Category: Wilderness Wanderings

My Vice Is Less Vicious Than Yours

Published on by D. G. Hart3 Comments

OreoOver at the History News Network comes news of Dr. Robert N. Proctor, a historian at Stanford, who is coming out with a book on big tobacco (e. g. R. J. Reynolds/Nabisco) with the even-handed title, Golden Holocaust: A History of Global Tobacco. It seems that RJR/N is tying up Dr. Proctor in court to prevent his book from being published.

Ignorance of the manuscript’s contents and the tobacco company’s tactics prevents comment on the merits of this case. A cigar smoker, I have no obvious dog in this fight, except for the continuing condemnation of smoking as an evil comparable to National Socialism. (Where’s our Walter to claim for smoking that “at least it’s an ethos”?) The moral illogic of smoking bigotry is particularly evident in the following paragraph from HNN’s story:

We now know in retropsect, thanks to industry documents, that the tobacco industry is really two separate industries: one that we see, that makes and sells cigarettes, and the other we don’t see, that has spent generations and an untold fortune trying to convince the world, against our collective better judgment, that smoking is a normal human behavior and should stay that way.

Clearly, the reporter has not been watching HBO’s Madmen, where smoking is as natural to 1960s USA as moms, hot dogs, and apple pie (and where moms usually make apple pies while puffing on multiple cigarettes). Also clear is that the reporter has not considered how unnatural partially hydrogenated oils are despite how well they go down with a glass of milk and, for a time in American history, with a Lucky Strike.

Whose Ox, Which Gore?

Published on by D. G. Hart50 Comments

A-View-of-World-from-9th-Avenue-Map_mediumthumbTim Keller continues to impress, not only with his wisdom, but also with his productivity. He has a new book, this time on idols, and as the darling Presbyterian pastor of Christianity Today’s editors, he answers questions about Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters. (That’s almost an early modern mouthful of a title.) The interviewer at CT asks Keller, “Do Christians have blind spots when it comes to false idols?”

Keller responds:

An idol is something you rely on instead of God for your salvation. One of the religious idols is your moral record: “God accepts me because I’m living a good life.” I’m a Presbyterian, so I’m all for right doctrine. But you can start to feel very superior to everyone else and think, God is pleased with me because I’m so true to the right doctrine. The right doctrine and one’s moral record are forms of power. Another is ministry success, similar to the idol of achievement. There are religious versions of sex, money, and power, and they are pretty subtle.

This is a curious answer. Keller could have opted for a version of an idol that was close to home or one that was easier to give up. For instance, if I were asked this question, I could respond with something about the idolatry of Christian contemporary music and its outlet in P&W worship. That would be no skin off my back, and I could score a point against my liturgical enemies. But if I offered up the Philadelphia Phillies as a form of idolatry, this one would hurt since I’d hate to abandon for God’s service what may be the best team in Philadelphia sports history. My answer would then go something like this:

I’m a Philadelphian, so I’m all for Ryan Howard. But you can start to feel very superior to everyone else and think, God is pleased with me because I’m so true to the best slugger in contemporary baseball. Home runs and RBI’s are forms of power. Another is winning the N.L. pennant two years in a row, similar to the idol of achievement. There are sports fan versions of sex, money, and power, and they are pretty subtle.

All of which is to say that the illustration one uses to answer a question about idolatrous blind spots may reveal something about the tenacity with which you cling to earthly and even spiritual goods, and which ones may be let go.

So what does it say that Pete Enns quotes Keller favorably at his blog? If Keller had identified either the Yankees or OT studies or Ancient Near Eastern Studies as possible idols, would Enns have been so ready to quote approvingly?

For that reason, Keller’s response would have been more impressively costly had he substituted “city” for “right doctrine”:

I’m a New Yorker, so I’m all for urban ministry. But you can start to feel very superior to everyone else and think, God is pleased with me because I’m so true to the Big Apple. Urban ministry and cultural transformation are forms of power. Another is church planting success, similar to the idol of achievement. There are religious versions of sex, money, and power, and they are pretty subtle.

So here’s a deal: I’ll consider giving up my potential idols of Machen and confessional Presbyterianism, if Keller is willing to put urban ministry on the altar and Enns is willing to sacrifice Ancient Near Eastern studies.

