in my own congregation. Men meet for book studies and fellowship – at very odd hours – not because they think it will be fun but because they know it’s the right thing to do. (Does anyone really study the Puritans because doughnuts are supplied?) Duty-sensitivity may not generate the religious affections that experiential types want to see in committed Christians, as in the man doing cartwheels to get to church and be with his “brothers.” But duty is enough to prompt many men to attend and from that point they often find the results are rewarding.

The lesson would seem to apply to attracting non-believers to church: they need to come not to be entertained or amused or even inspired but because they have an obligation to their maker and sustainer. I have no delusion that the current crop of church planners and growth experts will ever reach this conclusion. Nor do I suspect that a duty-sensitive church will generate a large following. But it sure makes a pastor’s job easier.

Scott Clark Has a Point

Published on by D. G. Hart5 Comments

(Or, show me your confessionalism!)

In Recovering the Reformed Confession, Scott Clark argues for and understanding of the Christian ministry and piety that informed the confessions of the Reformed churches pretty much all the way down to when Boy George (Whitefield) set foot in the North American British colonies. Among the points Clark makes is that the teachings affirmed and practices prescribed in the Reformed confessions are a better gauge of Reformed identity than the sort of zeal and experience that the likes of Whitefield encouraged and sought.

One way to test Clark’s argument is to ask by what measure do we evaluate a college that claims to be Protestant. Some who are sharply critical of Clark have recently faulted one of the leading evangelical institutions on two grounds: first, a majority of the faculty voted for Barack Obama; second, its teachers education program encourages students to embrace notions of tolerance and diversity that various secular state teachers’ agencies affirm, thus forcing Christian college education majors into a secular mold of “social justice.” (The same critics of Clark have faulted Covenant College for its faculty’s support for Obama in the 2008 presidential contest.)

What does not seem to matter in such evaluations is whether the college’s faculty are members or attend churches where the Reformed creeds are the confessional standard. In fact, one could well imagine a college qualifying as a flagship institution because it was consistently pro-Republican (as long as the pro-life plank of the platform was in place) and minimally doctrinal. If memory serves, this was exactly the kind of place that Wheaton College was before 1990. Culturally activist while doctrinally tolerant on dogmatic minutia is likely the ideal for Clark’s critics, meaning that creeds and confessions do not matter significantly when evaluating Christian higher education.

So why do such critics object if the confessionalist shoe does not fit? It isn’t an accusation of infidelity (though it has implications for this.) It is simply a question of definition: do the creeds inform the way you assess Christianity or do you have a different list of allegiances and personalities that in effect constitute your confession? If you are confessional you are going to evaluate Christian institutions and expressions on the basis of the creeds, as well as the health of the communions with which an institution affiliates. But if you are more inclined, in this case, to Whitefield and Edwards, you end up criticizing a school for its politics. In other words, pietism generates activism; while confessionalism nurtures perseverance.

Put another way, a confessional “world view” (as much as I hate the phrase) esteems the cult and the culture in inversely proportional relations. The higher one’s view of the creeds, the less one cares about politics. And the more one cares about culture, the less the creeds matter.

Makes sense to this confessionalist.

Whither Wheaton?

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

Andrew Chignell, a graduate of Wheaton College and son of a former Wheaton professor, created a minor kerfuffle with a piece about the outgoing college president, A. Duane Litfin, and Wheaton’s search for his successor. Chignell argues that Wheaton, the flagship institution of American evangelicalism, is at a crossroads. He also seems to try relatively benignly to settle scores for those faculty (and their progeny) who were bitterly disappointed by the 1992 appointment of Litfin when Nathan Hatch, now president of Wake Forest University, was the odds on favorite to be Wheaton’s president. The hope was that Hatch, then provost of Notre Dame, an accomplished historian, and graduate of Wheaton, would lead Wheaton into the promised land of elite, private, liberal arts colleges, with of course the evangelical convictions and piety still in place. Some of that disappointment was evident in Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, a book whose polemical edge appealed to Wheaton faculty who wanted a true academic like Hatch as their CEO. (Full disclosure: I taught at Wheaton from 1989 to 1993 and my wife is a 1976 graduate.)

