Do You See What I See?

Published on by D. G. Hart115 Comments

Haven’t heard the carol yet, but I’m sure it’s coming.

This post from Guy Noir at the Pertinacious Papist brought the Christmas carol to mind and it concerns our peaceful interlocutor, Bryan Cross, and why he doesn’t see what others do.

First Guy quotes a critic of Called to Communion but does not link to his source (and yes, I had hoped it was — all about — me):

I think the point is that Bryan Cross and the whole Called to Communion project is almost entirely out of step with modern Roman Catholicism post-V2. … It’s why you don’t see very many cradle RCs calling us to communion. They understand that the Vatican now sees us as true Christians, having in practice renounced the anathemas of Trent even while still nominally claiming them. The religion that Bryan and CtC promote is very heady and not at all in touch with the average RC in the pew. …[T]he church basically renounced its earlier doctrines and practices at V2… Bryan et al don’t see it at all, which is why we get 10,000 word tomes trying to make the square peg of Tridentine Romanism fit the round hole of post-V2 RCism. The blindness of CtC is seen in their refusal to admit that if Francis and any nineteenth century pope sat down together, neither one of them would recognize each other as a true RC.

Then Guy comments, I think in support of both the critic and of Bryan Cross (though I may be mistaken):

I really don’t know. Does proposing something that seems simply beyond the pale — just because it seems beyond the pale — make a suggestion out of the question? If a nagging suspicion or claim won’t go away, is the best policy simply to ignore it? If Francis to so many Catholics sounds unCatholic, isn’t that a reason to address to underlying issues, versus continuing to exist in a faith-anestithizing environment where we just pretend it ain’t so? And while I am at it, since when is a Pope who talks like Universalism is an option and Being Good is good enough, a pope than evangelicals think sounds evangelical?! B. B. Warfield and Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, please call you offices, stat!

In which case, it looks like Bryan doesn’t see, contrary to what his paradigms tell him, either what the state of affairs is in the contemporary church or who his allies are in the contemporary church. One thing I do know — it would be worth the price of admission (a cheap bottle of Irish whiskey?) to be around the Callers when they read Crux and National Catholic Reporter.

If You Can Make It In SE Grand Rapids . . .

Published on by D. G. Hart12 Comments

you can make it on Oprah.

After the initial battle over Love Wins died down, Bell seemed to disappear from the public eye. He left his Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids and headed out to California to work on TV projects.

The Rob Bell Show will premiere Dec. 21 on the Oprah Winfrey Network, a one-hour show that features Bell and is co-produced by him. He also recently toured the country with Winfrey on a Life You Want Weekend.

In many ways, some elements of typical evangelicalism are a good fit for Oprah’s lineup of public confession and personal transformation, said Kathryn Lofton, author of Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon. The difference, however, is that The Church of Oprah incorporates as many religious concepts as possible, while evangelicalism commits to exclusivity.

“I think an interesting way to think about Bell and Oprah here is to observe how easily she incorporates him into her pantheon of spiritual advisers. She remains, as ever, the determining corporate deity,” said Lofton, a professor of religious studies at Yale.

“One way of looking at this is less a merger of two equal powers than it is the acquisition by one large corporation of another small business.”

To be sure, Bell still holds his evangelical credentials, with degrees from Wheaton College and Fuller Theological Seminary. And like other leading evangelicals, he’s trying to stake out some ground on marriage.

Did I miss something? When did Oprah become hip?

Maybe not a Rich Man but What about a Fat One?

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If being rich makes it difficult to enter the kingdom of God, how about obesity? This is the debate that some are having over the canonization of G. K. Chesterton:

Whether or not a person was temperate in food and alcoholic consumption is not only relevant, but absolutely central to the question of sanctity. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if a person is not temperate in food and drink and the use of other created goods, there is no way they could be a saint.

