Category: Reformed Protestantism

An Easy Way to tell a New Calvinist from an Old Calvinist — Say Lutheranism!

Published on by D. G. Hart126 Comments

This is inspired by R. Phillips’ post on why Old Calvinists should be encouraged by, even rejoice over, New Calvinism. The word inspired is key because inspiration does not come easily to Old Calvinists unless we are talking the doctrine of Scripture. Temperamentally, we tend to be phlegmatic souls who see almost nothing new under the sun (see below). But New Calvinists see inspiration and enthusiasm as part and parcel of genuine faith. Such inspiration also cuts down on cognitive powers — think Gilbert Tennent.

The lone exception to the New Calvinist w-w is Lutheranism. That is where New Calvinists find their critical skills and discern differences. Does cessationism matter? Not so much. But talk too much about the Lord’s Supper or baptism and you feel the wind going out of New Calvinist hedonism.

I wonder if one reason for such skepticism about Lutheranism is that confessional Lutherans put the stiff upper lip in the theology of suffering. Lutherans know the hype and pizzazz of the theology of glory and stay away from it. New Calvinists, in contrast, seem to be suckers for energy, the triumphalism, the earnestness of the religious conference and the celebrity speaker.

For that reason, I propose a thought experiment. What if we took Phillips’ words regarding New Calvinists and applied them to Lutherans? Would the world-wide interweb go kablooie?

1. Old Calvinism should avoid being overly critical but should rejoice in the New Lutheranism.

2. Old Calvinism should not be threatened by or feel pressure to conform to the New Lutheranism.

3. Old Calvinism should humbly listen to the New Lutheranism, benefiting from its insights and critiques.

4. Old Calvinism should zealously seek to serve rather than to undermine the New Lutheranism.

If Phillips could write about Lutheranism the way he does about New Calvinism, I might be persuaded. Otherwise, I suspect that Phillips was a New Calvinist before New Calvinists starting selling t-shirts.

Postscript: I have taken this personality test that has been going around on the Internet and I further wonder if New Calvinists would score differently from an Old Calvinist, if maybe the differences are primarily temperamental. Here are (all about) my results:

MIDDLING

Your habits and perspectives most resemble those of middle-class Americans. Members of this group tend to be gentle and engaging parents, and if they’re native English speakers they probably use some regional idioms and inflections. Your people are mostly college-educated, and you’re about equally likely to beg children not to shout “so loudly” as you are to ask them to “read slow” during story time. You’re probably a decent judge of others’ emotions, and either a non-evangelical Christian, an atheist, or an agnostic. A typical member of this group breastfeeds for three months or less, drinks diet soda, and visits the dentist regularly. If you’re a member of this group, there’s a good chance that you roll with the flow of technological progress and hate heavy metal music.

What's Wrong with Calvinism?

Published on by D. G. Hart64 Comments

If you can attribute American patriotism or the Tea Party to Calvinism, you have a term that is almost as much of a wax nose as evangelicalism. This is why the phrase Reformed Protestant is better than Calvinism. Reformed Protestant has a definite meaning that Calvinism doesn’t.

And this is why the so-called New Calvinism thrives (at least in its own promoters’ minds). Take for instance the question of diversity, a factor that lets New Calvinists think they are the mainstream. Here is Matthew Barrett on John Piper:

Some today are surprised by the wide diversity within New Calvinism, including everyone from Lecrae to the Gettys, or R. C. Sproul to Francis Chan. Piper points out that this diversity among Reformed-minded folks has always been present. All one has to do is look back at the long list of Calvinists in church history. Piper suggests comparing Augustine and Adoniram Judson, Francis Turretin and John Bunyan, John Calvin and Chapiper-writingrles Spurgeon, John Knox and J. I. Packer, Cotton Mather and R. C. Sproul, Abraham Kuyper and William Carey, Haynes and Dabney, Theodore Beza and James Boice, Isaac Backus and Martin Lloyd-Jones, etc. “If there is such a diversity in the Old,” Piper argues, “then we really cannot find dividing lines between the Old and the New.”

He goes on to say, “The Old is too diverse and the connections between Old and New too organic to claim things that are new in the New that were not present in any aspects in the Old.” The New is too assorted to claim any “downgrade” or “upgrade” from the Old. History is too complex for “broad brush commendations of one over the other or condemnations of one under the other.” Hence, any “given issue that you try to address you can find periods and persons and movements among the Old that would outshine the New.” Piper concludes, “There is no claim, therefore, in my assessment that the New is better.” From here Piper goes on to give 12 features that define the New Calvinism.

