Tag: Francis Schaeffer

Why Credit Schaeffer but not Aristotle?

Published on by D. G. Hart27 Comments

This is my problem with w-w proponents. When they explain the accomplishments of people with the wrong w-w they play the “common grace” card. Why, of course, folks without a proper w-w understand some truth because ultimately God set it up that way. Listen to a recent account of Aristotle’s abilities:

This does raise the obvious question, what about all those pagans who did get things right? Surely Aristotle, for example, was correct in much of what he said about God, virtue, etc., even if he wasn’t saved? The worldview proponent can happily concede this fact, but it doesn’t prove the existence of universally accessible axioms of reason. Any true beliefs the unbeliever does hold (and in principle there’s no limit to the number of true beliefs an unbeliever may hold) are attributable to common grace. That is, any truth, goodness, or beauty found among unbelievers is a gift from God, but these gifts are not given equally to all. Common grace does not entail common reason, nor can everyone be an Aristotle.

Granted, Aristotle entered the world with certain capacities for which he could not take credit. But can’t we attribute anything to his years of study, his clarity of prose, his competent arguments. Doesn’t he himself deserve praise for some of his accomplishments?

What’s odd about the above rendering of Aristotle and common grace is how much this same w-w apologist has no problem giving credit to Christian w-w proponents, instead of chalking up their insights to “special grace”:

The first Christian to use the term “worldview” was the Scottish theologian James Orr (1844-1913). Orr claimed that our view of Jesus affects our view of everything else in life—of God, of man, of sin and redemption, of the meaning of history, and of our destiny. While Orr gave Christians the building blocks for the idea of a Christian worldview, it was the Dutch theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) who took the idea and ran with it. . . .

Credit for popularizing the idea of a Christian worldview among evangelicals in North America undoubtedly goes to Francis Schaeffer (1912-1984), who founded the L’Abri community in Switzerland and wrote extensively on apologetics, art, and culture. Schaeffer had a profound impact upon the following generation of evangelicals, including Nancy Pearcey and Charles Colson (see How Now Shall We Live?) and James Sire (see The Universe Next Door). These evangelicals all affirmed the two key insights of Orr and Kuyper: 1) that the Christian faith forms a unified and coherent vision of all of life, and 2) that this vision stands in irreconcilable opposition to all competing non-Christian visions of life.

That’s a double standard.

I thought w-wers were opposed to dualism.

In point of fact, w-w theory has a serious flaw if it fails to recognize the goodness of creation and the accomplishments of creatures who use their gifts with remarkable ability even without the aid of the Holy Spirit’s redemptive work. That seems like all the more reason to give folks like Aristotle even more credit (humanly speaking) than Schaeffer.

The Fine Print about Truth

Published on by D. G. Hart16 Comments

I recall Francis Schaeffer talking about “true truth” to make the point, if memory serves, that Christians do not endorse relativism. But among the apologists for Rome I don’t recall hearing so many appeals to abstract truth — that is, the idea that the church stands for the truth (but see if you can figure out what that truth is). It’s like Dwight Eisenhower’s old line about America’s faith: “In other words, our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.”

Here’s one apologist on the first leg of the truth-goodness-beauty-three-legged stool:

So, this Church that the Bible tells us was founded by Jesus Christ; this Church that the Bible tells us is the pillar and ground – the upholder and foundation – of the truth; this Church that the Bible tells us is the fullness of Jesus Christ – the fullness of the truth; this Church that the Bible tells us is guided into all truth by the Holy Spirit – the Spirit of Truth; this Church must teach us what? Error? No! This Church must teach us truth. It cannot teach us error. The Church founded by Jesus Christ must teach the truth he fullness of the truth. It cannot teach error!

Does God want everyone to be Catholic? According to the Bible, the Church founded by Jesus Christ contains the fullness of the truth that He has made known to us about Himself. What does the Catholic Church claim about itself? Well, it claims that it contains the fullness of the truth given to us by Jesus Christ. The Bible tells us that the Church founded by Jesus Christ contains the fullness of the truth, and here is the Catholic Church claiming to contain the fullness of the truth, and claiming to have been founded directly by Jesus Christ. If whatever church you are in doesn’t at least claim these things for itself, then you have some thinking and praying to do.

Another appeal to truth that makes the church’s truth qualities more important that Scripture’s:

Truth is truth. It cannot be error, by its very essence and defi­nition. How can truth’s foundation or pillar or bulwark or ground be something less than total truth (since truth itself contains no falsehoods, untruths, lies, or errors)? It cannot. It’s impossible, as a straightforward matter of logic and plain observation. A stream cannot rise above its source.

What is built on a foundation cannot be greater than the foundation. If it were, the whole structure would collapse. If an elephant stood on the shoulders of a man as its foundation, that foundation would collapse. The base of a skyscraper has to hold the weight above it. It can’t be weaker than that which is built upon it. The foundations of a suspension bridge over a river have to be strong enough to hold up that bridge. They can’t possibly be weaker than the bridge, or the structure would collapse.