This is a minor flap for Wheaton, despite the creation of a website dedicated to Chignell’s article, because very few Wheaties, as alums are known, have bothered to write. In fact, if not for the poor performance by the owners and editors of Books and Culture, where Chignell’s article was supposed to be published – the “back story” is also at Whither Wheaton – the piece may well have floated away to the Internet’s kazigabties of unused archives, except for Chignell’s own website.

To his credit Chignell does not perform a hatchet job on Wheaton, though it was too edgy for the folks at Wheaton’s neighbor, Books & Culture. He credits Litfin with growing the college’s physical plant and endowment, for shepherding the school through potentially damaging ethos changes such as dropping restrictions against off-campus drinking and dancing, and for overseeing the adoption of a new mascot – from post-9/11 infelicity of Crusaders to the environmentally sensitive but anemic Thunder. Chignell also comments favorably on the decline of religious politics at Wheaton – when he was a student DuPage County, Wheaton’s home, was the most Republican jurisdiction in the United States. Chignell fails to mention that Litfin also oversaw a new statement of faith that dropped the premillennial and dispensationalist laden plank. This was a significant move for many who regarded Litfin, a graduate of the Philadelphia College of Bible (before doing doctorates at Purdue and Oxford), as a fundamentalist since dispensationalism was one of fundamentalism’s chief articles of faith. Wheaton’s old statement of faith reflected its affinities to anti-modernist Protestantism.

On the debit side, Chignell faults Litfin for losing good faculty because of the president’s enforcement of doctrinaire convictions. The most celebrated was the dismissal of a philosophy professor, Josh Hochshield after he converted to Roman Catholicism. But one prospective professor got away when her conjecture that the Bible did not forbid gay marriage ended her candidacy. (On the upside her admission did not prevent an appointment at Calvin College.) Also glaring for Chignell were Litfin’s views on creation, and the apparent irony of raising funds for a science center with all the bells and whistles for first-rate science when the college is committed apparently to doctrines that undermine such research and learning.

The problem for Chignell comes down to Litfin’s own understanding of maintaining a college’s Christian identity. Chignell writes:

In his 2004 book “Conceiving the Christian College,” President Litfin characterizes Wheaton as operating on a “systemic” model, whereby “all of the professors are to be scholars who embody the Christian commitments of the institution, with the expected result that genuinely Christian thinking will permeate the school’s academic and student life programs.”

Chignell agrees that schools operating according to this model are of “immense value.” But he also thinks that the systemic model can take a number of different forms.

At the far end is what might be called the magisterial approach: here a select group of academic administrators specifies which interpretations of the core doctrines and codes are to be propagated throughout the system, and then requires that everyone signs on to those specific interpretations. At the other end is what might be called (for lack of a better term) the wiggle-room approach. Here a certain amount of space is allowed for differing—albeit still reasonable—interpretations of the propositions constituting the systemic core. That doesn’t mean that “anything goes” or that the core is ever significantly or casually altered. But administrators who adopt the wiggle-room approach will tend to be more modest and consultative in interpreting that core, and will often “agree to disagree” on issues that can reasonably be deemed ambiguous or adiaphorous.

Litfin’s fault, then, was in following the magisterial approach, especially on creation, when Wheaton needed and still needs the wiggle-room touch.

A few problems follow from this analysis. First, although I may not agree with the particulars of Litfin’s ideas about creation, Chignell fails to recognize that the faculty who got away from Wheaton were not victims of creationist tyranny. (The college’s statement on creation is hardly polemical – “WE BELIEVE that God directly created Adam and Eve, the historical parents of the entire human race; and that they were created in His own image, distinct from all other living creatures, and in a state of original righteousness.”) The issues in the cases he mentions were Roman Catholicism and gay marriage. In which case, the contrast between a fundamentalist view of creation and a new science center is a red herring. For that matter, plenty of creationists approve of all kinds of science outside the field of biology.

