Last night, the author of the incredibly wise book, The Hungry Soul, gave the annual Jefferson Lecture (John Updike gave it last year). Leon Kass is someone about whom more people should know.
Category: Wilderness Wanderings
Rob Bell on, you know, "The Healing Thing"
Christianity Today recently interviewed Rob Bell, the pastor responsible for taking emergent Christianity to the New Jerusalem of North American neo-Calvinism. Among the different questions and answers was this exchange:
You say, “Jesus wants to save us from making the Good News about another world and not this one.” What do you mean?
The story is about God’s intentions to bring about a new heaven and a new earth, and the story begins here with shalom—shalom between each other and with our Maker and with the earth. The story line is that God intends to bring about a new creation, this place, this new heaven and earth here. And that Jesus’ resurrection is the beginning, essentially, of the future; this great Resurrection has rushed into the present.
The evacuation theology that says, “figure out the ticket, say the right prayer, get the right formula, and then we’ll go somewhere else” is lethal to Jesus, who endlessly speaks of the renewal of all things.
All well and good, but how is this good news to people with no earthly hope? If I’m dying of aids or cancer, I probably don’t give a rip about the renewal of all things. I want to know if my sins are forgiven, and when I die, if am I going to see Jesus or not.
Yes, and I would say that central to that new creation is the problem with the first creation—death. The Resurrection is about God dealing with the death problem. And central to this giant cosmic hope is a very intimate, yes, you can trust this Jesus. You can trust this new creation. You can trust being with him when you die, when you leave this life, however you want to put it. Yes, there is an intensely personal dimension to this giant story that you and I get to be a part of.
And neo-Calvinists wonder why two-kingdom folks are worried about blurring distinctions between creation and redemption, between Christ’s Lordship as creator and his rule as mediator, between this world and the world to come?
This is not to say that neo-Calvinists are saying the same thing as Rob Bell. But what is the difference substantially, that Bell hasn’t met enough Dutch folk to be able to pronounce Dooeyweerd?
Ref21 Food Fight
Carl Trueman continues to wonder about the advisability of singling out homosexuality in the Church of Scotland.  “Apparently, this man left his wife and children to pursue his homosexual relationship. If true, he is an adulterer. That he is a gay adulterer compounds the issue but does not define it. Again, like a one string banjo, I hit the same note: if the church is to avoid simply looking (and, frankly, being) homophobic, then it cannot afford to single out homosexuality as the key sin above all sins, while turning a blind eye to other matters. ”
Phil Ryken wonders about the wisdom of Carl’s wondering.  Among the reasons he gives, Ryken worries about the effects of a defeat in Scotland for churches elsewhere. “I also believe that a defeat on this issue in the Church of Scotland inevitably weakens the hand of other churches in other countries that will seek in coming years to defend biblical standards of sexuality from a secular political onslaught. Only today the Associated Press is reporting that growing support for gay unions is changing the political landscape in America. I expect that in time this change will lead to hardship and persecution for Christian churches and schools across America. Thus it is important for evangelicals to stand together on homosexuality and everything else associated with a consistently biblical ethic for human sexuality.” Continue reading “Ref21 Food Fight”
The End of Christian America
Jon Meacham wrote a less provocative piece than its title for the magazine he edits on “The End of Christian America.” Reactions have been mixed even if it is hard to argue either with the data that prompted the article or Meacham’s Augustinian conclusion:
The columnist Cal Thomas was an early figure in the Moral Majority who came to see the Christian American movement as fatally flawed in theological terms. “No country can be truly ‘Christian’,” Thomas says. “Only people can. God is above all nations, and, in fact, Isaiah says that ‘All nations are to him a drop in the bucket and less than nothing’.” Thinking back across the decades, Thomas recalls the hope—and the failure. “We were going through organizing like-minded people to ‘return’ America to a time of greater morality. Of course, this was to be done through politicians who had a difficult time imposing morality on themselves!”
