Punch Drunk on Baylys

Published on by D. G. Hart16 Comments

In the many to and fro’s of kicking around two-kingdom theology with those crazy guys, Tim and David Bayly, I have wondered why their rhetoric so often starts and ends Limbaughesque. For instance, here’s a riff on two-kingdom theology and Keller-wannabes that would make Rush proud:

It’s one of the supreme ironies of our reformed fellowship that, despite what any reasonable person would think, the R2K, 2K, spirituality of the church preppies, along with their brothers mute behind the redemptive-historical gag, are out there in the Aussies’ back of beyond helping the PCA/MNA hiptsers dig. Both sides together, now.

The common denominator is hatred for the shame of the Gospel and a propensity to do the look-at-the-birdie routine, albeit they point in radically different directions.

What’s certain is that no one has a heart to love the lost, to rescue the perishing, to break the jaw of the wicked snatching the widow and orphan from his mouth, or to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ in its earthshaking power and wisdom and holiness. Find me the hip church plant where former lesbians and pro-abort feminists have been converted to the Gospel and are now zealous for the conversion of their former sisters-in-crime, pitying their bondage and, from love, going out to seek and to save that which is lost to bring them under the preaching of the full Gospel and the teaching of everything Jesus commanded–particularly that so-pertinent part having to do with Adam being created first, and then Eve.

For that matter, find me the R2K, 2K, spirituality of the Church, redemptive-historical preaching church where the pastor or elders or deacons–anyone, for that matter–faithfully show up at the baby-slaughterhouse nearby to plead for the lives of those little ones about to die.

Amazing similarities between the most disparate things are all over the place, aren’t they?

The spite mixed with sanctimony in such an outburst is truly hard to fathom (except when you remember Rabbi Bret).

What is curious, though, is that the Baylys are capable of better verbiage. In rummaging through their archives to try to diagnose the unease that produces such vituperation, I ran across a quite sensible post about the problems with Lutheranism, yes, the Lutheranism that I will go out of my way to hug. Pardon the length of the following quotation, but it is useful for making the point I want to make as well as giving a sense of the Baylys’ (I’d say) legitimate concerns with Lutheranism.

At first I viewed the increasing infatuation with Lutheranism within elements of the Reformed Church with bemusement. But as the trend toward accommodation with–and even emulation of–Lutheranism grew within conservative elements of the Reformed Church, I watched with mounting alarm. In particular, I have serious reservations about the Lutheran law-gospel divide, which, from my experience of LCMS practice, seems either to produce or (in the case of Lutheranism-smitten Presbyterians) to be the product of a desire for theological conservativism without the hindrance of practical piety.

Three things immediately struck me as a seventh-grader of Evangelical background upon entering a LCMS school:

First, I remember how startled my brother and I were by the rampant misuse of God’s name by students and adults alike. Not only did students routinely take God’s name in vain, they did so in front of pastors in class without reproach. Of course, my experience of the LCMS is narrow. There may be vast swaths of the LCMS where the third commandment is honored. Yet within the portion of the LCMS I am acquainted with a tragically casual attitude toward the name of God prevails.

Second, we were struck by the gilded cross and life-size, bleeding Jesus at front and center of the LCMS church attached to our school. Again, this is personal experience, but unlike misuse of God’s name, I am not willing to admit that I have a narrow and incomplete view of the LCMS in this area. Check it out. Visit LCMS churches and see how many contain graven images of Christ. Lutherans embrace icons in worship. If you doubt this, use Google to find pages by LCMS men defending icons of Christ in worship. Lutherans (modern Lutherans far more than Martin), in fact, seem to delight in tweaking Reformed sensibilities by defending the spiritual benefits of icons. They not only publish images of Christ in their curriculum and erect pictures of Jesus in their homes, they unashamedly place them front and center in their places of worship.

Third, one of the chief ways my brother and I stood out from the other students in our LCMS school was our father’s refusal to let us join school teams or attend the majority of school sporting events. Why? Because LCMS schools routinely scheduled games on Sundays. This remains true today. Lutherans have few qualms about pursuing their pleasures on the Lord’s Day. Lutherans were far ahead of culture as a whole in placing children’s sporting events on the Lord’s Day. Many Presbyterians find Calvin’s explanation of the Lord’s Day deficient. Lutheran practice in this area makes even the most liberal of PCA churches appear Sabbatarian. . . .

I suspect I know what most LCMS folk will say to these complaints: they’ll complain that they differ from me and other Reformed folk principially and theologically in these areas. They’ll say, “But we interpret these commandments differently than you.” Yes, they do. But I say back to my LCMS friends, isn’t it interesting how your interpretations of these commandments demolish the first table of the law as a practical force within individual human lives? Wasn’t it Luther who said that if we defend the Gospel at points other than the precise point under attack, we are in fact not defending the Gospel at all?

So, you disdain Allah and revile Buddha: but you put images of Christ, false images, idolatrous images, at the center of your sanctuaries. I know, I know, I’m a Docetist. I don’t really accept the humanity of Christ. In Christ, God took on form; we can now make images of God because God has taken on human substance. But, let me ask one question. In Christ, God did take human form. But the Christ of your crucifixes and icons, do they contain that form? Do you really know His form?

