An Anniversary that Deserves More than a Mug

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

The Orthodox Presbyterian Church turns 75 today. Festivities have so far included lectures, presentations from the General Secretaries of the Assembly’s standing committees, a banquet tonight, and the opportunity to purchase handsome coffee mugs. Thankfully, the Assembly’s organizers resisted the chief temptation of our time — t-shirts (which are fine to wear under shirts with collars but should be reserved for the boudoir or basketball court).

The OPC has also produced two new books to mark the event, Confident of Better Things, a collection of essays edited by John Muether and Danny Olinger, and Between the Times: The Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Transition, 1945 to 1990 by yours truly.

The latter title covers a number of important episodes during the period when second generation Orthodox Presbyterians decided what to do with the legacy and heritage of Machen, Van Til, Murray, Stonehouse, Young, and Woolley. It includes chapters on the creation of the Trinity Hymnal, the formation of Great Commission Publications, Westminster Seminary’s relationship to the OPC, relations with the PCA and RPCES, and the demise of the Presbyterian Guardian.

One of the more interesting parts of this middle period was the OPC’s desire and protracted effort to merge with the Christian Reformed Church. To honor the anniversary and whet readers’ appetites, the following is an excerpt from chapter seven, “The OPC and the Christian Reformed Church, 1956-1973”:

The OPC’s dependence on theologians and churchmen from immigrant backgrounds characterized its first three decades of existence and gave to the denomination a unique character and international outlook. Westminster Seminary was the source of this foreign presence. Names such as Cornelius Van Til, Ned B. Stonehouse, and R. B. Kuiper were not common fare among American Presbyterians. And even though John Murray’s name was more common than Dutch family names among Presbyterians whose ties to Scotland and Ireland were apparent in the colonial era and first half of the nineteenth century, even his Presbyterianism — the Scottish Free Presbyterian Church — differed in important respects from the American tradition out of which the OPC came. Yet, the OPC did not simply find a place for these foreign Calvinists, as if the church were a haven for the world’s Reformed masses struggling to be free. If anything these Dutch and Scottish Calvinists helped to preserve the conservative Presbyterianism they had learned at Princeton Seminary and that Machen had established at Westminster. In turn, these hyphenated Presbyterians helped to define the the OPC. Because the denomination had emerged from the northern Presbyterian mainline church, it was obviously American in its formal expressions. But because of the presence of foreign leadership — a point that the OPC’s critics never tired of making — the church was also un-American.

The Dutch-American connection was particularly strong and a significant influence upon the OPC’s ecumenical relationships before 1970. Here the ties went back again to Old Princeton. Geerhardus Vos’ decision to complete his theological studies — after transferring from Calvin Seminary — at Princeton Seminary and Princeton’s subsequent appointment of Vos in 1892 as professor of biblical theology established a unique kinship between conservative American Presbyterians and Dutch-American Calvinists of which the OPC was practically the sole beneficiary. Of course, the relationship also benefitted the Dutch communion. As an ethnic religious body on the margins of Anglo-American culture and Protestantism, the CRC was naturally looking for ways to assimilate. Conservative Presbyterians at Princeton and Westminster were particularly attractive half-way houses from ethnic isolation to mainstream respectability. But again, not to be missed in this relationship is the leadership of Dutch-Americans within the OPC. The church did not merely provide a comfortable home for ethnic Calvinists who hoped to be successful in the United States on American terms. In fact, the situation was almost the reverse. The OPC became a comfortable home for Reformed orthodoxy and Presbyterian practice because hyphenated Calvinists assumed positions of leadership in the denomination.

The downside of ethnic leadership, as disaffected critics never ceased to mention, was the OPC’s difference from other conservative Protestants who followed the ethos and piety of American Christianity more than a Reformed faith less encumbered by United States developments. The upside was an ability to see the Reformed faith without the blinders of national pride or patriotic civil religion. So appealing was this international Calvinism that the OPC almost decided to unite with the Christian Reformed Church. In fact, at a time when American Protestants were increasingly identifying Christianity with the American “way of life,” the OPC was contemplating ways to establish closer ties to Dutch-American Reformed Protestants.