Two years ago in the epages of Ordained Servant, T. David Gordon reached a similar conclusion, and he didn’t need to quote a columnist:
Indeed, if there is any real evidence of the decline of Christianity in the West, the evidence resides precisely in the eagerness of so many professing Christians to employ the state to advance the Christian religion. That is, if Ellul’s theory is right, the evidence of the decline of Christianity resides not in the presence of other religions (including secularism) in our culture, but in the Judge Moores, the hand-wringing over “under God” in the pledge of allegiance, and the whining about the “war on Christmas.” If professing Christians believe our religion is advanced by the power of the state rather than by the power of the Spirit, by coercion rather than by example and moral suasion, then perhaps Christianity is indeed in decline. If we can no longer say, with the apostle Paul, “the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly,” then perhaps Christianity is indeed in significant decline. If we believe we need Christian presidents, legislators, and judges in order for our faith to advance, then we ourselves no longer believe in Christianity, and it has declined. Christianity does not rise or fall on the basis of governmental activity; it rises or falls on the basis of true ecclesiastical activity. What Christianity needs is competent ministers, not Christian judges, legislators, or executive officers.
Sometimes when the church is really the church she even beats journalists to the real story.
If the Bible Speaks to All of Life, Why Not the Confession?
I do not do Facebook, though I might sign up for MyFace. I am happily uninterested in Twitter, which as T. David Gordon has suggested, is what twits do. So using a blog to tell others about what I’m doing seems silly if not narcisistic.
With those qualifications out of the way, a recent speaking engagement at Grove City College (where I heard Gordon make a very compelling presentation on the need for caution in using technology that requires batteries and plugs) got me thinking about the world-and-life-viewitis that has reached epidemic proportions among Protestants. Most evangelical Protestant colleges these days are justifying their existence and identity by saying they provide a wholistic vision on learning that is grounded in the Christian faith. The Lordship of Christ, the authority of Scripture, even the cultural mandate come in for aid and comfort.
This ideal is an honorable one and springs from generally wholesome motives. Who would not want to see Christ honored in all aspects of the created order, and who would want to be unfaithful where Scripture has revealed God’s holy will?
There’s just one problem: the Bible doesn’t speak to all the arts and sciences, let alone whether incoming freshmen should receive a laptop or whether it should be an Apple or an IBM machine. In fact, the one place where Christ is revealed, the Bible, has very little to say about the curriculum of an undergraduate education. If we say that it does, we are in danger of putting the imaginations of men above the Word of God — that is, making the Bible say what we want it to say. Continue reading “If the Bible Speaks to All of Life, Why Not the Confession?”
2K Food Fight?
Over at Heidelblog, Scott Clark takes some exception to the proposal at Old Life for a Bureau of Weaker Siblings.
Among the points he makes, these are the most interesting:
Hart mentions a natural law approach to resisting fornication (that the act of fornication is contrary to the creational intent of sex for procreation). This view seems to concede the Romanist view of sex. We should rather say that fornication is contrary to creational intent because, by definition, it entails sex outside of marriage. I’m not ready to concede the case that birth control is sinful. He also suggests that the hotel owner might not have “access†to natural law. This is an odd concession. Who doesn’t have access to natural law? To whom has natural law not been revealed? Isn’t one of the points of NL that it is universal? (Rom 1-2)? Continue reading “2K Food Fight?”
Bureau of Weaker Siblings
Imagine the following scenario (not apparently one conceived by John Lennon): a hotel owner refuses to let out a room to couples whom he knows may engage in fornication, adultery or sodomy. The owner decides upon this policy out of his own Christian convictions. But the owner conducts his business in a civil polity that grants civil rights to fornicators, adulterers, and sodomites. What is the owner to do?
This is a conundrum which supposedly trips up two-kingdom thinking because the idea of a distinction between civil or common and religious realms denies the possibility of the existence of anything like a Christian hotel. If no such religious hotels exist, then apparently the owner should, according to 2k logic, change his policy and make rooms available to those who violate God’s laws. But if he insists on his policy, informed by his conscience, then he should sell his hotel because he lives in a land that will prohibits “Christian” hotels. One other option is to suffer the penalty for his violation of civil rights and either pay a fine or go to jail.
This test case for two-kingdom thinking actually fails to recognize that the alternatives here are actually more than two, and that the either-or approach that afflicts so much anti-thetical analysis does not do justice to the variety of God’s creation and providence. First, the hotel owner could actually appeal to natural law as a common standard for local laws. He could argue that sexual encounters outside marriage are inappropriate because they ignore the telos of sex, namely, procreation and reproduction. Second, if natural law is unavailable to this Christian hotel owner, he could appeal to the mercy of his local magistrate and petition for an exception to the laws of the county, city, or state. If he asked for such an allowance, he might actually find a kinder hearing than if he simply asserted to the town council, while wagging his finger, that the state’s laws were an affront to God’s moral will.
