Would A Reformed-World-and-Life View Be More Effective?

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Jeremy Beer has many good points to make about Newt Gingrich’s conversion to the Roman Catholic Church. Among them is the following, that has surprising resonance with a two-kingdoms theology (why wouldn’t it? All Western Christians of merit are deep-down Augustinian):

It is unwarranted in the first place to think that serious, practicing Catholics will automatically agree on matters of social, economic, and political philosophy and policy. To state the thesis in a more moderate form, it is unwarranted to believe that they would agree if they were all pious enough or smart enough or understood the faith enough. That’s not how it works. The church doesn’t declaim authoritatively on anything that isn’t a matter of faith or morals because it can’t. Outside the quite small realm of faith and morals, there’s ample room for disagreement and debate even among Catholics of good will and well-formed consciences. (I am not claiming to be a Catholic of good will, and certainly not one with a well-formed conscience; I’m just laying out the theory here, as well as I understand it.)

But let me come to the interesting and in some ways opposite point. Gingrich is the latest in a steadily lengthening string of high-profile converts to Rome among political conservatives and neoconservatives. In the last few years, that list includes Sam Brownback and Robert Novak and Robert Bork and Larry Kudlow and a number of others.

Now, reflect, and let me know if I’m wrong. Did any of these men (or any other high-profile politician/journalist/muckety-muck convert not listed here) change his public opinions about any idea, policy, or other matter of public significance after his conversion?

The Great Debate: Psalms vs. Hymns

Published on by D. G. Hart37 Comments

Before blogs existed, email did.

(From the NTJ, Jan. 1997)

From: Glenn Morangie
To: T. Glen Livet
Date: 9/3/96 9:28am
Subject: Hymns

Glen,
The word here in Green Bay is that I am not impressed by arguments against exclusive psalmody. Mr. Mears gave one in Sunday School this week.

Here are my reasons: 1) that we may sing hymns is not very Reformed even though it may work for Lutherans; 2) if we believe that Col. 3 commands the singing of hymns, why hasn’t our denomination commissioned capable people to write hymns reflecting NT revelation? 3) why also do we sing prayers written by men, namely Charles Wesley and Isaac Watts in the “golden age” of hymnody, who couldn’t pass licensure or ordination exams (and so wouldn’t be allowed to lead prayer in public worship)? 4) is any hymn as good as a good metrical psalm? 5) why does our denomination rely so heavily on John Murray on Gen. 2:7 but when it comes to Eph. 5 or Col. 3 finds him to be quite human? and 6) don’t we need to revise our standards since the divines were exclusive psalmodists (and isn’t our fudging here the tip of the iceberg when it comes to other worship novelties)? Continue reading “The Great Debate: Psalms vs. Hymns” →

Still Crazy After All These Years

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(From NTJ, 39 Alexander Hall, July 1998)

While the principle is subject to abuse, we would affirm the idea that communities of faith, like individuals, are products of their age. For example, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, founded in 1936, came about immediately following what historian Robert Handy has described as the great religious depression in American history. And in his multivolume twentieth century American religious history, Martin Marty locates the birth of the OPC squarely in the thick of the cacophonous “noise of the conflict.” Without a doubt the context of depression and conflict have markedly shaped the identity of that little denomination in its first sixty years.

This year the Presbyterian Church of America is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary, and the occasion has prompted reflections on the state of the culture at its birth in 1973. One minister in the church has described that year in this way: “The PCA came into being as a separate entity at a very crucial time in the history of the church and world. The year 1973 was marked by great cultural transition from modernism to post-modernism, from liberalism and a reaction to it, to a younger generation that was searching for truth, to a time when evangelicals were becoming aware once again that the Gospel of Jesus Christ did have social implications and applications.”

Wow! The editors of the NTJ, like many of their contemporaries, may have been guilty of sleep-walking through most of the 1970s. Even so, we were taken aback by those claims. We do not believe that 1973 witnessed the decline of modernism, and we have argued elsewhere that modernism is alive and well and looking an awful lot like evangelicalism. (And please: the language of postmodernism surely did not come into vogue until fully a decade after the PCA’s birth).

