What A Difference A Day Makes

Published on by D. G. Hart222 Comments

If Westminster Seminary were hoping for a media bump from its decision to sue the federal government over the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Affordable Care Act, they couldn’t have picked a worse day. The seminary’s press release did reach at least one Roman Catholic website, but events at the Vatican absorbed most news coverage. A small Protestant seminary was no match for God’s new vicegerent.

Publicity tactics aside, Westminster’s decision to sue the federal government is an odd twist in the institution’s long associations with the spirituality of the church and biblical theology. The suit comes in the form of a protest against federal policy but it masks a chance to make a public pronouncement against abortion:

The Complaint, submitted to the federal district court in Houston, Texas, states federal agency defendants are violating Westminster’s rights under the First Amendment, and related statutes, to the free exercise of religion, by requiring the Seminary to provide health insurance to its employees that covers, and thereby promotes, their use of abortion-inducing drugs. Westminster believes this is in direct violation of one of the most basic tenets of its religious foundation – the sanctity of life – the understanding that every human life is created in the image of God.

So instead of explaining how Obama Care will hurt the Seminary, its president, Peter Lillback, uses the podium to protest abortion:

“It is indisputable that every human embryo, formed the moment a human egg is fertilized, has a unique human identity,” said Westminster President Peter Lillback. “That is a human life the Affordable Care Act we are challenging would destroy. In Westminster’s view, this mandate is the antithesis of the federal government’s solemn responsibility ‘to promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty’ for its citizens.”

Declaring the sanctity of human life is fine, but taking the government to court (or jumping on a case already before the courts) is another. Paul’s example of going to court in Acts 24-26 would hardly be the model for such litigiousness. His motivations were first of all self-defense and evangelistic. Posturing does not come to mind. (And if some think “posturing” is too cynical a read, how exactly do they think the editors at the Philadelphia Inquirer are looking at it — if they noticed?)

Equivocation on the politicized nature of this decision — and the press release to publicize it, mind you — comes in the responses supplied at the WTS website:

Q: Does filing the lawsuit involve Westminster in a political cause?
A: Westminster is not a partisan institution. Joining this lawsuit is an expression of our deeply held religious beliefs. We are united in this action with many other religious institutions that are standing for religious freedom unrelated to any partisan cause.

That is not an answer.

Q: Shouldn’t Westminster concentrate on its core mission?
A: Teaching the whole counsel of God is at the core of our mission. Westminster’s commitment to the whole counsel of God includes matters of public theology. Thus, when necessary, the Board and faculty must be prepared to speak and to act our deeply held Biblical convictions that from time to time require appropriate civic engagement.

Westminster already does plenty of speaking and acting. It teaches, holds conferences, its faculty and board members preach, and I am sure many of these people take actions in the civic realm that testify to their convictions. But a law suit? Isn’t 1 Corinthians 6:7 part of God’s whole counsel? “To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather suffer wrong?” If you want to say that Paul is only talking about lawsuits by Christians against fellow believers, then what about 1 Timothy 2:1-2: “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.”

Wherever you look in the New Testament, Christians were not trying to rock the boat aside from the God-appointed means of preaching the word of God and worshiping the author of that word. And that was a different kind of boat-rocking, not one so close to show-boating.

Suspense Ended

Published on by D. G. Hart39 Comments

The answer to the quotation teaser from a day or so ago is Roman Catholic. All winners will receive a PDF of the Old Life Theological Society mug.

The quotation comes from Pius X in his famous condemnation of modernism as a heresy with the encyclical, PASCENDI DOMINICI GREGIS (1907). It is a long statement that dug in the papacy’s heels even deeper against the forces of modernity. The pope was most concerned to condemn the influence of higher criticism and liberal theology. But as the quote shows, Rome’s opposition to modern times included American conventions like the separation of church and state.

