Not to be confused with the BBC show, “The Office,” and not to confuse David Brent with W. Robert Godfrey (though sometimes I wonder), Westminster California is starting a podcast entitled “Office Hours.” Season One features interviews with Godfrey and Julius Kim. A preview of the season is now available, complete with instructions and incentives for subscribing.
Now the only question is whether R. Scott Clark is more like Tim or Gareth.
Sports talk radio is not the best entertainment but it sure beats Glen, Rush, and Sean beating up the Obama administration. Listeners in Philadelphia have listened to forty-eight hours of casuistry while Eagles’ fans process the reality of Michael Vick being added to the roster. After serving two years in federal prison for molesting and killing dogs in dog-fight related activities, Vick has been cleared by the NFL to play and the Eagles swooped him up. For a sampling of the moral outrage, check this out.
Now if only we could convince football fans that an unborn child is higher on the chain of being than a pit bull.
Our favorite Byzantine-rite Calvinist (how many fish can there be in that pond?), David Koyzis, has written another post (July 28) critical of the two-kingdom/spirituality of the church views advocated here. In the piece he brings up the common retort of neo-Calvinists that all other so-called Christian outlooks are guilty of affirming neutrality if they don’t follow a Reformed world-and-life-view. In this case, our debate has concerned the contemporary academy and remedies for the secularism that afflicts it. (Actually, banality may be the bigger problem of the modern university, except of course during March Madness.)
Leaving aside finding solutions to what afflicts contemporary academic life, the neo-Calvinist pattern of falling back on charging non-neo-Calvinists with neutrality is getting old (and worse than being called Lutheran) and fails to see how much neo-Calvinism actually resembles fundamentalism at a deeper level.
The fundamentalism on which I cut my soul was constantly splitting the world in two, between the sacred and the profane, as if some shared existence was not possible for believers and non-believers inhabiting the same neighborhood, working in the same office, pledging allegiance to the same flag. Kuyperians may have a more sophisticated version of the fundamentalist mindset – think of all that epistemology and post-Kantian idealism – but the position still strikes me as one that fails to recognize the common arenas of the created order such as the state, marriage, and education. Do Christians and non-Christians pursue these matters differently? From an ultimate perspective, yes. The former strive to engage in these activities to the glory of God, the latter do not. (But let’s remember the filthy rags that afflict even the pursuit of God’s glory.) From a penultimate perspective, it’s hard to see how a history prof teaching the survey of the United States at Cow College U. is doing the job any worse than the prof at Consistently Calvinist College. The standards for that evaluation are not Scripture or the creeds; they are set by the American Historical Association and the leading graduate departments of history.
It is also hard to see how neo-Calvinists make any sense of the Westminster Standards’ teaching on the Lord’s Day, as in the distinction between sacred duties of worship and rest, profaning the Lord’s Day by doing that which is explicitly sinful, or even breaking the fourth commandment by doing common work on the Sabbath that is actually lawful on other days. In other words, the Standards assume that three categories of moral evaluatoin – the sacred, profane, and the common, and these spheres actually shift depending on whether the day is holy or ordinary (as in common).
So someone like myself who affirms the common is not asserting neutrality. God is Lord over all things. But that Lordship is not always redemptive. Sometimes it is merely creational or providential. As I like to say, Christ was Lord in Iraq even before U.S. forces invaded.
This distinction is also important for two-kingdom folks who worry about neo-Calvinism invariably turning theologically liberal. Koyzis objects to my apparent fallacy of saying neo-Calvinism is flawed because it has so often resulted in churches more concerned about working out a Reformed view of math or television than communions that hold on to the Cannons of Dort. He may have a point regarding the logic of my historical observation. At the same time, I wonder if neo-Calvinists have the capacity to observe that their project has not worked out well in either the Old World or the New one and that adjustments may need to be made.
