Category: Shameless Selves Promotion

Still Smokin'

Published on by D. G. Hart25 Comments

In an effort to make back issues of the Nicotine Theological Journal available on-line, readers may be interested to see that volume one of the journal glorified newsletter has been added to our page of back issues. (Please beware that the PDF versions will not capture the original layout in WordPerfect.) To tempt readers to take a gander, here is an excerpt from the lead article, “Calvinism, Ethnicity, and Smoke,” from issue number 2.

Old School Presbyterians who grew up within or on the edges of American evangelicalism — we write autobiographically — generally came to regard the Christian Reformed Church with awe for her robust expressions of Reformed piety. To be sure, Dutch-American Calvinists were never completely spared the piety of fundamentalism. But it was always a fundamentalism with a difference. While they may have frowned on such worldly amusements as card-playing or the theater or the dance hall, they continued to drink and smoke. “Sin came from the heart, not the environment,” they generally insisted, and they were usually right. So when you walked into the Calvin College coffee shop twenty years ago, it was not coffee that you smelled, but the pervasive scent of burning tobacco. Then there was the habit of the elders of the Wheaton CRC who smoked on the church lawn after Sunday morning worship, conveniently applying a jolt of nicotine to bus loads of stunned evangelical college students who were returning from church and knew next to nothing about Dutch ways, let alone Calvinism.

This brazen dismissal of artificial morality seemed so, well, healthy. For between puffs these elders could readily produce sound and sophisticated theological arguments on Christian liberty, the true nature of Christian virtue, and serving God in all walks of life. Yes, healthy, and more than a bit intimidating. Mark Noll well described the shock of seeing professing Christians smoke for the first time in his life, when he traveled to Calvin College as a Wheaton basketball player for his team’s annual “ritualistic slaughter.”

SUCH NICOTINE-STAINED PIETY, however, rapidly seems to be becoming a thing of the past. Visiting teams no longer suffer the effects of second-hand smoke on their travels to Grand Rapids. Recently the oldest college of the CRC held a “Great Calvin Smoke-Out.” Anti-smoking support groups have been launched, and smoking is now prohibited in all buildings on campus. (Though our spies report that some faculty are quietly practicing civil disobedience in the privacy of their offices.)

The new CRC morality was on graphic display in the January 6, 1997 issue of the Banner. In its “Worldwide” news column, the Banner reported on the combined efforts of the American Cancer Society and the National Jewish Outreach Program to encourage Jews in converting Saturdays into “Smoke-Free Sabbaths.” We are not persuaded that the pleasures of smoking are forbidden on the Lord’s Day. Still we would pause to commend the Banner at least for recognizing the increasingly quaint principle that some things are inappropriate on the Sabbath.

My (All about Me) Only Comfort

Published on by D. G. Hart4 Comments

Any real Reformed Protestant would know that 2013 marks the 450th anniversary of the Heidelberg Catechism. The Heidelberg Conference on Reformed Theology, sponsored in part by the Selbständige Evangelisch-Reformierte Kirche Heidelberg, will be held in Heidelberg from July 18 to July 20, with a worship service on the following Lord’s Day. The speakers include a variety of international scholars and pastors.

In addition to the conference, the conference organizers, Jon D. Payne and Sebastian Heck, have edited a volume of essays on the Catechism, A Faith Worth Teaching: The Heidelberg Catechism’s Enduring Heritage. Here is an excerpt from my chapter:

Ever since English colonial powers took control of the North American region to the north of Chesapeake Bay and turned New Netherland into New York, the Heidelberg Catechism has taken a back seat to the Westminster Assembly=s Shorter Catechism. As members of the Church of England, the eventual governors of New York were not particularly zealous about a catechism that had originated during the tumultuous war of the 1640s and that had failed to unify the English churches or Parliament. But once the English gained the upper hand over the Dutch in North American colonial developments, that victory sealed the fortunes for the catechism that was the primary teaching device and doctrinal standard for German- and Dutch-speaking Protestants. From the late seventeenth century on, the most influential and numerous churches in North America would be of English descent. This meant that in the New World and, later, the United States, Westminster=s Shorter Catechism would enjoy greater popularity than Heidelberg, and that the latter would be restricted to immigrants and settlers of Dutch and German descent.