You don’t just put holes in His hands and feet and side, you make them a certain size, you put them in particular locations. You go further still: you put a distinctively formed nose on His head, colored eyes in His brow, particular cheeks and lips on His face. You give your graven image not just form, but personality and character. You show Him with tears. You place emotions and character on His face. Yet are your images true? If they are, why do they all differ from each other? Are there ten-thousand human forms of Christ?

Do your icons truly portray Christ? Would I know Jesus from your icons? Would I recognize Him on the basis of your images? Would I be able to tell Him from the reviling thief on the basis of your icons? If not, how can they be anything less than a particularly blasphemous and reprehensible lie when you place them at the front of the Church for veneration? Surely, a man who put up an image of Bozo the Clown and called it Churchill and told children to look to his Churchill for inspiration would be reviled as dishonest and contemptuous. Yet you do far worse to Christ.

Idolatry, other gods, the Lord’s Day, God’s name: the entire first table of the law the LCMS tragically diminishes.

Of course, LCMS advocates deny this. But the proof is in the pudding. As Calvin says, the second table of the law is given to demonstrate hypocrisy in regard to the first. Shall I mention how antinomian my experience of LCMS practice has been in terms of the second table of the law? The seventh grade teacher and children’s choir director who told his LCMS class that he subscribed to Playboy without the slightest fear that his job might be jeopardized? The eighth grade teacher who, though a delightful man’s man, ran off with another man’s wife? The tenth grade, school-sponsored campout where I had my first (and thankfully, only) experience of a pot-fueled group grope in which the staff sponsor was a full participant (and remained on the job for the rest of the year)?

Shall I mention the drinking and drunkenness common in LCMS churches and even at LCMS events? The disdain for Christ’s teaching on divorce within marriages of the church? Yes, all these things take place within other churches, including the PCA. But the frequency of their occurrence within our particular communions cannot be ignored. I find no pleasure in arguing this way. But I can’t be silent when I know these things to be true.

I have no desire to speak ill of the LCMS. To be honest, speaking ill of the LCMS was the last thing on my mind for many years for the simple reason that the LCMS used to be utterly outside the Reformed, Evangelical orbit. But when the LCMS is portrayed as a paradigm for Reformed churches, and when Reformed men praise Lutheran theology and worship, and when Reformed men leave Presbyterian churches for LCMS churches and try to persuade others of the wisdom of their course, I object. The LCMS is brazenly contemptuous of the first table of God’s law. It pays lip service to the second table, but even there, the standard of holiness in the average LCMS church would prove deeply disturbing to most PCA church members within their own churches.

Granted, it’s overdone at points, but aside from the Baylys’ appeal to the first table, which they disallowed when 2kers were trying to explain why they weren’t dropping everything to run out and picket at abortion clinics, their concern for second, third, and fourth commandments here is admirable. Also worth mentioning is the expressed desire of not wanting to speak ill of Lutherans. Boy, we two-kingdomers could have used a little of that love over the last two weeks at the Baylys home blog.

But the most important feature of this post is that it shows the Baylys are capable of analysis. Instead of simply shooting from the hip and dismissing as folly any form of disagreement, the Baylys based their rather restrained objections to Lutheranism on substantial theological points. And while their posts against 2kers were quick to assume the worst, this post against Lutherans manifests a measure of sadness even about important disagreements.

Wow! I didn’t know they had it in them.

Maybe it is a function of hardening arteries (or craniums). The Baylys wrote about Lutherans in 2004, six years before the current evil regime. Maybe conditions in the United States and the nation’s churches have so deteriorated that they feel the need to embody Guillame Farel more than Johannes Oecolampadius. Or it could be that they simply aren’t spending enough time at Happy Hour.

(Should I close comments now before Truth Divides . . . Truth Unites calls me an idiot?)

Wheaton Is Calling (and I Wish They'd Stop)

Published on by D. G. Hart5 Comments

Within roughly two years, Philadelphia has lost two good Presbyterian pastors to the evangelical capitol of Wheaton. The first to go was Craig Troxel, who left Calvary OPC in the city’s suburb of Glenside to take a call to Bethel OPC in Wheaton. And now comes word of Phil Ryken, senior pastor at Tenth Presbyterian Church (PCA) taking the reins as president of Wheaton College. Perhaps because Phil’s departure brings back difficult memories of losing my wife’s and my dominie, Troxel, the news of Ryken’s imminent departure from the capitol city of American Presbyterianism rocks my Old Life world more than I would have expected. (I confess to having bad dreams Saturday night over the news.) Having recently relocated to center city, only a few blocks away from Tenth Church, Phil’s presence was more reassuring than I likely realized when we decided to move (even though we continue as members at Calvary). Phil strikes me a honorable fellow, good scholar, capable preacher, and all round mensch. I am deeply saddened that I will not be running into him as a fellow resident of William Penn’s original city plan.