I wonder what Piper or Barrett would say about New Calvinism’s diversity being the product (as Nate commented) of waffling, for instance, on baptism and charismatic gifts, the way that Old Calvinism doesn’t. In other words, diversity is a sign of failure, not an indication of strength.

Plus, if you define Calvinism by the creeds and confessions of the Reformed churches, which is how Calvinism started, you find remarkable coherence. Spurgeon, Judson, and Piper are out. Knox, Kuyper, and Dabney are in.

And this is what Old Calvinists find so alarming about the New Calvinists. They can understand themselves entirely as a categorical abstraction (Piper’s 12 points) without relationship to word, sacrament, or discipline — the marks of the church (as in, Reformed according to the word). In fact, aside from the implicit hubris in the New Calvinists’ understanding of the past, do these guys, as Tim Challies apparently believes, think they are in the mainstream? Can you really be in the mainstream when instead of church you chart your existence by conferences and organizations like Gospel Coalition, Acts 29, and Sovereign Grace? Have I got a book for Tim.

My understanding of earth sciences is spotty, but new bodies of water generally do not become the mainstream within three decades unless you do some serious dirt moving (and that didn’t even spare New Orleans). But cheerleaders always think their team is number one, even when they are losing.

The New Calvinism is not the Old Calvinism

Published on by D. G. Hart251 Comments

We can be sure of that thanks to Jared Oliphint:

Twelve Thirteen features of the New Calvinism:

1.The New Calvinism, in its allegiance to the inerrancy of the Bible, embraces the biblical truths behind the five points (TULIP), while having an aversion to using the acronym or any other systematic packaging, along with a sometimes qualified embrace of limited atonement. The focus is on Calvinistic soteriology but not to the exclusion or the appreciation of the broader scope of Calvin’s vision.

1. The Old Calvinism begins with the doctrine of Scripture summarized in confessions like the Westminster Confession of Faith and is willing to use TULIP as a handle for understanding Calvinist soteriology. Old Calvinism also relies on systematic thought.

2. The New Calvinism embraces the sovereignty of God in salvation, and in all the affairs of life in history, including evil and suffering.

2. The Old Calvinism affirms divine sovereignty in everything, even in Christ’s death on the cross for the elect.

3. The New Calvinism has a strong complementarian flavor as opposed to egalitarian, with an emphasis on the flourishing of men and women in relationships where men embrace a call to robust, humble, Christ-like servant leadership.

3. The Old Calvinism follows biblical teaching on male ordination and refuses to describe human life this side of glory as flourishing.

4. The New Calvinism leans toward being culture-affirming rather than culture-denying, while holding fast to some very culturally alien positions, like positions on same-sex practice and abortion.

4. The Old Calvinism understands salvation to be distinct from culture, hence Old Calvinists’ belief that deceased saints are saved even though they no longer inhabit a culture.

5. The New Calvinism embraces the essential place of the local church. It is led mainly by pastors, has a vibrant church-planting bent, produces widely-sung worship music, and exalts the preached word as central to the work of God locally and globally.

5. The Old Calvinism does not exist apart from congregations where the marks of the church are evident and which are part of regional, national, and ecumenical assemblies.

6. The New Calvinism is aggressively mission-driven, including missional impact on social evils, evangelistic impact on personal networks, and missionary impact on unreached peoples of the world.

6. The Old Calvinism actually calls and supports home and foreign missionaries through assemblies of presbyters that oversee such ministry.

7. The New Calvinism is inter-denominational with a strong (some would say oxymoronic) Baptistic element.

7. The Old Calvinism is Reformed Protestant and seeks fraternal relations with communions of like faith and practice.

8. The New Calvinism includes charismatics and non-charismatics.

8. The Old Calvinism excludes charismatics because Old Calvinists believe in the sufficiency of Scripture.

9. The New Calvinism puts a priority on pietism or piety in the Puritan vein, with an emphasis on the essential role of affections in Christian living, while esteeming the life of the mind and being very productive in it, and embracing the value of serious scholarship. Jonathan Edwards would be invoked as a model of this combination of the affections and the life of the mind more often than John Calvin, whether that’s fair to Calvin or not.

9. The Old Calvinism does not drop names and includes Reformed Protestants who are temperamentally restrained (read Scots, Dutch, Germans, Swiss).

10. The New Calvinism is vibrantly engaged in publishing books and even more remarkably in the world of the internet, with hundreds of energetic bloggers and social media activists, with Twitter as the increasingly default way of signaling things new and old that should be noticed and read.

10. The Old Calvinism has more books than New Calvinism, and many of them are ones that New Calvinists need to tell the difference between Calvinism and other kinds of Protestantism.