But aside from the merits of historical trends, the distinctions among the holy, common, and profane are actually important for the way neo-Calvinism has played out in theologically suspect results. By trying to redeem the culture, or the state, or the house, neo-Calvinists feel good about denying the sacred-secular distinction, thus asserting Christ’s Lordship over every single cubit millimeter. Yet, I have not seen a neo-Calvinist recognize that one of the chief features of Protestant modernism was a similar denial of the sacred-secular distinction in order to Christianize everything, to affirm God’s rule over all areas of life, not just in the religious or holy ones. Again, fundamentalism is the flipside of this impulse, and differs by refusing that the culture or the state can be Christianized (of course the home is sacred, family values and all that). By failing to acknowledge that part of existence is good even apart from redemption because it is created, neo-Calvinists want to redeem things that do not need to be saved. And it is this expansive view of salvation – because of the missing category of the common or created – that leads to liberal theology.
Darryl Hart recently spoke with Mark Dever of Capitol Hill Baptist Church and 9 Marks Ministries. Hart endures a barrage of pointed questions from Dever and has opportunity to discuss many of the ideas familiar to Hart’s readers. The audio can be downloaded here.
How could that be? Well, one answer is that it happens whenever you read the Bible through the lens of politics, whether conservative, liberal, or the make-believe category of independent. We first noted the appearance of The American Patriots’ Bible here. Now Richard Gamble, the OPC elder who teaches American history at Hillsdale College and is not to be confused with Richard C. Gamble, the Covenanter pastor, has reviewed the patriotic scriptures for The American Conservative magazine. The entire review is worth reading, but this is a particularly apt section:
A nationalized Bible would seem in effect to reverse the story of redemption. At the core of Christianity is a message that the gospel of salvation is flung wide open to all peoples regardless of nationality, race, or language. The day of Pentecost made that truth clear. While Christianity has inevitably taken on national accents as it has encountered culture after culture over the past 2,000 years, it is a universal faith. Why, then, take that transnational faith and fuse it with an earthly Caesar and empire by setting it side by side in pages of Holy Writ with a particular nation’s history and identity, as if Christianity belonged to Americans in a special and intimate way not true of other people? This Bible by its very existence distorts the gospel. As Augustine says in The City of God, the “heavenly city, while it sojourns on earth, calls citizens out of all nations, and gathers together a society of pilgrims of all languages…â€
Beyond what the editor and the publisher intended, The American Patriot’s Bible is deeply American. It takes to a new level the remaking of Scripture into a marketable consumer good, a trend underway in the United States since at least the invention of the modern steam press in the early 19th century. (See R. Lawrence Moore’s Selling God.) It also exemplifies the irony of American Protestants, who adhere to the sufficiency of Scripture for faith and life yet find the unadorned text of that Word not so sufficient after all. And finally, it provides further evidence of how theologically ill-equipped one dominant strand of American Christianity has been over the past few hundred years to know how to sojourn in America, how to conceive of the United States as part of the City of Man and of the church as a stranger in a strange land.
Pomo’s and Fropo’s are at it again.
Is it egotistical to think so, bro?
I keep hearing that justification is only a part of salvation and so falls short of yielding the “whole Christ.†I understand the desire to do justice to all the benefits that believers receive in this life from Christ – including adoption and sanctification.. But I wonder if this concern for all of Christ recognizes just how total his work is in the benefit known as justification and received by faith alone. Here is what the Belgic Confession says in Article 22, “The Righteousness of Faithâ€:
We believe that for us to acquire the true knowledge of this great mystery the Holy Spirit kindles in our hearts a true faith that embraces Jesus Christ, with all his merits, and makes him its own, and no longer looks for anything apart from him.
For it must necessarily follow that either all that is required for our salvation is not in Christ or, if all is in him, then he who has Christ by faith has his salvation entirely.