What Ryken’s departure means for Tenth will not be evident for some time, not simply until they call a successor but also because historical developments don’t make sense for a good twenty years. Tenth’s bones are as good as they can be for a church that I wish were more Old School Presbyterian than its practices allow. The church’s history is almost two centuries long, and its identity is not bound up with the recent past of its denomination, the PCA. This means that Tenth will likely not be caught up in PCA efforts to be hip, relevant, or influential. Tenth has been a church in the city for a much longer time than the sirens of urban ministry have been calling the PCA to transform the culture through its metropolitan centers. In other words, Tenth is comfortable being urban – it doesn’t have to try. Also, Tenth’s tradition of sacred music, though not necessarily following Reformed strictures about special music and organs, has prevented praise bands from cluttering the front of the church with the permanent apparatus of drums, music stands, and microphones. The church will likely continue to be what it is – an evangelical church with solid Reformed commitments even if not allowing those convictions to dislocate Tenth’s older patterns of worship (which is sensible, restrained and respectful), or its use of parachurch ministries for missions and other forms of devotion.

The meaning of Ryken’s appointment for the College is also not clear, though again history is a useful guide. Ryken himself embodies different strands of Presbyterian identity that have not always found an outlet at Wheaton or the town’s many evangelical institutions. Phil himself grew up at Bethel OPC, a congregation that split soon after he graduated from Wheaton and started at Westminster (Philadelphia). Part of the congregation remained in the OPC where Troxel is now pastor. The other part left to affiliate eventually with the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. Meanwhile, Phil, who worshiped in the OPC while at Westminster, transferred his membership to the PCA when he took the call at Tenth as an associate pastor under James Montgomery Boice. (To be clear, Tenth was in the PCUSA up until 1981 when the congregation aligned with the RPCES, and then with the PCA which in 1983 absorbed the RP’s through Joining and Receiving. The OPC missed the opportunity to join the emerging sideline Presbyterian enterprise in 1986 when an insufficient majority of commissioners voted to become part of the PCA.)

In earlier years of OPC history, Wheaton College produced a number of students for Westminster who eventually became ministers within the denomination. Through the presidency of J. Oliver Buswell and the teaching of Gordon Clark in the philosophy department, until the 1940s Wheaton was a welcome option for OP parents looking for a Christian college for their children. But after Buswell and Clark left Wheaton (partly owing to the trustees’ discomfort with Calvinism), the college of choice for OP parents became Calvin. More recently since the 1970s, Covenant College has filled the niche for many OP’s who are looking for a Reformed liberal arts institution.

This means that Ryken goes to Wheaton at a time when the stars of the evangelical and Reformed worlds are not exactly aligned. For instance, the networks of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals and Wheaton College do not overlap significantly. ACE draws heavily upon PCA ministers and Calvinistic Baptists. Neither of these groups has a big presence at Wheaton College where the church option for those with Calvinistic sensibilities is College Church, a congregation with historic and complicated ties to the Congregationalists. Another important church presence at Wheaton is Bible Church, an independent congregation that split from College Church in 1929 over fears of creeping liberalism within the Congregationalist denomination. But Wheaton has as many churches as most towns have Starbucks. The mainline congregations in town generally have an evangelical sweet spot that attracts college faculty, while sideline Protestants, including Wesleyans, Baptists, and Orthodox Presbyterians, fill in as alternatives.

Will Ryken’s presence at Wheaton bring the worlds of ACE and evangelicalism into closer proximity? Some of the most outspokenly critical Wheaton alums fear so. Indeed, the objections by the evangelical left over Ryken’s membership in the PCA and ACE is one indication of how far apart the worlds of Wheaton and conservative Presbyterianism are. (How recent posts at the Ref21 blog are helping Phil’s cause are not entirely clear either.) Ryken is hardly a flamethrower of the Totally Reformed right. He has historical interests in Puritanism, and has some loyalty to what he learned while an intern from William Still, an evangelical pastor in the Church of Scotland. But even if Phil can sup with high voltage Presbyterians, like Old Lifers, and can even appreciate their arguments, he is hardly on a crusade to make the world to conform to Richard Baxter, John Owen, or John Calvin.

All of that to say, Phil’s appointment is an encouraging sign about Wheaton College to conservative Presbyterians. But for some in the Wheaton constituency, such encouragement is part of a zero sum game where if Calvinists are happy, than evangelicals should be scared. For the moderate middle of Wheaton’s constituency, Phil’s Presbyterian credentials are likely foreign but also formidable enough to be comforting that he will give the College sound theological leadership. Not to be missed are Phil’s training and instincts as a scholar. Having graduated from Wheaton, and having kept a hand in writing and editing, Phil knows a lot about the life of the mind. As Mark Noll well cautioned in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, integrating evangelical faith and intellect is a task that may be as hard to believe as turning the bread and wine of the Mass into the body and blood of Christ. Perhaps less difficult will be integrating conservative Presbyterianism and American evangelicalism, a task that left Buswell and Clark in the 1940s looking on the outside of Wheaton’s Wesleyan leaning piety. But if anyone is up to the task, Phil is arguably the best equipped and well positioned to give it a try. We wish him God’s speed even if I also wish he were sticking around as a neighbor.