If You Can't Say Something Nice . . .

Published on by D. G. Hart11 Comments

HappyWho says Old Lifers can never say anything good about theonomists? Here is evidence that says they can. Granted, the kind words stem from comparisons among theonomy, terrorism, and a certain strain of the Left — sort of like being damned by faint praise. Even so, we can all be thankful that theonomists are not as bad their caricature.

Have a nice day.

Have the Coen Brothers Lost Their Edge?

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

tom reaganAn affirmative answer would be one way of reading the recent piece on Joel and Ethan Coen, the makers of such great movies as Miller’s Crossing, Hudsucker Proxy, and No Country for Old Men at Christianity Today. The neo-evangelical habit is to take the rough edges off Christianity in order to make the faith relevant and agreeable to middle America. That also seems to be what happens when the editors at CT turn a kind eye toward former bad boys of Minnesota. I mean, of the many characters available to him, Josh Hurst, the author of the piece, turns to Marge, the family friendly cop from Fargo. Hurst writes:

That’s a good way to describe the brothers’ opus: a chronic search for truth. Some might argue that the Coens’ world is amoral, but a discerning look reveals morality aplenty. Good and evil stand apart from one another as clearly as black and white—or red and white, in the case of their classic crime story, Fargo. Set against the endless snow of the frigid Midwest, it’s a movie about greed, about a perfect crime gone horribly awry—in short, about the wake of destruction left by one man’s evil ambitions, seen starkly as a crimson trail of blood against the pure white terrain.

But then comes the evangelical smiley face:

Fargo’s heart and soul is local sheriff Marge Gunderson, played in an Oscar-winning turn by Frances McDormand. She’s chipper, [did someone say “chipper”?] pleasant, and very pregnant. She’s deeply affectionate and supportive of her husband, Norm. Their tranquil life contrasts the frenzied greed of the bad guys as much as a drop of blood on the snow. . . . Like Marge herself, the Coens have a longstanding curiosity about matters of morality. But hard as they might try, they can’t seem to shrug off the realities of evil as calmly as their most famous heroine.

Another reading of the Coen’s comes more from Tom Reagan, the punching-bag hero of Miller’s Crossing, than Marge Gunderson, the cop who likely pulled the Coens over a couple times during their youthful indiscretions. Tom repeatedly says, after being told to look into his heart, that you can’t know what motivates anyone, not even yourself. That’s actually fairly compatible with what Protestants know about the ambiguity of moral impulses even among the saints. But it is not the same as, “the heart is desperately wicked, who can know it?”

Granted, the Coens did lose some of their mojo when they indulged Hollywood with Intolerable Cruelty and Ladykillers. Both movies appeared to be parodies of Coen brothers movies, what Hollywood would try to do if it were going to make a movie like Joel and Ethan.

But when you take a movie that features a human leg sticking out of a wood chipper and turn it into a study of purpose and rectitude, you may feel, like the teenager who is embarrassed to find that his parents also like The Who, that the church lady is trying overly hard to live on the edge.

Caritas in Flagrande

Published on by D. G. Hart6 Comments

Caleb Stegall over at Front Porch Republic has already asked a good question about a recent evangelical statement, “Doing the Truth in Love,” that commends the pope’s recent encyclical Caritas in Vertate to the wider evangelical world. Caleb asked, “how many evangelicals does it take to comment on an encyclical?” The answer is a whole lot more than the teamsters it takes to change a lightbulb. The answer to Caleb’s question is 68, the number of evangelicals who signed “Doing the Truth in Love.” The answer to the question about the teamsters is “10, you gotta problem with that?”

Maybe it is oldlife’s current obsession with neo-Calvinism, but we couldn’t help but notice a strong attraction of Kuyperians to Benedict’s encyclical. The Protestant statement backing the pope originally stemmed from a Center for Public Justice effort, and a number of neo-Calvinists added their signatures, among them our favorite Byzantine-rite Calvinist. The convergence of neo-Calvinists and the Roman church’s pontiff does not prove our repeated contention here that a preoccupation with worldview turns the confessional and ecclesial lobes of one’s brain into jello. But it does add to the mix of examples that show neo-Calvinists to be promiscuous in their discernment.