Therefore, to say that Christ is not enough but that something else is needed as well is a most enormous blasphemy against God– for it then would follow that Jesus Christ is only half a Savior. And therefore we justly say with Paul that we are justified “by faith alone” or by faith “apart from works.â€
However, we do not mean, properly speaking, that it is faith itself that justifies us– for faith is only the instrument by which we embrace Christ, our righteousness.
But Jesus Christ is our righteousness in making available to us all his merits and all the holy works he has done for us and in our place. And faith is the instrument that keeps us in communion with him and with all his benefits.
When those benefits are made ours they are more than enough to absolve us of our sins.
I don’t know about others, but that sounds like a whole lot of Christ being affirmed in justification and our righteous standing before God. It also sounds like the Reformation’s insistence on justification as the material principle of our protest with Rome was precisely to do justice to the “whole Christ.â€
“I don’t read books, I write them.†The first time I said that I knew it didn’t sound good. And that was the point because it was actually more a joke on me than on those who haven’t written books. Historians do not write because they are necessarily wise. And the way historians write means that they have less time to read books they would prefer to ponder. Too often I’ve spent an evening with an Edwards, Buswell, Bushnell, or Beecher and had to pass on Epstein, Berry, Machen or Meilaender. Even worse, sometimes I’ve had to read what I’ve written.
Current duties – a volume on the history of the OPC to commemorate the denomination’s 75th anniversary – forced me to take a look at a piece written about a decade ago on Orthodox Presbyterians and secularization. It was entitled, “Reconciling Two Kingdoms and One Lord: Twentieth-Century Conservative Presbyterians and Political Liberalism in the United States,†and presented at a conference at the Vrijgemaakt seminary in Kampen sponsored by the Archives of the Free University.
The conclusion is reprinted below may complicate perceptions that the editors of the NTJ are not sufficiently on board with Vos and Van Til. What is even more interesting than the views of the editors is that Vos and Van Til can be read against each other, at least when it comes to understanding the saeculum.
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>. . . the OPC relied upon three separate doctrinal strands to maintain the integrity of the church and her witness in the face of political liberalism and its secularizing effects. First, J. Gresham Machen bequeathed to the OPC the Southern Presbyterian tradition of the spirituality of the church which put limits on church power while also preventing it from intervention in spheres beyond its domain, such as politics. Second, John Murray outlined the implications of divine sovereignty for public life when he affirmed the church’s duty to speak on civic affairs because God had ordained both the church and the magistrate and so ruled over each. Finally, Cornelius Van Til worked out the inferences of the sufficiency of Scripture when he asserted that Christ’s lordship over all things made the Bible relevant for all walks of life. These three doctrines have greatly shaped the way that American Calvinists have reacted to the de-Christianization of American society, as the example of the OPC demonstrates. Furthermore, the way Orthodox Presbyterians applied these doctrines appeared to vary according to whose interests or territory were at stake. When they needed to defend the prerogatives of the church or the independence of Christian schools, Orthodox Presbyterians have relied upon the sort of logic that undergirded Machen’s defense of the church’s spiritual mission. But when American society appeared to be growing more tolerant of immorality, usually defined on pietist terms that sees godlessness in certain forms of immoral behavior, then Orthodox Presbyterians turned to notions about God’s sovereignty or the Bible’s relevance to all walks of life for the work of the church and also for the regulation of public life.
This explanation of the theology at work in Orthodox Presbyterian responses to the secularization of American politics reveals that Reformed teaching on politics as it played out among conservative Presbyterians has not been sorted through systematically. Although political liberalism represents a tradition of state craft quite compatible with the separation of religious and public spheres implied by sphere sovereignty — a notion very similar to the spirituality of the church — American Calvinists have generally regarded the reduction of religious references in public life and the prevalence of certain kinds of worldliness in society as a betrayal of both divine sovereignty and biblical authority. Although God was still sovereign and the Bible was still true when Christ suffered the unjust penalty of dying on the cross, for the Orthodox Presbyterian sampled here the proof of God’s rule and biblical authority is only substantially compelling when righteousness and divine truth prevail in civic life. In other words, despite knowing cognitively that different standards apply for the city of God, i.e., the church, and the city of man, i.e., the state, the doctrines of divine sovereignty and biblical sufficiency have tended to take precedence over sphere sovereignty and the spirituality of the church. As such, conservative North American Calvinists like those in the OPC have often demanded from the state the same kind of obedience and truthfulness that Christ requires of his bride. . . .