Forensic Friday: An OPC Classic

Published on by D. G. Hart35 Comments

Are Christians really new creatures? It certainly does not seem so. They are subject to the same old conditions of life to which they were subject before; if you look upon them you cannot notice any very obvious change. They have the same weaknesses, and, unfortunately, they have sometimes the same sins. The new creation, if it be really new, does not seem to be very perfect; God can hardly look upon it and say, as of the first creation, that it is all very good.

This is a very real objection. But Paul meets it gloriously in the very same vers, already considered, in which the doctrine of the new creation is so boldly proclaimed. “It is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me” – that is the doctrine of the new creation. But immediately the objection is taken up; “The life which I now live in the flesh,” Paul continues, “I live by the faith which is in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.” “The life which I now live in the flesh” – there is the admission. Paul admits that the Christian does live a life in the flesh, subject to the same old earthly conditions and with a continued battle against sin. “But,” says Paul (and here the objection is answered), “the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith which is in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.” The Christian life is lived by faith and not by sight; the great change has not yet come to full fruition; sin has not yet been fully conquered; the beginning of the Christian life is a new birth, not an immediate creation of the full-grown man. But although the new life has not yet come to full fruition, the Christian knows that the fruition will not fail; he is confident that the God who has begun a good work in him will complete it unto the day of Christ . . . . That is what Paul means by living the Christian life by faith.

Thus the Christian life, though it begins by a momentary act of God, is continued by a process. In other words – to use theological language – justification and regeneration are followed by sanctification. In principle the Christian is already free from the present evil world, but in practice freedom must still be attained. Thus the Christian life is not a life of idleness, but a battle.

That is what Paul means when he speaks of faith working through love (Gal. v. 6). . . . True faith does not do anything. When it is said to do something (as when our Lord said that it can remove mountains), that is only by a very natural shortness of expression. Faith is the exact opposite of works; faith does not give, it receives. So when Paul says that we do something by faith, that is just another way of saying that of ourselves we do nothing, when it is said that faith works through love that means that through faith the necessary basis of all Christian work has been obtained in the removal of guilt and the birth of the new man, and that the Spirit of God has been received – the Spirit who works with and through the Christian man for holy living. The force which enters the Christian life through faith and works itself out through love is the power of the Spirit of God. (J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, pp. 146-47)

Putting a Point on Two Kingdoms

Published on by D. G. Hart23 Comments


Posts and comments have been flying fast and furious over at the blog of those two crazy guys, Brothers Tim and David Bayly (they admit that they are “out of their minds”) about two-kingdom theology. It started over a week ago with acrimony surrounding the experimental Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards and Martin Lloyd-Jones, but quickly descended into mud-slinging about who has picketed abortion clinics the most, thus proving that the conversion experience is hardly otherworldly.

One of the points to surface in these debates is the cockamamie idea (to them) of the separation of church and state. As I have tried to point out, if you don’t believe in the separation of church and state, what is the alternative? One to which a Bayly Bro alluded was Calvin’s Geneva, with a nice scoop of scorn for those Calvinists who have departed so far from the pater familia of Reformed orthodoxy and Christian politics. But when I try to bring up the idea that idolaters and heretics were not welcome in Geneva – ahem, can anyone say Servetus? – I receive another helping of scorn. I simply don’t know what I’m talking about because executing heretics is not what they are talking about. Then why bring up Calvin?

I may not know what I’m blogging about, but I definitely don’t know how you can promote Calvin’s ideas on church and state and not see the pinch that might be coming in this greatest of nations on God’s green earth for Mormons and Roman Catholics (for starters). I’m not sure Baptists would be secure either since they do rebaptize. (Just trying to show I’m not selective in my dogmatic intolerance.) And the Baylys have the nerve to call me utopian. What land of chocolate (props to the Simpsons) would execute Servetus and keep Orrin Hatch?

And then along comes Rabbi Bret to the rescue. Mind you, he has been banished (it could be a self-imposed exile) from the Bayly Bros land of chocolate blogging for extreme remarks, so I am not implying that he speaks for the Baylys. But I am not sure how the Baylys and other versions of Christian America, from an orthodox George Washington and a federally envisioned Moscow, Idaho, to the transformation of New York City, can avoid having a Christian influence on society that stops at religious intolerance without limiting Christian influence to mere morality (quite like the liberal Protestant project, mind you, where the Bible was good for ethics but lousy for doctrine).

Here is how Rabbi Bret puts a point on it:

A second problem with the idea of a Christian advocating some version of “it is only fair that in a pluralistic culture that no faith, including Christianity, ever be preferred by the state” is that such a statement is treason against the King Jesus Christ. All Christians should be actively working for the elimination of false faiths from our culture and for the elimination of the influence of false faiths upon our civil-social / governmental structures. Any Christian who advocates the planned continuance of religious and cultural pluralism is a Christian who is denying the King Jesus.

