Category: W-w

Comparing Christian Liberal Arts Colleges (part two)

Published on by D. G. Hart1 Comment

The first of these posts compared Hillsdale College and Covenant College as Christian liberal arts colleges by their course requirements in each respective institution’s core curriculum. This follow up calls attention to Professor Jay Green’s initial suspicions about Hillsdale calling itself a Christian college because its mission is more civilizational than confessional.

Any two-kingdom confessional Protestant who read Dr. Green’s first column had to be amused if not frustrated by the way he positioned Covenant College along with its peer institutions in the Coalition for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). Evangelical colleges (some of them turned universities) have for almost forty years marched under the banner of the integration of faith and learning. They converted to the Neo-Calvinist cause somewhere around the time that Francis Schaeffer popularized Abraham Kuyper among American evangelicals. This was also around the time that evangelical faculty and students began to read The Reformed Journal and discovered how darned smart Calvin College (now university) professors were (sometimes they were even funny). With the integration of faith and learning came the elixir of w(orld-and-life-vie)w. In that intellectually pietistic hothouse, faculty and students attempted to bring every square inch of the arts and sciences under the Lordship of Christ. One goal of these institutions was to redeem or transform the culture, and a primary way to do that was to bring a Christian perspective to every single human activity — from goat breeding to Division III men’s football. If you think that sounds sort of civilizational, you’re right.

Reformed confessionalists of the two-kingdom type pushed back against the line blurring that such w(orld-vie)w thinking encouraged. The church and the world were separate categories, just as were general and special revelation. Christianity might require a definite perspective on Christ’s deity or the place of the Hebrew monarchy in the plan of redemption. But on matters of interpreting Andrew Jackson’s electoral victory in 1828, Christians had liberty to come to differing conclusions, most of which would depend on the best scholarship produced overwhelmingly by unregenerate scholars who had no trace of a Christian w(orld-and-life-vie)w.

In other words, confessional Protestantism, not the kind to which Dr. Green appeals, produced critics of the confessional-non-civilizational-but-nevertheless-cultural-integration of faith and learning or transformation of culture that institutions like Covenant College promoted. From a truly confessional Reformed perspective, the mission of many evangelical colleges was civilizational. And that transformationalist outlook and mission undermined a churchly or confessional understanding of Christianity irrespective of what it meant for higher education.

But now Dr. Green has tried to use confessionalism to undermine Hillsdale’s claims to be a Christian college. Again, he has largely recanted his original piece. But the argument he initially made is useful for gaining clarity about confessional Protestantism.

One point in particular bears mentioning. In his first piece about Hillsdale, Dr. Green worried that civilizational Christian colleges would make the work of confessional Christian colleges more difficult:

As Christian nationalism grows more attractive and widely accepted, some colleges are feeling pressure to shift toward defining themselves by their civilizational rather than their confessional priorities. I’m guessing that development offices find it easier to raise money for a college actively committed to saving Western Civilization than for one that promises only to walk in the way of Jesus.

Claiming to be taking the high ground where Jesus walked over against those in the ditches of saving Western Civilization has an inspiring WWJD-feel, but it does not actually describe well “the way of Jesus” in which evangelical colleges that are part of the CCCU execute their Christian mission. Dr. Green said specifically that institutions that belong to the CCCU are “‘Christian’ in the sense that their faculty (and sometimes their students) submit to clear statements of faith.”

But when you look at the CCCU website, here‘s what you will find in reply to the question, “What is Christian Higher Education?”

First, we integrate biblical truth not just into “spiritual” aspects of the institution but throughout the academic enterprise. Our professors pursue academic excellence because they are committed to God as the author of truth, and that truth has implications for every academic discipline. The classroom and the laboratory are just as much arenas of Christian integration as the college chapel.

There is the classic Neo-Calvinist move of blurring the spiritual and temporal, sacred and secular. All of life is religious and so all of religion is civilizational or cultural

Second, we are committed to the moral and spiritual formation of students. Education that instructs the mind without deepening the soul is not true learning. Our schools seek to develop students who, in the words of the Old Testament prophet, “act justly and love mercy and walk humbly with their God” (Micah 6:8). . . . This task gives meaning and coherence to every part of the academy, from the classroom to the fine arts studio, from the internship placement to the residence hall and the athletic field.

Again, in the Neo-Calvinist world of higher education, it’s hard to see where civilization begins and confessional ends because an activist, civilizational Christianity is co-extensive with confession — though so far the confession of faith has little theology (but lots of justice).

Third, we are committed to graduating students who make a difference for the common good as redemptive voices in the world. Our schools offer a wide variety of academic programs because we believe that Christians are called to use their vocations as vehicles to bring the good news of Jesus Christ to a fallen world. Our graduates . . . play a redemptive and restorative role in the world as doctors, teachers, marketers, engineers, parents, soccer coaches, and in a host of other ways. In other words, we are private religious institutions that exist for the public good and contribute to human flourishing. 

So integration of faith and learning extends across the curriculum to redeem and transform the world, one that has many civilizations in need of redemption. One has to suppose that if successful, graduates will build redeemed civilizations that could well qualify as Christian. And how is such a transformationalist understanding of Christian education any less civilizational than Hillsdale College’s self-professed Christian identity?

To Dr. Green’s credit, he does acknowledge that CCCU institutions might do better at being explicitly Christian in their mission.