11. The New Calvinism is international in scope, multi-ethnic in expression, culturally diverse. There is no single geographic, racial, cultural governing center. There are no officers, no organization, nor any loose affiliation that would encompass the whole. I would dare say that there are outcroppings of this movement that nobody (including me) in this room has ever heard of.

11. The Old Calvinism was and still is international in ways that the New Calvinists would not understand. Old Calvinists also appreciate in ways that New Calvinists don’t how European and Western Calvinism is. This means that Old Calvinists speak English without feeling guilty.

12. The New Calvinism is robustly gospel-centered, cross-centered, with dozens of books rolling off the presses, coming at the gospel from every conceivable angle, and applying it to all areas of life with a commitment to seeing the historic doctrine of justification, finding its fruit in sanctification personally and communally.

12. The Old Calvinism teaches that Christ died on the cross only for the elect and Old Calvinists are happy to let the Reformed creeds and confessions define the way that Reformed pastors teach and apply the atonement (among other doctrines taught and professed by the Reformed churches).

13. The New Calvinism uses words like robust, vibrant, embrace and lots of adverbs.

13. Old Calvinists don’t.

Would You Give Up Whiskey for Lent?

Published on by D. G. Hart33 Comments

It’s a curious post for early in a period some call Lent, but Robert Christian thinks Roman Catholics have a drinking problem:

From parishes to parochial schools to university classrooms, the Church is failing in its responsibility to talk about the pernicious impact of alcohol (and even drugs) on so many people in our society, along with the detrimental impact it has on achieving the common good. One is more likely to see devout Catholics being flip about drinking—or even romanticizing and glorifying it—than confronting the nihilism, escapism, and despair that are a big part of our nation’s drinking culture and the wreckage that it leaves in its wake. The Church takes a harder line on drugs, but how often is the topic really discussed? How often does the Church address why people turn to drug use and explain its incompatibility with human flourishing? The Church provides some assistance, but most often it comes after people have already had their lives and the lives of their loved ones (and possibly strangers) devastated by the ruinous costs of addiction. The Church can and should do better. . . .

It is strange that those who identify the emptiness of materialism, consumerism, the sexual objectification and exploitation of others, the lust for power, and other false paths to happiness are failing to address the illusory nature of the “happiness” generated by drugs and alcohol. It is downright embarrassing when one compares the Church to the world’s other religions. Buddhism, Taoism, Mormonism, Sikhism, Islam, the Baha’i faith, and various Hindu sects and protestant denominations either teach that alcohol should be avoided entirely or used in moderation (defined in such a way that many Catholics would find fairly extreme). While engaging in interfaith dialogue, the vast majority of thoughtful, virtuous young people I have met from other faiths have been teetotalers (those who abstain from alcohol entirely), while I have witnessed many of my fellow devout Catholics, who are otherwise morally serious, acting foolishly due to their consumption of alcohol. The contrast is cringe-worthy.

Not to be overly low church, but the habit of giving up something (it used to be sin) for forty days a year may not be the best way to live a life of moderation and restraint. At the same time, comments like Christian’s reveal the dark side of the old charge that Protestantism was just a cover for antinomianism. No one can outmoralize a Protestant. Even so, Rome’s version of the gospel is no barrier against taking the law lightly.

The human predicament may be that we love the law when it makes us superior, and we love grace when we are feeling low. Protestants of the good sort know that we are only superior in Christ.

Let My People Go

Published on by D. G. Hart122 Comments

If the Israelis can distinguish between an Arab Christian and an Arab Muslim, why can’t Americans tell the difference between an evangelical and a Reformed Protestant? (Supply your own punchline.)

This thought experiment came to mind when reading this:

An Israeli bill will grant legal distinction between Israel’s Muslim and Christian Arabs for the first time, recognizing Christians as a separate minority. But many Arab Christians don’t want such distinctions.

The controversial bill was approved by a 31-6 vote in its third and final reading in the Knesset Monday. The legislation will also increase employment representation for Christian Arabs in Israel’s government by adding an Israeli Christian Arab to the panel of the Advisory Committee for Equal Opportunity.

This will give the primarily Arab 160,000-person Christian population in Israel its own representative alongside representatives for ultra-orthodox Jews, new immigrants, women, and other religious and social groups, according to the Jerusalem Post.

What’s the problem with such a distinction? Looks like it’s the same problem in the U.S.:

“I believe most Arabs will refuse this decision,” Munther Na’um told CT of the controversial bill passed earlier this week. It distinguishes between Israel’s Muslim and Christian Arab communities for the first time and recognizes Christians as a separate minority.