If we need to be subject to King Jesus in all of our lives, and if we want his rule in every walk of life, including Manhattan for those who can afford it, then how do we tolerate other faiths in our nation? If the Bible is the norm for all of life, including politics, why doesn’t the state assume the same opposition to false religion as the church? We don’t tolerate heterodox teaching or unrepentant immoral living in our churches, so why would a nation that has Christian standards be more lenient than the church? Wouldn’t that nation be the civil version of the mainline Protestant churches before the sexual revolution? (This question has the ring of plausibility since it suggests why so many Protestants are inclined to conclude that the founding fathers, who were hardly orthodox, were highly orthodox. If orthodoxy is synonymous with morality, then the criteria for judging Christ’s rule shifts significantly.)

But aside from questions this raises about holding back on fully applying God’s word to all of life, including Roman Catholic neighbors, what about being subject to the government ordered by a constitution that preserves religious liberty? If those who say public education is a legitimate option for Christians can be accused of denying the legitimacy of Christian education, can’t those who continue to live with a regime guided by the U.S. Constitution be blamed for supporting idolatry? And if the toleration of unbelief by law is so awful, a sign of disloyalty to King Jesus, then when are folks like Rabbi Bret and the Pastors Bayly going to do more than blog or picket and actually follow the example of many Calvinists and resist tyranny? Is it really fair to accuse 2k advocates of bad faith when the accusers themselves won’t engage in the sort of armed insurrection practiced by Calvinists in sixteenth-century Holland, seventeenth-century England, and eighteenth-century America?

Where Bret seems to part company with the Baylys (and the Christian school advocate, Kloosterman) is over the magistrate’s enforcement of the first table of the law. Bret favors it, while the others seem to think that the magistrate should acknowledge the first table but not enforce it. That sure doesn’t seem to be Calvin’s theory or practice with Servetus who was executed for a defective view of the Trinity (the First Commandment by my reckoning). But even if you allow for this weasely distinction, then haven’t you introduced an area where all that Christ has commanded is not enforce? Christ commands people to have only one God. The magistrate theoretically believes this but lives with subjects who believe in many Gods. Huh? I wonder where exactly the biblical instruction comes for rulers to distinguish the first and second tables of the law so that the latter becomes legislation but not the former.

At the end of the day, it seems to me that the Covenanters had a good position on all this, even if I disagree with their starting place. They refused to participate in the U.S. regime because it did not acknowledge Christ as Lord. They would not run for office or vote in elections (up until about 1980). That seems like a good way of keeping your distance from a regime that tolerates other faiths and doesn’t acknowledge the Lordship of Christ. But folks like Bret rail against the United States and then run for Senate on the Constitution Party ticket – the God-denying Constitution, that is.

For 2k advocates along with your average conservative Presbyterian, Bret’s and the Baylys’ complaints are no skin off our backs. American Presbyterians revised our confession of faith and we now confess that the magistrate has a duty to protect the freedom of all people, no matter what their faith or level of unbelief. According to Bret’s logic, my communion is guilty of treason against the Lord Jesus Christ. And yet, the Covenanters, who would have disagreed vigorously with the American revisions of the WCF, never once considered (to my knowledge) severing fellowship with the OPC because of these differences on church and state.

In which case, are the Christian transformers of the U.S.A. making a mountain out of a mole hill? Or is it better to say that they are like Peter, defending his lord with a sword, when that way of doing things has passed away and a new order is in place, a spiritual regime for a spiritual institution – the church – which is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ?

Hug A Lutheran Age

Published on by D. G. Hart7 Comments

Over at his blog, Messiah College historian, John Fea links to one of his students who has created a Facebook page for “Hug A Lutheran Day.” We here at oldlife do not need a day to hug Lutherans. But we can appreciate their humor. The Messiah student (with props to http://www.oldlutheran.com) says you know you’re a Lutheran if:

…when someone mentions red and green (in terms of Christmas), you immediately think of a battle over hymnals.

…the pastor skips the last hymn to make sure church lasts exactly 60 minutes.

…in response to someone jumping up and shouting “Praise the Lord!”, you politely remind him or her that we don’t do that around here.

…you think a meeting isn’t legitimate unless it’s at least three hours long.

…you have more than five flavors of Jell-O in your pantry.

…when you were little, you actually thought the Reverend’s first name was “Pastor.”

…when you’re watching “Star Wars” in the theatre and when they say, “May the force be with you,” you reply, “and also with you.”

…you tap a church visitor on the shoulder and say, “excuse me, but you’re in my seat.”

…Bach is your favorite composer just because he was Lutheran, too. …your house is a mess because you’re “saved by Grace,” not by works.

…your mother reminds you often that she wishes you’d studied the organ.

…you sing “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus” while sitting down. …you feel guilty about not feeling guilty.

The only one I would add, on a more serious note, is you know you’re a Lutheran if you believe in justification by faith alone. (Major props to Martin Luther.)