To hear a call for confessional Christianity is encouraging. But in Dr. Green’s case, his brief for confessional Christian colleges needs the clarity that comes from distinguishing the arts, sciences, and theology as separate branches of learning, the way Protestants did before Kuyper.

Comparing Christian Liberal Arts Colleges (part one)

Published on by D. G. Hart1 Comment

Professor Jay Green’s thoughts about Covenant College and Hillsdale College have come and gone but his two articles do raise a couple of questions that may be worthy of further comment. The first has to do with the curriculum of a Christian college. The second has to do with that vexing question of Christ and culture, which runs to notions about transforming culture or integrating faith and learning. This post is about the former — curriculum — and it will read like a college catalogue because it relies on course descriptions from Covenant and Hillsdale to compare the religious dimension of a liberal arts college purporting to be Christian.

In his first post, professor Green distinguished between civilizational and confessional Christian colleges. Part of the difference stems from whether faculty actually need to affirm (believe) Christian statements of faith. At Covenant they do. For Green, Hillsdale is different because it “is a civilizational Christian college” in the sense of “acknowledging and honoring the strategically important role the faith played in laying the foundations of both Western Civilization and the American Founding.” He knows that many faculty at Hillsdale “also embrace Christianity in a confessional sense.” But because belief is not required at Hillsdale, “less time and attention are given to using Christian insights to critique things like Western Civilization and the American Founding.”

By the way, somewhere in here is a big point about ecclesiology and whether colleges should function like churches.

Not to be missed as well is an apparent assumption that Green does not develop — the idea that if you believe and teach Christianity you will critique Western Civilization and the American Founding. Does he mean to suggest that true believers will automatically be skeptical of the West and the United States? Or will they simply be willing to be critical, just as they would criticize Chinese or Islamic civilization and China and Indonesia? Or is he simply hinting that because Hillsdale is not sufficiently critical of the West and America — it is very political according to Green — the college loses its Christianness.

Whatever Green means about the relationship between Western civilization, the United States, and Christianity, his understanding of a confessional college leaves out what the apostle Paul included, namely, that those who preach the gospel out of envy or spite should be praised as long as they preach the gospel. That is, no matter the motives of the preacher or the faculty member, the content of what they preach or teach should be of first importance.

If catalogues are revealing, here is Covenant College’s description of basic courses in their core curriculum.

COR 100 The Christian Mind
This course is designed to introduce newly enrolled students to the general scope and distinctive emphases of a Covenant College education. The first portion of the course focuses on our calling in Christ and some of its implications for the task of being a student. The second portion introduces students to the Reformed tradition; and the third portion invites students to join with the faculty in addressing challenges that the tradition currently faces. 2 hours.

COR 225 Cultural Heritage of the West I
This course fosters cultural literacy by surveying important philosophical, theological, literary, scientific, and aesthetic ideas which have shaped Western culture. It begins with the earliest origins of Western culture in ancient Semitic (including Old Testament) and Greek cultures, then considers the transformation of these earlier influences successively in Roman culture, the rise of Christianity, the medieval synthesis of classical and Christian sources, and the Renaissance and Reformation. The course includes exposure to important works or primary sources, critiqued from a Christian perspective. 3 hours.

COR 226 Cultural Heritage of the West II
This course fosters cultural literacy by surveying important philosophical, theological, literary, scientific, and aesthetic ideas which have shaped Western culture. It considers the emergence of Modernism in the physical and social sciences from roots in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment as well as the effect of later reactions like Romanticism and Existentialism. The effect of these philosophical and scientific ideas on literature and other arts is also explored. The course includes exposure to important works or primary sources, critiqued from a Christian perspective. 3 hours.

Hillsdale in contrast spends a lot more time with the West’s cultural heritage though its catalogue says less about teaching from a “Christian perspective.” As part of the core curriculum students at Hillsdale take at least six courses — two in history, two in English, and two in Philosophy and Religion — that add up to 18 hours (ten more than Covenant). Here is what those courses are supposed to cover.

HST 104 The Western Heritage to 1600 3 hours The course will focus on the development of political cultures in Western Europe before 1600. It begins with a consideration of Mesopotamian and Hebrew civilizations and culminates in a survey of early modern Europe. The purpose of the course is to acquaint students with the historical roots of the Western heritage and, in particular, to explore the ways in which modern man is indebted to Greco-Roman culture and the Judeo-Christian tradition.

HST 105 The American Heritage 3 hours This course, a continuation of HST 104, will emphasize the history of “the American experiment of liberty under law.” It covers from the colonial heritage and the founding of the republic to the increasing involvement of the United States in a world of ideologies and war. Such themes as the constitutional tensions between liberty and order, opportunity in an enterprising society, changing ideas about the individual and equality, and the development of the ideal of global democracy will be examined. Attention will also be given to themes of continuity and comparison with the modern Western world, especially the direct Western influences (classical, Christian and English) on the American founding, the extent to which the regime was and is “revolutionary,” and the common Western experience of modernization.

ENG 104 Great Books in the Western Tradition: Ancient to Medieval 3 hours This course will introduce the student to representative Great Books of the Western World from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Selections may include the Bible and works by authors such as Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Vergil, Ovid, Augustine, and Dante. The writing content includes a variety of writing exercises that incorporate traditional compositional and rhetorical skills.

ENG 105 Great Books in the British and American Traditions 3 hours A continuation of English 104 but with a focus on Great Books in the British and American traditions. English authors may include Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Wordsworth, Dickens, Yeats, Eliot; American authors may include Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, Frost, Hemingway, Faulkner, and O’Connor. The writing emphasis continues with a variety of writing exercises that incorporate traditional compositional and rhetorical skills.