This implicit ethno-confessional rivalry between Heidelberg and Westminster was not intentional but it was inevitable thanks to the United States’ debt — despite political independence — to the people, language, and churches of the United Kingdom. Estimates of each catechism from respected leaders in the United States= Reformed and Presbyterian churches illustrate that Heidelberg has always took a back seat to the Shorter Catechism among Reformed Protestants in the United States.

I won’t be speaking, but I wish I could go. It’s a wonderful city, a great cause, and an impressive line-up.

What New Calvinists Can Learn from Old Calvinism — Failure

Published on by D. G. Hart5 Comments

Collin Hansen lists the top-ten theology stories of the year. Number ten is the boom-and-bust cycle of Tim Tebow and Jeremy Lin. Hansen goes on to wonder why Christians follow celebrities and don’t reflect on failure (possibly because the Gospel Coalition is built on fame and ignores the troubles of folks like C. J. Mahaney):

Tebow wasted away on the New York Jets bench behind an inept starter after the Broncos traded him and prospered under the precision passing of Peyton Manning. Lin also left his team when the Knicks declined to mach an offer from the Houston Rockets, where’s he’s played reasonably well. Why would God not want these men to succeed and spread the gospel through a growing platform in the nation’s largest city? How can they testify to Christ in failure and disappointment? Too few have explored these questions with the same fervency that greeted their ascendance to international celebrity.

If the young and restless would-be Calvinists read much in the history of Calvinism they would know that failure and defeat is par for the course of the church militant (neo-Calvinists’ postmillennial optimism to the contrary). Here is one sober perspective on Calvinist history that suggests if the young and restless read the past less for inspiration and more for understanding, they would have the tools for handling disappointment (they might even get over their celebrity fetish):

For the better part of two hundred years the Corinthian temptation has been to regard Reformed Protestantism’s importance in cultural and political terms. This was a perspective held not only by Reformed believers. Think of Max Weber and his theory about Calvinism and capitalism, or of Alexis de Tocqueville and Calvinism’s contribution to democracy, or of Robert Merton on Calvinism and the rise of modern science. These older arguments do not have the force they once did, but even a couple of years ago at the academic conference in Geneva that marked the five hundredth anniversary of Calvin’s birth, most of the scholarly presentations explored not the sorts of ecclesiastical reforms that characterized Reformed Protestantism but the way that Calvinism shaped the modern world. Such assessments have prompted Reformed believers to think of Calvinism less as a churchly movement than as a religiously-based source for social transformation. Of course, the rise of neo-Calvinism and the inspiring words of Abraham Kuyper have contributed mightily to this estimate of Reformed Protestantism.

But even before Kuyper, the temptation to regard Reformed Protestantism for its political and cultural significance was constant for Presbyterians. How could it not be since the rise of Reformed Protestantism was bound up with European politics. . . . However we estimate the size, scope, and power of the modern nation-state, the reality is that Reformed Protestantism was on the ground floor of the construction of modern Europe and its colonial proliferation, a period that ran from 1600 at least to World War II. No wonder, then, that conservative Reformed believers pine for the days when their faith mattered to the mission of a particular nation. Scottish Presbyterians still long for the days of the National Covenant. Abraham Kuyper endeared himself to Reformed believers by evoking a golden age of Dutch history. Meanwhile, American Presbyterians have their own version of this nostalgia and attempt to construct a Christian founding of the United States even though the very point of the new nation was to bring an end to the pattern of confessionalization that had torn apart Europe (and especially England) during the seventeenth century. . . .