Thoughts on American Presbyterianism

Published on by D. G. Hart3 Comments

Darryl G. Hart recently joined Camden Bucey of Reformed Forum to share a few thoughts on American Presbyterianism.  The conversation is casual and covers a range of topics including the modernist-fundamentalist debates of the early 20th century and the historical developments of women in office.

download the mp3

What Biblicists Miss about the Bible

Published on by D. G. Hart18 Comments

(or why we need creeds)

W. G. T. Shedd stood courageously by Benjamin Warfield’s side in opposing revisions to the Westminster Standards. Shedd explains below why appealing to the Bible or to being biblical is unpersuasive. It also suggests that the individual with his Bible does not have the status (i.e. power) of God’s ordinance (WCF 31.2) that the assemblies and synods that produce creeds do. As good Presbyterians, we should always recognize that creedal formation takes place by committee. The same goes for revision.

Of course Scripture is the only infallible rule of faith. But this particular way of appealing to Scripture is specious and fallacious. In the first place, it assumes that Calvinism is not Scriptural, an assumption which the Presbyterian Church has never granted. . . . Secondly, this kind of appeal to Scripture is only an appeal to Scripture as the reviser understands it. Scripture properly means the interpretation of Scripture; that is, the contents of Scripture as reached by human investigation and exegesis. Creeds, like commentaries, are Scripture studied and explained, and not the mere abstract and unexplained book as it lies on the counter of the Bible House. The infallible Word of God is expounded by the fallible mind of man, and hence the variety of expositions embodied in the denominational creeds. But every interpreter claims to have understood the Scriptures correctly, and, consequently, claims that his creed is Scriptural, and if so, that it is the infallible truth of God. The Arminian appeals to the Articles of Wesley as the rule of faith, because he believes them to be the true explanation of the inspired Bible. . . .

The Calvinist appeals to the creeds of Heidelberg, Dort, and Westminster as the rule of faith, because he regards them as the accurate exegesis of the revealed Word of God. By the Bible these parties, as well as all others who appeal to the Bible, mean their understanding of the Bible. There is no such thing as that abstract Scripture to which the revisionist of whom we are speaking appeals; that is, Scripture apart from any and all interpretation of it. When, therefore, the advocate of revision demands that the Westminster Confession be conformed to Scripture , he means conformation to Scripture as he and those like him read and explain it. It is impossible to make abstract Scripture the rule of faith for either an individual or a denomination. No Christian body has ever subscribed to the Bible merely as a printed book. A person who should write his name on the blank leaf of the Bible and say that his doctrinal belief was between the covers, would convey no definite information as to his creed. (Shedd, Calvinism: Pure and Mixed, pp. 145-46)

Whither Wheaton?

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

Andrew Chignell, a graduate of Wheaton College and son of a former Wheaton professor, created a minor kerfuffle with a piece about the outgoing college president, A. Duane Litfin, and Wheaton’s search for his successor. Chignell argues that Wheaton, the flagship institution of American evangelicalism, is at a crossroads. He also seems to try relatively benignly to settle scores for those faculty (and their progeny) who were bitterly disappointed by the 1992 appointment of Litfin when Nathan Hatch, now president of Wake Forest University, was the odds on favorite to be Wheaton’s president. The hope was that Hatch, then provost of Notre Dame, an accomplished historian, and graduate of Wheaton, would lead Wheaton into the promised land of elite, private, liberal arts colleges, with of course the evangelical convictions and piety still in place. Some of that disappointment was evident in Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, a book whose polemical edge appealed to Wheaton faculty who wanted a true academic like Hatch as their CEO. (Full disclosure: I taught at Wheaton from 1989 to 1993 and my wife is a 1976 graduate.)

This is a minor flap for Wheaton, despite the creation of a website dedicated to Chignell’s article, because very few Wheaties, as alums are known, have bothered to write. In fact, if not for the poor performance by the owners and editors of Books and Culture, where Chignell’s article was supposed to be published – the “back story” is also at Whither Wheaton – the piece may well have floated away to the Internet’s kazigabties of unused archives, except for Chignell’s own website.

To his credit Chignell does not perform a hatchet job on Wheaton, though it was too edgy for the folks at Wheaton’s neighbor, Books & Culture. He credits Litfin with growing the college’s physical plant and endowment, for shepherding the school through potentially damaging ethos changes such as dropping restrictions against off-campus drinking and dancing, and for overseeing the adoption of a new mascot – from post-9/11 infelicity of Crusaders to the environmentally sensitive but anemic Thunder. Chignell also comments favorably on the decline of religious politics at Wheaton – when he was a student DuPage County, Wheaton’s home, was the most Republican jurisdiction in the United States. Chignell fails to mention that Litfin also oversaw a new statement of faith that dropped the premillennial and dispensationalist laden plank. This was a significant move for many who regarded Litfin, a graduate of the Philadelphia College of Bible (before doing doctorates at Purdue and Oxford), as a fundamentalist since dispensationalism was one of fundamentalism’s chief articles of faith. Wheaton’s old statement of faith reflected its affinities to anti-modernist Protestantism.