PHL 105 The Western Philosophical Tradition 3 hours A general overview of the history of philosophical development in the West from its inception with the Pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece to the 20th century Anglo-American and Continental traditions. The contributions of seminal thinkers and innovators such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche are studied. Major works by these and other important philosophers are read, analyzed, and discussed with the aim of understanding what they argued for and against in regard to metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical issues. The course investigates to what extent they influenced their own and subsequent societies, how these philosophical systems create varying views of the world and human life, and how they address the perennial questions humans universally ask, existential questions such as, “Is there purpose and meaning in life?”; epistemological questions such as, “What are the limits of human knowledge?”; metaphysical questions such as, “What is the ultimate nature of the reality in which we live?”, “Is there life after death?”, “Are humans identical to their brains?”; and ethical questions such as, “What is the fundamental criterion of right and wrong human action?” In short, the course examines the main Western philosophical thinkers and traditions in an effort to understand what they have taught, why they have so taught, and how they have helped form and shape Western civilization.

REL 105 The Western Theological Tradition 3 hours A survey of the history of Western theology, analyzing and exploring the teachings of the various theological traditions that have influenced Western Civilization. Given the dominant influence of Christianity on Western culture and society over the past 2000 years, the course makes clear the theological teachings of the major Christian traditions that have prospered and played a significant role in shaping Western societies. The connections between theology and notions of proper community and individual life, theology’s influence on Western metaphysics and ethics, and the influence theology has had on the development of modern institutions and enterprises, such as modern science, are explored. In addition, the conceptual innovations about the nature of man and his abilities which theological disputes over the nature of God and Christ have provided are pointed out and discussed. Moreover, particular notions of the religious life and of the role of religion in life that have dominated Western thought on these matters are also explored. In short, students are instructed in the basic teachings of that faith that has dominated and, until recently, to a large extent directed the course of Western civilization in order to understand how religious belief informs self-understanding, provides a comprehensive view of reality, and, by instilling a vision of human life, its purpose and proper comportment, shapes the larger culture.

One aspect to notice, irrespective of the personal convictions of professors, Hillsdale’s curriculum is set up to present Christian context for the West and American government and culture. This instruction may be too friendly to Western culture and the United States, but it is very positive about Christianity. No specific confessional tradition claims to be at the center of Hillsdale’s Christian identity (though some faculty may try). But for Hillsdale to call itself a Christian college hardly looks like a bait and switch.

What is also striking is that Hillsdale delivers these courses on the West and America through specific academic departments. These courses are both in the core and at the beginning of a sequence of an academic major. Because they are not set apart in an interdisciplinary “Core” area which may be staffed by sociologists, English professors, historians, or musicians, Hillsdale’s “Core” curriculum is not set apart in a nebulous, required, general education or interdisciplinary part of the curriculum, something that students check off before getting to real courses in English, history, and philosophy. At Hillsdale, the core courses are the real courses (even if students still check boxes when taking them because of curricular requirements). This likely accounts for why Hillsdale has so many majors in English, history, and philosophy.

The exception to this pattern at Covenant are the required “Core” courses in Bible and Theology.

BIB 111 Old Testament Introduction
This course introduces the basic theological themes, chronological framework, and literary character of the Old Testament with a focus on Genesis – Kings. It aims to provide: 1) the foundations for theological interpretation of the Old Testament, giving special attention to the covenantal framework for redemptive history; and 2) an introduction to critical theories concerning the authorship, canonicity, integrity and dating of the documents. 3 hours.

BIB 142 New Testament Introduction
The course will deal with 1) questions of introduction (authorship, canon, inspiration, integrity of the documents, dating, etc); 2) beginning hermeneutics; 3) inter-testamental history as a background to the New Testament, as well as 4) a study of the historical framework of the New Testament as a whole, and key theological concepts. 3 hours.

BIB 277 Christian Doctrine I
A survey of the major doctrines of the Christian faith. First semester investigates the biblical data on Scripture, God, man and Christ. Second semester investigates the biblical data on the Holy Spirit, salvation, Church and last things. The Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms serve as guidelines and resources. 3 hours.

BIB 278 Christian Doctrine II
A survey of the major doctrines of the Christian faith. First semester investigates the biblical data on Scripture, God, man and Christ. Second semester investigates the biblical data on the Holy Spirit, salvation, Church and last things. The Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms serve as guidelines and resources. 3 hours.

These four courses give Covenant a leg up on Hillsdale, especially if you are a Presbyterian. Covenant requires two courses that survey study of Scripture, and two that summarize Christian doctrine. These arguably constitute the most confessional pieces of Covenant’s education. But because professor Green is more concerned with what faculty believe and profess, he spends little time in his published pieces on curriculum and academic departments.

What may be the most important difference between the two colleges is the way they conduct a liberal education. Both schools advertise themselves as liberal arts colleges. But at least at their websites, Hillsdale uses language that informed a long line of liberal arts colleges in the United States. Covenant’s statements are much less liberal education-inflected and bear some of the conviction of a Bible college where the Bible is pre-eminent and the arts and sciences are second string.

Consider this answer at Covenant to the FAQ, what makes Covenant different from other top-rate liberal arts colleges?

At Covenant, why you learn something is every bit as important as what you learn. Here, you will learn to see God in every facet of your life, and you will be personally taught by acclaimed professors who could teach virtually anywhere in the world and choose to be here.