Still, 1973 is a watershed year of sorts, as evidenced by these cultural milestones:
1. McDonald’s unveils the Egg McMuffin.
2. The NIV (New Testament) is published.
3. Construction begins on the Alaska pipeline.
4. Nixon fires special prosecutor Archibald Cox in his “Saturday Night Massacre.”
5. Ron Blomberg of the New York Yankees becomes the American League’s first designated hitter.
6. Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
7. Supreme Court hands down its Roe v. Wade decision.
8. The IBM Selectric typewriter becomes “self-correcting.”
9. Death claims Pearl Buck, Pablo Picasso, and Bruce Lee (hmm, perhaps modernism died after all).
10. The world’s first video game, “Pong,” debuts.

We leave for others the task of drawing any conclusions about PCA identity. But lest readers complain that we have unfairly listed the more unsavory aspects of a most forgettable year of a most miserable decade, we remind them that we deliberately excluded any reference to the uniforms of a certain Major League Baseball team from western Pennsylvania, a historic bastion of American Presbyterianism.

What if Lutherans and Reformed Agreed on Sanctification?

Published on by D. G. Hart16 Comments

Some Reformed will concede agreement with Lutherans on justification.  But they draw the line at sanctification.  Supposedly, the Lutheran doctrine of salvation is so justification-centric that Lutheranism neglects the other benefits of salvation.

A piece by David P. Scaer, professor of systematic theology at Concordia, Ft. Wayne, suggests that Lutherans are closer to Reformed than many think.  He wrote:

Lutherans recognize that Christians as sinners are never immune to the Law’s moral demands and its threats against sin, but in the strictest sense these warnings do not belong to Christian sanctification, the life believers live in Christ and in which Christ lives in them. In Roman Catholic and some Protestant systems, the Gospel brings the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ, but is replaced by the Law which sets down directives for Christian life and warns and threatens the Christian as Christian. Law, and not the Gospel, becomes God’s last and real word for the believer. So Christianity deteriorates into an implicit and eventually coarse legalism and abject moralism. Jesus faced this understanding of an ethically determined concept of sanctification among the Pharisees. Holiness was defined in terms of fulfilling ritual requirements. Sixteen centuries later for similar reasons, Luther raised his protest against medieval Catholicism. At times, the New Testament uses the words sanctify and sanctification of God’s entire activity of God in bringing about man’s salvation. More specifically it refers to the work of the Holy Spirit to bring people to salvation, to keep them in the true faith and finally to raise them from the dead and give them eternal life (Small Catechism). All these works are also performed by the Father and the Son. Since God is not morally neutral and does not choose to be holy, but He is holy, all His works necessarily share in His holiness. The connection between the Holy Spirit and sanctification is seen in the Latin for the Third Person of the Trinity, Spiritus Sanctus. The Spirit who is holy in Himself makes believers holy, sanctifies them, by working faith in Christ in them and He becomes the sources of all their good works.

Sanctification means that the Spirit permeates everything the Christian thinks, says and does. The Christian’s personal holiness is as much a monergistic activity of the Holy Spirit as is his justification and conversion. The Spirit who alone creates faith is no less active after conversion than He was before.

Speaking of Front Porch Republic

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Caleb Stegall, a descendant of five generations of Covenanter preachers — so you know he must be good (and odd), tells about his experience with preparing a hog to go to the butcher.  Aside from being funny, it is a reminder to all of us would-be agrarians that the trade off between soul-killing office work and body killing farm work is a deal that most of need to keep.

So How is Blogging Different from Facebook?

Published on by D. G. Hart3 Comments

While catching up on the blogosphere last night, I ran across news from two good friends over at Front Porch Republic.  From one friend came word that he is battling the disease of shingles.  The other wrote about his experience with law enforement in Arizona — two speeding tickets thanks to cameras installed on Phoenix’s freeways (I guess they’re not so free). 

After reading these and emailing the one friend to wish him good health, I wondered if I had just experienced what millions do through Facebook, an Internet phenomenon that entirely escapes me.  I don’t know what it does, why it’s useful.  But maybe what I encountered at FPR is exactly what happens on Facebook – going on line to see what friends are doing (or, in this case, is being done to them). 

