Tag: culture wars

Without 2K It's All A Muddle

Published on by D. G. Hart78 Comments

The response to last week’s post about the similarities between the religious right and political Islam is in (at least from the person who inspired the comparison) and it seems to be to deny the point about the ways in which Christians and Muslims object to secular society simply by stamping feet harder and louder. Bill Evans is back with this rejoinder (though it is not all about me):

Some are opposed to Christian political involvement on theological grounds. Here we think of the current proponents in Reformed circles of the so-called “two-kingdoms” doctrine (2K). According to this way of thinking, Christians have no business involving themselves as Christians in the political process, nor of proclaiming that there is a Christian position on the issues of the day. Such political activity, it is argued, fails to recognize the essentially spiritual mission of the Church, and to acknowledge that the task of the Church is to prepare people for the hereafter, not to work for political or social transformation. Some 2K advocates (e.g., here) have recently upped the rhetorical ante, suggesting that there is no essential difference between Christians who seek cultural transformation and Muslims seeking to impose Sharia law.

Although my main point here is not to provide an extended critique of current Reformed 2K thinking, I do have significant reservations about it. I tend to agree with the standard objections—that it has rather little connection to the two-kingdoms theme in Calvin and the earlier Reformed tradition (Calvin certainly thought that Geneva should be governed in accordance with broadly Christian principles), and that it confuses the Kingdom of God and the Church (biblically speaking, the Kingdom involves the Church but is not coextensive with it). Moreover, its working assumption that there is no middle ground of principled pluralism between theocracy and 2K is certainly open to question, and I sense that what traction 2K is getting stems largely from the fact that it provides a theological fig leaf for the evangelical culture-war fatigue referenced earlier.

Not to be missed is that Evans’ main point is that Christians have an obligation to engage the culture war (say, hello to Abraham Kuyper):

Simply put, a refusal to engage the cultural and political issues of the day is no longer an option for thoughtful conservative Christians in America. The battle has been forced upon us. Reasons for this have to do with current political realities, especially the wholesale shift of administrative power to a technocratic elite with a rather clear progressive social agenda. Wesley J. Smith of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism has recently explored this development in an insightful article in The Weekly Standard. Smith writes, “Liberals today seek to create a stable, and what they perceive to be a socially just, society via rule by experts—in which most of the activities of society are micromanaged by technocrats for the economic and social benefit of the whole. In other words, social democracy without the messiness of democracy, like the European Union’s rule-by-bureaucrats-in-Brussels. This is the ‘fundamental transformation’ that President Obama seeks to implement in this country.” . . . If Smith is correct, and I think he is, culturally conservative religion and religious believers are in the crosshairs of these secular, culturally progressive technocratic elites.

This is a remarkable misreading of 2k and American politics. First the theology bit.

Evans, who is a graduate of Westminster Theological Seminary, should know something about J. Gresham Machen who advocated the church staying out of politics (a 2k view) but then turned around and testified before Congress against the Department of Education, for instance. The lesson Machen taught me at least is that 2k is not opposed to Christian political involvement. What 2k opposes is the blurring of categories and confusion of arguments that so often afflicts Christians who either want to redeem the world or fear the world is out to get them. What is more, 2k actually follows the categories supplied by Reformed orthodoxy, such as the Westminster Confession.

Notice that within the Confession Christian involvement in politics has three possible expressions — believers, church officers, and Christians who hold political office.

On the involvement of Christians: It is lawful for Christians to accept and execute the office of a magistrate, when called thereunto: in the managing whereof, as they ought especially to maintain piety, justice, and peace, according to the wholesome laws of each commonwealth; so, for that end, they may lawfully, now under the new testament, wage war, upon just and necessary occasion. (23.2)

On the involvement of church officers as members of assemblies (and all Presbyterian pastors are members of presbyteries, not congregations): Synods and councils are to handle, or conclude nothing, but that which is ecclesiastical: and are not to intermeddle with civil affairs which concern the commonwealth, unless by way of humble petition in cases extraordinary; or, by way of advice, for satisfaction of conscience, if they be thereunto required by the civil magistrate. (31.4)

On the involvement of the magistrate, well here you may get a difference of opinion, but the revised confession says: It is the duty of civil magistrates to protect the person and good name of all their people, in such an effectual manner as that no person be suffered, either upon pretense of religion or of infidelity, to offer any indignity, violence, abuse, or injury to any other person whatsoever: and to take order, that all religious and ecclesiastical assemblies be held without molestation or disturbance. (23.3)

I believe this would apply to Christian magistrates protecting Muslims even though Islam is not Christian. Even the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, for which Evans works (at Erskine Seminary) allows the possibility of Christian magistrates in a secular country protecting Muslims:

Christian magistrates, as such, in a Christian country, are bound to promote the Christian religion, as the most valuable interest of their subjects, by all such means as are not inconsistent with civil rights; and do not imply an interference with the policy of the church, which is the free and independent kingdom of the Redeemer; nor an assumption of dominion over conscience. (23.3 ARPC Confession of Faith)

Since the United States is not a Christian country (just ask the Covenanters), the part about promoting the Christian religion is off.