At Hillsdale’s website the following describes the College’s commitment to a liberal arts core curriculum:

Liberal learning produces cultivated citizens with minds disciplined and furnished through wide and deep study of old books by wise authors. . . . It does so by leading forth students into a consideration of what has been called, “the best that has been thought and said.”

For what it’s worth, until the so-called fundamentalist controversy, Protestant denominational colleges (even Free Will Baptists) had no trouble offering a Christian and liberal education. Those colleges offered way more courses in the arts and sciences than they did in Bible and theology. Then when the mainline Protestant denominations started to go liberal (theologically) and dabbled with notions of God revealing himself as much through literature as through Scripture, fundamentalist-leaning Protestants turned to the Bible as the core of the college curriculum — first at Bible colleges and then at liberal arts schools like Wheaton, Gordon, and Westmont. How Hillsdale pulled off what it has — a return to the Protestant denominational Christian liberal arts college without being exclusively Protestant — is anyone’s guess.

If professor Green is a bit befuddled in pigeonholing Hillsdale College, he is not alone.

Should a Reformed Protestant Receive Treatment at a Roman Catholic Hospital?

Published on by D. G. Hart2 Comments

(From the Winter 2010 Nicotine Theological Journal)

After a visit to my father at his local hospital, I had a worldview moment. What should have alerted me from the outset was the name of the place – St. Mary’s. But then I noticed that the spiritual services wing of the hospital had dropped off for him a brochure about their activities which was included with information about television channels and daily menus – talk about trivializing the eschaton. But the kicker was the crucifix in my dad’s ICU room. Shazzam!!! That’s a whole lot of idolatry for a man who is on a heart monitor.

But is Roman Catholic medicine really any different from Reformed medicine or even – dare I say – secular medicine. If worldviews go all the way down to the very tips of our toes, and if we can’t escape the claims of Christ in any parts of our lives, can I really look the other way in good conscience when entering a hospital room that displays an image of Christ on a cross?

And then there is the concern for quality of health care. If Abraham Kuyper was right that Roman Catholicism “represents an older and lower stage of development in the history of mankind” and if Protestantism occupies a “higher standpoint,” shouldn’t my dad try to find treatment at a Protestant hospital? Kuyper, by the way, wasn’t real complimentary of Roman Catholicism on science either.

It could be that I have once again misunderstood the claims of neo-Calvinism and that some algorithm exists for taking the gold of scientific advances from the dross of defective worldviews. But it could also be that the language of worldviews and the difference they make for every aspect of human existence is overdone, simply a rallying cry for inspiring the faithful, but not anything that would prevent my father from receiving treatment from unbelieving nurses employed by Roman Catholic administrators. Then again, the power of modernity is stunning, making all of those religious claims about connections between spiritual and physical reality look fairly foolish – as if a creed actually produces better medicine.

I mean no disrespect to the neo- Calvinists and their epistemological purity. But if they could help me out on this one, I’d be grateful. Does a Reformed worldview really make a difference for modern medicine and the ordinary decisions a sick believer must make in seeking a physician or hospital – under the oversight, of course, not of the elders but the insurance company?

Why Bavinck?

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Would readers exist for Herman Bavinck’s writing, increasingly available thanks to the good work of translators, without the ground already fertilized by evangelicals trying to overcome “the scandal of the evangelical mind” through w-w? James Eglington’s biography prompted a think:

The much more common Dutch theological heavyweights were Abraham Kuyper (positive estimate), Klaus Schilder (negative), and G. K. Berkhower (mixed but mainly positive). Then came the names, much more widely known, of Dutch-American scholars at Westminster and Calvin seminaries, such as Cornelius Van Til and Louis Berkhof (respectively), and before them, the one blazing the trail between Dutch and American theological circles, Geerhardus Vos, the biblical theologian at Princeton Seminary from the 1890s to the 1930s.

Many of these names, however, will be unfamiliar to pastors and church members without some link to the Christian Reformed Church or the United Reformed Churches. This is only to say that the main thread of Anglo-American theology largely runs through New England and Presbyterian sources, beginning with the Puritans and Jonathan Edwards, through to Old Princeton (from Charles Hodge to J. Gresham Machen), and down to professors who taught at Westminster, Fuller, Gordon-Conwell, and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. To that lineage, adding another Dutch theologian is a stretch.

But this does not mean Bavinck’s time in any way has passed. As Eglinton explains in answer to his own question, Bavinck, who was “brilliant theologian” and “household name” in the Netherlands, taught at Kampen Theological School and the Free University in Amsterdam, wrote a four-volume dogmatic theology in addition to books on child education, psychology, women’s rights, and a host of ethical topics.

Bavinck was also known in the United States. He gave the Stone Lectures at Princeton Seminary in 1908 ten years after Abraham Kuyper had given them, and on his visit to the States president Theodore Roosevelt, a Dutch-American of some remove from colonial migration, welcomed the Free University theologian to the White House.

That may sound like old news and readers may be wondering what Bavinck has done for American readers lately. The answer here is a lot of thanks to the efforts of the Bavinck Institute which over the past decade sponsored the translation of Bavinck’s corpus in English, such as God and Creation (2004); Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation (2008); Reformed Dogmatics, 4 volumes (2004-2008); Essays on Religion, Science, and Society (2008); The Christian Family (2012).