Also worthy of note about the encyclical is Pius’ rejection of the “evolution of doctrine.” Here is a sample:

28. Thus then, Venerable Brethren, for the Modernists, both as authors and propagandists, there is to be nothing stable, nothing immutable in the Church. Nor indeed are they without precursors in their doctrines, for it was of these that Our Predecessor Pius IX wrote: These enemies of divine revelation extol human progress to the skies, and with rash and sacrilegious daring would have it introduced into the Catholic religion as if this religion were not the work of God but of man, or some kind of philosophical discovery susceptible of perfection by human efforts. On the subject of revelation and dogma in particular, the doctrine of the Modernists offers nothing new – we find it condemned in the Syllabus of Pius IX., where it is enunciated in these terms: Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the progress of human reason; and condemned still more solemnly in the Vatican Council: The doctrine of the faith which God has revealed has not been proposed to human intelligences to be perfected by them as if it were a philosophical system, but as a divine deposit entrusted to the Spouse of Christ to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted. Hence the sense, too, of the sacred dogmas is that which our Holy Mother the Church has once declared, nor is this sense ever to be abandoned on plea or pretext of a more profound comprehension of the truth. Nor is the development of our knowledge, even concerning the faith, impeded by this pronouncement – on the contrary it is aided and promoted. For the same Council continues: Let intelligence and science and wisdom, therefore, increase and progress abundantly and vigorously in individuals and in the mass, in the believer and in the whole Church, throughout the ages and the centuries – but only in its own kind, that is, according to the same dogma, the same sense, the same acceptation.

Now I know I have the wrong paradigm which is good a locating men made of straw, but as I read this section I have a sense of tension between the papacy’s condemnation of modernism and the idea of the development of doctrine that flourishes whenever people ask about changes in the teaching of the church. When Pius quotes Vatican I that the doctrine revealed by God to the church is not to be “perfected” by human reason but is “a divine deposit entrusted to the Spouse of Christ to be faithfully guarded and infallibly interpreted,” it sure sounds like doctrines, teachings and practices won’t change. But that’s likely the view of traditionalist Roman Catholics.

But then along came Vatican II with all the affirmations of conciliarism and the laity:

37. The laity have the right, as do all Christians, to receive in abundance from their spiritual shepherds the spiritual goods of the Church, especially the assistance of the word of God and of the sacraments. They should openly reveal to them their needs and desires with that freedom and confidence which is fitting for children of God and brothers in Christ. They are, by reason of the knowledge, competence or outstanding ability which they may enjoy, permitted and sometimes even obliged to express their opinion on those things which concern the good of the Church. When occasions arise, let this be done through the organs erected by the Church for this purpose. Let it always be done in truth, in courage and in prudence, with reverence and charity toward those who by reason of their sacred office represent the person of Christ.

I am not sure that Pius X would have approved:

. . . studying more closely the ideas of the Modernists, evolution is described as resulting from the conflict of two forces, one of them tending towards progress, the other towards conservation. The conserving force in the Church is tradition, and tradition is represented by religious authority, and this both by right and in fact; for by right it is in the very nature of authority to protect tradition, and, in fact, for authority, raised as it is above the contingencies of life, feels hardly, or not at all, the spurs of progress. The progressive force, on the contrary, which responds to the inner needs lies in the individual consciences and ferments there – especially in such of them as are in most intimate contact with life. Note here, Venerable Brethren, the appearance already of that most pernicious doctrine which would make of the laity a factor of progress in the Church.

I guess that’s why you need the development of doctrine.

The Proverbial Pot and Its Black Friend

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From the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up department comes the Baylys’ complaint about the doings in Vatican City. Turns out, the U.S. pastors for whom almost everything is sexual, believe Rome’s problem reduces to sex. The Cardinals, you see, dress like girls, so how could you ever trust them?

Serious men do not parade in embroidered dresses. Men who carry the cross of Christ do not wear fanciful costumes more than once a year, and then only in the company of their children. These men, “princes of the church” resplendent in their papal-conclave regalia, are not serious men. They are men with an unmanly love of finery, fancy and ceremony. They are as serious as Hollywood, as normal as Liberace.