Oldlife.org 201: Wit and Sarcasm

Published on by D. G. Hart51 Comments

The first installment in this series about this blog was to clarify what a blog is. One aspect that I did not mention was that the more successful blogs are provocative – that is, they agitate readers and that’s why people come back. The most successful blogger in the world arguably is Andrew Sullivan, the former editor of the New Republic, and his blog is hardly tepid.

This leads to the second point in need of clarification. Oldlife.org is the on-line presence of the Nicotine Theological Journal. Long before provocations started at this blog, the editors and authors of the NTJ were provoking readers and library patrons in hopes of thinking through the implications of Reformed faith and practice today, with a little levity and sarcasm thrown in. The editors’ inspiration was partly Andrew Sullivan whose time at the New Republic made it one of the most thoughtful, rancorous, and witty magazines on politics and culture at the time. But Sullivan was not the only inspiration. Other authors who wrote on serious matters with wit and sarcasm that provided models for the NTJ were Richard John Neuhaus, P. J. O’Rourke, Joseph Epstein, H. L. Mencken, and Calvin Trillin.

None of these sources, readers may object, are Reformed. Which raises the question whether Reformed authors may engage in wit and sarcasm when pursuing their convictions. Well, the answer is yes. If you spend much time in the polemical writings of the Old School and Princeton theologians, you will find a fair amount of wit and sarcasm. Here are a couple examples, the first from Charles Hodge after a seven-round dogma fight with Edwards Amasa Park (named for Jonathan Edwards – ahem) over theological method and the nature of Calvinism:

It is a common remark that a man never writes anything well for which he has “to read up.” Professor Park has evidently labored under this disadvantage. Old-school theology is a new field to him; and though he quotes freely authors of whom we, though natives, never heard, yet he is not at home, and unavoidably falls into the mistakes which foreigners cannot fail to commit in a strange land. He does not understand the language. He find out “five meanings of imputation!” It would be wearisome work to set such a stranger right at every step. We would fain part with our author on good terms. We admire his abilities, and are ready to defer to him in his own department. But when he undertakes to teach Old-school men Old-school theology it is very much like a Frenchman teaching an Englishman how to pronounce English. With the best intentions, the amiable Gaul would be sure to make sad work with the dental aspirations.

The second comes from Benjamin Warfield in one of the last pieces he ever wrote, an article objecting to the latest proposal (1920) to unite the largest Protestant denominations in the United States:

Now it is perfectly obvious that the proposed creed contains nothing which is not believed by evangelicals. and it is equally obvious that it contains nothing which is not believed by Sacerdotalists – by the adherents of the church of Rome for example. And it is equally obvious that it contains nothing which is not believed by Rationalists – by respectable Unitarians. That is as much as to say that the creed on the basis of which we are invited to form a union for evangelizing purposes contains nothing distinctively evangelical at all; nothing at all of that body of saving truth for the possession of which the church of Christ has striven and suffered through two thousand years. It contains only “a few starved and hunger-bitten” dogmas of purely general character – of infinite importance in the context of evangelical truth, but of themselves of no saving sufficiency. So far as the conservation and propagation of evangelical religion is concerned, we might as well for a union on our common acceptance of the law of gravitation and the rule of three.

By the way, these were a couple of quotes readily available from Hodge and Warfield. If you go farther into their works, along with those of Old Schoolers like Dabney and Thornwell you will find many more examples, sometimes of laugh out loud proportions.

One last source of inspiration for Oldlife.org and the NTJ is – duh – J. Gresham Machen. He did not show a lot of wit or sarcasm in his writings. But his polemics were nonetheless blunt, so much so that many who believed charity to be the only Christian virtue considered Machen mean and beyond the pale. But it is precisely Machen’s candor and warrior spirit that is worthy of emulation. The following is from a piece he wrote for an inter-faith gathering on the relations between Christians and Jews:

The fact is that in discussing matters about which there are differences of opinion, it is really more courteous to be frank – more courteous with that deeper courtesy which is based upon the Golden Rule. For my part, I am bound to say that the kind of discussion which is irritating to me is the discussion which begins by begging the question and then pretend to be in the interests of peace. I should be guilty of such a method if I should say to a Roman Catholic, for example, that we can come together with him because forms and ceremonies like the mass and membership in a certain definite organization are, of course, matters of secondary importance – if I should say to him that he can go on being a good Catholic and I can go on being a good Protestant and yet we can unite on common Christian basis. If I should talk in that way, I should show myself guilty of the crassest narrowness of mind, for I should be showing that I had never taken the slightest trouble to understand the Roman Catholic point of view. If I had taken that trouble, I should have come to see plainly that what I should be doing is not to seek common ground between the roman Catholic and myself but simply to ask the Roman Catholic to become a Protestant and give up everything that he holds most dear.

. . . So to my mind the most inauspicious beginning for any discussion is found when the speaker utters the familiar words: “I think, brethren, that we are all agreed about this . . .” – and then proceeds to trample ruthlessly upon the things that are dearest to my heart. Far more kindly is it if the speaker says at the start that he sees a miserable narrow-minded conservative in the audience whose views he intends to ridicule and refute. After such a speaker gets through, perhaps I may be allowed to say that I regard him as just as narrow-minded as he regards me, and then having both spoken our full mind we may part, certain not as brothers (it is ridiculous to degrade that word) but at least as friends.

None of this is to suggest that Oldlife.org pulls off the wit, sarcasm, polemics, or bluntness of the writers who have inspired this endeavor. It is only to point out that the tone and style of Oldlife.org is not over the top.

Which Doesn't Belong and Why?

Published on by D. G. Hart77 Comments

Warning: really, really shameless self-promotion.

Bernard McGuirk, the executive producer of Imus in the Morning, did (and may still do) a bit in which he played Cardinal Egan and would ridicule Don Imus up one side and down the other in a thick Irish accent. His barbs were far more abusive than anything the host said about the women’s basketball players at Rutgers University.

One part of Cardinal Egan’s shtick was the game, “which doesn’t belong and why.” He would name three people, objects, teams or songs, and then ask Imus to identify the odd one out. Imus was always wrong because Egan had a witty and sometimes degrading reason for which one actually did not belong.

In the spirit of a show I used to listen to before Imus got fired and is no longer syndicated, I post the series of events scheduled at Eerdmans this summer to mark the publisher’s 100th anniversary. I am honored and do not feel worthy of this company, so I have my own answer to the question, “which doesn’t belong and why.” But I invite readers to submit their own answers. The winner (the funniest) will receive a copy of the book.

P.S. Apologies to Nick Wolterstorff for not posting this in time for his lecture last week.

Sometimes the Prayer Book Just Makes Sense (sorry for having the word “just” so close to the thought of praying)

Published on by D. G. Hart63 Comments

For those who resist watching videos like the one posted earlier today from “King of the Hill,” here is the text of Bobby’s prayer, which is a brilliant illustration of the enormity that happens when trying to put sober truths into vulgar words.

I want to give a shout out to the man that makes it all happen. Props be to you for this most bountiful meal that’s before us. Okay, check it. God, you got skills. You represent in these vegetables and in this napkin and in the dirt that grows the grains that makes the garlic bread sticks that are on this table today. Yes. Yes. Thanks, J-man. Peace.

Of course, Reformed Protestants don’t need to go the Anglicans to read prayers before meals. Most of the older psalter-hymnals of the Dutch Reformed churches include liturgical resources at the back of the book that reproduce prayers, many of them attributed to Calvin, for public worship, ecclesiastical assemblies, and family devotion. The following is the prayer for before a meal. At the risk of offending contemporary worship leaders, I’d argue this is, like “Of the Father’s Love Begotten” is a better hymn than “Shine, Jesus, Shine,” a better prayer than Bobby’s.

Almighty God, faithful Father, You have made the world and uphold it by Your powerful word. You did provide Israel in the desert with food from on high. Will You also bless us, Your humble servants, and renew our strength by these gifts, which, through our Lord Jesus Christ, we have received from Your bountiful Fatherly hand. Give that we may use them with moderation. Help us to put them to use in a life devoted to You and Your service. May we thus acknowledge that You are our Father and Source of all good things. Grant also that at all times we may long for the lasting food of Your Word. May we thus be nourished to everlasting life, which You have prepared for us by the precious blood of Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Savior, in whose name we pray. Amen.