“It’s meant to separate the whole family [Israeli Arabs] in political decisions,” Na’um said, speaking from his base in the northern Israeli town of Shafr Amr. Palestinians living in Israel are referred to as Israeli Arabs.

“It’s not good for Arabs, whether Christians or Muslims, or the Jews,” he said. Na’um believes that some Israeli politicians are “trying to separate us by religious status and create a political situation from that.”

“It will not be effective,” he added.

The bill was approved by a 31-6 vote in its third and final reading in the Knesset Monday. The legislation will also increase employment representation for Christian Arabs in Israel’s government by adding an Israeli Christian Arab to the panel of the Advisory Committee for Equal Opportunity.

The evangelical leader downplayed the move by Israeli politicians in the Knesset which has angered fellow Arab lawmakers.

“I don’t think this will make much impact because the relations between Christians and Muslims are very close. We have the same traditions, the same culture. It will be difficult to separate us just because we are Christians and they are Muslims,” Na’um said.

In other words, the reason for rejecting differences between Muslims and Christians is political. They are more effective as an ethnic political bloc than they are as separate religious groups.

And that is about as far as this analogy goes because what Christians face in the U.S. in no way compares to the circumstances that Palestinians confront in Israel. But the point is that the aspect of American Protestantism that keeps throwing Reformed Protestants into the same evangelical goo as every other Protestant who is either outside the mainline or ambivalent about the mainline churches’ policies and programs is politics is similar to the one that unifies Arab Christians and Muslims in Israel — not what they believe but a common political foe. Ever since the Religious Right emerged as an electoral force, Reformed Protestants have been more inclined to carve up the national scene according to culture-war categories than confessional teaching. W-w my foot!

That is true except for 2kers, who know that the kingdom of Christ claims higher and different allegiances than the Republic or Tea Party.

Golden Oldie (part two)

Published on by D. G. Hart11 Comments

An excerpt from “‘Reformed’ or ‘Revived’: Why Words Matter”, Modern Reformation (July/August 1998):

Perhaps a better way of showing these differences is to contrast the words “revive” and “reform.” These words connote the same difference already noted between Tennent and the Second Helvetic Confession. The word, “revive,” suggests an effort to recover genuine spiritual existence and vitality in the lives of believers, and to introduce non-believers to the eternal life that comes through Christ. A revival cuts through the forms and “vain repetitions” of established and hypocritical religion and goes to the heart to cause and nurture genuine conversion and real repentance. Not only does revivalism thrive on the desire for authentic religion but its aim is individualistic. To be sure, the more people revived, the better the church may be. But revival stresses individual conversion and personal morality.

The word, “reform,” however, suggests a restructuring of a specific order. A reform’s purpose is to take an existing organization or body and making it conform to a correct or true standard and norm. So while revivals aim at generating or deepening spiritual life in individuals, reformations strive to impart a more faithful shape to the visible church in its corporate life, in doctrine, worship, and government. For example, individuals sitting through the Mass may be Reformed in their understanding of the Lord’s Supper, but the liturgy presently violating their conscience hardly is.

Though these meanings of “revive” and “reform” don’t come from Webster’s dictionary, they are implicit in the arguments used to defend both revivalism and reformation. If a revival occurs, its defenders argue that spiritual life has been imparted, in other words, that the spirit of God is at work. This was not only true in the eighteenth century but is still so today. Tennent, for instance, not only thought that ministers who supported Whitefield’s revivals were regenerate — after all, he assumed that Whitefield’s opponents were dangerous because unconverted. But Tennent also presumed that the revivals of his day were a work of God. More recently, Iain Murray has followed a similar logic. Though he has not gone so far as Tennent in questioning the regeneration of individual ministers, Murray is convinced that the First Great Awakening was a work of God. Though he believes revivals are occasions where God blesses the ordinary means of grace in an extraordinary way, Murray is not reluctant in concluding that the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century was the result of the work of the Spirit. Murray’s conclusion should not be surprising. Since Calvinists believe that only God can give spiritual life to the unregenerate, a revival ipso facto has to be a work of God. But that begs the epistemological question of whether we can know for sure where and when God’s Spirit is active.

The interpretive stakes are not quite so high, however, when it comes to telling whether reformation has taken place. The marks of the church, according to the Reformers, are one very important way to discern where the gospel is. Unlike revivalism which encourages the evaluation of things that are invisible, namely, the human soul, the Reformation promoted the search for phenomena that can be observed by the human senses. In the words of the Belgic Confession, Article 29, “The marks by which the true church is known are these: if the pure doctrine of the gospel is preached therein; if she maintains the pure administration of the sacraments as instituted by Christ; if church discipline is exercised in punishing of sin; in short, if all things are managed according to the pure Word of God.” In other words, to look for Reformation is to evaluate visible or external forms. But to look for revival is to make judgments about things invisible and internal.