Tim Bayly piles on with quotations from John Calvin about lascivious attire, which the modern day Gilbert Tennent uses to berate those who don’t see anything particularly wrong with how the Cardinals dress. First Calvin:

No bishoprics are so opulent, no abbacies so productive, in short, no benefices so numerous and ample, as to suffice for the gluttony of priests. But while they would spare themselves, they induce the people by superstition to employ what ought to have been distributed to the poor in building temples, erecting statues, buying palate, and providing costly garments. Thus the daily alms are swallowed up in this abyss.

Then Tennent Tim:

We could go on with such condemnations by our Reformed fathers all day, but there’s no use. Reformed men today in the richest nation the world has ever seen have left their fathers in the faith far behind.

As one of the best-known Reformed theologians of our day put it to me concerning such straighforward condemnations of Rome by Luther and Calvin, “They were sinning when they wrote that way.”

Meanwhile, the advertisements for the upcoming Clearnote Pastors Fellowship Conference feature a picture of the famous Reformers Wall in Geneva. In it we see Calvin dressed, you guessed it, in a skirt. To the eye not trained in fashion, it could look like a dress or house smock. Granted, it may not have the embroidery of the Cardinals’ attire, but a gown functions like a skirt and hides what’s going on below.

Which again proves that the Baylys are a tad obsessed with sex. Gowns could look like dresses. But they also may connote authority. Hence, the robes that judges wear. And yet, when you can draw a straight line between outward appearances and spiritual truths, something C. S. Lewis identified with paganism (and which by the way seems to afflict 2k’s biggest critics), you see Rome’s troubles as having less to do with sin, the sufficiency of Christ, and scriptural authority, and more with gowns, celibacy, and sexual scandal.

Culture Wars Then and Now

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In my course on Christianity and Politics in the U.S., I assigned Thomas R. Pegram’s Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800-1933 (published by Ivan R. Dee, who remains one of the genuine mensches in American publishing). I continue to be struck, not only by how good the book is, but also by how little the dynamics between Democrats and Republicans have changed. Yes, the contested issues have — abortion and marriage instead of alcohol and women’s suffrage. But Republicans are still the moralists and the Democrats are the libertarians. For instance:

. . . controversies over temperance laws tended to strengthen Democrats and hurt Republicans. Although many Democrats practices personal temperance and even supported some regulation of the liquor industry, the party as a whole expressed its commitment to “personal liberty” in the matter of drinking. “Why do you allow the dyspeptic Boston to tell you want to drink, and when and how you must behave on Sunday?” asked a New York Democratic congressman in 1867. Prohibition not only endangered the preferences and customs of drinkers, including Protestant Germans who normally voted Republican, it also provoked among Democrats the old Jacksonian fear of arbitrary power. The 1870 platform of the Indiana Democratic party denounced Republican intentions [are you listening David and Tim Bayly] “to regulate the moral ideas, appetites, or innocent amusements of the people by legislation.” By challenging anti-liquor laws, Democrats in the mid-1870s won elections in Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. In the highly competitive politics of the Third Party system, issues that energized voters in one party and alienated small groups in the opposition party enough to keep them from voting or even cause them to “scratch” their ballots and cross party lines, were often decisive in elections. Alcohol regulation became such an issue in the decade following the Civil War.

The Heavenly City

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When I heard reports that Benedict XVI’s butler was imprisoned for leading secret documents to the press, I was skeptical of the idea that the accused was actually locked up in a Vatican prison. Talk about a violation of two-kingdom theology. But thanks to the long and contested history of the papacy, it does turn out that the Vatican is a mix of temporal and spiritual authority still to this day. Here is a bit of the history:

Popes in their secular role ruled portions of the Italian peninsula for more than a thousand years until the mid 19th century, when many of the Papal States were seized by the newly united Kingdom of Italy. In 1870, the pope’s holdings were further circumscribed when Rome itself was annexed. Disputes between a series of “prisoner” popes and Italy were resolved in 1929 by three Lateran Treaties, which established the independent state of Vatican City and granted Roman Catholicism special status in Italy. In 1984, a concordat between the Holy See and Italy modified certain of the earlier treaty provisions, including the primacy of Roman Catholicism as the Italian state religion. Present concerns of the Holy See include religious freedom, international development, the environment, the Middle East, China, the decline of religion in Europe, terrorism, interreligious dialogue and reconciliation, and the application of church doctrine in an era of rapid change and globalization. About 1 billion people worldwide profess the Catholic faith.