Meanwhile, the neo-Calvinist theological interpretation of Benedict is not reassuring. DTL states:

In Christ’s death and resurrection, God removes all that stands in the way of right relationships between God and the world, among humans, and between humanity and the rest of creation. Human development is included in this restoration of all things to right relationship.

This is the typical neo-Calvinist cosmological rendering of redemption, the license that tells Christians they need to save the world – not just the lost tribes in Africa, but also the kitchen sink. Is it really possible that Benedict is a neo-Calvinist? What would Abraham Kuyper, who thought Rome had nothing to offer the modern world, say?

We do not want to suggest that Benedict or any other pope cannot be read for insight and wisdom. In this case, oldlife has yet to read the encyclical. But would the evangelical signers of DTL also be willing to draft and sign the books by other authors who possess a lot of wisdom about the economy and globalization – say Niall Ferguson or P. J. O’Roarke?

And what about Wendell Berry? Is he chopped liver? Almost twenty years ago he wrote:

Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible. Those who have “thought globally” (and among them the most successful have been imperial governments and multinational corporations) have done so by means of simplifications too extreme and oppressive to merit the name of thought. Global thinkers have been and will be dangerous people. National thinkers tend to be dangerous also: we now have national thinkers in the northeastern United States who look on Kentucky as a garbage dump. A landfill in my county receives daily many truckloads of garbage from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. This is evidently all right with everybody but those of us who live here. (“Out of your Car, Off Your Horse,” 19)

So why no statement recommending The Unsettling of America to evangelical readers. Berry had some of us thinking about the problems of globalization a while ago. It didn’t take the Bishop of Rome to get us to do it. And we didn’t have to issue a declaration and seek signatures to call attention to our debt to Berry.

Mind you, if Benedict actually agrees with DTL when the statement says, “globalization has indeed lifted millions out of poverty, primarily by the integration of the economies of developing nations into international markets. Yet the unevenness of this integration leaves us deeply concerned about the inequality, poverty, food insecurity, unemployment, social exclusion—including the persistent social exclusion of women in many parts of the world—and materialism that continue to ravage human communities, with destructive consequences for our shared planetary habitat” – if that’s what the encyclical affirms, then maybe a Berry declaration is in order. As Stegall notes, “Take it from me, sitting in the belly of the beast, when Evangelicals ask you for a ‘serious dialogue’ about ‘new models of global governance,’ reach for your gun. Or your rosary.”

Beyond globalization, Benedict, and Berry is the cringe produced by watching low church Protestants jump on the papal bandwagon. Could it be that evangelicals get more mileage out of siding with the pope than even a popular American author? Impugning motives is always unwise, but why don’t these evangelicals worry just a little bit about coming off as Vatican groupies?

Sorry for the cynicism, but any good Protestant knows something is wrong when those who are not in fellowship with the Bishop of Rome, and who remain tarnished by the condemnations of Trent, are so eager to recommend the chief officer of the church whose jurisdiction their communions have purposefully renounced.

Two Kingdom Theology is the Change We've Been Waiting For

Published on by D. G. Hart16 Comments

Kevin DeYoung, over at DeYoung, Restless, and Reformed, has weighed two-kingdom theology and Kuyperianism in the balance and hopes for a middle ground in the following way:

I am loathe to be an apologist for the status quo, or to throw cold water on young people who want to see abortion eradicated or dream of kids in Africa having clean water. I don’t think it’s wrong for a church to have an adoption ministry or an addiction recovery program. I think changing structures, institutions, and ideas not only helps people but can pave the way for gospel reception.

Perhaps there is a–I can’t believe I’m going to say it–a middle ground. I say, let’s not lose the heart of the gospel, divine self-satisfaction through self-substitution. And let’s not apologize for challenging Christians to show this same kind of dying love to others. Let’s not be embarrassed by the doctrine of hell and the necessity of repentance and regeneration. And let’s not be afraid to do good to all people, especially to the household of faith. Let’s work against the injustices and suffering in our day, and let’s be realistic that the poor, as Jesus said, will always be among us. Bottom line: let’s work for change where God calls us and gifts us, but let’s not forget that the Great Commission is go into the world and make disciples, not go into the world and build the kingdom.