Eglinton himself, a lecturer in theology at the University of Edinburgh, has overseen dissertations by several graduate students on aspects of Bavinck’s thought. In some ways, the answer to Eglinton’s question – why a Bavinck biography – owes as much to the recent output of Bavinck’s writings as to the circumstances that made Bavinck one of the Netherland’s greatest theologians of the first half of the twentieth century.

Another reason for appreciating Bavinck and Eglinton’s biography is the importance of neo-Calvinism among American evangelicals for at least the last fifty years. For doctrinal and devotional inspiration evangelicals have drawn heavily from usual suspects like the Banner of Truth, seminaries like Westminster, Gordon-Conwell, and TEDS, and popularizers like R. C. Sproul and John Piper.

At the same time, evangelicals have also undertaken what may be called worldview analysis. That inelegant phrase stands for trying to understand all of creation, not just redemption, from a perspective informed by biblical teaching and theological fundamentals. This way of thinking has inspired Protestants to venture into fields in the humanities and sciences in the name of Christ. Sometimes they even repeat Kuyper’s famous phrase, that Christ claims “every-square inch” as his own. Francis Schaeffer may have first made this outlook popular, with help later from Chuck Colson. But even more important were scholars at Calvin College and Calvin Seminary who set the bar high for professors at many evangelical colleges and attempted to pursue scholarship from a Christian outlook.

Bavinck fits in this line of endeavor since he himself wrote on political and cultural topics from a Reformed perspective. But what is often missing from the American Protestant appropriation of neo-Calvinism is the serious theological underpinning on which it rested. Bavinck is as good an example of serious theological investigation in the neo-Calvinist tradition as anyone can find. Eglinton’s biography in turn may be news to many readers that the neo-Calvinists were no slouches when it came to doctrine, worship, and the church.

What Could Have Gone Wrong?

Published on by D. G. Hart11 Comments

Has American evangelicals’ love affair with Dutch Calvinism (in its w-w forms) finally run out of steam?

Remember back to Francis Schaeffer who popularized Kuyperianism for figures like Jerry Falwell (the elder) and Tim LaHaye. In Christian Manifesto (1981), Schaeffer wrote:

The basic problem of the Christians in this country in the last eighty years or so, in regard
to society and in regard to government, is that they have seen things in bits and pieces
instead of totals. They have very gradually become disturbed over permissiveness,
pornography, the public schools, the breakdown of the family, and finally abortion. But
they have not seen this as a totality—each thing being a part, a symptom, of a much
larger problem. They have failed to see that all of this has come about due to a shift in
world view—that is, through a fundamental change in the overall way people think and
view the world and life as a whole. The shift has been away from a world view that was
at least vaguely Christian in people’s memory (even if they were not individually
Christian) toward something completely different—impersonal matter or energy shaped
into its present form by impersonal chance.

W(orld)-(vie)w analysis basically had free reign among evangelicals for the next thirty-five years thanks to its comprehensiveness. Everything became spiritual or religiously meaningful because everything was under the Lordship of Christ. Even if you raised questions about the differences between the spiritual and the temporal, or the ecclesiastical and civil, such “dualism” was in denial of Christ’s sovereignty.

That explains why even Baptist English professors drank Kuyper with gusto:

Within the North American context, Mouw explains, these core points can be boiled down to “an appreciation for the ‘not-one-square-inch’ manifesto regarding the kingship of Jesus, a broad acceptance of the idea of sphere sovereignty, and a commitment to the integration of faith and learning.” Mouw’s examination of these essentials—fleshed out and applied with varying levels of specificity within the thirteen essays which cover topics including public theology, education, and baptism, as well as more esoteric intra-reformed issues—reveal just how great an influence Kuyper has wielded, even among those of us caught unaware. The reading leaves me with awe and gratitude in the recognition that even my own quintessentially Baptist and evangelical educational institution would not be what it is without Kuyper and his fellows. After all, our university catalog promises in its “Statement on Worldview” that students will “receive an education that integrates [a] Christian and biblical worldview,” and the institution increasingly equips, expects, and holds accountable faculty for doing just that—even more noteworthy considering that the memory of a time when “Christian education” was understood there and elsewhere to consist of opening class in prayer has not quite faded into the past.

Even as late as two years ago, Kuyper drew appreciation from the likes of the Muslim-American political theorist, Shadi Hamid, though a non-Christian appropriation of the Dutch statesman would lean toward the pluralism (and the pillarization that went along with it in twentieth-century Dutch society) in Kuyper’s thought:

Christian pluralism sees the city of man as inherently broken and fallen from sin, which, in turn, means that politics must be acknowledged as a site of uncertainty, rather than certainty. The solution, then, wouldn’t be walling off one’s Christianity from the domain of Caesar, but rather applying it in a more self-conscious manner.

That was not how evangelicals read Kuyper. Pluralism went with secular humanism and watch out if you have a diversity of views among Christians about the actual structures of Christ’s Lordship.

But now that many know (what they always knew) about the true nature of Donald Trump and now that the likes of Betsy De Vos and Josh Hawley, Trump supporters of different degrees, have made positive references to Kuyper — now, Trump has finally revealed the problems of Kuyperianism:

we who inherit the legacies of white Christianity are called to acknowledge and seek to repair harm that has been committed on behalf of our traditions. Kuyper’s notion of the lordship of Jesus, articulated in the famous “square inch” quote, has more problems than it being used to baptize a wide range of questionable endeavors or to convey that Christians are the arbiters of the kingdom of God. The very notion of Jesus’ ownership of all things has imperialistic overtones, reflecting Kuyper’s Victorian-era white/European Protestant Christian triumphalism. While Kuyper celebrated cultural “pluriformity,” he maintained that outside of Europe and North America, most cultures had not benefited humanity as a whole. . . .

