Category: Piety without Exuberance

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?

Of Choice Meats and Good Cigars

Published on by D. G. Hart24 Comments

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

He writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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.

When Does The Multi-Site Pastor Get to Confess His Sins?

Published on by D. G. Hart15 Comments

Rockwell worshipOne of the advantages of being a Country Parson that Tim Keller and I both failed to mention is the ability of rural ministers to worship with their congregations while leading in worship. This thought came to mind when reading the recent USA Today piece on the Rev. Keller and multi-site churches.

According to the story, the reporter, one church member

heard [Keller] preach at 10:30 a.m. on the Upper East Side. Now she has brought friends to hear him at the West Side 5 p.m. service. He briefly greets her, then slips into the service just before his sermon.

In 45 minutes, before the final hymn, Keller’s gone — off to deliver the same sermon, “The Gospel Changes Everything,” on the East Side.

Then, again, Keller, founder and senior pastor of Manhattan’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church, will dash back to West 79th Street for his fourth service of the day at three leased locations.

It’s not the traditional American mom-and-pop church, where the same pastor counsels parishioners, visits when they’re ill or marries or buries them.

Keller’s service-hopping — he usually preaches to three-fourths of the 5,500 people who attend Redeemer services — reflects a new model for worship spreading rapidly across the U.S. church landscape: multisite churches.

I know what follows may sound like criticism, and I know Keller has recently written on how to respond to criticism in a way that has attracted praise, but this story does raise a number of troubling questions.

The first, what does this multi-site performance say about worship and the sermon? I know one pastor in the Redeemer network who regularly complains about Presbyterian worship being logocentric. But what could be more logocentric than a pastor showing up to give his sermon, not having participated in the rest of the service? And isn’t a tad logocentric for those attending these multi-site services to go mainly to hear the Big Kahuna preacher? Reformed worship regards the service as an organic whole, with prayer (in various forms), the word (in various forms), the offering (in one form), and the sacraments constituting the means why which God communes with his people. The sermon may be the main course in the meal of worship, but it is not the only one.

The second question goes to the point of this post’s title: isn’t a pastor worshiping with the congregation during a service? I know he is leading, and I also know – having led worship, reluctantly (as a four office Presbyterian elder) – that a person is thinking about leading worship in ways that are different from thinking about honoring and glorifying God. Still, doesn’t a pastor need to confess sins, sing praise, hear the word as he reads it, and maybe even tithe (usually his wife has that covered)? But if the pastor only shows up for the “main event,” doesn’t this communicate that he is not part of the congregation, not part of the worshiping assembly, not in need of the same means by which the rest of the believers are receiving God’s grace and blessing? Or does urban ministry require a different kind of church?

Which means that the advantage of a mom-and-pop church, whether in the city, suburbs, or country, is that a pastor can worship God too along with the rest of the congregation.

Why Not Lutheran Baptist?

Published on by D. G. Hart54 Comments

oxymoronOr, why do Baptists want to be Reformed (as opposed to Calvinistic or particular), and why do Reformed Protestants present an object more attractive than Lutherans to Baptists?

These questions continue to bump and push around the mush in my mind, especially when I read folks like James White taking exception to Presbyterians who want to say that Reformed Baptist is something of an oxymoron, and then read the follow-up discussion over at Scott Clark’s blog. I understand how some may take the narrowing of Reformed identity to exclude Baptists as needlessly exclusive. Though I also can’t understand why no reviewer complained about the Dictionary of the Reformed and Presbyterian Tradition in America’s exclusion of Baptists from the scope of entries. (Mark Noll and I didn’t even include those Baptists who do baptize infants – Congregationalists.) I also understand that a Baptist might try to be covenantal in his understanding of redemptive history and still reject infant baptism.

What I don’t comprehend is how few seem to notice or take issue with the traffic for so long running between confessional Reformed and Baptists instead of between confessional Reformed and other confessional Protestants. Mind you, I enjoy the company of Calvinistic Baptists as much as the next Orthodox Presbyterian, and find all sorts of signs of health among those congregations known as Reformed Baptist.