Third, to ensure that his hotel was thoroughly Christian, he could also deny rooms to liars, blasphemers, idolaters, thieves, and murderers, as well as anyone who has considered such acts and words in his or her heart. Of course, the owner might have to go out of business because no patron, not even a saint, could meet the owners’ righteous standards. Fourth, the owner could show his zeal for God’s law by also refusing to cohabit with his spouse and children for violating any one of God’s laws in heart, word, or deed.
The last option might be the most ingenious of all. If the Christian hotel owner is a member of a Presbyterian Church, he might prevail upon his session to petition the local magistrate in a case “extraordinary,” as tolerated by the Confession of Faith, ch. 31. What the session could do would be to work with the local government to establish a Bureau of Weaker Siblings in which the church would provide members of a public committee whose charge would be to evaluate the religious scruples of this hotel owner, and similar cases, to determine if he qualifies as one of St. Paul’s weaker brothers. Owners who cannot provide services to sinners, or to those who perform certain, more heinous kinds of sin, clearly lack the strong conscience that allows other Christians to regard such services to sinners as a legitimate part of their calling before God and love of neighbor. If a person, like the hotel owner in this example, were approved by the bureau as a weaker sibling, then he could gain permission from the state to be exempted from the scope and sanctions of laws that violated his conscience. Certificates of Weakness would be valid ideally for sixty days, and renewable, after meeting monthly with the Bureau, up to ten times.
Give It Up
It, in this case, is evangelicalism.
Rick Phillips, over at the Ref21 blog, comments on Michael Spencer’s (aka Internet Monk) piece on the collapse of evangelicalism. Phillips writes:
. . . what many have been saying for years is true: American evangelicalism is for the most part non-Christian, if biblical definitions are used. Bible doctrine has not been taught for years, and there are largely-populated areas with scores of evangelical churches where one cannot find any serious Bible teaching. Youth ministry has been the pinnacle of this phenomenon, as evangelical youth ministries have tended to be virtually devoid of truth or godliness. So the situation is as bad as we have feared, and I agree with Michael Spenser that in the coming years (really, starting now) this is going to be revealed dramatically.
So why continue to call yourself “The Allicance of Confessing Evangelicals”? Isn’t this sort of like calling yourself “The Alliance of Confessing Modernists”? Hello!?!
(I’d submit a comment over at Ref21 but unlike some blogs, their posts remain above the fray.)
Timmerman is Our (Paleo-Calvinist) Homeboy
If any publications inspired the NTJ, it was (and is) the New Republic, First Things, and the Reformed Journal (not necessarily in that order). The latter has not been in print for over a decade, but it was a refreshing, provocative and often wrong-headed outlet for considerations of Reformed faith and practice.Â
The quotation below comes from an article that was part of a series on Reformed identity in American life: John J. Timmerman, “Whatever Happened to Sunday?” Feb. 1981. It may come as close to an expression of Old Life piety as you can find. It is Lord’s day-centric, logocentric, and supremely aware of the Christian life as a pilgrimage. If only more Grand Rapidians could find this part of their Kuyperian selves.Â
Sunday was church in Orange City, Iowa, in the first decades of the century. I suspect that is is so even now in the little pockets of piety that dot Northwest Iowa, though it can’t be as still in the town or in the homes as it was in my youth. There were three services, which I attended with simulated docility. The preacher delivered three sermons before his often critical sheep, dressed in a somber Prince Albert, sweating it out in August afternoons without air-conditioning before a whir of variegated hand-propelled fans. He spoke in these churches, some of them large, without the aid of electronic devices, and a voice of good timbre could be heard on the street through the open windows. There were always competitive babies in the crowd, quieted not by artful jouncing but by breast feeding. As the sermon pounded on, squirming little boys were pinched. Sometimes fractious older boys in the back seats were policed by elders. Dutch psalms were fervently sung while a lathering janitor pumped the bellows of the organ at 110 degrees. There was no choir – an irrelevant impertinence.