On the debit side, Chignell faults Litfin for losing good faculty because of the president’s enforcement of doctrinaire convictions. The most celebrated was the dismissal of a philosophy professor, Josh Hochshield after he converted to Roman Catholicism. But one prospective professor got away when her conjecture that the Bible did not forbid gay marriage ended her candidacy. (On the upside her admission did not prevent an appointment at Calvin College.) Also glaring for Chignell were Litfin’s views on creation, and the apparent irony of raising funds for a science center with all the bells and whistles for first-rate science when the college is committed apparently to doctrines that undermine such research and learning.

The problem for Chignell comes down to Litfin’s own understanding of maintaining a college’s Christian identity. Chignell writes:

In his 2004 book “Conceiving the Christian College,” President Litfin characterizes Wheaton as operating on a “systemic” model, whereby “all of the professors are to be scholars who embody the Christian commitments of the institution, with the expected result that genuinely Christian thinking will permeate the school’s academic and student life programs.”

Chignell agrees that schools operating according to this model are of “immense value.” But he also thinks that the systemic model can take a number of different forms.

At the far end is what might be called the magisterial approach: here a select group of academic administrators specifies which interpretations of the core doctrines and codes are to be propagated throughout the system, and then requires that everyone signs on to those specific interpretations. At the other end is what might be called (for lack of a better term) the wiggle-room approach. Here a certain amount of space is allowed for differing—albeit still reasonable—interpretations of the propositions constituting the systemic core. That doesn’t mean that “anything goes” or that the core is ever significantly or casually altered. But administrators who adopt the wiggle-room approach will tend to be more modest and consultative in interpreting that core, and will often “agree to disagree” on issues that can reasonably be deemed ambiguous or adiaphorous.

Litfin’s fault, then, was in following the magisterial approach, especially on creation, when Wheaton needed and still needs the wiggle-room touch.

A few problems follow from this analysis. First, although I may not agree with the particulars of Litfin’s ideas about creation, Chignell fails to recognize that the faculty who got away from Wheaton were not victims of creationist tyranny. (The college’s statement on creation is hardly polemical – “WE BELIEVE that God directly created Adam and Eve, the historical parents of the entire human race; and that they were created in His own image, distinct from all other living creatures, and in a state of original righteousness.”) The issues in the cases he mentions were Roman Catholicism and gay marriage. In which case, the contrast between a fundamentalist view of creation and a new science center is a red herring. For that matter, plenty of creationists approve of all kinds of science outside the field of biology.

Second, Wheaton’s statement of faith is hardly the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms. It is a useful but meager affirmation of general Protestant verities. By its very nature it reflects the wiggle-room that fundamentalists and evangelicals tried to find to achieve a generic conservative Protestant identity. In other words, Wheaton’s statement of faith is hardly magisterial; Calvin’s is (i.e. the Three Forms of Unity). Wiggle-room enforcement of wiggle-room creeds is another issue.

Third, Chignell is overly optimistic in thinking the wiggle-room touch can keep an institution like Wheaton from turning into Oberlin. The comparison is hardly implausible because when Wheaton started it was in the vein of Wesleyan-Congregationalist perfectionism and post-millennialism running rampant in the mid-West. The affinities between Wheaton and Oberlin were strong, from the kingdom of God to anti-slavery. And yet Wheaton did not become the liberal Protestant institution that Oberlin did despite (or because of?) Finney’s revivalism. One reason is that Wheaton had a fundamentalist interlude under the presidency of J. Oliver Buswell. During that era, and then the subsequent influence of neo-evangelicalism, Wheaton’s administrators, trustees, faculty, students, and students’ parents knew that liberal Protestantism was something that good Christians wanted to avoid. Indeed, one of the important and ignored issues facing schools like Wheaton and sister institutions like Christianity Today is the presence of faculty and editors in important decision-making capacities who belong to such communions as the Episcopal Church USA or the Presbyterian Church USA. If faculty or editors at evangelical institutions reject the writings and appointments of scholars from anti-modernist communions because of views on women’s ordination or homosexuality, what sort of evangelical identity will result?

In fact, the history of American Presbyterianism shows what happens when Chignell’s wiggle-room approach if followed – you wind up in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. with not simply wiggle-room, but lots of room for elbows, heads, feet, and even private parts. In the 1920s the church’s progressives proposed the Auburn Affirmation for the sake of giving flexibility in the church on such cardinal doctrines as the inerrancy of Scripture and the virgin birth of Christ. The number of essential and necessary doctrines was even fewer than Wheaton’s statement of faith, though the church already had a confession of faith. And that hermeneutic became the basis for the liberal church that the PCUSA is today; it would avoid taking a hard stand against anything except conservatives, favoring breadth over orthodoxy. (I concede that members of Wheaton faculty who are in the PCUSA would not regard their communion as liberal. But I don’t think they can plausibly claim that liberalism is unwelcome in the PCUSA, otherwise why would the Presbyterian Layman and the Confessing Church movement attract the numbers that they do?)

So maybe the reason that Wheaton avoids becoming Oberlin is by having presidents like Litfin who apply a measure of disciplinary pressure on academics who by nature of their scholarly and cosmopolitan impulses are not exactly known to be keepers of the orthodox flame.