So the “reformed” and the “revived” make two different kinds of determination when they look for Reformation and revival. Proponents of revival make claims that should be reserved for God, that is, whether a soul has truly come to new life in Christ. To be sure, the “revived” look for evidence in visible and external things such as profession and deed. But to say that a revival occurred is to determine that God did actually regenerate a remarkable number of souls. The Parable of the Sower suggests the need for less certainty in making such a determination. The “reformed,” however, do not pretend to look into the state of souls or make judgments about God’s intervention into human history. Yes, they do use the language of “true” and “false” churches, which are forms of evaluation that connote eternal significance. Still, they make no claims about the spiritual state of individuals. And in the context of sixteenth-century Europe one did not need to be a believer to spot a Reformed church. A professing Roman Catholic would see an extraordinarily different liturgy in a Protestant church and know that this congregation had been “reformed.” The difference, of course, would be that the Protestant would call such visible changes “true,” while the Catholic believer would regard them as “false.”

The lesson taught by the differences implicit in the words, “reformed” and “revived,” is not simply that we should be careful about claiming to know things we can’t. It is also that our assessment of Christian expressions and practice will always be limited to forms. We cannot see into the human heart and therefore must judge whether the words and deeds of an individual believer’s life are credible, and whether the liturgy, teaching, and government of a congregation are reformed according to the Word. In other words, we are limited to the world of appearances and our conclusions should always reflect a caution befitting the limits of our knowledge. For this reason, professing believers who cherish the Reformed Faith might want to delete the words, “revival,” “revived,” and “revive,” from their vocabulary. If you are Reformed you should know that detecting the pulse of spiritual life in a convert or the hand of God in human history is work that only God, who surpasses human understanding, can do.

Imagine if You Were Orthodox Presbyterian

Published on by D. G. Hart54 Comments

John Zmirak is back to pester (unintentionally) Jason and the Callers with an explanation for what conservative or traditionalist Roman Catholic culture is so weird. He thinks the problem is numerical. Not as many good Roman Catholics exist as “Sunday Catholics”:

How many people in America actually believe all the central truths of the Catholic Catechism? Public opinion surveys have revealed that high percentages of Sunday Mass-goers do not hold, or perhaps never learned about, transubstantiation (the change of bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist). Depending on which faction of the Catholic fragment you belong to, you can chalk up that ignorance to either the collapse of Catholic schooling, the dumbing down of the liturgy, or even to the suppression during the 1970s of the “unconscious catechesis” that used to occur every time the most unlettered peasant knelt for the Host and reverently took it on his tongue from the blessed hands of a priest.

I don’t know that public opinion surveys have asked “Sunday Catholics” what they believe about the physical resurrection of Christ, or the Immaculate Conception, but if average Catholics believe what I was taught in my Catholic high school, then they are heretics – and probably don’t even know or care.

Practice is not a perfect mirror of what we believe, but surely it tells us something that the rates of divorce, premarital sex, and cohabitation are not a whit lower (and in some cases higher) among Roman Catholics than among most churchgoing Protestants. The explosive growth of annulments is partly an outright abuse on the part of bishops, and partly a recognition that many Catholics enter the sacrament with “defective intent.” Remember that if either party going into a marriage considers divorce and remarriage a possible option it invalidates the marriage. So most of the annulments given out nowadays are quite likely valid – unlike too many Catholic weddings. . . .

The implication of this sad fact is clear: On a grave moral issue where several popes have invoked their full moral authority short of making an infallible declaration, 95 percent of U.S. Catholics (the number is surely higher in most of Europe) have rejected the guidance of Rome. They are not “bad Catholics” so much members of a new, dissenting sect – which happens to occupy most of the seats in most of the churches, and many of the pulpits and bishop’s offices, too.

This means that the market for serious Roman Catholic reflection and works is small:

A good friend of mine who works for a major Catholic publisher reported to me the results of some very pricey market research his company undertook, to turn up the actual size of the “orthodox Catholic market.” Many thousands of dollars later, his company learned that if you count Catholics who go to Mass more than once a week, or spend a single dollar on Catholic books or other media, or volunteer for any parish activity, the grand total for the United States of America is no higher than 1.2 million.

That is the whole Catholic market. No wonder there isn’t enough revenue to go around. All the quarrels between traditionalists and Novus Ordo conservatives, between the lovers of Dorothy Day and fans of John Courtney Murray, are fights for pieces of this tiny pie. A pop tart, really.

