Tag: Bob Godfrey

Escondido Magic

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

For all with blogs to read, a wonderful time of unanimity among neo-Cals, 2kers, theonomists, experimental Calvinists, and neo-Turretinis has prevailed. In the presence of a common foe — infallible popes, antiquity without apostles or prophets, and overdetermined historical narratives — Reformed partisans are breaking bread on various blogs, all singing in one Protestant voice.

For such a time as this, readers of Old Life, both friendly and hostile, may be inclined to give ear to an interview that Scott Clark did with the authors of the new history of Westminster Seminary California — W. Robert Godfrey and yours truly (all about me). The book is entitled A New Old School and if readers follow the links I am fairly confident they will find their way to a page where a purchase would be in order.

Let lions lie down with lambs.

Love that Bob

Published on by D. G. Hart38 Comments

In his new book on the so-called Escondido theology, John Frame tries to establish a link between the two-kingdom views of certain authors and Meredith Kline, who taught at Westminster California for almost two decades. This analysis fails in two respects. The first is that I, whom Frame includes as an Escondido “theologian,” never studied with Kline. If truth be told, I’m still only about one-fifth of the way through Kingdom Prologue (did someone say “fifth”?).

The other reason why Frame’s analysis fails is that he neglects the real source of Westminster California’s alleged uniqueness, namely, its president, W. Robert Godfrey. Bob Godfrey was Old School before any of us knew what Old School was and even before Bob himself began to lecture on the American church. He introduced his students to strands of Reformed Protestantism that were older than J. Gresham Machen and Abraham Kuyper. Students who heard his lectures on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became aware of a world of topics and battles that had been vital to the Reformed churches. And some of those students, the Escondido “theologians” especially, learned from those lectures and tried to reappropriate for the contemporary church the faith and practice of the historic Reformed and Presbyterian churches. Most students were aware that some adjustments would have to be made. We cannot go directly to 1560 Geneva (we can’t have the state execute idolaters). But we also knew that Machen and Kuyper were not the last word on what it meant to be Reformed.

This is an important perspective to keep in mind — and which Frame entirely ignores — because so many of the hits upon Westminster California have come from people who are shocked, just shocked, to learn that some might call themselves Reformed who do not follow lock step with recent understandings of Reformed Protestantism. So if someone sounds different from Gaffin or Murray on union — horrors! — even if they can find historic Reformed sources that don’t say it the same way as Westminster Seminary theologians, they aren’t Reformed. Or if someone discovers that the doctrine of republication was taught and developed among older Reformed theologians, they will need to suffer for departing from Murray. If someone notes that Reformed churches did not believe in “every member ministry” but had a high view of pastoral office and the duties of ministers, they must be faulted for not following the advances of Jack Miller and Tim Keller. If someone brings up the fact that Reformed Protestants only sang psalms and did not tolerate special music, well they must be trouble makers because all of our churches today now sing hymns and sometimes have choirs. If someone finds that justification was more important than union in the development of Reformed soteriology during the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries, well they must be “Lutheran” because they are not following the faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary. Or if someone learns that Calvin and Rutherford did not construe the nature of the church, the state, and Christ’s kingdom the way Kuyper did, then they must be in error because Kuyper set the standard for all Reformed political reflection.

In other words, Bob Godfrey taught his students to read the past not by looking at the present and then cherry picking historical precedents, but by judging the present in the light of the past. He unlocked a door that allowed students to see arguments and practices that sometimes nineteenth- and twentieth-century conservative Reformed churchmen had themselves neglected or forgotten. This is not to say that Bob Godfrey is to blame for the Escondido Theology. It is to say that he deserves credit for rediscovering an older part of the Reformed heritage that his students have tried to recover for the contemporary church. And it is important to see that the opposition to Godfrey’s students comes most often from people who regard the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as THE AGE of Reformed orthodoxy.

It's All About Bob

Published on by D. G. Hart2 Comments

Godfrey that is. But actually, it’s also about Aimee and Updike. It in this case is Always Reformed: Essays in Honor of W. Robert Godfrey, the festschrift to honor Westminster California’s lovely and talented president (just released and available at the WSC bookstore). As readers may wonder after perusing the table of contents, when was the last time that a festschrift included chapters not only on Aimee Semple McPherson and pneumatology, but also on Reformed dogmatics and the Lord’s Supper? This is a book sure to appeal to Wesleyans and Reformed.