Second, Wheaton’s statement of faith is hardly the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms. It is a useful but meager affirmation of general Protestant verities. By its very nature it reflects the wiggle-room that fundamentalists and evangelicals tried to find to achieve a generic conservative Protestant identity. In other words, Wheaton’s statement of faith is hardly magisterial; Calvin’s is (i.e. the Three Forms of Unity). Wiggle-room enforcement of wiggle-room creeds is another issue.

Third, Chignell is overly optimistic in thinking the wiggle-room touch can keep an institution like Wheaton from turning into Oberlin. The comparison is hardly implausible because when Wheaton started it was in the vein of Wesleyan-Congregationalist perfectionism and post-millennialism running rampant in the mid-West. The affinities between Wheaton and Oberlin were strong, from the kingdom of God to anti-slavery. And yet Wheaton did not become the liberal Protestant institution that Oberlin did despite (or because of?) Finney’s revivalism. One reason is that Wheaton had a fundamentalist interlude under the presidency of J. Oliver Buswell. During that era, and then the subsequent influence of neo-evangelicalism, Wheaton’s administrators, trustees, faculty, students, and students’ parents knew that liberal Protestantism was something that good Christians wanted to avoid. Indeed, one of the important and ignored issues facing schools like Wheaton and sister institutions like Christianity Today is the presence of faculty and editors in important decision-making capacities who belong to such communions as the Episcopal Church USA or the Presbyterian Church USA. If faculty or editors at evangelical institutions reject the writings and appointments of scholars from anti-modernist communions because of views on women’s ordination or homosexuality, what sort of evangelical identity will result?

In fact, the history of American Presbyterianism shows what happens when Chignell’s wiggle-room approach if followed – you wind up in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. with not simply wiggle-room, but lots of room for elbows, heads, feet, and even private parts. In the 1920s the church’s progressives proposed the Auburn Affirmation for the sake of giving flexibility in the church on such cardinal doctrines as the inerrancy of Scripture and the virgin birth of Christ. The number of essential and necessary doctrines was even fewer than Wheaton’s statement of faith, though the church already had a confession of faith. And that hermeneutic became the basis for the liberal church that the PCUSA is today; it would avoid taking a hard stand against anything except conservatives, favoring breadth over orthodoxy. (I concede that members of Wheaton faculty who are in the PCUSA would not regard their communion as liberal. But I don’t think they can plausibly claim that liberalism is unwelcome in the PCUSA, otherwise why would the Presbyterian Layman and the Confessing Church movement attract the numbers that they do?)

So maybe the reason that Wheaton avoids becoming Oberlin is by having presidents like Litfin who apply a measure of disciplinary pressure on academics who by nature of their scholarly and cosmopolitan impulses are not exactly known to be keepers of the orthodox flame.

And yet, this analysis of Wheaton’s conservatism is unconvincing because what has long struck me about the school is not its doctrinaire evangelicalism but its pietistic ethos. During my tenure at Wheaton I was struck how much the place had the feel of Christian summer camp, where campers (students) took math and history instead of archery and swimming from their professors (counselors). That is not necessarily a knock against Wheaton. Institutions that provide a safe Christian retreat for older adolescents and young adults, on their way to professional lives and parenting, is hardly the worst service a Christian organization can perform. But this impression rang true at a recent alumni event in Philadelphia where those in attendance viewed the promotional materials (posters and film) for the current capital campaign. What was striking was that faculty, books read and written, or graduates like Chignell who go on to excel in higher education, were not evident. Instead, the focus, especially of the film, was on the student experience, as if this were a recruiting film for prospective students. What dawned on me while watching the film was that the student experience is what attracts high schoolers to apply, parents to pay for tuition, and alums to give to the school. That is because the experience of students in all the extra-curricular activities appears to be as important to the making of a Wheatie as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Mind you, the students are very smart. They have to be to get in to a very competitive school. But do they need to be smart to stay at Wheaton? Or is what keeps them there the evangelical warmth and fellowship that comes from a personal relationship with Jesus?