Here is how the current Vatican penal system works:

It’s like criminal justice in Italy, but smaller. Upon the founding of Vatican City in 1929, Pope Pius XI decided it would be easier to adopt Italian criminal law and procedure—and any subsequent changes to that system—than it would be to build his own version from nothing. (Italy has since become too liberal for the Church on certain issues, such as abortion and homosexuality.) The Vatican’s promotor iustitiae (promoter of justice, or chief prosecutor) has the authority to haul scofflaws before the giudice unico, or trial court judge. Convicts can appeal to the three-judge Tribunale, and ultimately to the Corte di Cassazione, or Supreme Court of Appeals. Accused criminals have the right to a public defender.

Most of the differences between Vatican City’s penal system and those of other Western countries result from the country’s size. There are no jury trials in Vatican City, in part because the country’s entire jury pool consists of fewer than 900 people. Most convictions result in fines rather than confinement, because the Vatican doesn’t have a long-term prison. Those few prisoners who do receive prison sentences are housed in Italian facilities at Pope Benedict XVI’s expense. There is no plea-bargaining.
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Vatican City does boast a single jail, just to the south of St. Peter’s Basilica, for pretrial detention, but it’s small and more often used for storage of equipment than criminals.

I don’t think this is what Augustine had in mind but it gives a whole new meaning to “I fought the church and the church won.”

Who Condemned This?

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Since Jason Stellman is out of commission with his quotation identifications, I offer the afflicted a small remedy. The following is a quotation from a text that condemns the separation of church and state, along with more general efforts to differentiate between religion and secular affairs.

But it is not with its own members alone that the Church must come to an amicable arrangement – besides its relations with those within, it has others outside. The Church does not occupy the world all by itself; there are other societies in the world, with which it must necessarily have contact and relations. The rights and duties of the Church towards civil societies must, therefore, be determined, and determined, of course, by its own nature as it has been already described. The rules to be applied in this matter are those which have been laid down for science and faith, though in the latter case the question is one of objects while here we have one of ends. In the same way, then, as faith and science are strangers to each other by reason of the diversity of their objects, Church and State are strangers by reason of the diversity of their ends, that of the Church being spiritual while that of the State is temporal. Formerly it was possible to subordinate the temporal to the spiritual and to speak of some questions as mixed, allowing to the Church the position of queen and mistress in all such, because the Church was then regarded as having been instituted immediately by God as the author of the supernatural order. But his doctrine is today repudiated alike by philosophy and history. The State must, therefore, be separated from the Church, and the [believer] from the citizen. Every [Christian], from the fact that he is also a citizen, has the right and the duty to work for the common good in the way he thinks best, without troubling himself about the authority of the Church, without paying any heed to its wishes, its counsels, its orders – nay, even in spite of its reprimands. To trace out and prescribe for the citizen any line of conduct, on any pretext whatsoever, is to be guilty of an abuse of ecclesiastical authority, against which one is bound to act with all one’s might.

Is this the condemnation of a theonomist, a neo-Calvinist, a fundamentalist, or a Roman Catholic? How can you tell the difference?

At Least It's Not Cleveland

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My perspective on the states that were once the Northwest Territories has changed since moving to Michigan and discovering the university town of Ann Arbor to be an urban oasis. So I don’t want to sound snotty about Cleveland. But a recent story (thanks) about the National Council of Churches closing its New York City facilities reminded me of the schadenfreude I experienced upon the news that the United Churches of Christ was moving its national offices from New York City to Cleveland. Now comes word of a similar downsizing. The once celebrated outcome of postbellum Protestant ecumenism, the Federal Council of Churches, founded in 1908, and morphed in 1951 into the National Council of Churches, is shuttering its New York offices and relocating to the basement of a Methodist congregation in Washington, D.C. (Okay, it is not the basement of a church but a national office building for the Methodists. Still, the idea that one of the denominations belonging to the NCC could house all of the NCC’s staff would have in 1960 been incredible.)