If Reformed Protestantism was chiefly an instance of ecclesiastical reform and renewal, then against that measure the OPC may be a worthy heir to the mantle of Reformed Protestantism, even meriting a celebratory toast. To be sure, the history of the OPC is strewn with believers who still want the church to be more than the church, to be at the forefront of maintaining and promoting social righteousness. But just as important to the OPC’s history has been a growing contentment with the church as simply the church. The word “simply,” of course, understates this sense because the church’s mission is hardly simple or ordinary. But to recognize that the church has a responsibility that no other institution does, and that God has instituted the church uniquely for his redemptive purposes, is the start of a broader sense of restraint and resolve that the OPC, while lacking many of the attributes and features that impress the Corinthian minded, is doing a good and important work no matter how quiet or routine.

Comparing J. Gresham Machen and Mustafa Kemal

Published on by D. G. Hart22 Comments

I did in fact compare Machen’s effort to purge Christian political activism from American Protestantism to Ataturk’s secularization of Islam in last night’s lecture. Here is an excerpt, well before the comparison:

The intervening history of Enlightenment and secularization is what makes the Religious Right and political Islam stand out. Both groups in different ways oppose secularization. Both also do so by appealing to the sacred texts of their faith. These similarities are what invite comparisons of activist evangelicals and political Muslims, no matter how unflattering or inflammatory. In fact, although born-again Protestants have not blown-up any buildings – wrong headed associations with the Christian militia and Timothy McVeigh notwithstanding – evangelicals’ continued reliance on older religious foundations for civil authority may look odder than political Islam considering that American Christians have so much more experience with alternatives to confessional states (or theocracy) than Muslims do. The United States, a secular nation hallowed by evangelicals, has almost 250 years under its belt and it stands as one of the chief alternatives to Christendom’s political theology. In contrast, the break up of the Ottoman Empire is still less than a century old and places like the Republic of Turkey are still trying to figure out the nature of secular democracy in a Muslim society. Evangelicals’ experience with secular politics may explain their reluctance to use violence. But it makes all the more unusual born-again Protestants’ appeal to the Bible as the norm for politics and social order. To unpack this anomaly a brief comparison of Christian and Muslim understandings of secularity may be useful.

As Bernard Lewis, among many others, has written, secularity in its modern sense – “the idea that religion and political authority, church and state are different, and can or should be separated – is, in a profound sense, Christian.” The locus classicus of this idea is Christ’s own instruction, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s” [Matt. 22:21]. This was directly the opposite of Roman and Jewish conceptions where either Caesar was God or God was the monarch. For Muslims, God was the supreme authority with the caliph as his vice-regent. What makes the contrast with Islam all the more poignant is that Christianity stood between Judaism and Islam chronologically such that Muslims could well have appropriated Christian notions of secularity. As it happened, Islam followed theocratic models of the ancient near east. Christianity, of course, made social order a lot more complicated as later disputes between popes and emperors demonstrated. Indeed, discomfort with secularity often arises from a legitimate desire for greater moral and political coherence. But for whatever reason, Christ himself apparently favored a social arrangement that differentiated spiritual matters from temporal ones.

No tomatoes thrown, but the ones served during a pleasant meal with UTC faculty were appetizing.

What Makes the Religious Right Different from Political Islam?

Published on by D. G. Hart62 Comments

I (all about me) will be in Chattanooga this week to speak at the University of Tennessee in the LeRoy Martin Distinguished Lecturer Series. I will be drawing on recent reflections about Islam and Turkey to consider the assets and liabilities of Christian political engagement in the United States. Here is the description from the Philosophy and Religion Department, which is hosting the event:

D.G. Hart’s comparison of Political Islam to Christian activists in the United States is a provocative and even inflammatory juxtaposition. Aside from obvious and significant differences between political activism and the use of violence, conservative Muslims and evangelical Protestants do register significant objections to secular understandings of society and the state. They also seek to have secular governments recognize, if not implement, the morality taught in sacred texts. In sum, both groups are raising important questions about the secular politics and whether efforts to bracket religion actually end up imposing a secular version of morality on citizens. And yet, some political observers in the United States do not find the Religious Right to be as threatening as political Islam. On the other hand, other commentators see no difference because all politically motivated religious groups are at odds with the norms of liberal democracy. These considerations raise important questions about whether Christianity is more compatible than Islam with liberal democratic societies, and whether secular constructions of public life owe their existence the developments of Christianity in the West. D. G. Hart will explore these questions in the light of his recent book From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism (Eerdmans, 2011).