Again, this could sound like a real indictment of Wheaton, and it does second from a different angle Noll’s scandal of the evangelical mind and the kind of indifference to intellectual life that has characterized born-again Protestantism. But it need not be read as evidence of anti-intellectualism at Wheaton. It could be a testimony to the institution’s uncanny ability to remain “conservative” on the basis of experience, on the vague and ethereal but in this case vital and vigorous attachment to having “Jesus in my heart.” That piety did not sustain lots of other Protestant liberal arts colleges founded in the wake of the Second Great Awakening like Oberlin. But it has for Wheaton. And perhaps Litfin’s regular speaking in chapel is one of the formal means that sustains Wheaton’s evangelical ethos. If so, Chignell’s assessment of Litfin and Wheaton misses the most important factor that the trustees should be considering in the choice of a new president.

The Unconverted Calvin, Part One

Published on by D. G. Hart30 Comments

From the NTJ, October 2000

Ask any living Calvinist if he believed in conversion and ninety-nine percent of the responses would be unabashedly affirmative. And yet, if you followed up with a question about where the Reformed creeds and catechisms teach about conversion, the answer would probably not be so swift or positive. One reason for the latter reaction might be that the Reformed confessions have very little to say about conversion per se. And when they do, they mean something very different from contemporary evangelical usage which regards conversion as synonymous with an instantaneous new birth or “born again” experience. For instance, the Canons of Dort, best known for outlining the mnemonic TULIP, describe true conversion as consisting of the external preaching of the gospel combined with the work of the Holy Spirit, who “powerfully illuminates” the mind, “pervades the inmost recesses of man; . . . opens the closed and softens the hardened heart, and circumcises that which was uncircumcised,” and transforms the will from being “evil, disobedient, and refactory” to being “good, obedient, and pliable.” That way of looking at conversion might satisfy the most zealous of low-church evangelists, until learning that Dort is not referring to a moment of crisis or decision but is actually describing the whole of the Christian life. As the Heidelberg Catechism puts it, “genuine repentance or conversion” consists of two things: “the dying-away of the old self, and the coming-to-life of the new” (Q&A 88). It is not clear whether the Westminster Standards mention conversion.

Ironically, despite the Reformed tradition’s teaching about conversion (or lack thereof), many conservative Presbyterians continue to speak of it as an experience of the born-again variety and ask prospective church members for a narrative of conversion. This is the consequence of almost 250 years of Presbyterian congeniality toward revivalism. This is the Jonathan Edwards School of Presbyterianism that looks upon his conversion as a model for genuine faith. While a student at Yale, Edwards recalled that he felt:

a calm, sweet Abstraction of Soul from all the Concerns of this World; and a kind of Vision, or fix’d Ideas and Imaginations, of being alone in the Mountains, or some solitary Wilderness, far from all Mankind, sweetly conversing with Christ, and wrapt and swallowed up in GOD. The Sense I had of divine Things, would often of a sudden as it were, kindle up a sweet burning in my Heart; and ardor of my Soul, that I know not how to express.

For Edwards, as for most other believers who have come to faith through revivalism’s direct appeals, conversion equals ecstasy.

But Edwards’ mountain-top experience of God is a long way from the older Reformed notions of regeneration, repentance, and sanctification to which the term conversion typically applies. For that reason, Edwards’ conversion may not be the best model. Here is where many experimental Calvinists, uneasy already about elevating an ordinary human being’s experience too high, would likely appeal to the apostle Paul, whose conversion on the way to Damascus makes Edwards’ look like chopped liver. At the same time, however, appealing to Paul has the disadvantage of establishing a norm for conversion that is so exceptional that Reformed believers, who are supposed to believe in the closing of the canon and the cessation of miraculous signs, could never hope to experience Christ in any way.