Even when taken on his own terms, there is much in Kuyper’s legacy to repudiate. And while it would be unfair to label Kuyper a white Christian nationalist, it is easy to see how his ideas could be employed in the service of white Christian nationalism, with its grievance ethos, its “color blindness” as a cover for its racism, its paternalism, its patriarchy, and its “populism” favoring white working-class interests.

What I don’t understand, once again, is why the flip-flops among evangelical scholars — evangelicalism used to be good but now its bad, Kuyper used to inspire but now he’s troubling — don’t raise more questions about the flops. Isn’t it obvious that the change of perception is largely a function of opposition to Donald Trump? If part of the Protestant world showed an attachment to Trump and we are dissecting those Protestants to see what ideas they held so we can purge those notions (and Trump) from our midst, is this really very deep? Isn’t it just another indication of the hold that Trump has on the minds of his biggest foes (and supporters)?

But if not for Trump, evangelicalism and Kuyper would be salvageable, right?

Sight-Seeing with Kuyper at Hagia Sophia

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The idea that a building like Hagia Sophia, which had been a Christian cathedral, then became a mosque, and then under a secular state committed to neutrality became a museum — the idea that Hagia Sophia should remain a site free from religion seems odd for neo-Calvinists to embrace. David Koyzis, a political philosopher who identifies with Neo-Calvinism seems to be ambivalent about what’s happening to this ancient building:

Last month it was reported that a Turkish court has cleared the way for the historic Hagia Sophia, an ancient Roman church built by the Emperor Justinian in the 6th century, to return to its former use as a mosque. Known as Ayasofya to the Turks, it functioned as a Muslim place of worship between 1453, when the Ottoman armies of Mehmed II, the Conqueror, conquered Constantinople, and 1934, when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk turned it into a museum.

Since then this architectural wonder has seen millions of tourists file through its interior, which once echoed with the sounds of Byzantine chant and Muslim prayers but now houses the ancient artefacts of two civilizations and two religions. Because Islam prohibits the presence of images in worship, the status of the building’s Byzantine mosaics, uncovered in recent times, remains uncertain.

This development is consistent with the efforts of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to move his country away from the secularizing Kemalist legacy towards a more Islamic identity.

When Koyzis concludes that his hope is for the cathedral to return to Christian worship, he avoids having to side with either Ataturk or Erdogan:

It’s possible that the authorities will come up with a compromise for Hagia Sophia. The mosaics may be covered temporarily during the Muslim prayer hours but will be visible at all other times for the benefit of the tourists, whose preferences Turkey cannot afford to ignore. However, given my paternal Greek heritage and my Christian faith, I cannot but hope that one day the praises of the God who revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ might again echo through the cavernous space of what was once the largest church in Christendom.

What might help Koyzis and other Protestants (not to mention Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox) is to remember what Abraham Kuyper experienced when he visited Istanbul during the first decade of twentieth century. To introduce his series on the Lordship of Christ (published as Pro Rege), Kuyper invoked his time at Hagia Sophia, according to James Bratt:

Kuyper introduced [the Lordship of Christ] from his fresh memory of observing prayers in Hagia Sophia. A faithful Muslim venerated the Prophet about 10,000 times a year, he computed. To kindle a lie devotion among Christians, it was necessary for them to understand their Master anew. (339)

In other words, visiting Hagia Sophia as a mosque was not something of which Kuyper disapproved.

In fact, Kuyper had respect to the point of envy for Islamic civilization:

Islam was the object of his supreme envy — a faith that, adapting itself to every culture, steeped its adherents in the conviction that the will of God was supreme over everything from the personal to the political, from the deep roots of time into the everlasting future, and under that conviction had spread a common worldview [w-w] from Gibraltar to the Philippines. This was Kuyper’s dream for Calvinism, the Dutch Golden Age times ten. As to particulars, he admired Muslim achievements in architecture . . . and he rhapsodized about Al-Azhar University in Cairo, where progressive scholarship had once flourished for seven hundred years in organic connection with religion and life. He noted the rise of pan-Islamic consciousness as a kind of liberation theology against colonial rule. It grounded independence in religious unity and ethical purification. If the “fanaticism” this produced worried him as a European, it echoed all his tales of heroic Beggars in the Dutch war for independence. (332)

Anyone tempted by Kuyper’s thoughts on Islam should obtain a copy of On Islam.

Transcending Partisan Politics is Sectarian

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

Evangelical Protestants suffer from a tic. It is an unwillingness to identify with a political party. Evangelical writers about politics can spot the defects of both the left and the right, though they don’t often calculate which side has the most flaws. They act as if Christians really are above politics. When believers follow the Bible, they will not have to settle for either what liberals or conservatives propose.

A couple examples: the first on race.

The danger is that Christians who rightly reject the first (conservative) view as sub-biblical will merely pick up the second (progressive) view uncritically and use the terminology that it provides. But both are secular, reductionistic and simplistic. The Bible’s account of justice includes both individual and systemic dimensions—and more. We are not merely individual and social, but also soul and body. Indeed, the term “world” (kosmos) in the New Testament has not only a material reality (as in God loving the world of human beings, John 3:16), but also a spiritual reality, an inevitable tendency to make counterfeit gods out of good created things (1 John 2:15-16). “Doing justice” on the basis of the biblical view will include extraordinary prayer and evangelism along with everything else. The biblical view of justice gives full weight to both personal responsibility and social structures while based on a rich understanding of human life that goes well beyond the world’s reductionistic alternative views.

