Tag: Chuck Colson

Communicants, Siblings, Friends, and Others

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

When you have a comprehensive view (w-w) of the world, when you think that your faith informs (or should) everything you do, hard are those distinctions that 2k so readily supplies, like — this is the church so Christian rules apply, this is not the church so freedom applies.

This problem is no less challenging for Roman Catholics than for neo-Calvinists since both are in the comprehensiveness business of showing how faith relates to EVERYthing a Christian does. Cathleen Kaveny took the comprehensiveness and catholicity of Rome in an arresting direction when she accused Richard John Neuhaus and the First Things crowd of partisanship and undermining the bonds of Roman Catholic unity:

Some conservative Catholics have blamed Pope Francis for sowing division among the members of the Body of Christ. But the charge is more properly lodged against one of the heroes of conservative Catholicism: the late Richard John Neuhaus.

It was Neuhaus, after all, who advanced the view that conservative Roman Catholics have more in common with orthodox Jews and Evangelical Protestants than they do with progressive members of their own religious communities. In fact, that view was an operational premise of First Things magazine under his leadership. This approach is based on a thoroughly distorted view of religious realities and commitments.

Does honoring Jesus as the Son of God count as a commonality? Like their conservative counterparts, progressive Roman Catholics acknowledge the divinity of Jesus Christ, and find the interpretive key to the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament. Orthodox Jews do not—indeed, must not—treat Jesus as the Messiah foretold in the Book of Isaiah. It would be blasphemous for them to do so.

Does living in the grace imparted by the sacraments count as a commonality? Both progressive and conservative Roman Catholics believe that God’s grace is channeled through the seven sacraments. Many Evangelical Protestants do not have the same view of grace or the sacraments; they often view the Eucharist as a memorial of a past event, not a way of being present with Christ here and now.

In trying to find common ground with evangelicals, then, Neuhaus was not truly Roman Catholic but actually Protestant:

Ultimately, Neuhaus’s focus was on nurturing these commonalities in the American political context—he was building a political movement. For a variety of partially overlapping reasons, conservative Roman Catholics, Evangelical Protestants, and orthodox Jews were inclined to vote Republican in political elections. Along with George Weigel and Robert George, Neuhaus coached Republican politicians in Catholic-speak to win national elections. . . . But here’s the irony of Neuhaus’s project: in treating theological belief and commitment as mere instruments of political will, Neuhaus’s view of religion resonated more with Feuerbach, Marx, and Leo Strauss than with the church fathers. In separating his own church of the politically pure from the hoi polloi of the body of Christ, his ecclesiology better reflects Protestant sectarianism than Roman Catholicism.

For the record, I too took issue with Evangelicals and Catholics Together for putting politics ahead of theology and for locating Christian unity not in ecclesiastical contexts but in parachurch groupings.

But Rusty Reno didn’t particularly care for Kaveny’s shot at Neuhaus. And so he tried to justify finding fellowship among religious people who were political liberals and then got mugged by reality:

many of the founding figures who played such a prominent role in First Things, as well as early readers like me, came to some shared conclusions. We became less and less impressed with the modern conceit that ours is a time of the unprecedented. We became more and more convinced that our traditions contained an inherited wisdom—a divine revelation—that provides greater insight into the human condition than any modern method, mentality, or revolution. Again, in the magazine’s early years, it was an exciting and invigorating to find others who were coming to the same post-liberal conclusions, whether they were Jewish, Catholic, or Protestant.

That is mainly true but does not represent the nature of Evangelicals and Catholics Together. Otherwise, ECT should have been called Evangelicals and Liberal Protestants and Roman Catholics and Mormons and Jews and Stanley Hauerwas Together. But at least Reno recognizes different layers of commonality:

When it comes to many things that are important to me, I have more in common with friends than with my brother. But my brother’s still my brother. It in no way compromises the truth of our fraternal bond for me to link arms with those with whom I have more in common politically, intellectually, or even theologically. The same goes for the sacramental bond that units us in Christ.

That is more or less a 2k point. But a 2ker would not call a magazine about religion and public life First Things. It’s not elegant but Penultimate Things or Proximate Things or Common Things would work better.

That left Michael Sean Winters to settle the debate and he did so (in neo-Calvinist-friendly ways) by taking issue with Reno’s separation of life into different spheres:

There may be “other dimensions” as Reno notes, but surely, for the Christian, those other dimensions need to be related to “what matters most.” It was this dualism between the Catholic faith and Catholic morality that stalked Neuhaus’s writings and continues to afflict the journal he founded. This dualism not only colored Neuhaus’ judgment, but it kept much of his otherwise enjoyable controversial writings at a fairly superficial level. It also led him to overlook the failings of his own team, both in politics and in religion: His defense of the Iraq War and of Fr. Maciel were stains on Neuhaus’ intellectual project that deserve attention and explanation by those who champion him.