What this adds up to is that 2k is once again tried and true according to the confessional heritage of the Reformed churches. I don’t suppose that Evans faults 2k for teaching that Christians may participate in politics (whether we turn into a Kuyperian holy duty is another matter but that sacred cause of politics is not something that Reformed Christians have adopted as part of their confession). Evans may disagree with 2k for arguing that churches should not meddle in politics. But that’s an issue he should likely take up with the Westminster Divines.

Perhaps the real disagreement comes over the nature of the magistrate. Here comes the political part of the post. Again, I wish that 2k’s critics would just once notice how practically all of the Reformed churches, liberal and conservative, have revised the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century chapters on the duties of the civil magistrate. But let’s go one step farther. Let’s say that Evans wants the kind of magistrate taught by the Westminster Divines, the one who can call councils and synods, be present at them, insure that they follow the word of God in Constantine like fashion, not to mention have the power to abolish heresies and blasphemies. If that is the kind of magistrate Evans wants, isn’t that what he has with today’s “technocratic elite” who are increasingly regulating more and more aspects of human life? Of course, the problem for him is that today’s politicians are not Christian and are not implementing Christian orthodoxy and morality. But if his fear is of a powerful state that can interfere with all parts of our affairs, wouldn’t the magistrate envisioned by the original Westminster Confession of Faith be the kind of big government that Evans believes Christians should oppose?

This is why if you want small government you should spend more time reading not the Bible but the debates between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists. The Bible has virtually nothing to say directly to check and balances, constitutions, executives, legislatures, and judiciaries. But the framers of the U.S. Constitution and their critics did.

2k gives a better reason to oppose the technocratic elites than Evans’ dismissal of 2k does on the way to a call for culture war (jihad?). It frees Christians to take their cues politically from non-believers. Evans appears to be left with either the Bible or the sixteenth-century Constantinian order which give him no grounds for a constitutional republic. Aside from a different religion, how is that different from political Islam?

Who's Afraid of the Means of Grace?

Published on by D. G. Hart108 Comments

Well, Dr. K. has done it. His interminable review of VanDrunen’s Natural Law and Two Kingdoms has terminated and is now available as a booklet, free to anyone who cares to download it (even if you don’t have a w-w). I have heard of review essays, not review books.

Of late the good doctor seems to be backing away from some of his fear mongering. He wants to promote a “reasoned” discussion of 2k. He even tries to credit 2kers with some positive contributions. The latter is evident in the following quotation from this book:

Numerous fears can lead us to a fear of engagement with today’s culture. Fear of worldliness, fear of losing our very souls, fear of accommodation, fear of losing our children. Our NL2K friends are rightly trying to warn us against triumphalism—thinking and acting as though we are bringing in the kingdom of God. They seek properly to warn us against biblicism—throwing Bible verses at people, at issues, at opponents without regard for careful interpretation and proper use of Scripture. They seek passionately to warn us against devaluing the institutional church—minimizing worship, denigrating the means of grace, and falling for the religious gimmickry used for marketing today’s religious associations that go by the name “church.”

But fear can never be the source of power. Only faith can provide power.

Here Dr. K. misidentifies the fear associated with 2k. The 2kers I know are not afraid of engaging the culture. We do so daily in the variety of callings God has granted. The fears that lurk around 2k are those of its critics who seem to be afraid that the kingdom will not come without the culture wars or the redemption of “all things.” Surely, neo-Calvinists of Dr. K.’s stripe would have us believe, Christians can do more to contend against the forces of evil than by simply going to church, worshiping God, attending the means of grace.

In point of fact, the gates of hell will not prevail against word, sacraments, prayer, discipline, and offerings. Saddam Husseins come and J. S. Bachs go. 2kers are confident (though doubts afflict us all) that God’s word will abide. It is 2k’s critics who can’t seem to fathom that God is prevailing even when his people do not appear to be, as if they have not read or reflected on that Word.

Old Life's 40-Day Prayer Vigil

Published on by D. G. Hart20 Comments

I read over at the Co-Allies site how the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) and the North American Mission Board (NAMB) of the Southern Baptist Convention are partnering to encourage Christians to pray for 40 days leading up to the U.S. presidential election this coming Fall (September 26th to November 4th). For some reason the link at TGC is dead even though the 40/40 Prayer Vigil link is not. Here is the rationale behind this initiative:

Dear Friend in Christ, we are delighted that you will join us in prayer for spiritual revival and national renewal. Our nation is in need of both. Jesus declared that His followers are the salt of the earth and the light of the world (Matthew 5:13-16). We must become engaged in this battle for our nation’s soul. However, until as Christians we experience revival in our own lives, it will be extremely difficult to restore our nation’s moral foundations.