The second on communism.

Liberation theology, which puts a Christian face on Marxist social analysis, retains an enormous mystique on the Christian left. This isn’t because left-leaning Christians admire Stalin but because they are profoundly skeptical of the alternative to communism: economic systems built on property and contract rights protected by the rule of law. These systems produce economic growth, but as wealth has grown we’ve also seen a growing worldliness and materialism in our cultures. Christians on the left (most famously Gregory Paul) point to the radical economic community of the church in Acts 2–5 and ask if this doesn’t implicitly delegitimize market systems of price and exchange.

Right-leaning Christians, meanwhile, often seem indistinguishable from secular conservatives. They rail against communism, yet almost none of them seems to have read serious theological analysis of communism—not even from anti-communist Christians like Chambers. In almost every case, their top priority is to protect free markets and economic growth rather than oppose the atheistic inhumanity of the communist worldview. And their zeal to defend free markets often leads them to downplay, or even celebrate, the worldliness and crass materialism that have been associated with economic growth.

Why is the church haunted by communism, even though in Christ crucified we already possess the real answer to the world’s suffering and injustice? Because the church hasn’t put a Christian economic ethic into practice systematically. We need, but don’t know how to develop, an organized and operational Christian economic life.

Actually, the Amish have developed an economic system by some measures. But even their herculean efforts to retain Christian solidarity depends on the “English’s” society of property, currency, a legal system, and the political process that functions in, with, and around economic systems. Talk about systemic.

This does not mean that Christian academics should refrain from connecting dots between revelation (general and special) and politics or economics. What it does mean is that Christians trying to be Christian about everything, including politics and economics, separate themselves from the institutions most responsible for those areas of society. Christian w-w thinking is really a product of a ghetto that is isolated from bodies of learning and institutional structures in which political and economic decisions are made.

It is functionally Amish. Is that where New Calvinists want to be? Sectarians on the margins?

Acting as if Majorities are in the Minority

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I keep scratching my head. For the last two weeks plus, I have read various cultural authorities on how evil racism is. At the same time, none of those condemnations of racism at mainstream and elite institutions count as evidence against the United States’ deep and abiding racism. Here is one example of the barrage of assertions that both condemn and apologize for racism:

Over the last few days, I have received numerous emails from institutions and organizations feeling compelled to issue statements on the George Floyd killing and the ongoing protests. I have an email from Strava, an app that tracks personal athletic endeavors, titled “we must do better, and we will” and stating that “we know our practices have bias because we haven’t designed them to make sure they don’t.” The Institute for Policy Integrity and NYU Law School declares: “[W]e stand with the Black community in the face of unconscionable racially motivated violence, [and] we understand that such violence is aggravated by retrograde, prejudiced policies.” The Tufts University Alumni Association says the protests “are the result of deep-seated racism and injustice that exists within our society.” Rachel Kyte, dean of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy calls “for an end to the illegal measures taken to prevent people from gathering and protesting peacefully and to the police aggression that targets Black citizens rather than protect them.” The executive council of Lewis & Clark College, from which I am retired, declares that mere expressions of support for the protests “runs the risk of removing responsibility from the majority and requiring the work be done by communities of color.” Society, not the cop, is responsible.

I have also heard from Cape Eleuthera Island School, the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, The Explorers Club, Northeastern University president Joseph E. Aoun, the Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation, the Oregon Historical Society, and American Bar Association president Judy Perry Martinez, all declaring that they must do better.

If this had been the reaction to the Montgomery Bus Boycott that featured Rosa Parks (1955-1956), the nation would not have had to wait roughly ten years for the Civil Rights Act to pass Congress. Heck, if the sentiments today of opposition to bigotry and white supremacy had been around in 1955, Rosa Parks could have sat wherever she darned well pleased.

The simultaneous condemnation of racism and insistence that the United States is a racist as Virginia was in 1619 is akin to evangelicals such as Francis Schaeffer lamenting the immorality and unbelief of the nation even as a born-again Protestant occupied the White House. Remember what Schaeffer argued at a time well before Monica Lewinski, Stormy Daniels, and Obergefell v. Hodges:

“People have presuppositions, and they will live more consistently on the basis of those presuppositions than even they themselves may realize,” Schaeffer wrote, and he was talking this way when most evangelicals were unaware of the storm of worldviews that was coming. He perceived the presuppositions of the looming humanistic and secular worldview as showing up first in art and high culture. He was right. While most evangelicals were watching Gunsmoke and taking their kids to the newly opened Walt Disney World, Schaeffer was listening and watching as a new worldview was taking hold of the larger culture.

Americans’ outlook may well have lacked the tools to defend standards of decency and good government, but to complain about a culture that celebrated the rule of law in western towns and family-friendly cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse, as if that culture is producing Lena Dunham’s Girls or Tacoma FD, is a bit like saying silence is violence.

Of course, the difference between the discussions today about racism and Schaeffer’s complaints then about cultural decadence are that no one at the New Yorker, Harvard University, the San Diego Mayor’s office, or Spotify was issuing statements in support of evangelicals’ morality, nor were they producing reading lists about the Ten Commandments and sanctification.

What Value Do Evangelicals Add?