See what’s inside:

Preface: Our Man Godfrey—R. Scott Clark

I. Historical

1. Christology and Pneumatology: John Calvin, the Theologian of the Holy Spirit—Sinclair B. Ferguson

2. Make War No More? The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of J. Gresham Machen’s Warrior Children—D. G. Hart

3. God as Absolute and Relative, Necessary, Free, and Contingent: the d Intra-Ad Extra Movement of Seventeenth-Century Reformed Language About God—Richard A. Muller

4. “Magic and Noise:” Reformed Christianity in Sister’s America—R. Scott Clark

5. Karl Barth and Modern Protestantism: The Radical Impulse—Ryan Glomsrud

II. Theological

6. Reformed and Always Reforming—Michael S. Horton

7. Calvin, Kuyper, and “Christian Culture”—David VanDrunen

8. History and Exegesis: The Interpretation of Romans 7:14–25 from Erasmus to Arminius—Joel E. Kim

9. John Updike’s Christian America—John R. Muether

III. Ecclesiastical

10. The Reformation, Luther, and the Modern Struggle for the Gospel—R. C. Sproul

11. The Reformation of the Supper—Kim Riddlebarger

12. Preaching the Doctrine of Regeneration in a Christian Congregation— Hywel R. Jones

13. Integration, Disintegration, and Reintegration: A Preliminary History of the United Reformed Churches in North America—Cornelis P. Venema

14. Epilogue: The Whole Counsel of God: Courageous Calvinism for a New Century—W. Robert Godfrey

Confession of Faith or Health Care Legislation?

Published on by D. G. Hart23 Comments

My confession of faith is not the Westminster Confession. It is the confession of my communion, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Of course, our confession bears many resemblances to the Westminster Confession. But if folks look at the publication of our confession, neatly produced by the Committee on Christian Education, it reads, the “Confession of Faith and Catechisms of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church with Proof Texts” (the proof texts are especially all the OPC’s). Again, the OPC did rely upon standards handed down from the Westminster Divines, adopted by the Scottish Kirk, and then in 1729 by the Synod of Philadelphia for the communion that was taking shape in the British colonies in North America. Still, when OPC officers subscribe our confession and catechisms, they are embracing documents that are different from those produced during the 1640s, and also with different understandings (because of the development of history) of several of the doctrines taught.

Many of the controversies in our current setting stem from originalists who insist that the contemporary church has abandoned the original sense of the Standards, and those who seek a different elaboration of Reformed theology. I myself find that I am on different sides of this debate, on the one hand wanting to find room for genuine theological developments within our communions, and on the other, realizing the folly and danger that usually attends adapting to the times.

Jason Stellman wants to break through the impasse and proposes the writing of a new confession. At his blog he writes:

Here’s where a new confession comes in. What is needed is the ability to avoid the task of divining the ever-elusive “system of doctrine,” the confession-within-the-confession, the bits and pieces of our doctrinal standards that really matter. But as long as we theoretically subscribe to the Westminster Confession and Catechisms but allow countless exceptions to be taken to them, we leave ourselves no choice but to scratch our heads over whether things like refraining from recreation on the Sabbath and 6/24 creation are intrinsic to the system. My proposal is simply that if we all agree that something is not intrinsic to the system, then why not omit it altogether? Then, once we have identified what our system of doctrine actually is, we can confess it strictly and with confidence. It is just this kind of approach—one that calls for strict subscription to the system of doctrine but allows laxity on incidental matters—that could potentially be the impetus for an ecumenical Reformed church consisting of believers from British Presbyterian and Continental Reformed backgrounds.

Maybe it comes from having studied with Scott Clark, but Stellman has a point. And though I can’t find it at Scott’s blog, he has for many years been maintaining that we need a new confession of faith, one that reflects both the tradition and the developments in theology since 1647. And while I can’t identify precisely the points of the argument, I think it runs something like this: if we continue to hold creeds and catechisms written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they run the risk of functioning like dictionaries – reference works we simply pull off the shelf when an ordination exam comes along or when going to a trial, but seldom used in the day-to-day life of a congregation and its broader communion. Richard Muller has proposed a helpful remedy to this situation, one that makes our adopted creeds and confessions part of the warp and woof of church life (in corporate and family worship, and in member’s piety).

But another way to give us more ownership of our confessional standards is to write a new one.

The more I study the history of the Reformed churches, the more sense this proposal makes. The Westminster Assembly was an incredibly complicated affair, and the issues before that body are virtually unknown to contemporary readers (unless you’re Chad Van Dixhoorn). For instance, here is what Philip Benedict writes about the Divines:

The majority of the delegates who favored a presbyterial-synodal form of church government worked to bring the others around to their position by demonstrating the form’s biblical basis point by point.; but the exegesis proved a time-consuming, contentious business. As the divines puzzled over Scripture, the clash of arms realigned the political situation. The New Model Army proved more successful that the Scottish forces in the warfare against the king and did a better job of claiming credit for joint victories. As the army’s power increased, the Independents and Erastians within the assembly grew more assertive and forces the initiation of regular consultations with Parliament, which was less sympathetic to clerical independence. As in the cities of Germany and Switzerland in the first century of the Reformation, the issue of who controlled excommunication became a bone of contention. . . . The new form of church government for England finally decided upon in conjunction with Parliament and spelled out in measure of August 1645 and March 1646 approximated the presbyterial-synodal churches of Scotland, France, and the Netherlands . . . . But it contained major compromises with Erastian and congregationalist concerns . . . . These accommodations displeased the Scottish envoys, who castigated the new system as a “lame Erastian presbytery.”(Benedict, pp. 400-401)