But why are Lutherans chopped liver? Why, in fact, has Lutheran become in some Reformed circles almost as objectionable as the other l-word – “liberal”? One could actually argue that confessional Lutherans share as much in common with confessional Reformed as particular Baptists, and our history is even longer (though it obviously has some rough spots). Could it be the objections to Lutherans run along ethnic lines – dare we say the twentieth-century German problem that forced German-Americans in Pennsylvania to become “Pennsylvania Dutch”? Or is it a problem of liturgy and the triumph of John Owen and Banner of Truth among American Presbyterians as opposed to the liturgical traditions of the Reformed churches on the continent?

If the latter, then as is so often the case, the turning point in American Presbyterian history is 1741 and the anointing of George Whitefield as the Boy George of vital Calvinism. Odd though that no one called that Episcopal priest Reformed.

Presbyterians and Puritans Apart?

Published on by D. G. Hart33 Comments

Some say it is nonsense to posit any difference between Puritans and Presbyterians. Others put it more delicately and argue for essential agreement among British Calvinists. The URC pastor, Mike Brown, has given some attention to this subject through the lens of Calvin and Owen on worship. He writes with some surprise that “the likes of Horton Davies and J. I. Packer . . . see a gap between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (at least) on worship practices. The piece of evidence that stands out is that John Calvin used and advocated a liturgy. John Owen opposed liturgies. To bring the Presbyterians into the debate, John Knox developed a liturgy for the kirk that became part of the early Presbyterian experience.

But Brown is unconvinced. He sees essential agreement:

Where one witnesses obvious discontinuity between the Continental Reformer and the English Puritan is in the use of liturgies. For Calvin, the liturgies he put to use in Strasbourg and Geneva displayed his understanding of a worship service that was spiritual, simple and in complete accordance with what Scripture alone prescribed. On the other hand, Owen clearly reveled great disdain for liturgies. In his Discourse Concerning Liturgies, Owen made many statements that suggest he believed liturgies somehow quenched the Spirit and obscured the simplicity of worship. Understood in its context, however, Owen’s Discourse is a polemic primarily against the imposition of liturgies. While Calvin knew well the difficulties of having a Protestant state make certain impositions upon the order of worship (such as the Genevan city council denying him his request for weekly communion), he never faced the type of situation which Owen and his fellow Nonconformists faced in England during the 1660s. This must be taken into consideration when evaluating any discontinuities between Calvin and Owen and their theologies of worship. Both Calvin and Owen were men of their times. Yet, both of these towering figures in the Reformed tradition firmly and unwaveringly believed that worship must be biblical, spiritual, and simple.

One question that lurks behind assessments like this is whether Puritans like Owen opposed all liturgy all the time, or simply the liturgy coming down from on high in the Church of England. Sure, most state-imposed measures are unwelcome, but Owen seems to go beyond this when he argues that liturgies restrain the free operation of the spirit.

This leads to an additional question, which concerns the way that Puritanism and Presbyterianism played out in the United States. New England was more receptive to revivalism than were the most Scottish segments of the Presbyterian Church (the Old Side and the Old School). This raises the further question, again for some unthinkable, whether Puritanism encouraged enthusiasm and spontaneity in ways that Old World Presbyterians regarded as a threat to confessional subscription and church polity. After all, if you can accept the word of others for creed and church order, why not in the prayers and forms of worship. (And, by the way, the Westminster Standards reveal much more detail on the interiority of Christian devotion — i.e. the ordo salutis — that The Three Forms of Unity or the Scottish Confession of Faith.)

One way to illustrate that these intuitions as more realistic than hypothetical is to remember that Presbyterianism started out in Scotland with liturgies (from Knox) and that arguably the greatest Puritan theologian, John Owen, wrote an essay against liturgy.

It may not prove the point about differences between Puritanism and Presbyterianism. But the different ways that those traditions played out in the United States do make you wonder.