Remember, a saint possesses not only natural virtue, but supernatural virtue. This means, of course, faith, hope and charity to a heroic degree, but it also means that even the saint’s natural virtues are elevated and oriented towards supernatural ends. For example, a virtuous man has formed the habit of prudence, which is the virtue of being able to identify and pursue the good in particular circumstances; i..e, of making good decisions. The saintly man, however, not only exercises natural prudence, but also demonstrates supernatural prudence; i.e., the virtue of prudence ordered towards supernatural ends, meaning exceptional discernment and good sense in spiritual matters.

Now, since supernatural virtue is a requisite of sainthood, and since grace builds on the natural virtues, it follows that a person who lacks even one of natural cardinal virtues cannot be “saintly” in the strict sense. Natural virtue is the foundation of supernatural virtue; if a natural virtue is obviously lacking, they cannot possess the supernaturalized version of that virtue which is built upon the natural. We may still have an exceptionally virtuous person, but nevertheless one with a major defect that makes it inappropriate to classify them as a saint. A person certainly cannot possess supernatural temperance if they lack even the natural virtue of temperance.

Is this being a bit too nitpicky? Absolutely not. Whether or not a person is a saint is a question of their character and conduct on the most personal level.

As much as the Obedience Boys can come across a more-devout-than-thou (or more likely, more-concerned-for-holiness-than-bad-Lutherans), I am glad they are still talking like Protestants. Indeed, it is a mystery to me that Christians would import pagan virtues into any scheme of divinely revealed holiness, almost as mystifying as the stakes for sanctity being so high not here and now — since you’ll have time in purgatory to burn off sin — but in the afterlife. If only Chesterton had remained a Protestant. He could have been a twentieth-century saint.

Still Spooked by Constantine (or Why I Am A Disestablishmentarian)

Published on by D. G. Hart12 Comments

Why do Christians believe society should be Christian? Did Christ and the apostles entertain such a belief? Keeping Israel Mosaic certainly made sense for about 1500 years of redemptive history but that did not exactly go well. Think exile. And when Christ came, did he try to put Moses back in the Mosaic Covenant? Paul would have us believe otherwise.

But Christendom continues to haunt residents of the West who pine for the days of Christian influence. Oliver O’Donovan defines Christendom this way:

. . . the idea of a professedly Christian secular political order, and the history of that idea in practice. Christendom is an era in which the truth of Christianity was taken to be a truth of secular politics. . . . . Let us say that the era lies between AD 313, the date of the Edict of Milan, and 1791, the date of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. . . . it is the idea of a confessionally Christian government, at once ‘secular’ (in the proper sense of that word, confined to the present age) and obedient to Christ, a promise of the age of his unhindered rule.

When O’Donovan looks for biblical support he has to go more to Israel’s legacy and Christ’s claims about the kingdom of God than he does to anything that Peter and Paul wrote about what Christian rulers should do (as if they ever entertained the idea of a Christian emperor):

The core idea of Christendom is therefore intimately bound up with the church’s mission. But the relationship between mission and Christian political order should not be misconstrued. . . . The church’s one project is to witness to the Kingdom of God. Christendom is the response to mission, and as such a sign that God has blessed it. (The Desire of the Nations, 195)

Not to be a literalist or anything, but the trusty search engine at ESV indicates that Matthew used “kingdom” 53 times in his gospel, Luke 44. Paul in his entire corpus uses the word 14 times (17 if you throw in Hebrews as any Three Forms person should). If declaring the Kingdom of God was a big deal to the apostles, they lost Jesus’ memo.

For that reason, the support for Christian norms in social life are more likely to depend on nostalgia for Christendom (or the theory of it) than on exegesis. Consider the following response to the Marriage Pledge and why Roman Catholics shouldn’t support it:

It is part of the Church’s mission to seek out the State and be united with it; it is the duty of the State to be subject to the Church in matters religious, including those pertaining to the eternal law and the natural law. When the State attempts to create positive law that is contrary to the natural or eternal law, the law itself is invalid. But the Church betrays herself if in confronting evil laws she abandons the State to its own devices. The Church has a positive mission to create concord between the Church and State, not to sow dissension between them. . . .