Therefore, we must conclude that if the Church is the founda­tion of truth, the Church must be infallible, since truth is infal­lible, and the foundation cannot be less great or strong than that which is built on it. Truth cannot be built on any degree of error whatever, because that would make the foundation weaker than the superstructure above it.

Accordingly, given the above biblical passages and many oth­ers, the Catholic “three-legged stool” rule of faith may be defined in the following way:

In the biblical (and historic Catholic) view the inspired, infallible Bible is interpreted by an infallible, divinely guided Church, which in turn infallibly interprets and formulates the true doctrinal (apostolic) tradition.

Here’s another who links truth to freedom (which is oh so American and modern):

The Catholic faith is about freedom because it is about the Truth, the deepest truth about God and about our existence. It appeals to the deepest sanctuary of the heart. If it promotes social institutions, it does so to make space for the voice of conscience in human affairs. Whether it concerns the sacredness of marriage, or of motherhood, or of family, or of life itself, the Church has a responsibility to speak the truth in love.

That sounds like Christianity is an IBM-like institution which supplies the workings that make a society run smoothly. Not sure what the truth is except for something deep.

But that kind of bland identification of Truth with Roman Catholicism, especially with the institutional church instead of with what the Word of God teaches, runs the danger of setting the church above the truth. Rod Dreher relayed the remarks of one of his friends about the dangers of so exalting an institution:

‘Institutionalism’ affects both traditional and progressive Catholics in equal measure. It is one might say – to borrow and misuse a term – the “structural sin” of Catholicism, living in its very bones, in seminaries, parish structures, canon law, etc. Institutionalism can be summarized as something like: ‘the excessive trust in institutional structures – including a complacent belief that the institution takes care of itself, an expectation that those vested with institutional authority can and will exercise sound if not perfect judgment, and finally, and most importantly, the conviction that all problems are institutional ones to be solved by ever-more refined rule-amending, making, or keeping’.

The most obvious manner in which institutionalism manifests itself is in attitudes toward the papacy and ‘creeping infallibility’ (in which the pope is assumed to be infallible even in his ordinary teaching). However, one can also see it among progressive Catholics and their attitude toward Vatican II as well as their oft- vocalized belief that we need a Vatican III to ‘address contemporary problems’ or that this or that rule needs to change. It is this obsession about the institution that makes mincemeat of both the tradition of faith (we need to adapt to the contemporary worldview or else no one will go to church anymore!), cover up evil (we cannot let anyone know about this or else no one will come to church anymore!), or place sole responsibility on Church institutions for failure (if it weren’t for those progressives at Vatican II, everyone would still be coming to church!).

When you look for defenses of or references to truth in the Shorter or Heidelberg catechisms, you don’t find much. The Shorter Catechism refers to truth as one of God’s attributes and defends telling the truth — ahem — in its explanation of the ninth commandment. Heidelberg goes a little farther in equating truth with the gospel:

Question 21. What is true faith?
Answer: True faith is not only a certain knowledge, whereby I hold for truth all that God has revealed to us in his word, but also an assured confidence, which the Holy Ghost works by the gospel in my heart; that not only to others, but to me also, remission of sin, everlasting righteousness and salvation, are freely given by God, merely of grace, only for the sake of Christ’s merits. . . .

Question 40. Why was it necessary for Christ to humble himself even “unto death”?
Answer: Because with respect to the justice and truth of God, satisfaction for our sins could be made no otherwise, than by the death of the Son of God.

That may explain why some Protestants don’t convert, because the truth about salvation is more important than the truth abstracted:

. . . when my friend asked how I could remain theologically conservative in spite of my great learning (not as great as he gave me credit for, by the way), I replied somewhat glibly,”I kept reading the Bible and it kept talking about me.” Although I certainly simplified the matter, the truth was that as I read more, learned more, and thought more, the evangelical understanding of the biblical narrative of creation–fall–judgment–redemption impressed itself upon me, continuing to recount the story of my own life while making sense of the world in a way that nothing else that I studied did. I knew that my own life was peppered by self-deception and sin and needed the grace of God offered in Christ. Further, I saw a world populated with human beings who regularly and vigorously sinned against one another. They too needed the grace of God offered in Christ. Finally, as my more progressive colleagues helped me to discern, there were (and are) sinful structures of oppression the permeated the world. Those caught in them–as either oppressed or oppressor–need the grace of God offered in Christ, while the structures themselves need the perfect king to come in righteous judgment and tear them down. In the end, all other explanations regarding the troubles of this world seemed insufficient, while all other solutions regarding how to address them seemed utterly inadequate. And thus I remained (and remain) evangelical.

Will the Real Kuyper Stand Up?

Published on by D. G. Hart105 Comments

From Crawford Gribben’s recent review of George Marsden’s book on 1950s America (and more):

His conclusion draws from the philosophy and political strategies of Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920), the renowned theologian, newspaper editor, and founder of the Free University in Amsterdam, who also found time to become the Prime Minister of the Netherlands (1901–05).