And yet, this analysis of Wheaton’s conservatism is unconvincing because what has long struck me about the school is not its doctrinaire evangelicalism but its pietistic ethos. During my tenure at Wheaton I was struck how much the place had the feel of Christian summer camp, where campers (students) took math and history instead of archery and swimming from their professors (counselors). That is not necessarily a knock against Wheaton. Institutions that provide a safe Christian retreat for older adolescents and young adults, on their way to professional lives and parenting, is hardly the worst service a Christian organization can perform. But this impression rang true at a recent alumni event in Philadelphia where those in attendance viewed the promotional materials (posters and film) for the current capital campaign. What was striking was that faculty, books read and written, or graduates like Chignell who go on to excel in higher education, were not evident. Instead, the focus, especially of the film, was on the student experience, as if this were a recruiting film for prospective students. What dawned on me while watching the film was that the student experience is what attracts high schoolers to apply, parents to pay for tuition, and alums to give to the school. That is because the experience of students in all the extra-curricular activities appears to be as important to the making of a Wheatie as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Mind you, the students are very smart. They have to be to get in to a very competitive school. But do they need to be smart to stay at Wheaton? Or is what keeps them there the evangelical warmth and fellowship that comes from a personal relationship with Jesus?

Again, this could sound like a real indictment of Wheaton, and it does second from a different angle Noll’s scandal of the evangelical mind and the kind of indifference to intellectual life that has characterized born-again Protestantism. But it need not be read as evidence of anti-intellectualism at Wheaton. It could be a testimony to the institution’s uncanny ability to remain “conservative” on the basis of experience, on the vague and ethereal but in this case vital and vigorous attachment to having “Jesus in my heart.” That piety did not sustain lots of other Protestant liberal arts colleges founded in the wake of the Second Great Awakening like Oberlin. But it has for Wheaton. And perhaps Litfin’s regular speaking in chapel is one of the formal means that sustains Wheaton’s evangelical ethos. If so, Chignell’s assessment of Litfin and Wheaton misses the most important factor that the trustees should be considering in the choice of a new president.

Was Machen Wrong Not to Appeal to Union?

Published on by D. G. Hart27 Comments

Writing on Gal. 2:19 (“For I through the law died to the law, that I might live to God”), a verse smack dab in a passage where Paul talks a lot about being “in” Christ, Machen writes the following:

The law . . . led men, by its clear revelation of what God requires, to relinquish all claim to salvation by their own obedience. In that sense, surely, Paul could say that it was “through the law” that he died to the law. The law made the commands of God so terribly clear that Paul could see plainly that there was no hope for him if he appealed for his salvation to his own obedience to those commands.

This interpretation yields a truly Pauline thought. But the immediate context suggests another, and an even profounder, meaning for the words. The key to the interpretation is probably to be found in the sentences, “I have been crucified together with Christ,” which almost immediately follows. “The law,” Paul probably means, “caused me to die to the law, because the law, with its penalty of death upon sins (which penalty Christ bore in our stead) brought Christ to the cross; and when Christ died I died, since he died as my representative.” In other words, the death to the law of which Paul here speaks is the death which the law itself brought about when it said, “the soul that sinneth it shall die.” Christ died that death, which the law fixes as the penalty of sin, when He died upon the cross; and since He died that death as our representative, we too have died that death; the penalty of the law is for us done away because theat penalty has been paid in our stead by the Lord Jesus Christ. Thus our death to the law, suffered for us by Christ, far from being contrary to the law, was in fulfilment of the law’s own demands. We are free from the penalty of death pronounced by the law upon sin not because we are rebels against the law, but because the penalty has been paid by Christ. (Machen’s Notes on Galatians, p. 159)

It is striking that Machen, a none too shabby Pauline scholar, preferred to use the language of representation or substitution rather than union with Christ. And instead of seeing union as the sub-text, Machen interprets this passage in what appears to be straightforwardly forensic categories.

Forensic Friday: Vos Weighs In

Published on by D. G. Hart52 Comments

To [Paul’s] view the resurrection with all that clusters around it, has behind it a still more potential principle, a principle from which in fact it springs, and in whose depths it lies anchored. And this deeper principle is that of the acquisition of righteousness, a forensic principle through and through, and yet no less than the resurrection a transforming principle also. It is especially by considering the nexus between Christ and the believer that this can be most clearly perceived: in the justification of Christ lies the certainty and the root of the Christian’s resurrection. For the supreme fruit of Christ’s justification, on the basis of passive and active obedience, is nothing else but the Spirit, and in turn the Spirit bears in Himself the efficacious principle of all transformation to come, the resurrection with its entire compass included. (The Pauline Eschatology, p. 151)

In our opinion Paul consciously and consistently subordinated the mystical aspect of the relation to Christ to the forensic one. Paul’s mind was to such an extent forensically oriented that he regarded the entire complex of subjective spiritual changes that take place in the believer and subjective spiritual blessings enjoyed by the believer as the direct outcome of the forensic work of Christ applied in justification. The mystical is based on the forensic, not the forensic on the mystical. (“‘Legalism’ in Paul’s Doctrine of Justification,” in Redemptive History and Biblical Interpretation, ed. Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., p. 384)