Thus all marriage (not just Christian marriage!) rightly falls under the authority of the Church. So if, in our times, the State attempts to usurp the rightful authority of the Church by either depriving her ministers of their liberty or by attempting to create laws which are injurious to the natural and eternal law, the role of the Church is to teach, admonish, and ultimately dissolve the temporal authorities. That is what the Magisterium indicates.

If you want evidence of why some Roman Catholics think the magisterium should still be running things, that piece is one where to find a paleo-Roman Catholic construction of Vatican II. But are Presbyterians any less enamored of Christendom or the national (civic) church that gave them legitimacy? Here‘s a defense of the establishment principle from the recent debates among Free Church Scotlanders over Scottish independence (if only the South had used the i-word instead of secession):

Lord Mackay of Clashfearn defines the current status of Church/state relations: “the relationship of the State to the Church of Scotland is one of recognition with a degree of support. As Professor Frank Lyall has said, ‘All that establishment means is that the civil authority has recognised the Church’s self-imposed task to bring the ordi-nances of religion to all Scotland, and looks to the Church on suitable ceremonial oc-casions.’”

What are the duties of the Established Church? In 1877 these were described as: “the protection of the Sabbath, the promotion of scriptural education in the public schools, the conservation of the purity of the Scriptures, and the sacredness of the law of mar-riage.” Today, this scope is greatly diminished: legislation has broken the back of a national recognition of the Sabbath; the state has monopolised education; the free market has removed ecclesiastical oversight from Bible production; and the institution of marriage has succumbed to demands from the gay rights lobby.

And here’s one more for the Lord-of-the-Rings enthusiasts out there. In response, again to the Marriage Pledge, Jake Meador pulls out a quotation from J. R. R. Tolkien:

The last Christian marriage I attended was held under your system: the bridal pair were “married” twice. They married one another before the Church’s witness (a priest), using one set of formulas, and making a vow of lifelong fidelity (and the woman of obedience); they then married again before the State’s witness… using another set of formulas and making no vow of fidelity or obedience. I felt it was an abominable proceeding – and also ridiculous, since the first set of formulas and vows included the latter as the lesser. In fact it was only not ridiculous on the assumption that the State was in fact saying by implication: I do not recognize the existence of your church; you may have taken certain vows in your meeting place but they are just foolishness, private taboos, a burden you take on yourself: a limited and impermanent contract is all that is really necessary for citizens. In other words this “sharp division” is a piece of propaganda, a counter-homily delivered to young Christians fresh from the solemn words of the Christian minister.

Has Meador or Tolkien considered what it’s like to be a Muslim or Jew in a Christian society (think Christendom)? And if we don’t like idea of Sharia law determining civil codes, why should Roman Catholic or Protestant teaching on marriage determine U.S. law? Because more Christians live in the U.S. than non-Christians?

But more to the point, have these folks contemplated whether Jesus and the apostles favored an establishment principle or where the early Christians went to be married? I don’t know the answer to the latter. But I do sense that Christendom is alive and well and that lots of Christians still pine for it. If the church as a pilgrim people not responsible for public affairs was a good thing for the early church, why not for Christians today? I mean, could anyone possibly imagine the OPC as the established church of the United States being responsible for religious life across the nation? (Imagine how long General Assembly would be!) That thought experiment might well put any number of Christian warriors off the Christendom project.

How Did the Reformation Ever Happen . . .

Published on by D. G. Hart222 Comments

without The Bible: Faith and Work Edition?

The constant and everyday relevance of the Bible is why David Kim, Executive Director of the Center for Faith & Work at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, and I—along with the editors of Christianity Today and Zondervan—are working on a new Bible. We want something with staying power.

The Bible: Faith and Work Edition will be a unique and engaging combination of doctrine, application, and community that can find its home not only on your nightstand at home, but also on your desktop at work. Its goal is to equip Christians to meaningfully engage various aspects of their work—even those we might not even think could be relevant—with a renewed sense of the power and relevance of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

With over 20 years of experience pastoring people in communities that wrestle with questions about faith and work, Kim says,

What you will learn in the pages of this Bible is not a list of do’s and don’ts at work, but a theology that will hopefully rewire the way you understand the gospel and how it has everything to do with your work. Once you see the connection between faith and work, the work of Christ will become more beautiful, comprehensive, and necessary. I hope this Bible will bring to you an excitement to engage not only your work, but also the world around you, with a renewed sense of purpose grounded in the unique hope of the gospel.