. . . perhaps the most significant doctrine in the OPC’s theological arsenal for coping with secularization and political liberalism may be the Vossian one that teaches about the gradual and varied unfolding of redemptive history. If, as biblical theologians have argued, the church in the period between Christ’s first and second advents is a pilgrim people, wandering in the wilderness until Christ leads them upon his return into the promised land of the new heavens and the new earth, then Orthodox Presbyterians like pastor Davison could legitimately have thought about his life in places like New Jersey more like Midge Decter thought of hers in St. Paul. In his comments on the epistle to the Hebrews, Orthodox Presbyterian theologian, Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., builds upon the insights of Geerhardus Vos to argue that the eschatology of the New Testament implies that “there is no ‘golden’ age coming that is going to replace or even ameliorate these desert conditions of testing and suffering.†Gaffin adds that “no success of the Gospel, however great, will bring the church into a position of earthly prosperity and dominion such that the wilderness with its persecutions and temptations will be eliminated or marginalized.†This eschatological reality means that as long as Christ is absent from the church, her “final rest†cannot be located in temporal or earthly conditions. For this reason, the situation of Protestants in the United States is actually more similar to that of Jewish Americans than that of the founding fathers or the Puritans who set out to make America a “city on a hill.†In which case, if Orthodox Presbyterians had reflected on and followed the insights of Vos for public life, they might have come to evaluate political liberalism and secular society less like nativist Americans and more like immigrants to the United States.
In an ongoing attempt to explain why some Reformed Protestants – okay, this one – are concerned about any formulation of doctrine that would de-center justification by faith, the following quotation from Benjamin Warfield is especially apt. It expresses the problem of human sin and the need for perfect righteousness with the sort of clarity that not only made Warfield legendary but also more importantly clarifies the significance of the righteousness that believers receive through faith alone.
Sometimes we are told that Justification by Faith is “out of date.” That would be a pity, if it were true. What it would mean would be that the way of salvation was closed and “no thoroughfare” nailed up over the barriers. There is no justification for sinful men except by faith. The works of a sinful man will, of course, be as sinful as he is, and nothing but condemnation can be built upon them. Where can he get works upon which he can found his hope of justification, except from Another? His hope of Justification, remember – that is, of being pronounced righteous by God. Can God pronounce him righteous except on the ground of works that are righteous? Where can a sinful man get works that are righteous? Surely, not from himself; for, he is a sinner, and all his works as sinful as he is. He must go out of himself, then, to find works which he can offer to God as righteous. And where will he find such works except in Christ? Or how will he make them his own except by faith in Christ?
Justification by Faith, we see, is not to be set in contradiction to justification by Works. It is set in contradiction only to justification by our Own Works. It is justification by Christ’s Works. The whole question, accordingly, is whether we can hope to be received into God’s favor on the ground of what we do ourselves, or only on the ground of what Christ does for us. . . . Justification by Faith means, that is to say, that we look to Christ and him alone for salvation, and come to God pleading Christ’s death and righteousness as the ground of our hope to be received into his favor. If Justification by Faith is out of date, that means, then, that salvation by Christ is out of date. . . .
Justification by Faith does not mean, then, salvation by believing instead of by doing right. It means pleading the merits of Christ before the throne of grace instead of our own merits. . . . Justification by Faith is nothing other than obtaining everlasting life by believing in Christ. . . .
(Warfield, Selected Shorter Writings, vol. 1, 283-84)
Old Life 