. . . Reno, too, puts his sacramental beliefs in one silo, and his moralizing in another, and never the two need challenge each other. That is not how Catholics think when we are thinking at our best.

Apparently, 2k thinking is a no-no for Roman Catholics as much as it is for neo-Calvinists. Everything belongs to God. Or the papacy has universal jurisdiction (which is a topic for discussion in its own right). Which makes it hard to justify solidarity with people of a different faith.

But if you limit that solidarity to the church and find all sorts of room for cooperation outside the church, problem solved. Why does that solution seem so impious?

Infallibility In Denial

Published on by D. G. Hart92 Comments

Here I thought we had entered a new era of warm relations between Protestants and Roman Catholics. We are almost twenty years from the first iteration of Evangelicals and Catholics Together. The architects of that project, Richard John Neuhaus and Chuck Colson have passed from the scene but the George brothers (in name only), Timothy and Robbie, have extended the spirit of culture war cooperation with the Manhattan Declaration. Add to mix Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom’s Is the Reformation Over? and you have a setting in which the lines dividing Rome, Geneva, Wittenburg, and Wheaton are increasingly fuzzy. That could be a reason for Protestants to convert to Rome since the differences aren’t great. But it could also be a reason to remain Protestant. If the differences aren’t significant, why bother putting up with bad liturgical music when you can keep the lousy praise band in your own congregation?

And then along comes the ex-Prots who write at Called to Communion to remind all the partyers that a curfew exists and, oh, by the way, they also called the cops if we don’t break up the revelry. CTC’s heavy handed insistence on older Roman Catholic verities is laudable in many respects but comes as a complete surprise to the world of Protestant-Roman Catholic relations. If some wonder why objections to CTC have been so pronounced at Old Life of late, the reason has something to do with how out of synch CTC seems to be with the rest of the Roman Catholic world and the vibe Protestants get from that Roman universe. Instead of telling us how much we share in common with them the way most Roman Catholics do these days, CTC is there to remind us how far Protestants fall short of the fullness of glory that is Rome. Like I say, this bracing splash of alcohol on the wound is welcome at a time when differences between Rome and Protestants look increasingly like personal preference.

At the same time, the other wrinkle in CTC’s project is how little they seem to notice that Rome is not a monolith of fidelity to the teachings of the pope, magisterium, and church councils. The Jesuits, Roman Catholic higher education in the United States, and the nuns are all examples of Roman Catholics out of sync with official church teaching and practice. But when you search around at CTC, you find more about problems among Reformed Protestants than you do about the nuns. Perhaps it is a function of a poor search engine, but if you want to know about the deficiencies of President Obama receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Notre Dame, you’re not going to find it readily at CTC.

CTC’s lack of attention to problems in the Roman Catholic Church has me wondering if CTCers’ insistence on infallibility in ways that would have made Benjamin Warfield’s head swim is responsible for this apparent hiding from Rome’s difficulties. Could it be that if you are so committed to an innerant church hierarchy, you’re predisposed deny errors in your communion?

To illustrate the point, I refer to the recent remarks at Old Life about development of doctrine and certain caricatures of Rome that may have surfaced. In one of my comments, I believe, I questioned the persuasiveness of an exegetical case for Rome’s view of justification since it didn’t seem to me that the Bible figures all that prominently in CTC defenses of Rome (minus Matt. 16:18 which is for CTCers what John 3:16 is for Free Will Baptists). Jason Stellman responded that this was a bit of a cheap shot since Roman Catholics care about the Bible do do exegesis. Only children who are ignorant make the mistake of saying that Roman Catholics don’t read and know their Bibles.

Well, that’s not what David Carlin says over at CatholiCity:

According to the poll, 25 percent of Evangelical Protestants read the Bible daily, as do 20 percent of other Protestants, while daily Bible-reading is done by only 7 percent of Catholics. Now this result didn’t bother me very much, since one can be very familiar with, and very greatly influenced by, a book without reading it on a daily basis. I myself don’t read the Bible daily; nor do I give a daily reading to Plato or Shakespeare; and it’s years since I read Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. Yet I know that all these writing have had a strong influence on the way I look at life and the world.

Far more disturbing was the poll result that showed that 44 percent of Catholics “rarely or never” read the Bible, while this is true of only 7 percent of Evangelicals and 13 percent of non-Evangelical Protestants. The level of religious vitality must be very low in a Christian church in which 44 percent of the membership almost never bothers to read the Bible.