One additional advantage of Calvin’s prayer over Bobby’s is that the Frenchman’s thanksgiving is not blasphemous.

Is Hank Hill Wiser than David and Tim Bayly?

Published on by D. G. Hart308 Comments

The Brothers Bayly have stirred up the pot again by arguing that Tim Keller is a greater threat than Doug Wilson and the Federal Vision to the PCA. Calculating the heinousness of error is indeed a judgment call, but the Shorter Catechism does indicate that some sins are more grievous than others.

As folks who often read the Baylys know, these PCA pastors rank sexual identity and gender relations fairly high on the list of woes that are afflicting the United States and the church. And despite our Lord’s own teaching that love of God is the greatest commandment – which would include those laws about blasphemy, idolatry, worship, and the Sabbath – my own sense of the Baylys is that they are not as rigorous in applying the third and fourth commandments as they are about the fifth and the seventh. My reason for thinking this is the Baylys’ preference for forms of worship music that do not, as I see it, maintain an atmosphere of reverence and awe. I am not going to listen to lots of tracks or watch lots of videos of the Good Shepherd Band to back up this claim, though I have seen a few. When the guitars come out, this aging boomer melts down.

I will grant that lots of folks disagree about the application of the first table of the law and I wish the Baylys could be as generous on differences in applying the second table (you know, whether protesting with them at abortion clinics is required in the sixth commandment). But even at the level of egalitarianism, one of the Baylys bugaboos, one could argue that contemporary praise music is fundamentally egalitarian by leveling all aesthetic standards down to those of what adolescents prefer. Actually, it is a kind of aesthetic superiority and ageism where the young are automatically given authority over the old. Democracy of the dead’s hymns and psalms? I don’t think so.

Which is why this video from King of the Hill is so refreshing (thanks to one of our southern correspondents). When Hank says, “I never thought that Members Only jacket would go out of style,” he put his finger on what ails contemporary worship: contemporary style is ephemeral and so not a reliable vehicle for communicating permanent truths.

In which case, why don’t the Baylys understand that by packaging worship in the idiom of contemporary music, they may be putting their Lord in Hank Hill’s box of lame? It sure doesn’t honor the Lord, not to mention that it doesn’t seem to be all that wise a strategy for fighting the culture wars.

Sometimes the light of nature (and even Hollywood writers) does really enlighten.

Where's Waldo Wednesday: Can Union Comfort the Way Justification Does?

Published on by D. G. Hart81 Comments

The following passage from Luther’s daily readings left me thinking:

What more could God do? How could a heart restrain itself from being happy, glad, and obedient in God and Christ? What work or suffering could befall to which it would not gladly submit, singing with love and joyful praise to God? If it fails to do so, faith has certainly broken down. The more faith there is, the more joy and freedom there is; the less faith, the less joy. Behold, this is the true Christian salvation and freedom from the Law and from the judgment of the Law, that is, from sin and death. Not that there is no Law or death, but that both death and Law become as if they were not. The Law does not lead to sin, nor death to doom, but faith walks through them into everlasting life.

I know, Luther does not mention justification but he might as well since we are justified by faith and our acquittal in justification is precisely what we need to beat the rap of guilt for sin and the accompanying penalty of death. I suppose someone might be able to write about union in such glowing ways, but I doubt it would make as much sense in the forensic world of law, guilt, judgment, and acquittal.

Is there more to salvation than justification? Sure. But can any other doctrine in the realm of the application of redemption pull off what justification by faith alone does? I doubt it.

Lay Plumbing

Published on by D. G. Hart83 Comments

Since relocating to Michigan I have not only had to think about whether Christians plumb differently from non-Christians. I have also had to think and act plumbingly.

First, I had to purchase a toilet auger to unblock a clogged septic line.

Then, I had to figure out how to displace a large puddle that had emerged in our “Michigan basement” after several heavy rains. A wet-dry shop vacuum allowed the removal of 14 gallons of water fairly easily.