Well, I for one haven’t read this edition of the Bible and already recognized how the gospel does and doesn’t apply. The gospel has provoked this post of sheer disbelief that Christians can be so full of themselves. I also know that the gospel has little to do with making split pea soup in the crock pot for this evening’s meal. I double dare Bethany Jenkins to tell me how justification by faith, sanctification, union with Christ EVEN, applies to dinner.

Apparently as well, the folks responsible for this Bible don’t understand that the gospel, properly understood as good news for what’s coming on judgment day, might actually yield second thoughts about this proposed edition of holy writ. (Where is Kathy Keller’s b-s detector when we need it?) But when you are in the bubble of Redeemerland and have the TKNY brand, you really do think your ideas can “impact” the church and the world more than anyone else (which so far mainly means selling more stuff than John Piper and Desiring God). I am sure that plenty of church officers at churches in small cities and suburbia come up with ideas about how their devotional gadget or technique will change the lives of everyone in the congregation and region. The problem for the Redeemerites is that their bubble of NYC and their ties to TKNY allow them to take silly notions and sell them to business executives (like book publishers) and magazine editors who want more readers.

Would anyone at Zondervan have taken this Bible proposal seriously if it had come from church staff, say, in Montgomery, Alabama?

Where Do You Get Your Inspiration?

Published on by D. G. Hart3 Comments

I don’t think Dwight Longenecker meant to imply this, and maybe the pitch for contributions to his parish hampered his thinking, but when he suggests that the shortage of priests stems from bad liturgical architecture, I was hardly persuaded:

As I travel around the country and see archive photographs of our Catholic churches it is clear that it happened virtually everywhere. Marble altarpieces were ripped out, statues taken down and relegated to basements, votive candle racks removed, beautiful flooring covered with carpet, wall paintings white washed and tabernacles moved to the side….the list goes on and on, and when the liturgical experimentation was finished, the religious orders invaded by pop psychiatrists, the colleges and universities taken over by modernism and the sacred music transformed into mediocre folk and light rock groups the new Protestant revolution was complete.

I always try to be broad minded and fair, but when you see the brutal, cheap and ostentatious churches that were built the crime of erecting these warehouses with tacky Catholic stuff inside is only surmounted by the iconoclastic crimes perpetrated on the existing buildings and artwork.

I do not know the details of the Josephinum wreck-ovation, but if the place was in need of work was it impossible to restore the artwork, modernize the facilities and do so with taste, balance and a sense of continuity? It seems not, and this process was repeated time and again by naive and ignorant modernist ideologues.

What has been the result? Has the experimentation filled the seminaries, sparked a wave of new vocations to the religious life, filled the churches with new life and brought Catholicism alive for the modern age?

I think we all know the answer.

(Yet more evidence of change among Roman Catholics that Jason and the Callers need to consider when spouting their call. I know, I know. No doctrine has changed. Everything is fine. Woot!)

I read Fr. Longenecker’s post on the very day when I finished reading excerpts from Jim Elliot’s journal, a piece of writing that first drove me batty and then drew me in. He was, for those who did not grow up in the hot house of northern Dispensational Protestant fundamentalism, one of those five missionaries who was in early 1956 slain by natives in the jungle of Ecuador. His wife, Betty Elliot, was responsible for publishing his often TMI journals and he along with the other victims emerged as martyrs for the cause of evangelism.

Elliot lived his life like a spiritual moth hovering around the flame of the almighty God –one day on cloud nine from some insight to emerge from his Quiet Time, the next he was in the depths of despair for thinking less than spiritual or holy thoughts. Only later in the journal does he become human and talk about his love for Betty in ways too intimate for women and children, and also vindicate Paul’s instruction (1 Cor 7) about the distractions that come to ministers when they take on marriage and family. Even so, the journal comes across as remarkably genuine and given a reader’s awareness of the tragedy that is coming, it makes for downright compelling reading. I wasn’t prepared to be as moved by the book as I was.