In addition to the difficulties of teaching millennials that anti-Catholicism used to exist, I also have trouble convincing college students that mainline Protestants were once formidable. The NCC’s offices were even called the “Protestant Vatican on the Hudson.” But with the rise of the religious right (evangelicals and Roman Catholics together), no one has the slightest idea that mainline Protestants have a central agency.

Such demise for the NCC could not have been foreseen in 1960 when the Interchurch Center, once called the “Protestant Vatican on the Hudson,” first opened on the upper west side of Manhattan next to Grant’s Tomb and Columbia University. More specifically the “God Box,” which originally housed dozens of denominational offices, is next door to architecturally magnificent Riverside Church, also built by the Rockefellers, and Union Seminary, collectively representing the once formidable but now faded power of Mainline Protestantism.

At the Interchurch Center’s 1960 dedication, a German Lutheran bishop presciently warned against the “institutionalization” of churches, noting that a beautiful building and organization were of “no avail without true faith.” Initially the NCC occupied four floors of the 19 story, $21 million imposing midrise that overlooks the Hudson River. The Methodists, Presbyterians, American Baptists, and Reformed Church in America, among others, also based their offices there.

His father having recently died, John D. Rockefeller III was present at the dedication to honor the Interchurch Center as the fulfillment of his father’s dream of a new Christianity without denominational distinctions. Although he didn’t then specify it, the Rockefellers also dreamed of a uniformly liberal Protestantism devoted to good works instead of doctrine. The elder Rockefeller donated the land for the Interchurch Center plus over $2.6 million for costs.

Ironically, nearly all the Mainline denominations housed there would begin their nearly 50-year membership decline just a few years later. A sanitized Protestantism without doctrine or distinctions simply became too boring to sustain. In the early 1960s, about one of every six Americans belonged to the seven largest Mainline denominations. Today, it’s one out of every 15.
Likely unable to conceive of such a dramatic spiral, the NCC’s chief pronounced at the Interfaith Center’s 1960 dedication: “It is the prayer of all who worked toward its creation that this will become more than a symbol of the growing spiritual unity of Protestant and Eastern Orthodox Churches in America.” Those days were heady times for the Mainline denominations, who were flush with members, money and influence. Church offices in the God Box then claimed to represent 40 million church members.

About 30,000 attended the Interchurch Center’s cornerstone ceremony in 1958 with President Eisenhower. He marched with 300 religious leaders under banners representing 37 participating denominations. David Rockefeller was present. So too was Charles Malik, the Lebanese Christian president of the United Nations. And Harry Emerson Fosdick, the dean of liberal Protestantism who built Riverside Church, was there also. In his brief speech, Ike condemned the recent bombing of a synagogue in Atlanta. Quoting George Washington, he hailed religious liberty and the importance of religion in sustaining morality.

Influence fades.

How Protestants Can Benefit from Selecting the Next Pope

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If states in the United States have open primaries that allow members of different political parties to vote in the opposing party’s primary, here is a way for Protestants to have a say in the selection of the next Pope. (By the way, Timothy George already offered his evangelical criteria for the next pope.)

Another benefit is financial profit. Apparently, betting on the next pope has a long history and bookies in Rome have established the odds:

The probabilities for other cardinals (as of March 8) include:

Gianfranco Ravasi, Italy, 14-1
Christoph Schonborn, Austria, 14-1
Peter Erdo, Hungary, 18-1
Luis Tagle, the Philippines, 20-1
Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, Honduras, 33-1
Jao Braz de Aviz, Brazil, 66-1
Gerhard Muller, Germany, 200-1

Among American cardinals, Timothy Dolan of New York leads with 20-1 odds, followed by Sean O’Malley of Boston at 33-1. Raymond Burke, current head of the Apostolic Signatura, comes next at 80-1, with Donald Wuerl of Washington (150-1) and Francis George of Chicago (200-1) as the long-shot Americans.

Ever the front-runner, I’m putting my money on Ravasi. With all the intrigue of late in the Vatican, my sense is that the Italians would like to retake control of a historic Italian institution.