And pop tarts aren’t health food. It isn’t normal for the Church to consist just of saints and zealots, ascetical future “blesseds,” and Inquisition re-enactors. Faith is meant to be yeast that yields a hearty loaf of bread. But since 1968 there has been nothing left to leaven, and we find ourselves eating yeast. (My apologies to English readers who love their Marmite.) The last time I was at the Catholic Marketing Network, which includes all the leading companies in the orthodox Catholic market, most of the attendees seemed to be people who’d bought their own booths – so the whole day was spent watching vendors try to sell each other their stuff. (“I’ll trade you three copies of The Secret of the Rosary for one of those 3-D Divine Mercy holograms.”) . . .

The weirdness, bitterness, crankiness, and the general mediocrity that pervade the Catholic subculture – from its newspapers to its TV shows, from most of its tiny colleges to the poorly-penned books, and sloppy, sentimental blogs that flood the tiny market of conservative Catholic readers – is the direct result of having few people to choose from. Right off the bat, 95 percent of potential applicants for any position have disqualified themselves for doctrinal reasons.

Well, John should console himself. At least Roman Catholics have newspapers, tv-shows, and colleges even if it is weird. With only 30,000 in the OPC, the best we can do is a summer Family Bible Camp at some state park in need of serious renovations. And even if you are the much “bigger” PCA, at 300,000 large, the best you can do is one college and a magazine that is sometimes in print.

Even so, Zmirak makes a useful point. When your numbers are low, your options for communicating are meager. If you want to blame this on the free market system — maybe Pope Francis would — then consider how much you can subsidize with only 30,000 small donors. If a potential market of 30,000 doesn’t provide the kind of scale that makes modern media affordable or even conceivable, the potential giving of 30,000 will hardly allow you to subsidize a college or radio station.

So if conservative Roman Catholics feel marginal, try being a conservative Presbyterian.

Show Me Ze Money, Lebowski

Published on by D. G. Hart15 Comments

If you ever wanted proof of how wealthy American Christians are and how little the ordinary means of grace receive from believers’ charitable contributions, just take a look stories like this:

In its fourth annual State of Giving report, the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA) reveals that charitable giving to more than 1,600 of its accredited organizations increased 6.4 percent last year. Donations reached $11 billion in 2012, compared to $10.3 billion in 2011. . . .

The biggest winners among 28 categories: foundations (up 25%), adoption (up 12.2%), K-12 education (up 12%), short-term missions (up 12.1%), and higher education (10%). The presence of education among the top five is notable, given the segment has seen one of the biggest declines since 2007.

Better yet, go to ECFA’s own website where you find numbers (for 2012) like this:

Bethany Christian Services — Expenses $82,735,557 Revenue $84,569,821

InverVarsity Christian Fellowship — Expenses $84,192,000 Revenue $83,494,000

Home School Foundation — Expenses $1,790,302 Revenue $1,770,418

Evangelical Presbyterian Church — Expenses $12,097,370 Revenue $16,059,164

Desiring God Ministries — Expenses $5,784,699 Revenue $6,023,726

Gospel Coalition — Expenses $1,106,824 Revenue $1,456,923

So that Roman Catholic readers don’t feel left out (or superior), I should mention that I tried to find figures on various diocesan budgets. Guidestar will provide them for a fee. But I did run across this dated tidbit in a pastoral letter from the Bishop of Albany (why the press did not cover a church officer sporting apostolic succession and episcopal charism is beyond me):

A recent study by Bishop William McManus and Father Andrew Greeley entitled Catholic Contributions: Sociology and Policy reveals that although American Catholics earn on the average over a $1,000.00 a year more than their Protestant counterparts, Catholic financial contributions to their Church are much less than those of Protestants. For example, on the average, Protestants contribute $580.00 to their Church annually as opposed to $320.00 for Catholics. Furthermore, Catholics contribute only 1.1 percent of their income to the Church while Protestants donate at the level of 2.2 percent of their income.

More strikingly, the study finds that the disparity between Catholic and Protestant giving is the result of the dramatic change in giving patterns of contributions to one’s Church over the past 25 years. In the early 1960’s, Catholics gave the same proportion of their income to the Church as Protestants contributed. In the last quarter century, however, the Protestant giving rate remains stable at approximately 2 percent of annual income while the Catholic rate has fallen from more than 2 percent to about 1 percent.

Why has this occurred? Is it that Catholics have become stingier or more miserly? I hardly think so. Is it due to the changing levels in Church attendance? No, because Protestant church attendance has declined significantly more than Catholic in this time frame but their level of giving has not. Is it because Catholics give to our schools rather than the Church? Statistics reveal that this is not the case because parents who send their children to Catholic schools contribute more rather than less to the Church than do other Catholics.