And then I recovered and realized that on Facebook (it seems) people only tell what they’re doing.  On blogs, at least the better ones, people reflect on what their doing. 

That would appear to make blogging more valuable (he wrote while patting himself on the back).  It may explain the difference between improper and proper personal disclosures.  If it’s done in a way that let’s people know who shouldn’t, then it’s improper.  If it’s done for the purpose of generalizing about the human predicament, then its proper.   (But it better be good.)

Thus ends today’s meditative moment.

At Least One Alliance Knows Where It Stands on Baptism

Published on by D. G. Hart12 Comments

That is a plausibly drawn conclusion after the kerfuffle created by Mark Dever’s post on “Things He Can and Cannot Live With.”   Like others to comment on this post, I admire Mark and count him a friend.  During a recent conference at Southern Baptist Seminary, where Mark is chairman of the board,  he and I enjoyed several pleasant conversations.  He is not only the pastor of the church where Jay and Ellen Hart were married (TMI – alert), but he is a Calvinist and says a lot of sensible and valuable things about congregational life, church membership, and discipline.  He is one of my favorite Baptists, most of whom orbit around Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville.

It should also be said that Mark deserves real credit for saying what he did about paedobaptism being a sin.  I disagree with him.  What do you expect from a Presbyterian elder?  But I’m not offended, much less annoyed.  If you take the sacraments seriously, not to mention being a faithful minister of the word, you need to say that the wrong practice of baptism is sinful.  (It should also be pointed out that Mark was not singling out paedobaptism.  He did mention it along with racism and universalism, but his list actually ran to 15 and included drum, organs, and female elders, none of which hit the threshold of paedobaptism but this was a free-flowing column.)

What is curious about the post is what it means for the variety of evangelical parachurch agencies like the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Together for the Gospel, and Gospel Coalition, all of which find credo- and paedobaptists inhabiting membership cheek by jowel under the umbrella of a lower-common denominator evangelicalism.  Mark actually has a very good interview with a fundamentalist pastor who questions Mark’s own participation in these alliances and coalitions on the grounds of not participating with those who observe sinful practices.  It was a frank even if friendly exchange.  (Why do conservative Presbyterians today keep wanting to “hang” with Baptists who think paedobaptism is a sin?) Continue reading “At Least One Alliance Knows Where It Stands on Baptism” →

Give It Up

Published on by D. G. Hart4 Comments

It, in this case, is evangelicalism.

Rick Phillips, over at the Ref21 blog, comments on Michael Spencer’s (aka Internet Monk) piece on the collapse of evangelicalism. Phillips writes:

. . . what many have been saying for years is true: American evangelicalism is for the most part non-Christian, if biblical definitions are used. Bible doctrine has not been taught for years, and there are largely-populated areas with scores of evangelical churches where one cannot find any serious Bible teaching. Youth ministry has been the pinnacle of this phenomenon, as evangelical youth ministries have tended to be virtually devoid of truth or godliness. So the situation is as bad as we have feared, and I agree with Michael Spenser that in the coming years (really, starting now) this is going to be revealed dramatically.

So why continue to call yourself “The Allicance of Confessing Evangelicals”? Isn’t this sort of like calling yourself “The Alliance of Confessing Modernists”? Hello!?!

(I’d submit a comment over at Ref21 but unlike some blogs, their posts remain above the fray.)

Timmerman is Our (Paleo-Calvinist) Homeboy

Published on by D. G. Hart7 Comments

If any publications inspired the NTJ, it was (and is) the New Republic, First Things, and the Reformed Journal (not necessarily in that order). The latter has not been in print for over a decade, but it was a refreshing, provocative and often wrong-headed outlet for considerations of Reformed faith and practice. 

The quotation below comes from an article that was part of a series on Reformed identity in American life: John J. Timmerman, “Whatever Happened to Sunday?” Feb. 1981.  It may come as close to an expression of Old Life piety as you can find.  It is Lord’s day-centric, logocentric, and supremely aware of the Christian life as a pilgrimage.  If only more Grand Rapidians could find this part of their Kuyperian selves. 