The Baptized Luther, Part One

Published on by D. G. Hart1 Comment

(From the April 2001 NTJ)

The basic problem for any evangelical historian approaching Martin Luther is, of course, the centuries of mythology, literary, visual, anecdotal, that have come to surround the man and the Reformation in the evangelical tradition. How many third rate Protestant artists have painted their pictures of an angry Luther nailing the theses to the castle wall and thus symbolically putting a nail in the coffin of medieval catholicism? And how often have the sentiments of such artworks been echoed and reinforced in evangelical sermons and tracts over the years? Yet Luther himself in 1545 tells us that “when I took up this matter against indulgences, I was so full and drunken, yea, so besotted in papal doctrine that, out of my great zeal, I would have been ready to do murder — at least, I would have been glad to see and help that murder should be done — on all who would not be obedient and subject to the pope, even to his smallest word.” Clearly Luther’s own professed understanding of himself at this point in time has largely fallen on deaf ears in the tradition. Far from nailing up the coffin of the medieval church, he saw himself as operating within its framework for the furtherance of its mission.

A further complication in assessing the relationship between the Reformation period and that of the later revivals has been an argument from silence. In asking why the great Reformers and Puritans did not reflect upon mass movements of God’s Spirit in the manner in which Jonathan Edwards was later to do, the popular answer has often been that they were in fact living at times of awesome revival and were unaware of the extraordinary nature of the times in which they lived. This would appear, for example, to be the position of the influential evangelical leader, Martyn Lloyd-Jones who, perhaps more than anyone else, shaped the popular understanding within English and Welsh Calvinistic circles of the nature and importance of revival in the twentieth century. Hence, as the goldfish cannot analyze the water in which it swims, the Reformers and Puritans could scarcely be expected to produce a treatise on revival akin to The Religious Affections.

There is a sense in which, of course, the scholar should not be influenced by such images and arguments. Few who have ever read Luther will fail to see the irony of a man who rejected Ulrich Zwingli as a Christian brother because of his eucharistic beliefs being used as an icon by the most hardline Protestant conspiracy theorists in their crusades against the influence of the Papacy. Yet it is also very difficult for the evangelical scholar, with the theological commitments that implies, to approach the Reformation without trying to read the Reformation in terms of how it anticipates or legitimates movements of the eighteenth century and beyond.

While there is at least one comment of Luther which might lead us to believe that the success of the Reformation depended on little more, humanly speaking, than his ability to drink beer (a point which, incidentally, certainly marks him off from much later revivalism), a more fruitful avenue for looking at Reformation priorities is almost certainly the literary output of the central year of 1520. It was at this point that Luther laid out in its fullest form his manifesto for Reformation in the three great treatises: The Babylonian Captivity of the Church; The Freedom of the Christian; and An Address to the German Nobility. These three works, produced at the point in Luther’s career when it was becoming clear that the Church of Rome was not going to institute a theological reformation from within, laid out for all to see the implications of his understanding of justification by faith for the realms of the sacraments, the Christian life, and the secular authorities.

To place sacramental theology at the heart of Luther’s Reformation should require no justification: the fact that he was willing to anathematize Zwingli precisely on sacramental grounds should indicate to us the importance of this to Luther’s program; and the fact that one of the three major treatises of 1520 is devoted to this topic is scarcely coincidental to Luther’s overall vision of Reformation. Furthermore, this point should immediately alert us to the fact that Luther’s understanding of what the Reformation is all about has a sacramental dimension which is not something which stands out in the later evangelical tradition.

The sacramental revisions which Luther proposes in The Babylonian Captivity present in pointed form ideas that had been developing in his mind throughout the previous five years and which had become increasingly focused in late 1518 and 1519. In brief, he reduces the number of sacraments from seven to three (penance still being considered a sacrament at this stage) and redefines them in terms of his understanding of the centrality of promise and faith. Thus, the sacraments come to function as outward symbols whose inner reality (and usefulness) is only available to the eyes of faith.