And then I needed to consider the various features of dehumidifiers in order to prevent such puddles in the basement from repeating and growing. And this has led to further consideration about installing a sump with its related pump in order to allow the dehumidifier to keep working without having to empty its water receptacle.

In which case, a sump pump might allow putting the washer and dryer in the basement, as well as the installation of a sink for the sorts of cleaning and rinsing that are less than desirable in the kitchen or bathroom.

If I did not know better, I would be tempted to think that God is mocking my repeated (and perhaps overused) point about Christian plumbing (or the lack thereof). But at least this much can be said in defense of 2k: so far the creational wisdom of the local hardware store staff has yet to steer wrong this mortgage payer who is not doctrinaire about water and its movement within and outside the home.

Oldlife.org 101

Published on by D. G. Hart19 Comments

Regular readers of Oldlife likely don’t need any explanation about the nature of this site but those unfamiliar with the medium or genre of blogging may need some guidance on how to read the posts published here. Genre may sound like a high-faluttin’ word to affix to a blog, suggesting some kind of artifice or even art to the mode of communication. But genre is fitting if only because a blog is a different kind of communication from older forms of publishing and readers who look at a post as if it were another kind of publication may hurt themselves as well as the author (I’m thinking here of the lack of charity or benefit of the doubt that some readers of blogs display, thus raising questions not only about the virtue of the author but also about the motives of the reader).

A blog – at least as I read them and participate in several – is somewhere between a Facebook page and an editorial in a magazine. Blogging is almost entirely personal since the author is his own editor in most cases; no editorial staff or marketing department oversees the writing. A blog is also a forum for thinking out loud – “here is something I read or observed, and I thought I’d write about it and see what readers think.” Magazines are in themselves ephemeral. I used to save old copies of magazines but soon gave up after several moves not only owing to sloth (or declining strength as aging happens) but also because highlighted articles were not as pertinent at the time of the move as they were when saved. If magazines lack permanency, blogs do so even more.

In which case readers, readers should not take a blog too seriously. It is not only an ephemeral medium but often times the author’s thoughts are highly transitional – again, this is a way of thinking out loud. James K. A. Smith recently explained the tension between a blog author’s intentions and readers’ expectations during some flack he took for thoughts he wrote in passing about a review of Rob Bell:

Um, it’s a blog post people. I wrote it in 20 minutes one morning after reading another piece of dreck by Lauren Winner. If it’s stupid, why comment on it? (There is a huge laughable irony about charges of ressentiment in the ballpark here–you can work that out for yourself.) . . . .

I must have missed the memo about the requirements for writing a blog post. Apparently, according to the self-appointed police force of the theological blogosphere, one is not allowed to comment on a topic unless one has first completed a dissertation in the field. Who decided only specialists could speak? Is there a reading list everyone’s supposed to have mastered before they can comment on an issue?

In other words, if readers don’t want to see what an author is thinking about, they don’t need to read the blog. But if they do, they shouldn’t expect the thoughts posted to be ready for prime time.

A blog is like Facebook (such as I imagine since I am not networked) in that it invites comments and an informal exchange of views. For this blogger, the responses are an important facet of the medium because it functions as a built-in letters to the editor. And just as a post can go up immediately in response to a recent event or development, so readers may respond immediately. The immediacy and the responsiveness of blogging is what makes it valuable in my judgment, and unlike most other forms of publication. It is also what makes it ephemeral. Who will read a post about the Phillies’ 2008 championship three years from now and think it poignant. Of course, some blogs do not allow comments, and I do not understand the point since part of the nature of thinking out loud is to start a conversation and see what others think as well.

At the same time, a blog is not like a magazine in that it does not reproduce well articles or material requiring hard or sustained thought. Some magazines, of course, have on-line content. But this is simply a way of reading a magazine article on-line. But a blog is more like the op-ed portion of a magazine – actually more like a newspaper because a magazine takes at least a week to be published; the newspaper comes out daily (most often) and the blog may occur semi-daily. But when bloggers are tempted to post papers or talks given at conferences, they become almost unreadable. Such material needs to be printed out, read with pen or pencil in hand, and given sustained attention – not read for three minutes before checking email or stock quotes.