Is recovering the dignity of the sacred office (as opposed to every member ministry), returning to psalm-singing (as opposed to hymns or praise songs), or restoring the Sunday evening worship service simply preserving the status quo? Or is judging a Christian profession by one’s quiet and ordinary work rather than whether you are making a difference really so widely accepted that Kuyperian transformationalism is a welcome relief? If so, beam me up, Kevin.

For what it’s worth, White Horse Inn has posted responses to DeYoung and Kevin himself gets the last word.

Who Said Moral Relativism Is Increasing?

Published on by D. G. Hart15 Comments

EaglesSports talk radio is not the best entertainment but it sure beats Glen, Rush, and Sean beating up the Obama administration. Listeners in Philadelphia have listened to forty-eight hours of casuistry while Eagles’ fans process the reality of Michael Vick being added to the roster. After serving two years in federal prison for molesting and killing dogs in dog-fight related activities, Vick has been cleared by the NFL to play and the Eagles swooped him up. For a sampling of the moral outrage, check this out.

Now if only we could convince football fans that an unborn child is higher on the chain of being than a pit bull.

Neutrality, Schnootrality

Published on by D. G. Hart66 Comments

Our favorite Byzantine-rite Calvinist (how many fish can there be in that pond?), David Koyzis, has written another post (July 28) critical of the two-kingdom/spirituality of the church views advocated here. In the piece he brings up the common retort of neo-Calvinists that all other so-called Christian outlooks are guilty of affirming neutrality if they don’t follow a Reformed world-and-life-view. In this case, our debate has concerned the contemporary academy and remedies for the secularism that afflicts it. (Actually, banality may be the bigger problem of the modern university, except of course during March Madness.)

Leaving aside finding solutions to what afflicts contemporary academic life, the neo-Calvinist pattern of falling back on charging non-neo-Calvinists with neutrality is getting old (and worse than being called Lutheran) and fails to see how much neo-Calvinism actually resembles fundamentalism at a deeper level.

The fundamentalism on which I cut my soul was constantly splitting the world in two, between the sacred and the profane, as if some shared existence was not possible for believers and non-believers inhabiting the same neighborhood, working in the same office, pledging allegiance to the same flag. Kuyperians may have a more sophisticated version of the fundamentalist mindset – think of all that epistemology and post-Kantian idealism – but the position still strikes me as one that fails to recognize the common arenas of the created order such as the state, marriage, and education. Do Christians and non-Christians pursue these matters differently? From an ultimate perspective, yes. The former strive to engage in these activities to the glory of God, the latter do not. (But let’s remember the filthy rags that afflict even the pursuit of God’s glory.) From a penultimate perspective, it’s hard to see how a history prof teaching the survey of the United States at Cow College U. is doing the job any worse than the prof at Consistently Calvinist College. The standards for that evaluation are not Scripture or the creeds; they are set by the American Historical Association and the leading graduate departments of history.

It is also hard to see how neo-Calvinists make any sense of the Westminster Standards’ teaching on the Lord’s Day, as in the distinction between sacred duties of worship and rest, profaning the Lord’s Day by doing that which is explicitly sinful, or even breaking the fourth commandment by doing common work on the Sabbath that is actually lawful on other days. In other words, the Standards assume that three categories of moral evaluatoin – the sacred, profane, and the common, and these spheres actually shift depending on whether the day is holy or ordinary (as in common).

So someone like myself who affirms the common is not asserting neutrality. God is Lord over all things. But that Lordship is not always redemptive. Sometimes it is merely creational or providential. As I like to say, Christ was Lord in Iraq even before U.S. forces invaded.

This distinction is also important for two-kingdom folks who worry about neo-Calvinism invariably turning theologically liberal. Koyzis objects to my apparent fallacy of saying neo-Calvinism is flawed because it has so often resulted in churches more concerned about working out a Reformed view of math or television than communions that hold on to the Cannons of Dort. He may have a point regarding the logic of my historical observation. At the same time, I wonder if neo-Calvinists have the capacity to observe that their project has not worked out well in either the Old World or the New one and that adjustments may need to be made.

