Category: This is Unbecoming

In a Wilsonian Frame of Mind

Published on by D. G. Hart23 Comments

That is Doug as opposed to Woodrow (to whom Mencken is giving it good and hard in my morning readings).

Our Pennsylvania correspondent sent me a piece that Doug Wilson posted about church officers who voted for President Obama:

Any evangelical leader — by which I mean someone like a minister or an elder — who voted for Obama the second time, is not qualified for the office he holds, and should resign that office. Unless and until he repents of how he is thinking about the challenges confronting our nation, he should not be entrusted with the care of souls. A shepherd who cannot identify wolves is not qualified to be a shepherd. . . .

Neither am I saying anything about the average parishioner. No doubt, he should be up to speed on biblical engagement with the issues of the day, and I would want to urge him to grow in his abilities to do so. But shepherds of God’s flock have a moral responsibility in this that is directly connected to their ability to discharge the responsibilities of their office. If a man is a pastor, and he voted for Obama in 2012, then his cultural astuteness is about as sharp as a bowling ball.

A generation later, it is easy for us to cluck our tongues at the German leaders who did not see what Hitler was doing, but it is very hard for us to see our complicity in things that are every bit as atrocious.

See, I did it. I mentioned Hitler, which is going to cause someone to appeal to Godwin’s Law. In Internet debate, according to the law, the first one to make the Nazi comparisons loses. This is apropos and funny in multiple situations. But if we live in a world in which genocide can and does occur — and we do — a supercilious appeal to Godwin when someone invokes the Holocaust when talking about Cambodia’s killing fields, or to the Rwandan slaughter, is to be too clever by half.

In Northern Ireland, that sort of assertion coming from the likes of Ian Paisley could reignite the troubles. Heck, I don’t think Doug could have gotten away with this during Woodrow’s administration. So perhaps a minister of the gospel should refrain from throwing verbal Molotov Cocktails?

But on the plus side, what a great country we live in even though Wilson is loathe to express proper gratitude. We may have Protestant ministers who are capable of Paisleyan fustigation, but Americans are loathe to shoot guns at each other for a group cause. As I write I can hear the snickers from Canada and Europe about Americans and their love and use of guns. But for a country that lacks Europe’s traditions of culture and settlement, this greatest nation on God’s green earth remains remarkably free from ethnic and religious civil war. (The real Civil War was different and may have spooked Americans from ever taking up arms against each other.)

In other words, Wilson can get away with this kind of verbal gun play because he enjoys a relatively peaceful and liberal society that gives everyone the chance to spout off (Wilson couldn’t get away with this in China or Turkey). In fact, he benefits from the full protection of the secular government that he so often denounces. Meanwhile, his denunciations are just so many words that government officials can ignore. The only things words like these break are not my Democratic neighbor’s bones but the endurance of Christians who might be better advised to live and act like they are in exile.

Neo-Boastfulness

Published on by D. G. Hart39 Comments

Our western Michigan correspondent sent word of a recent piece in the Christian Reformed Church’s magazine, The Banner, that fairly well captures the sense of superiority that runs in Reformed circles. Some boast in liturgy (not many, really), some boast in doctrine, some in earnestness, and others in world affirmation. Now comes the double boast of neo-Calvinism’s superiority and its taking credit for evangelicals’ engagement with the world. According to Robert Joustra:

Times columnist David Brooks calls these young evangelicals “the Cynic Kids.” He writes that “the harsh events of the past decade may have produced not a youth revolt but a reversion to an empiricist mind-set.” These Cynic Kids, he says, “don’t like the system—however, they are wary of other alternatives as well as dismissive of their ability to actually achieve the desired modifications. As such, the generation is very conservative in its appetite for change” and “deeply resistant to idealism. Rather, the Cynic Kids have embraced the policy revolution; they require hypotheses to be tested, substantiated, and then results replicated before they commit to any course of action.”

Entitled, in other words, they are not. Just when the world badly needs the affluent, educated young to risk everything on an audacious idealism, something beyond themselves, beyond fear and uncertainty, beyond recessions and terrorism, First World problems are getting deadly serious.

Young evangelicals badly need a Christian theology that makes sense of this orgy of brokenness they are inheriting without turning them cold and cynical. They need, to quote Bob Goudzwaard, “hope in troubled times.”

Enter world-reforming Calvinism—“neo-Calvinism,” some say for short—and its practical theologies. It lacks the triumphalism and the culture-conquering religious wars of the last few decades, fueled as it is by its frank Augustinian confessions of sin and brokenness. Like our postmodern blockbusters—Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, pick your HBO/AMC prime time award-winner—this Calvinism is earnest about feeling the painful, terrifying wounds of ourselves and our world.

It doesn’t offer escapism, it doesn’t offer conquest, at least not by us mere mortals. It is unflinching in its encounter with the world’s darkest places because it knows this is not the way it’s supposed to be. Calvinism’s practical theology answers the painful moral questions of the Cynic Kids while offering real evidence, real foretastes of hope for a better world. It is slow theology, working among the ruins—“proximate justice,” Steven Garber calls it—but it is resilient theology, theology manifest in outcomes, in malaria meds and clean water, in fair loans and growing businesses.

Joustra also takes neo-Calvinist credit for evangelicals’ discovery of the importance of institutions:

Public justice is political, but it’s also more than that: it’s the social, cultural, and religious virtue that makes the political possible. It is, in the words of Mike Gerson, the architect of PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), “the banality of goodness”—of small, repeated, habituated, ritual acts of long obedience.

And it’s what Jamie Smith calls “loving faithful institutions” in his bracing manifesto in last fall’s Comment magazine. He says young evangelicals are dabbling, experimenting with institutions because they see the lasting power of those social forms, both in the destruction they bring when systems behave badly, and in the renewal when systems are restored. “Institutions,” he says, “are ways to love our neighbors. Institutions are durable, concrete structures that—when functioning well—cultivate all of creation’s potential toward what God desires—shalom, peace, goodness, justice, flourishing, delight.”

We who are already Reformed have a taste of that kind of good inheritance passed down in the structures of churches, of colleges, retirement homes, aid agencies, think tanks, and more. As it turns out, “they’ll know we are Christians by our love” is just a good paraphrase of “they’ll know we’re Reformed by our institutions.”

This neo-Calvinism may, as Joustra puts it, lack “the triumphalism and the culture-conquering religious wars of the last few decades.” But it’s hardly lean on self-promotion. Nor is this boosterism for Dutch Reformed Protestantism (which is indeed impressive on many historical registers) all that candid about the cultural engagement and institution building in which evangelicals were engaged long before Albertus Van Raalte ever set foot in Holland, Michigan. Sunday School, Vacation Bible School, the Women’s Temperance Union, the Young Men’s Christian Association, and the Evangelical Alliance were all up and thriving long before Dutch-Americans translated Abraham Kuyper into English.

In which case, readers may wonder if cultural engagement and institution are all that Reformed. Or could it be that the habit of most Christians is to baptize what they like and do in the idiom of their confessional or communal religious tribe. I for one would surely like to see neo-Calvinist policy wonks and evangelical institution builders taking hope not from their engagement but from the God described in Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 1:

Q. What is your only comfort in life and in death?

A. That I am not my own, but belong— body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.
He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.
He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven; in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.
Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.

Put not your hope in NGOs, think tanks, or the smartest guys in the Reformed Protestant seminar room.