Truth be told that the Nicotine Theological Journal has been delayed considerably by the distraction of blogging. And the reason has to do with the nature and immediacy of the blog; an article that I might write for the NTJ is generally too long for a blog, and the immediacy of a blog makes it a more tempting medium than a journal to make one’s thoughts public. Why wait three months to print my latest critique of Keller when I can publish it TODAY!!! at Oldlife.org.

In other words, readers of blogs need to lighten up. And readers of Oldlife, the on-line version of the NTJ, would best be advised to light up when reading the blog. Here at a blog, the most fitting form of smoke, as ephemeral as the medium, is a cigarette. For the journal, best to light up a pipe or cigar.

Still Here and Disappointed to Be

Published on by D. G. Hart19 Comments

Back when many Americans were worried about the effects of changing from nineteen to twenty in the dates of computers’ operating systems I took some pleasure in observing how such care could turn into hysteria. I do not say this to my credit since it is unbecoming to take delight in the discomfort of others. But if Y2K was supposed to be as cataclysmic as the hawkers of bottled water, batteries, and dried beans said, then I figured there was not much hope for the Harts. Either we would die of starvation or gunshot wounds (after approaching a neighbor’s house in search of hospitality). But I knew we couldn’t stock enough food and water or fire wood to subsist longer than it would take to patch back together the world’s highly centralized network of computers, information, and commodities.

So to make light of the situation, I found a soup recipe for dried navy beans and prepared an article for the Nicotine Theological Journal in which I advised those Y2K preparers who had acquired too many bags of beans and too many cases of bottled water how to use the recipe to begin to reduce the piles of subsistence provisions stacked in their basements. I still regard this piece as one of the more funny in the history of the NTJ, but at the time I confess that I wrote with a sense of nervous amusement. I had heard enough predictions about the problem of changing digits within operating systems to be relatively certain that Y2K was a hoax. I sure hoped it was, and I sure thought it would be funny – all that stockpiling for end-of-civilization living – if it turned out to be. But I was sufficiently chary to be denied genuine hilarity until the morning of January 1, 2000 when I woke up to find that the coffee maker worked, the computer booted up, and the car started.

Judgment Day 2011 has invited lots of people, Christian and not, to engage in the kind of ridicule I experienced at the time of Y2K. Predictions about May 21, 2011 even caught the attention of sports-talk-radio hosts who framed questions running the gamut of audience demographics from which woman listeners would most want to sleep with before the end of the world – more the spirit of Fat Tuesday than that of preparation for meeting one’s maker – or which injured member of the Phillies should start the last game before the rapture. As risible as the prediction of the last chance for saving faith before divine retribution was, I was also wary and less than confident that Harold Camping was wrong. I was especially wide awake around 5:52 pm last Saturday as I drove east on I 80 in Pennsylvania and listened to a story on NPR about the pet care service offered to those believers who would leave their cats and dogs to be with the Lord. Not only did I experience a measure of disgust at the thought of people profiting from this prediction as well as the gullibility of rapture believers. But I also worried what road conditions would be like should Camping turn out to be right and I was left behind.

The problems with Judgment Day 2011, as compared to Y2K, are more numerous and go beyond feelings of apprehension, gullibility, charity, or disgust. I was convinced that Camping was wrong to pick a date. I still find it hard to believe that people would listen to his apocalyptic siren call after he got it wrong seventeen years ago, though I’m sure Camping had and still has a numerological explanation. I was also pretty certain that Camping was mistaken about the mechanics of Christ’s greeting his saints. I had grown up in a dispensationalist church and was familiar with the idea of a rapture, and I spent too many long nights without sleep after watching the movie “Thief In the Night.” But since I am a bit of an agnostic about the specifics of how human history will end, I couldn’t be certain that a rapture was completely out of order.

But what would happen if judgment day didn’t, especially to the devoted who had prepared for the end of the world in a very different way from Y2K? I do grieve for those believers who went to bed Saturday night seriously disappointed and wonder if they still trusted God after such a let down. I hoped that they would find genuine rest and comfort and take some hope from attending the means of grace on the following Lord’s Day. Maybe these sad saints would go back to the churches they had left behind when Camping condemned the institutional churches as apostate.