And one thing Elliot’s book proves, is that Christians (Protestant or Roman Catholic) don’t need well appointed altars to be inspired for full-time Christian service. Here’s one sample (those adverse to experimental Calvinism be advised):

JANUARY 29 [1948] Genesis 35 Lord, I would recenter my spiritual life as Jacob does in this portion. Instead of Beth-el, he centers his experience on El Beth-el — not the house of God but the God of that house. Often I feel compassion for Thy Church, because it is visible and can be physically apprehended, but I would not have that be my concern any longer. Lord, I want to be centering my interest on Thee, the God of God’s house. Be then revealed to me that my desires might be fixed on the primary thing. Christ, the Son of sorrow (v. 18) has now become the Son of His right hand. Praise God, the Savior is exalted in heaven and there given His deserved place. “As in heaven, so in earth.” Even so, come, Lord Jesus! [18]

Surely, Fr. Longenecker, a graduate of Bob Jones University, knows better.

Does Learning from the Academy Include Reading Historians?

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

Pete Enns yet again thinks in the standard evangelical-vs.-mainline categories when thinking about appropriating biblical scholarship for the church:

Or consider the following: it’s been known within the evangelical community to encourage promising seminary students to pursue doctoral work at major research universities, but for apologetic purposes: infiltrate their ranks, learn their ways, expose their weaknesses. Or, related, they are told to “plunder the Egyptians”—a phrase actually used. To appropriate whatever in critical scholarship can aid the cause and either ignore or fight against the rest.

And so you have three postures by this faith community toward the threat posed by the academic study of the Bible: gatekeeper, spy, or plunderer. What lies beneath these postures is a deep distrust of the academy.

But the academy isn’t just a problem for evangelicals or other conservatives. On the other end of the spectrum we have the mainline church and theological interpretation—which is a movement to recover scripture for the church (the mainline church) in the wake of the historical critical revolution, which has not always been friendly to life and faith.

This is no rejection of the academy, though. What’s done is done. We’ve passed through what Walter Wink calls the “acid bath of criticism,” which has done the necessary job of stripping us of our naïve biblicism. But now, what’s left? What do we do with the Bible? How does it function in the church? What does it say about God? What should we believe? So, whereas evangelicalism distrust the academy, the mainline has felt a bit burned by it.

What if those are not the only options and what if Enns himself studied at a school where biblical scholars thought about matters of faith and criticism differently? What if, in fact, Enns ever broke up the evangelical world into its Wesleyan, Baptist, and confessional Protestant wings? If he did, he might find a guy like Mark Noll — when will biblical scholars learn from the academy (read academic historians) — writing about Westminster’s Ned Stonehouse in these terms:

Stonehouse abandoned the widespread assumption that the evangelists wrote history according to the canons of the modern period. For him exact harmonization became considerably less important than it had been for other evangelicals. Mark, for example, did not set out to write a biography of the modern sort, but rather was proclaiming “the glad tidings of Jesus Christ, and this presupposes something different from the interest which a biographer has in his subject . . . . The gulf that separates Mark’s historical method from the typical modern one is seen most clearly in the almost complete absence of the notion of development.” Luke, for his part, “is least concerned with the chronological and topographical settings of the incidents and teachings which he reports.” . . . In these and other assertions, Stonehouse broke with a long evangelical tradition that had regarded the evangelists’ sayings as simply reports of facts largely unrelated to the author’s theological intentions. Stonehouse’s final purpose in these protoredactional studies was anything but liberal or radical. It was precisely the truth of the message, the reality of the historic Christ, which Stonehouse expected to enhance by noting the literary purposes of the gospel-writers . . . (Between Faith and Criticism, 107-108)

Not only was Stonehouse doing something thoughtful in the world of believing and academic biblical studies, but he also served as a churchman in the OPC on any number of standing committees of the General Assembly.