I believe that the decline in the pattern of Catholic giving to the Church is due primarily to the lack of communication and the lack of leadership.

Calvinism Envy

Published on by D. G. Hart52 Comments

Mark Tooley wishes Methodists were more like Calvinists. (H.L. Mencken couldn’t tell a difference when it came to Prohibition and World War I.)

Calvinists are sometimes mocked but they do have their own élan. These determined people endured the flames, created their own cosmology, generated revolutions, crossed oceans, conquered virgin lands, built civilizations, and writ themselves large across history. Calvinism inspired literature, art, work ethics, and systems of governance. Theirs is a world of fire and drama. Think John Knox, Oliver Cromwell, Jonathan Edwards, Rembrandt, Hester Prynne wearing the brand of her Scarlet Letter, Woodrow Wilson, George C. Scott in “Hardcore,” or a bewhiskered Francis Schaeffer in his lederhosen traipsing about the Alps. They may not always be easily lovable but they must command respect. Theirs is a firm, unflinching identity.

As a Methodist, I’m jealous of the Calvinists. . . . Where’s the drama in Methodism? Methodists typically are amiable people, earnest, quiet, dutiful, often colorless, diligent but not renowned for intellectual rigor, art, literature or political theory. Methodism transformed Britain, shaped America, and has influenced the world. It fostered education, charity, philanthropy, a democratic ethos, and social reform. But Methodism doesn’t easily spark the electricity that Calvinism often has. Instead it evokes images of potluck suppers, hymn sings and ice cream socials. Very nice.

In point of fact, Methodism did once spark experimental, culture-transforming Protestantism with the best of the Edwardseans. The problem was that it cooled off the way most movements do when they organize and form structures. Then Wesleyanism needed the kick of Holiness (read Nazarenes) or a second dollop of the Holy Spirit (read Pentecostals) to reignite the fire.

The source of Tooley’s envy is John Piper’s recent poem, The Calvinist, set to video. (The sort of financing, planning, and producing that go into even a small video like this do tend to sap the vigor of even Piper’s earnestness.) Here are a few lines:

See him on his knees,
Hear his constant pleas:
Heart of ev’ry aim:
“Hallowed be Your name.”

See him in the Word,
Helpless, cool, unstirred,
Heaping on the pyre
Heed until the fire.

See him with his books:
Tree beside the brooks,
Drinking at the root
Till the branch bear fruit.

It won’t rival Horatio Bonar, so why did it turn Tooley’s head? It likely goes back to the way that Puritanism has dominated the English-speaking world’s idea of Calvinism. And of course, no Protestant group, not even those world-changers, the Dutch-American Calvinists, can rival the way that the Puritans continue to enrapture and repel.

But if Tooley wants to see a different strain of Calvinism, one less exceptionalist and more restrained, he only needs to visit any congregation of the OPC. There he will find pot-fatalist suppers, hymn sings, and even the avoidance of stimulants (e.g., grape juice). That’s not a put down or a recommendation. It is (what it is) a communion Christ founded.

Now Lutherans Are Tightening My Jaws

Published on by D. G. Hart298 Comments

Triumphalism is always bad but I never knew it was possible from Lutherans who generally keep the rest of us Christians honest with a tenacious theology of the cross. Anthony Sacramone picks up on Gene Veith’s post to argue for Lutheranism’s superiority to Reformed Protestantism. Since Anthony spent time at Redeemer NYC, he may not understand the difference between Reformed Protestantism and Calvinism, which explains his account of Reformed Calvinist strengths:

Calvinism, like other evangelical movements, offers new beginnings. Under powerful preaching, even the baptized come to believe they are starting a new life in Christ. Before they may have experienced, or been subjected to, dead religion with its rituals and liturgies, but now they have living faith — a personal relationship with the Risen Christ. They often mark their lives by the day they came to faith (which had nothing to do with water baptism) and how nothing was the same after that. We love the idea of the do-over. The Lutheran teaching of continual repentance does not have the same psychological effect (nor is it intended to).

Calvinism also offers some of the more potent expository preaching you will hear. Where are the Lutheran Spurgeons or Martyn Lloyd-Jones? Or, for that matter, Tim Kellers? The Law-Gospel paradigm in the pulpit does not lend itself easily to the kind of dynamism, for lack of a better word, often found in Reformed pulpits — preaching that often offers specific direction to the person in the pew, over and above repentance. Lutherans can roll their eyes at such preaching, but it is precious in the life of Reformed Christians, as far as sustaining their life of faith goes.