And what about Family Radio stations? Did they have programming planned and loaded into computers to keep going after the rapture? Or would the stations be silent? Would the Family Radio website still be up? And did the executives of Family Radio contract with some broadcasting version of Eternal Earth-Bound Pets to insure that some unbelieving radio engineers and website administrators would be available to keep their broadcasts and Internet sites going?

But I was most curious about my own reaction (all about me, right?). When I was an eleven-year old and the Israeli’s were beating the dickens out of the Arabs during the Six-Day War, my congregation heard lots about the end of the world. After all, “signs of the times” were indicating that the Lord’s return was any day. As a budding adolescent I was deeply disappointed by the news. I still had yet to experience dating, driving, high school, and marriage and sex were at least a decade away. I wasn’t sufficiently sanctified to consider that a day with the Lord might even be better than a night of conjugal bliss.

But Judgment Day 2011 had a very different effect, possibly the signs of middle-age or maybe an indication of spiritual growth. I personally wanted Camping to be right. Of course, I still have projects going and plans for time with family and friends that I would regret to see unfulfilled. But since I do pray often the Lord’s prayer, and since the second petition calls for us to pray for the hastening of the kingdom of glory, I don’t think that believers should necessarily find unbelievable the idea that Christ is coming on a specific day. The specification itself is wrong, but I couldn’t help but wonder if Camping could turn out to be right even if his method and tactics were wrong. Wouldn’t it be one of the great ironies – and redemptive history is filled with such reversals of human expectations – if the end of the world did in fact happen in an amillenial way rather than in a dispensationalist manner on May 21? After all, no one knows the time or the hour, which means that Camping still could have been wrong and that Christ could have come on May 21 without a rapture. Plus, Christians are supposed to hope for the Lord’s return, so could I really root against Camping? And what of those who jeered Noah, John the Baptist, or even Christ himself during his first advent? I didn’t want to be guilty of human expectations that put Christ into a box that would prove Camping and his followers to be a charlatan and boobs.

So here we are on May 23, Family Radio is still broadcasting (though I haven’t heard any explanations yet), and the website is still up though the numbers counting down the days until the end of the world are gone and the entire website has received a facelift. Sports-talk-radio hosts are still commenting on what they did or did not do on Saturday evening – one suggested to friends at 5:55 pm drinking up since a rapture would mean not having to pay the bar tab (a patently illogical piece of wisdom since if the drinkers kept drinking they would not have been raptured and would face the judgment of settling their bar tab). Some people are breathing a sigh of relief, others are still scratching their heads over the gullibility of Christians and their strange ways of interpreting the Bible. And some, if they are like me, are disappointed that the day for which believers are supposed to long, and the joy that will take place at the marriage supper of the Lamb, did not happen. Instead, it is back to work, plans, friends, family, vacations, paying bills, changing litter boxes, mowing grass, and sipping overpriced coffee. We live in a good world, but oh how much better the world to come will be.

Taking Every Cat Captive

Published on by D. G. Hart12 Comments

Partly to help out a friend, and also to acknowledge the pleasant companionship of our two felines, Isabelle and Cordelia, I reprint below a piece from the Spring 2009 issue of the Nicotine Theological Journal that followed the death of my first and my wife’s favorite pet, Skippie. Despite all their charms, our current cat models cannot compare with the original article. But thankfully they are a pleasant ectype of the archetype.

Soulless but Spirit-Filled

The first time I took notice of pet-death grief was when I ran into a cynical, sarcastic, and thoroughly unsentimental friend during a late night visit to the market for milk. He was clearly down – not full of the one-liners or antics that characterized his banter. When I asked what was wrong, this scruffy hard-edged man began to choke up. He explained that his family’s pet dog – some mix with strong German Shepherd lines – had died.

I was dumbfounded. Not only could I barely process the disparity between this emotional response and my friend’s normal demeanor, but I also had trouble understanding such affection for an animal. Granted, I had no pets growing up and so the experience was foreign. Still, as a person who took delight in all sorts of dogs and cats, and who always intended to acquire one once housing circumstances would allow, I was not completely without emotions for dogs or cats. I had cried as a kid over Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, and even Flipper.