Carlin explains this phenomenon by appealing to Trent, and part to the sacramental nature of the church:

All this changed, officially at least, at Vatican II, which dropped the Church’s 400-year-old “defensive mode of being.” Lay Catholics were now at long last given the green light to read the Bible; indeed, they were encouraged to read it. Yet today, nearly a half-century later, 44 percent of American Catholics “rarely or never” read the Bible, and only 7 percent read it on a daily basis. How can this be?

Part of the answer, of course, is inertia. Four centuries of a certain policy cannot be changed immediately overnight – any more than an aircraft carrier at sea can make a turn of 180 degrees on a dime. Another part of the answer is the sacramentalism of the Catholic Church: To save your soul, it is more important to participate in the sacraments than to read the Bible. But a third part of the answer is, alas, that the leadership of the Church (I mean its bishops and priests) have not stressed the importance of Bible-reading for shaping the Christian mind and heart.

Carlin’s point about Trent’s defensiveness on Bible reading is confirmed by an article in the old New Catholic Dictionary (1910) on Bible Reading by Laity (the date is important because this is a description of the Roman Catholic Church prior to Vatican II:

The Council strictly prohibited the reading of all heretical Latin versions, unless grave reasons necessitated their use. The Council itself did not forbid the reading of the new Catholic translations, although even these later fell under the ban of the Index Commission which Trent set up for the supervision of future legislation regarding the Bible. In 1559 the Commission forbade the use of certain Latin editions, as well as German, French, Spanish, Italian, and English vernacular vereions. Two centuries later, however, it modified the severity of this legislation by granting permission for the use of all versions translated by learned Catholic men, provided they contained annotations derived from the Fathers, and had the approval of the Holy See. Our present discipline grows out of the decree, “Officiorum ac Munerum,” of Leo XIII. This decree states that all vernacular versions, even those prepared by Catholic authors, are prohibited if they are not, on the one hand, approved by the Apostolic See, or, on the other hand, supplied with proper annotations and accompanied by episcopal approbation. However, it contains a provision whereby, for grave reasons, biblical and theological students may use non-Catholic editions as long as these do not attack Catholic dogma.

This does not prove that Roman Catholics can’t or should not do exegesis. The point instead is about the conservative Roman Catholics who are more intent on showing Protestantism’s errors than the problems in their own ecclesiastical home. And I cannot help but think that an emphasis on infallibility produces a culture in which denial is a habit of mind if not a w-w.

Why Exclude Walter and the Dude?

Published on by D. G. Hart24 Comments

Viewers of “The Big Lebowski” may well remember one of many memorable lines from Walter Sobchak. This one comes in the context of a discussion with Donny about the merits of nihilism. Walter will have none of an outlook that believes in nothing. As he explains to Donny, “Say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”

That line came to mind when reading a recent Christianity Today editorial about Chuck Colson and his efforts to unite Roman Catholics and Evangelicals in an Abraham-Kuyper like coalition to oppose “spiritual nihilism.”

Colson, like Kuyper, was concerned about the effects of modernism and later postmodernism on contemporary culture. And like Kuyper, he believed that unless believers are equipped with the critical tools of worldview thinking, they are unlikely to make any headway in redeeming culture.

When Colson and Richard John Neuhaus formed Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT), their new Protestant-Catholic initiative, the group focused its initial statement on the common mission of the church in the third millennium. That mission, their 1994 document said, involved contending together “against all that opposes Christ and his cause.” In “developed societies,” that included “widespread secularization” that had descended “into a moral, intellectual, and spiritual nihilism that denies not only the One who is the Truth but the very idea of truth itself.”

Within the framework of Kuyper’s vision, this was an excellent summary of what Protestants and Catholics needed to address together.

As commendable as it may be for Christians to combat nihilism, why would this be a project that would exclude religiously conflicted folks like the Dude’s good friend and bowling team member, Walter? Lots of people who are not Christians oppose nihilism. Some of them are Christian. Some are Muslim. Some are Mormon. Some profess no God. If you want to oppose nihilism, then why not broaden the tent?

It could be that Christians think they alone have the true basis for a proper opposition. Or it could be that “spiritual nihilism” is different from Karl Hungus’ version of nihilism. But it does seem to me to be a form of shooting yourself in the foot when you make a common cultural cause into a matter of the gospel of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Postscript: are neo-Calvinists really comfortable with Colson carrying the water for Kuyper’s legacy?