The battle for our nation’s soul is not just about voting booths. This is first and foremost a spiritual contest. A spiritual battle is being waged
across our nation, and it must be met first of all with spiritual weapons. God’s people must pray for a great outpouring of God’s Spirit on them,
the churches, and the nation. Then, when God has responded with His outpouring, His people will be empowered and motivated to do the hard work of restoring our nation’s moral foundation.

This Prayer Guide will help you join with thousands of other fellow believers to bring these great needs before God. The Guide provides a page for each
day and hour of the 40/40 Prayer Vigil. Each page has everything you need to invest in a time of personal spiritual reflection and petition for yourself, the church, and the nation. Please keep in mind though, that the Guide is just that — a guide. It is designed to give you a starting place for your time of prayer. Here are some suggestions for making your prayer vigil a powerful, personal spiritual time.

I was glad to see that the guide includes more than simply praying for the next president of the United States of America. It does mention that prayers are needed for communities, families, and churches.

But I am still perturbed at the way that evangelicals focus on presidential politics — letting the national election cycle of the one officer voted into office by the general populace set the agenda for American society. The key to turning things around in the U.S. has little to do with the next president or the bloated federal bureaus he or she (apologies to the Baylys) oversees. It even has less to do with ideas (or W-W) and the consequences they have.

In case anyone hasn’t noticed, the family in the United States is not doing to well. Marriage rates are down, divorces are up, and there is this pesky little matter of homosexual marriage. Not to be missed is the way that parents are apparently dropping the ball in child rearing. Has anyone heard of bullying? And has anyone considered that the best way to stop bullying is for parents to lay down a little discipline in the home? Meanwhile, state and city governments continue to dump boatloads of money on urban school districts (and their various meal plans) without ever seeming to consider that student learning begins at home. And if the homes of urban youth are not in good shape, how exactly are a couple of square meals and a No-Child-Left-Behind formula going to fix the marriages necessary for children not to flourish but simply get by?

For that reason, Old Life is proposing a forty-day vigil for families. It begins today and goes to June 1, the forty days before the month most associated with marriage. And the first petition for April 23 is to pray that evangelicals and Southern Baptists will wake up about what’s really important in American society. It’s the family, less than intelligent one!

The New York Times: A Better Way?

Published on by D. G. Hart69 Comments

Many conservative Presbyterians and Reformed believe – along with the idea that no neutrality exists – that secular America is intolerant of red-blooded Christianity. The current alarm over gay marriage and abortion on demand is evidence of the Reformed-sky-is-falling-world-and-life-view.

Could it be that consolation might come to these upset souls from the secularized (as opposed to hallowed) pages of the New York Times? It could if conservative Protestants would take a gander at the columns written by Ross Douthat. When the Times hired him away from the Atlantic Monthly, some conservatives worried that Douthat, a smart, Roman Catholic, and remarkably wise-for-his-age-writer, might succumb to temptation to fit with the liberal intelligentsia (as if Atlantic is Chronicles) in by soft pedaling his conservatism. But this has hardly been the case. Within the past month Douthat has posted at his Times blog (in addition to columns) a number of serious and thoughtful posts against gay marriage that conservative Protestants should well consider, both for encouragement in culture-war well doing and for learning how to make an argument with people who don’t share your faith (or any).

On August 9th, Douthat wrote in response to a post by Noah Millman who explained why he was supporting gay marriage:

What I would strongly dispute, though, is his suggestion that it’s possible to escape entirely from ideological conceptions of marriage, into a world where it’s all just people loving people, and the way we treat one another is the only thing that matters. This seems like an extremely naive view of how ideas intersect with human action, and how cultures shape behavior. Of course all ideals and ideologies are imperfect descriptions of reality, and semi-quixotic attempts to graft order onto the inherent messiness of human affairs. But you can’t escape them just by declaring that they’re “artificial,” because such artifice is itself natural to man, and inherent to culture-making and social order. Every society has its ideals and ideologies, about marriage as much as about any other institution. And the fact that wedlock was once somewhat more about property and somewhat less about love than it is today doesn’t mean that our ancestors didn’t have their own theories of marriage, and their own arguments about what the institution meant and ought to mean.

Read the Greeks and Romans; read the New Testament; read Shakespeare and The Book of Common Prayer. There was never a time when human beings weren’t building ideologies of marriage, and there was never a culture where those ideologies didn’t have an impact on how people wed and parented and loved.