Little did I realize then that the cat with whom my wife and I were then sharing space when my friend’s dog died would have a similar effect on me. When we put her down after eighteen years, I knew exactly how my seemingly cold friend felt. My wife and I cried for days, only consoled by memories.

Of course, people anthropomorphize pets in ways that hypothetical Martians would find strange. (One also wonders what the angels think.) And the effort to detect human ways and feelings in a cat can be as pathetic as sentimental. But even after discounting the human propensity for making creation and its occupants conform to man and his ways, the bond between pets and their care givers (“owner” implies a contractual relationship) is natural and even healthy. And it need not trespass into the eery world of pet cemeteries, the resurrection of pets, or even pet heaven. (Why do people never posit a pet hell? I guess that is where Michael Vick will go.)

Our pet’s remains now lie underneath a couple feet of sand and dirt, and a big piece of slate next to the home where she lived the longest with her peripatetic companions. Skippah arguably had the prettiest face and eyes of any feline we had seen (a faux Maine Coon), and at a playing weight of roughly seven pounds her entire life (except for the end when she dipped below four), she matched her beauty with an elegantly petite frame and bushy tail. She was always solicitous of sun light and at night the warmth of a lap or a lamp would have to suffice. Now what remains of her after six months is likely only bones and fur. Her material existence is virtually nil.

After she died the most palpable feeling was that of emptiness. How could such a little creature fill a three-story town house? It was as if we had removed a big couch from the front room. Upon walking into the home, we immediately detected the hole of not having another living being in the house. This emptiness was not confined to a room or space. The difference pervaded the entire house, from the basement, which was off limits to Skip, to the third floor where she only occasionally slept. In fact, comparing the loss of a pet to a favorite piece of furniture graphically highlighted the spiritual dimension of pet-having, and gave a measure of plausibility to human affection for, in H. L. Mencken’s terms, “domesticated live stock.”

A man may have many warm feelings for a recliner. He may recall watching a favorite team’s championship from the cushion afforded in that chair. He may remember watching his son take his first steps as a toddler. He may even look at various stains on the upholstery and recollect any number of juicy sandwiches or bowls of ice cream consumed from that comfortable seat. But a chair, no matter how many cushions and levers make it a part of one’s domestic delights, is inanimate. It has no life, no personality, no will. Its qualities are fixed and those can be arranged to suit the needs and pleasures of the sitter. The recliner does not change its user. When it wears out, the sitter will find another comfortable chair in which to enjoy reading, watching, smoking, conversing, and eating.

An animal is palpably different. It has a spirit and a personality and these features differ not only from inanimate objects but also from other critters of the same species. A companion of a pet must make allowances for the willfulness of the creature, from managing a cat’s waste to determining whether to leave flowers on the dining room table (and risk an overturned vase and harmful puddle of water). Some of this willfulness can easily be annoying. Even so, the point is that a creature with no more claim to a soul than a much beloved piece of furniture has a spirit and disposition that make it much more like a man or woman, boy or girl than an inanimate object or even a plant. In fact, the remains of a pet have no real use, but the parts of a chair could be turned into other useful objects. (Anyone for a neck tie made from the upholstery to honor the recliner’s memory?)

So even if an animal has no soul, even if it cannot worship its maker, even if it will not be resurrected either for eternal life or destruction – even if it is an it – it is way more spiritual than many of the creations with which humans share the planet. The proof text for this assertion comes from Psalm 49, a passage providentially read the Lord’s Day before we said good-bye to our beloved Skip. Twice in that Psalm of the Sons of Korah comes the refrain, “Man cannot abide in his pomp, he is like the beasts that perish.” On the one hand, this comparison is not meant to convey good news about the happy, well fed, and powerful man who, without his possessions has as much to fall back on as an animal. On the other hand, it does liken an animal to man, the crown of the created order. Granted, the beast is only as good as man without his dignity. But that is obviously an upgrade from those parts of creation without souls or spirits.

The consolation for those who lived with her is that Skip was full of spirit, an endless source of delight, and so fully worthy of affection. The anguish is that the object of our fancy no longer has the spirit that made her so adorable.