Can A Perfect Society Be Fixed?

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Several stories about doings in the Vatican and the selection of the next pope have me wondering about reform and its possibility. One of those items has nothing directly to do with the Vatican but its musings on the state of Roman Catholic higher education in the United State (even after Ex Corde Ecclesiae) do raise questions about how effective even papal encyclicals are in regulating the faithful.

All sides, liberals and conservatives, seem to think that the church needs to be reformed. Even George Weigel (thanks John Fea), one of Rome’s chief apologists, admits to an NBC reporter that the secrecy of the current conclave is out of touch with the twenty-first century. Progressives want changes on the status of women, contraception (family planning), more democratic participation, and the promotion of social justice. Conservatives want the church to stand pat on women, sex and would likely prefer to see crack downs on renegade elements within the church. But conservatives are not clear on lay involvement compared to the hierarchy’s power (perhaps because some of the most forceful spokesmen for conservatism are laymen). Then there is the complicated issue of how closely Rome’s teaching should follow U.S. understandings of free markets, democratic participation, and foreign relations.

In other words, everyone thinks reform is in order. Something is broken that needs fixing. And yet Rome claims to be a perfect society. So is reformation truly possible when everything is already good (even though it isn’t)? I don’t ask this as a gotcha move. It is a serious inquiry. If you already have the notion that the church is perfect and its sovereign is infallible, and when you score points against Protestants by noting all of our imperfections, is it really possible to admit that changes are needed? Or is it the case that changes will happen in a way that says no one ever did anything wrong? Which is to say that reform never happens.

Easypeasy

Published on by D. G. Hart33 Comments

The good Rabbi posits once again that I am a dunce (along with all 2kers) for not recognizing that the church and the state are all part of one cosmic government under the authority of God. (One of his fans suggests I am not regenerate.) Actually, I do understand this. Anyone who has the slightest knowledge of divine sovereignty and powers delegated to parents, churches, and magistrates knows that God’s rule extends to the secondary means by which he orders all things.

The problem for the Rabbi is that he goes back and forth between this cosmic government and the specific relations between nations and their churches. Talking about divine sovereignty and human institutions in the abstract is one thing. Talking about the relations between church and state in a particular polity is another.

The signs of this confusion come when the Rabbi concludes:

1.) Darryl is saying Calvin was wrong and that Geneva was a unbiblical model. Sinful Calvin. Sinful Geneva. I’m sure glad we have a clearly superior model working for us now in these uSA that we can look to for an example.

2.) In an ideal social order the Pastors serve God by obeying God’s revelation for the Church and civil magistrates serve God by obeying God’s revelation for the Civil realm. The Pastors don’t work for the Government and the Magistrates don’t work for the Church. Both, however are subject to God in His revelation. This isn’t that difficult.

First, I am wrong to challenge the superiority of Geneva even though Christ and Paul did not establish a polity anything like Geneva. This would suggest that the Rabbi is not pleased with the early church that did nothing to make sure that the magistrate was following God’s law. Personally, I’d rather be in the camp of criticizing Calvin than the one that questions Christ. But most critics of 2k never really look at what’s happening in Acts to understand what the church’s mission properly is. Instead, they pine for the days when pontiffs in Rome were christening Holy Roman Emperors.

Second, the Rabbi takes as soon as he gives. Geneva by his reckoning was not an “ideal” social order because the pastors did work for the government. So Brett is no fan of Calvin’s town either, but this leaves him with no historical home (maybe that’s why he kvetches so much).

Third, this is easy stuff. Yes, despite the long and troubled history of relating religion to politics, from Israel to Kuyper’s Netherlands, it’s not difficult. Pass the mints.

One last point to notice is this notion of an “ideal social order.” The Rabbi presents himself as a true-blue political conservative and loves to deconstruct the social engineers on the Left who are trying to usher in the kingdom of justice and equality. He should know then that conservatives don’t believe in ideal social orders. They refuse to immanentize the eschaton. It’s the Stalins of the world who actually believe ideal social orders are possible. Conservatives simply endure the infirmities and woes of this world.

Turns out life in this world is difficult.