Sunday was church in Orange City, Iowa, in the first decades of the century. I suspect that is is so even now in the little pockets of piety that dot Northwest Iowa, though it can’t be as still in the town or in the homes as it was in my youth. There were three services, which I attended with simulated docility. The preacher delivered three sermons before his often critical sheep, dressed in a somber Prince Albert, sweating it out in August afternoons without air-conditioning before a whir of variegated hand-propelled fans. He spoke in these churches, some of them large, without the aid of electronic devices, and a voice of good timbre could be heard on the street through the open windows. There were always competitive babies in the crowd, quieted not by artful jouncing but by breast feeding. As the sermon pounded on, squirming little boys were pinched. Sometimes fractious older boys in the back seats were policed by elders. Dutch psalms were fervently sung while a lathering janitor pumped the bellows of the organ at 110 degrees. There was no choir – an irrelevant impertinence.

The heart of the service was the sermon; upon that the evaluation of the preacher and the determination of his ecclesiastical fortunes depended. Then, as it was well into the sixties, it was as rhetorically fixed as the terza rima. Apparently all texts were best analyzed and interpreted in terms of three points. I remember a preacher saying, “One more point and then we go home.” Whether the content was brilliant or mediocre, it was formulated in terms of an introduction, three divisions, and application. The three points were often chosen with care and memorably phrased. These pegs to remembrance enabled certain people to recall sermons accurately for years. A lady of eighty-eight wrote me recently saying about some sermons she had heard “I know the introduction and application he made and often talk about them.” She also gave the three points of several sermons she had remembered for fifty years. Such fixed rhetoric may seem wooden, bit its mnemonic helpfulness was striking. As a boy, of course, I had no interest in these sermons. I spent my time counting the pipes in the organ, the panes in the colored glass windows, watching the consistory up front, and daydreaming. I am glad that later I learned to appreciate the meticulous preparation, craftsmanship, and meditation that went into their making. Some of these older ministers operated on volubility, but others on a lot of mind and heart; not a few had style and some had class. . . .

Three services, three trips to church, three meals pretty well consumed the day. What time remained was to be used in a way compatible with the spiritual tone of the day. To many this all sounds like “a hard, hard, religion,” as well as something of a bore. Indeed, it took something out of one but it put something real into one also. The church was a sanctuary, a renewal of hope, a confirmation of faith. These people did not have easy, pleasure-filled lives. They had a profound sense of the mystery and misery of human existence. There were no protective barriers. I remember my mother crying over the deaths of little children. Children were sometimes marred by smallpox, weakened by scarlet fever, dead of diphtheria. Diseases now almost routinely cured carried off parents, leaving homes fatherless and motherless. Fearful accidents occurred on the farm. Hail, storm, and drought brought destruct to crops. But the death of the saints was precious in the sight of the Lord, and in the eye of the storm was the providence of God. How often these people prayed for a rainbow, how often they found a spiritual rainbow in the church where God spoke to them through his servants, and promised cure for all misery.

At that time and even into the sixties, there was a remarkable consensus as to the meaning and practices of Sunday. Although the Bible did not specify the number of services to be held on Sunday, congregations attended with notable faithfulness and did not appear to grow weary of that kind of well-doing. Even though the services in the earlier decades of the century were a surcease from loneliness on the empty prairie, a stay against loss of identity in a strange land, and the warm concourse of friends, these were not the reasons that brought them to church. What did bring them to church was a felt spiritual need and a sense of duty. They believed God wanted them to come as often as they could and that it was good for them to be here. That kind of consensus has been eroding for years, whether out of spiritual amplitude, secular diversions, boredom, or alienation. . . .

The consensus on Sunday behavior is also waning. Whereas in the early decades of the century, attendance at church three times was common, today attendance twice is lessening. The blue laws have almost vanished. If a member of my old church in Iowa had spun his Buick over to the Blackstone Cafe at Sioux City for a Sunday dinner of prime rib and cocktails, he would have been in danger of losing his membership; if one does that in Grand Rapids today he risks only losing his shirt. The old blue laws were based on the idea that the Sabbath is a “day of sacred assembly” and that “wherever you live, it is a Sabbath to the Lord.” The older generation thought God made the Sabbath for man to insure rest and spiritual growth, not to do what he wanted. They were uptight and possibly self-righteous about Sunday. The present generation is relaxed and self-righteous about it. . . .