Most striking for the evangelical approaching Luther on the sacraments is his view of baptism, for it is at this point that Luther’s theology sits most uncomfortably with any reading of his spiritual life in terms of later conversionism. At the start of the baptism section in The Babylonian Captivity, Luther makes the following point:

But Satan, though unable to do away with the virtue of baptizing little children, has shown his power by putting an end to it among adults. Today there is scarcely any one who calls to mind his own baptism, still less takes pride in it; because so many other ways have been found of getting sins forgiven and entering heaven.

What Luther is alluding to here is the medieval stress upon baptism as a “first plank” for salvation which, once the recipient has again fallen into sin, is more or less abandoned in favour of the “second plank” of the church’s penitential system. Such an approach effectively reduces the significance of baptism to a point in the past and focuses the mind far more upon the various means which the church provides in the present for dealing with sin. As a result, baptism becomes less important than the present penitential system with which believers have to do.

Martin Kenunu

The Unconverted Calvin, Part Two

Published on by D. G. Hart5 Comments

From the NTJ, October 2000 (concluded)

Whatever the merits of Bouwsma’s historical scholarship, his point about Calvin’s conversion or, better, evolution should not come as a shock to those who claim to follow in the French Reformer’s spiritual footsteps. That it does amaze is testimony to the way that pietistic influences have eaten away Presbyterian and Reformed brain cells. Once upon a time the Calvinistic branch of Protestantism was not so gullible when it came to the gushes of emotion that are supposed to count for the work of the Spirit among revivalistically inclined Protestants. For most Presbyterians, affirmative answers to questions commonly asked at a public affirmation of faith were a sufficient gauge to a man or woman’s standing before God. But these more formal and objective measures of Christian zeal began to look bland once the converts of the revivals of the First Great Awakening began to tell about the ways in which they had been slain by the Holy Ghost (as if they had, to borrow Luther’s phrase, swallowed him, “feathers and all”). At that point, the great and ongoing struggle between dying to sin and living to righteousness was reduced to a moment, a crisis, a specific time when the convert experienced Gawdah. And ever since the eighteenth century when Presbyterians began to look for signs of grace where no one had looked before, they not only started to insist on the kind of conversion narratives that make Calvin look like a non-evangelical, but they also introduced an element into their religious sensibility that would prove to be destructive of Reformed piety and worship. They began to insist upon experiences and encounters and restrictions and insights that their theology could not deliver. (This explains, by the way, the great disparity between the biblical and theological disciplines in Reformed theological education and the area of study misnamed as practical theology. Prospective pastors learn for two-thirds of their classes that it is God who saves his people and then are told that to be successful in the ministry they need to be enthusiastic, warm and caring. Go figure.) Continue reading “The Unconverted Calvin, Part Two” →

What Would Tim Keller Say to Wendell Berry?

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Here are some thoughts about why the conversation would be interesting.

Why John Calvin Was No Neo-Calvinist (and pass the Paxil)

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Now our blockishness arises from the fact that our minds, stunned by the empty dazzlement of riches, power, and honors, become so deadened that they can see no farther. The heart also, occupied with avarice, ambition, and lust, is so weighed down that it cannot rise up higher. In fine, the whole soul, enmeshed in the allurements of the flesh, seeks its happiness on earth. To counter this evil the Lord instructs his followers in the vanity of the present life by continual proof of its miseries. . . .
     Then only do we rightly advance in the discipline of the cross, when we learn that this life, judged by itself, is troubled, turbulent, unhappy in countless ways, and in no respect clearly happy; that all those things which are judged to be its goods are uncertain, fleeting, vain, and vitiated by many intermingled evils. From this, at the same time, we conclude that in this life we are to seek and hope for nothing but struggle; when we think of our crown, we are to raise our eyes to heaven. For this we must believe: that the mind is never seriously aroused to desire and ponder the life to come unless it be previously imbued with contempt for the present life.

Institutes, III.ix.1