The heart of the service was the sermon; upon that the evaluation of the preacher and the determination of his ecclesiastical fortunes depended. Then, as it was well into the sixties, it was as rhetorically fixed as the terza rima. Apparently all texts were best analyzed and interpreted in terms of three points. I remember a preacher saying, “One more point and then we go home.” Whether the content was brilliant or mediocre, it was formulated in terms of an introduction, three divisions, and application. The three points were often chosen with care and memorably phrased. These pegs to remembrance enabled certain people to recall sermons accurately for years. A lady of eighty-eight wrote me recently saying about some sermons she had heard “I know the introduction and application he made and often talk about them.” She also gave the three points of several sermons she had remembered for fifty years. Such fixed rhetoric may seem wooden, bit its mnemonic helpfulness was striking. As a boy, of course, I had no interest in these sermons. I spent my time counting the pipes in the organ, the panes in the colored glass windows, watching the consistory up front, and daydreaming. I am glad that later I learned to appreciate the meticulous preparation, craftsmanship, and meditation that went into their making. Some of these older ministers operated on volubility, but others on a lot of mind and heart; not a few had style and some had class. . . .
Three services, three trips to church, three meals pretty well consumed the day. What time remained was to be used in a way compatible with the spiritual tone of the day. To many this all sounds like “a hard, hard, religion,” as well as something of a bore. Indeed, it took something out of one but it put something real into one also. The church was a sanctuary, a renewal of hope, a confirmation of faith. These people did not have easy, pleasure-filled lives. They had a profound sense of the mystery and misery of human existence. There were no protective barriers. I remember my mother crying over the deaths of little children. Children were sometimes marred by smallpox, weakened by scarlet fever, dead of diphtheria. Diseases now almost routinely cured carried off parents, leaving homes fatherless and motherless. Fearful accidents occurred on the farm. Hail, storm, and drought brought destruct to crops. But the death of the saints was precious in the sight of the Lord, and in the eye of the storm was the providence of God. How often these people prayed for a rainbow, how often they found a spiritual rainbow in the church where God spoke to them through his servants, and promised cure for all misery.
At that time and even into the sixties, there was a remarkable consensus as to the meaning and practices of Sunday. Although the Bible did not specify the number of services to be held on Sunday, congregations attended with notable faithfulness and did not appear to grow weary of that kind of well-doing. Even though the services in the earlier decades of the century were a surcease from loneliness on the empty prairie, a stay against loss of identity in a strange land, and the warm concourse of friends, these were not the reasons that brought them to church. What did bring them to church was a felt spiritual need and a sense of duty. They believed God wanted them to come as often as they could and that it was good for them to be here. That kind of consensus has been eroding for years, whether out of spiritual amplitude, secular diversions, boredom, or alienation. . . .
The consensus on Sunday behavior is also waning. Whereas in the early decades of the century, attendance at church three times was common, today attendance twice is lessening. The blue laws have almost vanished. If a member of my old church in Iowa had spun his Buick over to the Blackstone Cafe at Sioux City for a Sunday dinner of prime rib and cocktails, he would have been in danger of losing his membership; if one does that in Grand Rapids today he risks only losing his shirt. The old blue laws were based on the idea that the Sabbath is a “day of sacred assembly” and that “wherever you live, it is a Sabbath to the Lord.” The older generation thought God made the Sabbath for man to insure rest and spiritual growth, not to do what he wanted. They were uptight and possibly self-righteous about Sunday. The present generation is relaxed and self-righteous about it. . . .
Mark Driscoll is Joining the Christian and Missionary Alliance
Or so it seems on the basis of Driscoll’s recent post on the differences between the New and Old Calvinism. (My, how pertinent the paleo/neo distinction has become.)Â
According to Driscoll, the differences between Calvinism 1.0 and 8.2 are simple and short: 1) New Calvinism is missional; 2) it is urban; 3) it is charismatic; and 4) it is loving. Old Calvinism, accordingly, is not these things. (Do I feel loved? Not really, but it doesn’t matter since New Calvinists are loving.)Â
What Driscoll may not realize is that American Calvinists have been there and done that. They did so in the person of  A. B. Simpson, a Canadian Presbyterian who ministered in the PCUSA, established urban missions and a training school (Nyack) in New York City, and was open to the emerging (couldn’t resist) Pentecostal revival.  The institutions Simpson founded, along with his teaching, formed the basis for the Christian and Missionary Alliance (1887). (Before Keller, there was Simpson.)
So whether Driscoll knows it, he has a denominational home. The upside is that Driscoll’s Calvinism could develop into the mature evangelical Protestantism of C&MA guru, A. W. Tozer, who could be remarkably perceptive about worship.  But just as likely the New Calvinism will go in a diferent direction because folks like Tozer and the C&MA are not new or hip.
Old Life 