The event is scheduled for Thursday, September 27, 2012, Thursday, September 27, 2012 at 5:00 pm in the University Center’s Raccoon Mountain Room (269). The public is welcome. Rotten tomatoes are not.

The Man who Made John Facenda and Frozen Tundra Famous

Published on by D. G. Hart24 Comments

I don’t know how the news of Steve Sabol’s death is traveling outside Philadelphia where chatter on sports-talk radio this morning was all about Sabol’s work in taking the National Football League from a sport like professional hockey into the prime-time attraction that it is today. But word of his death did register with me since Sabol was one of my few brushes with greatness.

Back in my junior year at Woodrow Wilson High, one of my history teachers, obviously looking for a day off without having to call in sick, had Sabol come to campus and speak to various classes. At the time NFL Films was still a relatively new venture, but it was largely responsible for that collection of highlight footage that ESPN would take over. It is an indication of how small-time the effort was that Sabol would mix with ne’er do well youths in Lower Bucks County. But by mythologizing the sport — Sabol played football at Colorado State while majoring in art history — he helped turn the NFL into the corporate behemoth it now is. I wonder if he had regrets.

Fast forward five years. During my junior and senior years at Temple, while studying film — does “the cinema” sound less dilettantish? — I worked for Steve Sabol. At their center city facility in Philadelphia, I mixed chemicals for the film processors between midnight and 8:00 so that the writers and editors could prepare those highlight reels that Howard Cosell announced. Of course, the real voice of NFL Films was John Facenda, the television news anchor for Channel 10 in Philadelphia. Later Sabol would use other Philadelphia voices, like Harry Kalas.

Segments from old soundtracks prompted me to buy one of the cd’s with the remarkably good music that turned football into art. (If readers want proof that my better half doesn’t read Old Life, admission of on-line purchases has to be it.) Folks born after 1970 can likely not imagine a time when professional football was almost as beautiful as it was modest. The irony is that Steve Sabol may have been so accomplished at his craft that he helped turn the NFL into something almost unwatchable (not to mention those vexing violations of the Lord’s Day).

John T., Philip B., and D.G.

Published on by D. G. Hart24 Comments

I am (all about me) a pretty big fan of Julie and Julia. For one thing, it’s a movie about food and I like to eat. Second, it’s about cooking and I like to cook because I like to eat. For another, it features Meryl Streep as Julia Child, which is a remarkable performance. How many actors have played such various roles?

My affection for the movie has inspired thoughts about a daily blog about one of my different responsibilities. For those who haven’t seen the movie, Julie decides to cook through the all the recipes of (I believe) Mastering the Art of French Cooking. And she blogs virtually daily about the trials and successes of this marathon.

This premise has made me think about blogging my way through Robert Murray McCheyne’s schedule to read the Bible in one year, not just the edification that accompanies reading the word, but also the challenges to schedules, the odd juxtaposition of texts and life’s circumstances, and the failed days which require reading 30 chapters in one weekend before the guests arrive. Another thought is to blog about talk-show radio, to follow the topics and screeds that govern sports-talk shows, Rush Limbaugh, and Phil Hendrie over the course of one year and see what that reveals about the American people.

One other possibility is to blog about the writing of a book, from the stage of drafting a proposal for a contract, through the ups and downs of research and writing, to the soul-enslaving chore of revising and editing. The problem with this idea is that it would give an editor too much information about whether the author is goofing off. It would also give future readers a chance to see the real flaws in the book — such as that point when you cannot nail down the argument but decide on a strategy that let’s you fudge it. If you let on that you didn’t have time to go to the archives for a particular section of the book, the way that Julie admitted she overcooked the beouf bourgignon, then your editor is likely going to make you go to the archives, thus delaying the book and prolonging the blog for another year.