The Law Coalition

Published on by D. G. Hart42 Comments

While working on a talk for a conference last week hosted and attended by academic conservatives, I revisited the Manhattan Declaration. My point was that so many who think themselves conservative think they also take religion seriously by injecting faith into public affairs. But what ends up happening most often is that the complexities and depth of faith are sacrificed for the sake of a common cause, and that commonality is almost exclusively moral and comes from the Second Table of the Decalogue. Listen, for instance, to the way that the Manhattan Declaration’s writers (and the Baylys and Rabbi Bret may well want to follow along) turn the sanctity of human life, traditional marriage, and religious liberty into “the Gospel.”

We are Christians who have joined together across historic lines of ecclesial differences to affirm our right—and, more importantly, to embrace our obligation—to speak and act in defense of these truths. We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence. It is our duty to proclaim the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in its fullness, both in season and out of season. May God help us not to fail in that duty.

Which gospel would that be exactly? The one professed by Southern Baptists, Roman Catholics, or Eastern Orthodox? J. Gresham Machen, in one of the quotations I used recently, might have a very different understanding of such joint endeavors:

I am bound to say that the kind of discussion which is irritating to me is the discussion which begins by begging the questino and then pretensd to be in the interests of peace. I should be guilty of such a method if I should say to a Roman Catholic, for example, wthat we can come together with him because forms and ceremonies like the mass and membership in a certain definite organization are, of course, matters of secondary importance – if I should say to him that he can go on being a good Cathoilc and I can go on being a good Protestant and yet we can unite on comon Christian basis. If I should talk in that way, I should show myself guilty of the crassest narrowness of mind, for I should be shoing that I had never taken the slightest trouble to understand the Roman Catholic point of view. If I had taken that trouble, I should have come to see plainly that what I should be doing is not to seek common ground between the roman Catholic and myself but simply to ask the Roman Catholic to become a Protestant and give up evertyhing that he holds most dear.

In other words, if Trent still matters, or the the Westminster Confession still matters, the signers of the Manhattan Declaration were in serious denial about the gospel.

What is also important to observe, though, is that they are also in mega-denial. For the law that they affirm, merely calling it the gospel, is only a few brief rules outlined in Scripture. For starters, God’s law also says a fair amount about worship and church polity that again would drive Roman Catholics and Protestants not together but apart — can you say the Mass, or how about apostolic succession? (The same can be asked of the Gospel Coalition — are they ignoring the means of grace, or ecclesiology in order to affirm a meager understanding of the gospel?)

So why is it conservative to affirm the law as revealed in holy writ during public debates if you don’t affirm all of the law? And how conservative can it be to rename the law “gospel”? This is not conservative. It is actually liberal and may border on being modernist.

But saying so makes you an antinomian and a secularist? Shazam!

Two Kingdom Tuesday: Doug Wilson Gets It More Than Chuck Colson

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

The latter has written a piece for Christianity Today in which he argues that Christian creeds should inform the U.S. search for a national identity:

I believe, then, that for national identity to be salient in the midst of our changing society, we need to promote a recommitment to our creeds, a respect for American history, and a proper role of patriotism, rooted in love of neighbor. Our founders’ Judeo-Christian heritage helped produce a culture in which moral responsibility, transcendent ethical principles, and the dignity of all people could flourish—a culture in which our creedal values made sense. This is why our role as leaven within society is so important, and why we must continue to bring a biblical influence to the public square, reinvigorating society.

As we do so, we must guard against the easy tendency to embrace xenophobic notions or fall into the equally perilous trap of promoting subcultural identities over national identity. People will not live with, let alone die for, a nation that has abandoned its religious moorings and adopted a creed that suggests we simply live together in cosmopolitan bliss. Millions of us, however, have been willing to live and die for beliefs rooted in our deepest convictions about God and man—convictions that were expressed so well in the stirring words of our national creed, the Declaration of Independence.

So where exactly does this leave Mormons and Jews? I understand why Colson, one of the co-hatchers of Evangelicals and Catholics Together, would not think that Protestant creeds might make life difficult for Roman Catholics. But are our creeds so generic that the U.S. can use them for a political identity that embraces all faith? I don’t think so!

Meanwhile, Doug Wilson shows that he understands one of the reasons for a 2k theology. In this video he answers a question about the propriety of having a U.S. flag in church or reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Ask Doug: American Flag and the Pledge of Allegiance in Church? from Canon Wired on Vimeo.

I guess Wilson is not fully comfortable with 2k theology. Given what he’s said in defense of Christendom, I suspect that if Christendom or Constantinople had flags he might allow them in church – these are empires big enough to reflect the bigness of Jesus’ reign. So he is likely still unwilling to accept a spiritual rule for Christ’s redemptive kingship in this age of redemptive history. But this is a step in the right direction.