There is also the call to young men to (a) discipline themselves and (b) engage the culture. This can be very invigorating to young Christians. 2K theology reads too often like defeat in the public square — “Christ is for church on Sundays; at your humdrum job, just keep your head down, do your duty, be obedient, pay your bills, and wait until the Eschaton.” And double predestination, as horrifying as it is, at least makes a kind of logical sense and also has a role to play in motivating the baby believer: “God chooses whom to adopt. And since everyone born deserves to go to hell because of sin, we should be grateful he chooses to save anyone at all.” That’s actually comforting — if you’re convinced you’re one of the Elect. Then you can rest in the fact that you can never fall away, that your faith will never ultimately fail, that God has plucked you out of the garbage bin that is Gehenna* — and for a purpose: not only to grant you eternal life but also to glorify Him.

But how can I know I’m elect? Calvinists have no problem with the subjective element in faith. Romans 8: 16: “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” Read 2 Peter — it talks of believers making their calling and election sure. (It also talks of making “every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge;and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love.” Try and preach that in a confessional Lutheran church and you’ll be slammed for confusing law and Gospel.) The Lutheran doctrine of predestination makes little sense to most non-Lutherans: a monergism that also says you can lose your justification. Doesn’t the Scripture say that God will glorify all who are justified? Etc. Etc. That subjective element in Calvinism is then balanced by weighty tomes of systematic theology to exercise your noggin.

Odd, but almost none of this is Calvin. It may be Puritan and experimental Calvinist, or Tim Keller and New Life Presbyterian. But it is not the conviction or practice of the original Reformed churches.

Sacramone goes on to explain why folks burn out on Reformed Protestantism Calvinism and turn (like all about him) to Lutheranism:

1. They come to believe that limited atonement is simply not biblical. It may be the logical consequence of double predestination, but if the Faith were reasonable in that sense, where do you begin and end? What is “reasonable” about the Incarnation or the Cross?

2. The lack of ecumenicity (or even simple courtesy). Lutherans are often slammed for teaching closed communion, but it does not deny the name “Christian” to Arminians, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, or, for that matter, the Reformed. Many Reformed do not believe Catholics and Orthodox are Christians, because these communions embrace a false gospel. But that means the overwhelming majority of all Christians who have ever lived got it so wrong that they are almost certainly lost. Which leaves an Elect pool of about 11 people, relatively speaking. Then what constituted the Bride of Christ, the Body of Christ, for all those centuries before Calvin, Zwingli, Beza, Vermigli, et al.? For a communion that prizes logic, this doesn’t make a helluva lot of sense.

3. Endless debates and factions — including the paedo-/credo-baptism controversy. Now, Lutherans have seen their splits, too. Pietist vs. confessionalist. Mainline (ELCA) vs. “conservative” (LCMS, WELS, and others). But when you start debating whether God hated the reprobate before the Fall or only after the Fall, it’s time to go do something else with your life.

4. The sacraments, as they’ve been understood, again, by the overwhelming majority of all Christians throughout time: baptismal regeneration and the real bodily presence of Christ in the Eucharist**. (I would add auricular confession to an ordained minister/priest and absolution.) Calvinism has this gaping hole in its center — a hole that the Federal Vision folk have tried to address by “thickening” their concept of covenant baptism and the Real Presence, which has raised the ire of those who believe FV types have rejected key points of the historic Reformed confessions. (Google all of R. Scott Clark’s blog posts contra Doug Wilson, and also the Peter Leithart heresy trial.)

Well, if Jesus died for everyone, how about Esau, the Cannanites, the Perizites, the Hittites, and all the other tribes Joshua conquered?

Complaining about whether one Christian regards another as a genuine believer is not an index to ecumenicity, though it is common for experimental Calvinists to assess someone else’s profession as illegitimate (think Gilbert Tennent). Ecumenicity has to do with churches (even if the word has “city” in it and makes Redeemerites go knock kneed). For one example of Lutheran ecumenicity I suggest Sacramone check here.

The point about factionalism is a point that others who have come through Redeemer NYC have also made, though some of those wound up in the place where “real” unity exists, fellowship with the Bishop of Rome. But does Sacramone actually think Reformed Protestants have split over infra supralapsarian debates? If he meant to be funny, then hilarity it up.

And one more time he needs to read the Belgic Confession, Heidelberg, the Westminster Confession and Catechisms on the sacraments and get back to us on gaping holes.

The consolation is that this may not be the reflection of a real Lutheran since it exudes so much triumphalism. Makes me think Sacramone has not gotten Keller out of his system.