All of this is a long-winded way of mentioning that I turned in what I believe to be the final manuscript for Calvinism: A Global History, which if production schedules go well and if the Lord tarries, should be published next spring by Yale University Press. I have been working on this for almost five years — sometimes in fits and starts — but for the last eighteen months in a concerted way, and it is a great relief to have the manuscript “in the can.” This also means that I have been communing for the last five years in various ways with John T. McNeill, author of The History and Character of Calvinism (1954), and Philip Benedict, whose book Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (2002), broke the mold for studies of Reformed Protestantism. My book is somewhere in between McNeill’s and Benedict’s. Like the former, mine tries to cover the entire range of Reformed communions in various settings since the sixteenth century. Like Benedict, I look at the institutional, political and social history of Calvinism but extend his narrative (in a much less comprehensive way) beyond 1700, where his book stops.

So far, I don’t think I have revealed anything that I haven’t already written for my editor or readers. Nor do I think I have exposed potential weaknesses for reviewers ready to pounce. And to give readers an additional peek into the book, I include an excerpt from the introduction:

Although Calvinism was flagging, Froude, Kuyper, and Beattie were not simply overcompensating with their praise for Reformed Protestantism. Various students of modern societies in the West, with no particular stake in the survival of Calvinism, made similar claims about the faith’s political and economic contributions. Alexis de Tocqueville had observed during his visit to the United States that representative government was the fruit of English Calvinism’s seed. In New England among the Puritans, he wrote, “Democracy more perfect than any of which antiquity had dared to dream sprang full-grown and fully armed from the midst of the old feudal society.” George Bancroft in his History of the United States of America asserted that “the fanatic for Calvinism was a fanatic for liberty, for in the moral warfare for freedom, his creed was a part of his army, and his most faithful ally in the battle.” Positive appraisals of Calvinism as a generator of a better world were not simply the product of nineteenth-century amateur intellectuals. Max Weber’s argument about the influence of Calvinism on economic productivity became a staple in the analysis of capitalism. Several decades later, Robert K. Merton extended Weber’s analysis to show that Calvinism was decisive in the English scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. These assessments of Calvinism reveal that Froude, Kuyper and Beattie were not delusional. As much as they hoped to inspire, they also employed arguments that many non-Calvinists would have found plausible.

As natural as global assessments have come to students of Calvinism, this book despite its title, Calvinism: A Global History, takes a different outlook. Instead of exploring Calvinism’s contribution to the workings of the modern world, this study takes a modest approach. It examines how a variety of western Christianity that started in opposition to Rome in obscure small cities in central Europe eventually distinguished itself from other forms of Protestantism and established institutional outlets not only across Europe but also in North and South America, Africa, Australia, and Asia. Too much scholarship during the last century has exposed the overdrawn and sometimes faulty analysis of earlier assessments of Calvinism. What is needed now is less an account of Calvinism’s role in the forces of globalization and more a narrative of how Calvinism became a global faith. Reformed Protestantism did indeed circumnavigate the planet. But it did so not by underwriting or inspiring the West’s political and economic forces. Calvinism spread around the globe through unlikely historical developments that perhaps only the sovereign God whom Reformed Protestants worshiped could pretend to control. This book is about how Calvinism became a global faith. As it is, the how of Calvinism’s expansion is key to understanding why.

Not All About Me (sort of)

Published on by D. G. Hart12 Comments

I will be speaking tomorrow at the Front Porch Republic conference at Hope College. Here are a few specifics:

Registration is now open for our Second Annual Conference to be held on September 15. This time we will be in Holland, MI on the beautiful campus of Hope College. We’ve got a stellar line-up of speakers including Bill Kauffman, Mary Berry Smith, Patrick Deneen, Jason Peters, Richard Gamble, William Schambra, Kate Dalton, D.G. Hart, Jeff Polet, Matt Bonzo, Authur Verslius, and a keynote address by Eric Jacobsen, author of the New Urbanist book, Sidewalks in the Kingdom.

