Doug Wilson joins the Bayly Bros in heaping scorn on our good friend Scott Clark and the case for recovering the Reformed confessions. To Doug’s credit, he avoids the vituperative edge that characterizes the Baylys’ outbursts.
What unites Wilson and the Brothers Bayly in their criticism of Clark, apart from disdain for Meredith Kline, mind you, one of the true geniuses of twentieth-century Reformed Christianity, is nostalgia for Geneva. Of course, this is not the Geneva that sent Castellio packing or Servetus to the flames – well, it is, but most contemporary pining for Geneva manages to overlook the downside of Constantianism even when practiced by Reformer pastors.
Wilson is writing in response to a piece that Clark did for Table Talk on what evangelicals should expect from a Reformed church. Clark tries to cushion the blow that might come from the doctrinal, polity, and liturgical trappings that disorient the average born-again Christian. When Clark explains that “confessional churches are isolated from both the old liberal mainline and the revivalist traditions†and so offer an alternative to liberal and evangelical Protestantism, Wilson goes off.
First, Wilson laments Clark’s isolationism. Not only are Reformed confessionalists separated from evangelicals and liberals, but also “from the cultural potency of Reformed theology and piety.†This is lamentable because for Wilson, the Reformed theology that he has read and studied “built a great civilization.†In contrast, Clark’s brand of Reformed theology, that of “the truncated brethren,†“would have trouble building a taco stand.â€
Wilson also takes exception to Clark’s claim that confessional churches today approximate the churches of the sixteenth century more than other Protestant congregations. For Wilson, this is patently untrue because the sixteenth-century Reformed churches were actually Reformed cities – that is, they were more than merely religious institutions. They were civil polities where supposedly Calvinism shaped all of Geneva’s or Strasbourg’s or Edinburgh’s life (tell that to the magistrates who stuck their neck out against the Holy Roman Empire and hired the Reformed pastors). This suggests that Wilson regards Reformed Protestantism as a way of taking names and kicking butt.
Furthermore, when Clark claims that evangelicals coming to Reformed churches will need time to acclimate to the new spiritual environment, Wilson retorts that Clark has the picture “exactly backwards†because Clark’s otherworldly version of the Reformed faith turns out to be warmed over evangelicalism (read: pietism). According to Wilson:
As an evangelical, and the son of an evangelical, allow me to give my testimony. I was part of the exodus from pop evangelicalism (not historic evangelicalism). I was sick of the cultural irrelevance and impotence of “believe in Jesus, go to Heaven when you die.†I was sick of a pietism that couldn’t find its way out of the prayer closet. I wanted to stop confessing that Jesus was Lord of an invisible seventeenth dimension somewhere. Why not here? Why not now? It was a long story, but the trail to historic evangelicalism, God-honoring worship, and a culturally potent and world transforming faith led me straight to the Reformed faith — the same faith that John Calvin and his successors confessed. Calvin preached to milkmaids and Calvin wrote letters to princes. Calvin drafted catechisms, and he drafted ordinances for the city council. Calvin thought that the idea of a civil society without enforcement of the first table of the law was “preposterous.” Calvin was a loyal son of Christendom, as am I.
It is remarkable that Wilson would seemingly dismiss the idea of people going to heaven, unless he thinks that this world is more than a foretaste but an actual embodiment of the world to come. I mean, people who milk cows to the glory of God still die, at which point the realities of the after life become fairly pressing compared to a Reformed way to pasteurize milk.
Also odd is Wilson’s sleight of hand regarding “pop†and “historic†evangelicalism. My own testimony (both from experience and study) instructs me that appeals to historic evangelicalism generally depend less on historical realities and more to the point the appellant is trying to make. Does Wilson really mean to suggest that Clark has more in common with Joel Osteen than Carl Henry? Let me testify again and say that I’ve spent time with Clark and know that his locks cannot compete with Osteen’s.
But the really arresting aspect of Wilson’s critique of Clark is the idea that cultural relevance and effective change of this world is what characterizes Reformed Christianity. I get it that post-Niebuhr and post-Kuyper Wilson’s brand of transformationalism is par for the course. But what is shocking is the conceit that Reformed are more effective than evangelicals in changing things.
The history of Protestantism in the United States shows that the groups that were most influential in creating the Protestant establishment and its many institutions, along with a civil religion that made the greatest nation on God’s green earth unfriendly to Roman Catholics, Jews, Mormons, and other forms of infidelity, were those evangelicals like Charles Finney and Lyman Beecher, or the ecumenical and liberal Protestants like Josiah Strong and Reinhold Niebuhr. Funny how Calvinism did not characterize those influential voices.
The reason for evangelicalism’s can-do body (as well as spirit) has to do with the inherently activistic and this-worldly faith of born-again Protestantism. Here I am reminded of Mark Noll’s response to a paper by Nick Wolsterstorff about the need for evangelicals to become more engaged in cultural and social matters. Noll said that telling evangelicals to be more active was like pointing an addict to dope.
So Doug Wilson may be the real evangelical. He may be more culturally relevant and effective than Clark and other two-kingdom proponents, though I hear that even in Moscow, Idaho the work of cultural clean up is not perhaps a model for taking on the rest of the nation, globe, or cosmos. Granted, if Wilson can rid the United States of automobiles, Walmart, and illegal drugs, I won’t complain. But I would ask that he put church reform higher on his list. All the infidelity among churches that claim to be Christian (even some Reformed communions) certainly appears to be a matter of greater alarm than getting non-believers to conform outwardly to the manners and customs of Credenda Agenda ‘s readers.
Which means that if Wilson think’s Reformed confessionalism’s dualism is bad ju ju, his works righteousness is bad do do (is the works righteousness of do doism ever good?).
Old Life 