For this reason, a better source for thoughts about conversion than Edwards’ or Paul’s experience is the man from whom Calvinists derive their name. Ironically, John Calvin does not serve the interests of revival-friendly Presbyterians well because the record does not show convincingly that the French Reformer had any experience that would qualify as a conversion or that might even be regarded as remarkable. According to William J. Bouwsma, whose biography of Calvin admittedly has not received unanimous endorsement from orthodox Reformed and Presbyterians, “religious conversion is a more problematic conception than is ordinarily recognized.” As a “cultural artifact” or an “individual experience,” it is an event that marks a “sharp break with the past.” Accordingly, “life before conversion . . . is irrelevant except as preparation for this break or as a stimulus to repentance; life afterward is made new.” Bouwsma argues, however, that evidence for a conversion of this type in Calvin’s life is “negligible.” Most biographers have cited a single passage from Calvin’s commentary on the Psalms, written in 1557. It reads:

God drew me from obscure and lowly beginnings and conferred on me that most honorable office of herald and minister of the Gospel. . . . What happened first was that by an unexpected conversion he tamed to teachableness a mind too stubborn for its years — for I was so strongly devoted to the superstitions of the papacy that nothing less could draw me from such depths of mire. And so this mere taste of true godliness that I received set me on fire with such a desire to progress that I pursued the rest of my studies more coolly, although I did not give them up altogether. Before a year had slipped by anybody who longed for a purer doctrine kept on coming to learn from me, still a beginner, a raw recruit.

Bouwsma interprets this passage as nothing more than “a shift and quickening of his interests,” certainly nothing incompatible with the evangelical humanism that many university students at Paris espoused, simply a willingness to be more teachable. In other words, there was no decisive break in Calvin with his former life until he ran afoul of Roman church authorities. But becoming a Protestant, something that was gradual and progressive, hardly qualifies as “going forward” at the time of an altar call or experiencing a unique and immediate sense of God’s presence somewhere in the woods outside Paris. Protestantism was a reformation, not a revival. Evidence of its transformation came in the form of changes in doctrine, liturgy and church polity, not in hearts strangely or normally warmed.

As Bouwsma also observes, Calvin was not enthusiastic about conversion as a precise event in his discussions of Christian piety. He “always emphasized the gradualness rather than the suddenness of conversion and the difficulty of making progress in the Christian life.” In a statement that many contemporary Presbyterians would deem nonsensical, Calvin wrote that “we are converted little by little to God, and by stages.” In his commentary on Acts, Calvin was even reluctant to attach much significance to Paul’s encounter with Christ on the way to Damascus. “We now have Paul tamed,” he wrote, “but not yet a disciple of Christ.”

Consequently, Bouwsma attributes more to family circumstances and educational influences than to the movement of the Spirit in explaining Calvin’s move into the Protestant fold in 1535. The death of Calvin’s mother and his subsequent exclusion from his father’s household, according to Bouwsma, imparted a sense of homelessness that would later befit a French exile in Geneva. Then at Paris Calvin learned the three languages — Latin, Greek and Hebrew — that were so much a part of the Christian reform movement spearheaded by Erasmus. Bouwsma concludes that whatever conversion Calvin experienced it was not a radical break with his past but rather the fruit of personal, spiritual and intellectual seeds sown earlier in his life.

Too Cool for You? Whither the PCA

Published on by D. G. Hart21 Comments

Calvary OPC in Glenside, Pennsylvania is a fairly vanilla Orthodox Presbyterian congregation.  Granted, the exterior is aesthetically quirky,  and the constraints of parking leave visitors wondering if they’ll be left behind should the rapture occur during a service. But the services are modest, centered on the word read and preached, the hymns are traditional; the Supper is administered once a month. Calvary is by no means high church, nor is it happy-clappy.

So when the PCA decides to plant a congregation only two miles from Calvary OPC, some on both sides might wonder about the need or advisability of a new conservative Presbyterian work in the area. What makes the situation even more anomalous is that the new plant is a daughter church of Tenth Presbyterian, a Center City Philadelphia congregation whose worship differs from Calvary’s only noticeably by virtue of special music – Tenth has an ambitious and tasteful choir, organ, and set of soloists while Calvary gave up on choirs in services about a decade ago. Granted, the new church plant may not be trying to replicate Tenth’s “style”; it might be after a different liturgical market. But since Calvary already provides a service and pulpit ministry that is in the ballpark of Tenth’s, it is not at all clear why the new church is necessary. Continue reading “Too Cool for You? Whither the PCA” →