Published on by D. G. Hart239 Comments

One more thought about David French’s implicit castigation of Al Mohler for deciding to support Donald Trump. It goes beyond French’s own theology of regeneration and good works to his w-w. If he thinks that faith should inform all he does, if that means especially it should determine his political judgments, why is his godly point of view so similar to journalists who don’t pretend to be Christians? Shouldn’t a Christian understanding of human nature, virtue, governance, society and more mean that a believer’s analysis will look different from a non-Christians? Wasn’t that the point of w-w thinking, integrating faith and intellect?

Take the case of Alabama Republican, Roy Moore. In his exchange with Eric Metaxas, French said “America is better off without Roy Moore.” He didn’t say much more than that but it’s not hard to imagine that again Moore came up short in the character balance sheet.

Anyone who tells you that your choice is limited to pro-abortion Doug Jones or an incompetent, unfit apparent child abuser like Roy Moore is simply lying to you. If you are a faithful conservative, you can write in a different name or stay home. You can reject the choice served up by the plurality of Alabama GOP primary voters and simply say, “If you want my vote, you have to do better.”

…There is no comparison between Moore and men like Patton, Jefferson, and King. Their legacies are complicated by their flaws. Moore’s candidacy is unambiguous. There is no positive political legacy to “complicate.” There is only a sordid, ignorant, and revolting reality.

No party or politician is entitled to your vote. Every man or woman who seeks public office has to earn the public’s trust. Roy Moore has earned nothing but its contempt.

This is not that different from David Graham’s point of view at the Atlantic:

The newest allegations against Moore present Republicans with a choice—not only individual officeholders, but the party as a whole, both nationally and in Alabama. Withdrawing support for Moore, and calling for voters not to support him, would be a bitter pill. It’s too late to replace him on the ticket, and although there’s talk of a Luther Strange write-in campaign, a Moore defeat would probably mean the seat goes to Democrat Doug Jones. And yet if the party’s members can’t bring themselves to set aside narrow partisan interest and condemn a man whom they despise, with a track record of bigotry, and with multiple on-the-record accusations of improper sexual misconduct with underage women, what behavior and which candidate can they possibly rule out in the future?

None of what French and Graham write is untrue, nor is it particularly profound or very political, unless electoral politics is really about finding the most virtuous people.

So what value does French add? As a recognized evangelical writer with a law degree and some history in conservative circles, he seems to add the evangelical perspective. What makes it different from writers at the Atlantic is that French appeals to Jesus for his morality.

That is not political philosophy. As Mark Noll wrote almost 10 years ago:

The merger of Jesus and Jefferson that propelled the New Christian Right was neither made in heaven, as in the eyes of its proponents, nor was it a cynical exercise in hypocritical self-interest, as often portrayed by its opponents. It was rather a historically constructed contingency that, judged from a broad Christian perspective, deserves to be both applauded and denounced….evangelical conservative politics has been a movement without a philosophy. … Yet to deal with such complexities—to bring together solidly grounded conceptions of government, employment, education, capitalism, race, history, world affairs, and even Christianity into practical political action—requires political philosophy of the sort that American evangelicals have never possessed. Theirs is not the tradition of Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, or Mater et Magistra. It is instead the tradition of Charles G. Finney, who in the 1830s declared that the problem of slavery could be resolved “in three years’ time” if only slaveholders would recognize that slaveholding was a sin. It is the lineage of Billy Sunday, who in 1919 predicted that Prohibition would empty American prisons and transform the country into a heaven on earth.

The flourishing of conservative evangelical politics in recent American history has done considerable good through the exercise of instinct, anger, energy, and zeal. It would have done much more good, and also drawn nearer to the Christianity by which it is named, if it had manifested comparable wisdom, honesty, self-criticism, and discernment.

Taking Every Fluid Ounce Captive

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

Churches have specific associations with bodies of water. This Lutheran Church Missouri Synod writer claims the Mississippi (but I wonder if Mark Twain would let him not to mention what Lutherans in Germany might think about rivers in the United States):

A lot of evangelicals are swimming these days. They’re slipping on their metaphorical fins and masks and churning their way across bodies of water to emerge on the other shore as members of a different faith community. Those that move from evangelicalism to Roman Catholicism are said to swim the Tiber; those that become Orthodox swim the Bosporus.

Reasons for their aquatic activities vary. Some like the art and architecture associated with the ancient faiths. Some like the ceremonial aspects–the liturgies, the veneration of icons, the Eucharist. Some like the history that oozes from Catholicism and Orthodoxy, a history that travels through great saints of yesteryear–through Augustine, Ambrose, Chrysostom, and Gregory of Nazianzus–but goes largely forgotten in contemporary evangelicalism. . . .

But evangelicals interested in “swimming” to a different tradition should consider traversing a body of water much closer to home: the Mississippi River, on which is located St. Louis, Missouri, and the headquarters of the premier conservative Lutheran church body in America, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

This raises at least one question: what body of water should Presbyterians identify with for their denominational affiliation?

American Presbyterians would likely claim the Delaware River since the first presbytery and General Assembly met in Philadelphia. But the Chesapeake might also apply since some of the earliest congregations settled by Ulster Presbyterians were in Maryland.

European Presbyterians, if the look to Geneva, probably invoke Lake Geneva.

The Scots likely think about the Firth of Forth (I was thinking it was a Fifth) given the estuary’s proximity to Edinburgh.

The Irish? They may have the hardest time attracting converts if crossing the North Sea is necessary for being a Presbyterian in Northern Ireland. I’m not sure swimming the Belfast Lough is any less challenging.