This means that if the ideology that justifies defining marriage as lifelong heterosexual monogamy gets swept into history’s dustbin, we won’t suddenly be flung into a landscape where the only real things are people and the people they love. We’ll just get a different ideology of marriage in its place, one that makes a different set of assumptions and generalizations and invests the institution with a different kind of purpose. And we don’t need a judge’s ruling (though Judge Vaughn Walker’s analysis was certainly clarifying!) to know what that ideology will look like: It’s the increasingly commonplace theory that marriage exists to celebrate romantic love and provide public recognition for mutually-supportive couples, with no inherent connection of any kind to gender difference and/or procreation, and with only a rhetorical connection to the ideal of permanence.

Because Douthat is thoughtful and because he writes for the Times, lots of people pay attention to what he writes and so various bloggers and op-ed writers responded to his August 9 post. One of those came from Glenn Greenwald, who argued that whether or not the state supports heterosexual marriage, the ideal of one-man-and-one-woman marrying could still prevail without legal sanction. One example to which Grennwald appealed was racism. Nearly everyone believes racism is wrong even if the state protects the rights of racists to speak freely and associate voluntarily.

Douthat responds this way:

. . . take alcohol and cigarettes. Why are Marlboros more stigmatized than Budweisers in contemporary America? Well, in part, it’s because there’s been a government-sponsored war on tobacco for the last few decades, carried out through lawsuits and public health campaigns and smoking bans and so forth, that’s far eclipsed the more halting efforts to stigmatize alcohol consumption. Here again, public policy, rather than some deep empirical or philosophical truth about the relative harm of nicotine versus alcohol, has been a crucial factor in shaping cultural norms.

And the same is true, inevitably, of marriage law. Culture shapes law, of course: Judge Walker’s decision last week would be unimaginable without the cultural shift that’s made gay marriage seem first plausible and then necessary to many people. But law tends to turn around and shape culture right back. And this is particularly true when the law in question is constitutional law, because constitutional rights carry a distinctive legal weight and an even more distinctive cultural freight. (To take just one example, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the cultural space for making a moral critique of pornography has shrunk apace in the decades since the Supreme Court expanded First Amendment protections for pornographers, and limited the reach of obscenity laws.)

So if Anthony Kennedy follows Walker and finds that the traditional legal understanding of marriage is unconstitutional — and, by extension, that it’s irrational and bigoted to think otherwise — it’s just naive to say that this won’t have a ripple effect in the culture as a whole.

The point here is not to discuss the merits of Douthat’s arguments – though they are considerable. It is instead to take notice and see that people of faith do speak up in public secular life and do not lose their jobs for doing so, even at the New York friggin’ Times! I wonder if more of the anti-2k crowd were to take a page from Douthat the public debates over hotly contested issues would be not only more “fair and balanced” but also more people would “decide” to regard favorably (rather than as kooks) those who defend the way that Westerners have practiced the family lo these many years.

For Doug Wilson Apparently Being Reformed Means Evangelicalism That Is Effective

Published on by D. G. Hart195 Comments


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.”

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?).

Where is Justin Taylor When You Need Him?

Published on by D. G. Hart6 Comments

MeSome bloggers use their page as a clearance house for what others are saying – sort of like Matt Drudge does the news. So if you want to know what John MacArthur thinks about the Manhattan Declaration, you could go here. Such places allow you to keep tabs on the doings and whereabouts of certain evangelicals with star power.

Others use the blog to promote their own appearances, merchandise, and ideas published elsewhere. Of course, Oldlife promotes the views of its editors and sometimes reprints material first published in the Nicotine Theological Journal (a subscription would make a nice stocking stuffer, by the way). But we have resisted using this e-space to publicize current activities and duties. This is supposed to be a place to discuss what it means to be Reformed – not a vehicle to learn about the Muether or Hart family vacation plans.

All of this is a way of explaining the awkwardness of what follows: I have posted a piece over at Front Porch Republic on the Manhattan Declaration. Because some of the comments in recent weeks have asked for my impressions of the statement, this notice is a tad more understandable. And because the specter of J. Gresham Machen hovers over the keyboards of the NTJ’s editors, and because my study of Machen has clearly informed my take on the Declaration, mentioning that post here also makes sense. But self-promotion still feels odd.

And so to complete the circle, readers may also be interested to know that I will be dining today (dv) at lunch on hot pork sandwiches purchased at Reading Terminal Market while watching – I haven’t yet decided – either Barton Fink or Blood Simple. This is less a Thank-God-It’s-Friday moment than it is a reaction to the end of the semester at Temple University. Later today, my wife and I will be watching films from Temple’s city archives at the program of Secret Cinema, a wonderful cultural resource in Philadelphia. On Sunday, we will be worshiping with the saints a Calvary OPC, Glenside.

Question: Who cares? Answer: I do and my wife does sometimes. It’s hard to tell if our cats, Isabelle and Cordelia, even think.