Cost is $30 for the day, $15 for students. Lunch is included. Porchers in the mid-west, this is your chance. There will be plenty of time for discussion during the day, and we are making arrangements for a post-conference gathering at a local establishment where the conversation can continue. We are looking forward to a great event, and we hope to see you there.

For location and other matters, go here:

And here is the conference schedule:

Panel 1: Politics and Economics 9:15-10:30

Jeff Polet, Hope College
Patrick Deneen, University of Notre Dame
Richard Gamble, Hillsdale College

Panel 2: Local Culture 10:45-12:00

Bill Kauffman, author of Ain’t My America
William Schambra, Hudson Institute
Mark T. Mitchell, Patrick Henry College

Lunch: 12:15-1:00

Keynote Address: Eric Jacobsen, author of The Space Between, 1:00-1:45

Panel 3: Environment and Place 2:00-3:15

Jason Peters, Augustana College
Arthur Verslius, author of Island Farm
D. G. Hart, Hillsdale College

Panel 4: Food and Farming 3:30-4:45

Mary Berry Smith, The Berry Center
Katherine Dalton, Contributing editor to Chronicles magazine
Matt Bonzo, Cornerstone University

Closing Remarks: 4:45-5:00

The title of my talk will be “Confessions of an East Coast Snob.”

Clearword Church Coming to Bloomington!

Published on by D. G. Hart963 Comments

And it is going to build at the corner of South Endwright and West Gifford Roads, just down the street from where Tim Bayly struts his stuff as a godly, manly promoter of praise bands.

Actually, this is a fabrication, but I do wonder what Tim, who wonders where the Escondido men are — here’s one answer — would think of a rival church right down the road from his congregation. Tim recently tried again to tarnish the reputation of two-kingdom folks by asserting that someone like me would oppose Archbishop of Nigeria’s recent decision to form a diocese in Indianapolis.

Anglican bishops from Africa are violating parish boundaries here in these United States, planting orthodox Christian parishes where the presiding Anglican/Episcopal authorities have betrayed the faith. Is this good or bad?

Ask Darryl Hart and his fellow Escondidoites and it’s bad… Right? After all, this is the sort of thing that was done by Anglicans like Whitefield during the Great Awakening, and Darryl and his fellow Orthodox and Old Light Presbyterians oppose such violations of proper ecclesiastical boundaries. . . .

For myself, though, I’m not holding my breath waiting for Old Presbyterians to mount a campaign against men like Nigeria’s Anglican Archbishop Nicholas Okah for trampling on the proper local Anglican authorities here in Indianapolis.

Unlike Tim, I believe that the United States is and should be a free country. Unlike Tim, I don’t pine for the days of Calvin’s Geneva when civil magistrates would have run out of town priests and pastors who had come ministering without an invitation. Unlike Tim, I know what my response would be to this situation — which is, what happens in the Anglican church stays in the Anglican church.

And unlike Tim, I know that the Old Siders he disparages actually reacted the way that Tim Bayly would if a new church started right down the road, and if the new pastor said that members at Clearnote Fellowship should leave their congregation to worship at Clearword Church because Tim Bayly was an unregenerate hypocrite (which is what Gilbert Tennent said about Old Siders). I don’t know for sure, but I suspect Tim would exhibit some of his manliness and not sit by while a fellow minister called him names or took away his flock.

Funny how if you look at something you thought you understood, you end up identifying with the people whom you denigrate.

Escondido Magic

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

For all with blogs to read, a wonderful time of unanimity among neo-Cals, 2kers, theonomists, experimental Calvinists, and neo-Turretinis has prevailed. In the presence of a common foe — infallible popes, antiquity without apostles or prophets, and overdetermined historical narratives — Reformed partisans are breaking bread on various blogs, all singing in one Protestant voice.

For such a time as this, readers of Old Life, both friendly and hostile, may be inclined to give ear to an interview that Scott Clark did with the authors of the new history of Westminster Seminary California — W. Robert Godfrey and yours truly (all about me). The book is entitled A New Old School and if readers follow the links I am fairly confident they will find their way to a page where a purchase would be in order.

Let lions lie down with lambs.