In other words, when you read Enns you get the impression that the Society of Biblical Literature or the Evangelical Theological Society are the only hermeneutical games in town. If he had only gone to Dallas Theological Seminary and then to Harvard, I might understand that construction of the alternatives. But he went to Westminster where Stonehouse taught and where the faculty studied the Bible differently from either the evangelical or mainline worlds. In fact, he went to seminary with guys who apply academic rigor to the preparation of two sermons a week.

Those are some of the same students who would likely use a careful study of the Bible to warn Enns away from Protestant churches that hand out icons.

No Room In the Inn but How about Your Living Room?

Published on by D. G. Hart24 Comments

‘Tis the season and that means nativity scenes are now decorating the brown grass that used to be the green placeholder for the gobblins, spider webs, and styrofoam tombstones of Halloween festivities. But looking at one collection of the holy family this morning on a frigid and overcast day made me wonder why Americans who celebrate Christmas and believe in both the baby Jesus and the risen Christ — if they are going to decorate for the holiday and disobey one of Christ’s Ten Commandments — don’t find more comfortable accommodations for Mary, Joseph, and the babe. Why, for those not living in the South or California and who confess Jesus as Lord, subject the family to conditions worse than those of first-century Palestine in whichever season Christ was actually born?

Of course, late fall is not the bleak midwinter, and Bethlehem cannot produce the wintry conditions that Michigan does. In fact, if Jesus had been born in Michigan, the carol, “In the Bleak Midwinter” would actually make sense. Its first stanza is a perfect description of winter weather in the Great Lakes region:

In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.

Today Bethlehem’s highs will be in the 60s. Hillsdale’s will be 33 (and that feels generous).

So if Christians want to show that they really care, don’t let Jesus, Mary, and Joseph endure December’s elements. Bring the nativity scene inside near to the chestnuts roasting on an open fire.

Ho ho ho.

Anti-Elder

Published on by D. G. Hart23 Comments

Tim Challies identifies five ugly qualities of the anti-elder (do they have beautiful features?):

The anti-elder is a dictator. Paul says, “He must not be arrogant.” The anti-elder is marked by arrogance and aggression, and therefore he makes decisions that are to his own advantage rather than to the advantage of the people in his care. He has a kind of unrestrained ambition that causes him to run over people rather than care for them. Instead of listening carefully and leading gently, he cuts people off and demands that he have his own way. The anti-elder is a dictator over his own little dominion.

The anti-elder is short-fused. “He must not be … quick-tempered.” The anti-elder has a hot temper and a quick temper. He lives by his passions, and refuses to exhibit any kind of mastery over his anger. Instead of leading in love, he leads through fear and when people get in his way, he explodes at them. All the while he justifies his anger by his ambition or his sense of calling, convincing himself that anyone who hinders him is actually hindering the Lord.

The anti-elder is an addict. “He must not be … a drunkard.” The anti-elder is addicted to alcohol or other addicting substances. He has surrendered control of his life to some kind of substance, over-using it, and eventually becoming dependent upon it. But as an arrogant and quick-tempered man, he will not allow others to speak to his sin or curb him from his sin. He is addicted, but still considers himself suited to ministry.

The anti-elder is a bully. “He must not be … violent.” The anti-elder bullies and abuses other people in order to get his way. He is a brawler, a man who is itching for a fight, willing to use force to get his own way. He will bully people with his words or even his fists. He will use force of personality or the strength of his position to coerce people to do his will, and to be domineering over them. Rather than using the Word to gently lead and guide people, he uses the Bible to bully them and to force them to do his bidding. He is an abuser.

The anti-elder is greedy. “He must not be … greedy for gain.” The anti-elder is greedy for financial gain. For this man pastoral ministry is not a calling and not a means through which he can serve God by serving God’s people; rather, ministry is a means to personal enrichment. He demands an exorbitant salary, and hops from church-to-church to climb the financial ladder. He does not regard his congregation as people God has entrusted to his care, but as marks through which he can enrich himself. The anti-elder loves his paycheck more than his people.

For a second or so Challies had me worried. Was he thinking (all) about me? But since blogging was not on his list, the editors of Old Life must qualify as godly elders.

By the way, wouldn’t it be great if all bad officers were so readily identified?