Aside from questions of church polity and ecclesiastical authority, England was also facing antinomianism and neo-nomianism churning out of sixteenth-century debates over predestination. Puritan practical divinity was also in the air, as were debates over prayer books and liturgical forms. The point is that the confession can be read as a historical document to see what was animating Reformed English and Scottish churchmen in the seventeenth century. In fact, it needs to be read this way if it is going to function as a reliable standard (has anyone heard of grammatical-historical exegesis?). And as a state-appointed committee, its documents can also be read like Obama’s recent health care provision – a statement that bears all the compromises that come with politics, which is the art of compromise.

But such historical investigation and political intrigue is a long way from embracing the Westminster Confession as our own confession of faith. For that reason, I do believe that Stellman and Clark are on to something. Maybe if the NAPARC churches ever adopted Bob Godfrey’s proposal for a federated denomination of Reformed churches, their first item of business would be to call an assembly to write a Reformed confession for the twenty-first century.

If Only Kuyperians Were As Reasonable as Godfrey

Published on by D. G. Hart53 Comments

Over at Confessional Outhouse, RubeRad (what’s up with those names?) has a quotation from Bob Godfrey’s address at the Westminster California conference on Christ and culture. Here it is:

As is often true in the history of the church, we [Kuyperians and 2K-ers] may not all perfectly agree what the Bible says, but I think we’re all agreed with the principle…The Bible is authoritative in everything that it says, about everything that it talks about. But I think we are also all agreed that the Bible, while authoritative in everything that it talks about, is not exhaustive in everything it talks about. The Bible tells us some things about history, but it doesn’t tell us everything about history. I believe it tell us some things about geology, but I don’t think it tells us everything about geology. I would suggest that it’s really only in three areas that we can say … it also speaks comprehensively, or completely, or exhaustively; we as Reformed Christians are committed to the proposition that that everything we need to know about doctrine and salvation is told to us completely in the Bible. … Secondly, we would say that the Bible is exhaustive in what it teaches us about worship. … And thirdly, the Bible tells us all we need to know about the Church and its government. … But I think we can probably agree as well, whatever our approach to Christ and culture, that the Bible does not speak exhaustively about politics. It says a lot of things about politics, it says a lot of things that are relevant to politics, but I don’t think any of us would want to argue that the Bible tells us absolutely everything we need to know about politics. Does the Bible even indisputably teach us whether we ought to have a democracy, or an aristocracy, or a monarchy? John Calvin says it doesn’t. … I don’t think anybody … would want to argue that every aspect of a platform proposed for a civil election could be derived from the Bible; I don’t think anyone would argue that. … So the Bible is authoritative in all that it says, but it doesn’t say everything about anything except salvation, worship, and church government.

I for one do not know a single advocate of two kingdom theology who would not affirm this. And the good thing about this statement is that it keeps first things first — doctrine, worship, and polity — while allowing for differences on other matters because the Bible itself does not pin down those other areas of human endeavor.

What is odd about RubeRad’s post is that he follows up Godfrey’s quotation with one from John Frame, that RubeRad regards as compatible:

Christians sometimes say that Scripture is sufficient for religion, or preaching, or theology, but not for auto repairs, plumbing, animal husbandry, dentistry, and so forth. And of course many argue that it is not sufficient for science, philosophy, or even ethics. That is to miss an important point. Certainly Scripture contains more specific information relevant to theology than to dentistry. But sufficiency in the present context is not sufficiency of specific information but sufficiency of divine words. Scripture contains divine words sufficient for all of life. It has all the divine words that the plumber needs, and all the divine words that the theologian needs. So it is just as sufficient for plumbing as it is for theology. And in that sense it is sufficient for science and ethics as well.

This strikes me as the typical Frame theological method of taking an inch and turning it into a mile. So people will agree with the idea that divine words are sufficient, some divine words apply to plumbing, and — voila — the Bible becomes as sufficient for plumbing as for theology. Hello!??! Do plumbers really need to study the Bible to plumb the way that theologians do to understand God and his revelation? As Fred Willard’s character in Waiting for Guffman said, “I don’t think sooooo.”

Either way, if more Reformed folks would follow Godfrey’s counsel than Frame’s logic, we might actually find that two-kingdom theology is not radical and that Kuyperian rhetoric is often bloated. Can we get a little reason around here?

"Office Hours" at Westminster California

Published on by D. G. Hart1 Comment

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.