But aside from the merits of historical trends, the distinctions among the holy, common, and profane are actually important for the way neo-Calvinism has played out in theologically suspect results. By trying to redeem the culture, or the state, or the house, neo-Calvinists feel good about denying the sacred-secular distinction, thus asserting Christ’s Lordship over every single cubit millimeter. Yet, I have not seen a neo-Calvinist recognize that one of the chief features of Protestant modernism was a similar denial of the sacred-secular distinction in order to Christianize everything, to affirm God’s rule over all areas of life, not just in the religious or holy ones. Again, fundamentalism is the flipside of this impulse, and differs by refusing that the culture or the state can be Christianized (of course the home is sacred, family values and all that). By failing to acknowledge that part of existence is good even apart from redemption because it is created, neo-Calvinists want to redeem things that do not need to be saved. And it is this expansive view of salvation – because of the missing category of the common or created – that leads to liberal theology.

We Need More Dads Like H. L. Mencken's

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Or maybe not.

An op-ed in the Journal reflects on the contemporary demise of Sunday school as an American religious institution and wonders about the effects of this development on the spiritual nurture of the nation’s youth.   Among the findings the author, Charlotte Hays, cites the following:

A study by the Barna Group indicated that in 2004 churches were 6% less likely to provide Sunday school for children ages 2 to 5 as in 1997. For middle-school kids, the decline was to 86% providing Sunday school in 2004 from 93% in 1997. Similarly, there was a six-percentage-point drop in Sunday schools offered for high school kids — to 80% from 86%. All in all, about 20,000 fewer churches were maintaining Sunday-school classes. And the future does not look bright: Only 15% of ministers regarded Sunday school as a leading concern. The younger the pastor, the study showed, the less emphasis he placed on Sunday school.

Continue reading “We Need More Dads Like H. L. Mencken's” →

Evangelicals Are Now Mainline (Woo Hoo!)

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Christianity Today is surprised, proud, and cautious about this state of affairs, which the American Religious Identification Survey reports.  Since 1990 the number of people identifying themselves as born-again has  almost doubled while mainline churches continue to lose numbers.  (Two important corrections to note: evangelicalism always was the mainline up until the 1920s when the mainline churches’ leadership went a little lite in the doctrine and heavy on the advocacy; second, identifying yourself as born-again as opposed to Methodist doesn’t really cost you anything – and at least the mainline denominations were churches.) 

The positive side of evangelicals’ mainline status according to CT is this:

We enjoy a significant position of authority — contra Meacham — in moral and political issues. Pastors Rick Warren and Joel Hunter, both of whom have had access to President Obama, exemplify this kind of standing in the culture. Glenn Stanton of Focus on the Family notes that the existence of laws or constitutional amendments opposing the redefinition of marriage in 43 states would be hard to explain absent the massive presence of pro-family evangelicals. Facing little competition from the old mainline, growing and dynamic megachurches, Pentecostals, and immigrant churches also have a great opportunity to appeal to the spiritually curious and open.

Frankly, I’m not sure Warren or Hunter actually count as political muscle, but evangelicals have always had trouble discerning the difference between celebrity appeal and institutional authority.  Even so, I thought the point (among many) of the Evangelical Manifesto was to recognize that political activism was giving evangelicalism a bad name. 

The editors do affirm, in a gesture to the “Manifesto,” that “spreading the gospel, not seeking social or political relevance, is the heartbeat of evangelicalism. More often than not, cozying up to the culture has been a ticket to later embarrassment.”  Ya think?

But they conclude:

we also must remain engaged in the larger culture. We cannot afford to become consumed by our own theological distinctives and subculture. That too would be a compromise. We are not called to identify with any culture or subculture, whether that be America or evangelicalism. Our future as a movement depends on that which is in our name, the evangel, the good news of Jesus Christ. If we keep that focus, we never have to worry about becoming the new sideline.

There you have it — viola!  By being faithful, evangelicals can have it all, both mainstream and counter-cultural, no hard choices required.  Those kind of easy answers long on inspiration and short on resolving contradictions admittedly have their appeal in mass movements like born-against Protestantism.  But American evangelicalism will never be trustworthy to confessional Protestants as long as its gate keepers abdicate the difficult work of deciding how ultimate loyalties affect proximate teachings and practice.