Kuyper’s theory of “sphere sovereignty” incorporated central tenets of the Calvinism he had inherited, but radically reconstructed its traditional political obligations. The Reformed tradition within which Kuyper operated had long assumed that the role of government was to uphold the moral claims of Scripture, and to effect a confessional culture in which societal norms paralleled those of believers. Kuyper’s great contribution to the Reformed tradition was to overturn this consensus, sometimes at substantial risk to himself, arguing for a more limited view of the responsibilities of government, and emphasizing that it ought not to intrude into the “spheres” of family, church, and voluntary associations. Kuyper argued that believers and unbelievers were divided by an “antithesis” that was simultaneously spiritual and existential, and so advocated the establishment of denominational schools and universities within which believers of different kinds could be separately educated.

This intrusion of sharp religious distinctions into the public square was balanced by Kuyper’s advocacy of “common grace”—the notion that all of humanity, as God’s image-bearers, were recipients of divine kindness—which permitted the construction of a public culture that could be non-confessional and non-denominational. Believers, in other words, could organize in robustly confessional institutions within a broader political environment that respected religious difference while enshrining the non-confessional principles of “natural law.” Kuyper’s utopia looked a lot like constitutional Americanisms, however far it would be from the sometimes theocratic assumptions of modern evangelicals.

This is a Kuyper behind whom I can line up. Church is a distinct sphere with limited responsibilities. Kuyperians use natural law instead of insisting on revealed truth in public life. Christian truth serves not as a basis for driving out the secularists and leftists but offers a strategy for embracing pluralism.

So why is it that the influence of neo-Calvinism flourished precisely during the most contested battles of the culture wars? One account would have to rely on Francis Schaeffer and his use of w-w to show why Christians could never bend the knee to a neutral public space. Along with that has to go a stress upon the neo-Calvinist notion of antithesis which does a handy job of dividing believers from unbelievers — why it doesn’t divide Calvinists from Arminians, or Protestants from Roman Catholics, or Christians from Jews is another matter.

All Down Hill After John Witherspoon?

Published on by D. G. Hart22 Comments

Anthony Bradley wonders (again) what has happened to Presbyterians and why they lost their momentum. First it was as popular voices among evangelicals, now it’s as dispensers of wisdom about the world:

I am wondering, then, for those who are raising their children in the Presbyterian tradition what resources exists for forming Presbyterian identity in terms of an understanding marriage & family (i.e., the relationship between covenant marriage & covenant baptism in America’s marriage debate), issues related to social & political power & federal political theory (which is derivative of federal theology), divorce and remarriage, war and social conflict, apologetics, and so on? How does a covenantal world-and-life view, and Presbyterian understandings of power structures, unlock the implications for a theology of work & economics when applied to international third world development, and so on?

By extension, I am also wondering what happened to Presbyterians as known and normative leaders of culturally leveraged institutions in American society and culture? Mark Twain and William Faulkner were Presbyterian. More Vice-Presidents of the United States have been Presbyterian more than any other denomination (Presbyterians rank 2nd for the US Presidency). Presbyterians rank 2nd in terms of placement on the Supreme Court in US History. I could go on. . . .

An initial thought is to wonder why Presbyterians need to go to another Presbyterian for instruction on the federal government. Isn’t reading the Federalists and Anti-Federalists (Presbyterian or not?) good enough?

Another wonder is whether Presbyterians have ever been all that influential as Bradley’s post assumes. To meet his criteria — “what Presbyterians are speaking to these issues or leading institutions that are (like think tanks or colleges and universities” — at least three sets of circumstances need to be in play. First, a person needs to be Presbyterian (what kind — Old Side, New Life, Neo-Calvinist — is another question)? Second, such a person needs to be writing on a vast number of public policy type subjects. So far Tim and David Bayly suffice. But then, third, and this is the kicker, the person needs to be sufficiently well known for folks in the pew to consult him or her (sorry, Tim and David). As it stands, lots of Presbyterians have lots of thoughts on all sorts of subjects and publish them (on the interweb). But no one of them stands out with Francis Schaeffer notoriety.

The problem, then, may have less to do with Presbyterian decline than with the diversification of communication technology and the formation of diverse pockets of affinity.

At the same time, Presbyterians need not feel so bad, at least if misery loves company. Bradley’s question applies just as much to Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, and — boy does it ever — to Congregationalists (nee Puritans). Among Western Christians, Rome stands out as distinctly different in this regard since Roman Catholics have an endless supply of public intellectuals who are doing their best imitations of popes, who speak constantly to a host of issues below their pay grade. This may explain much of Rome’s contemporary appeal to converts. If you want a church with all the answers to life’s pressing questions — don’t go to Guy Noir but to the Vatican. But if you believe in the spirituality of the church and the sufficiency of Scripture, you don’t need a Presbyterian pontiff to tell you how to live. You go to church, say your prayers, work dutifully at your callings, and take your lumps.

One last thought about Anthony’s question comes from a period I know relatively well. During the first half of the twentieth century we did have Presbyterians who spoke on any number of issues, were well known and so had pretty large followings. These were William Jennings Bryan, Billy Sunday, J. Gresham Machen, and Carl McIntire. Maybe 1 in 4 isn’t bad. But if that’s going to be the percentage of Presbyterians we should heed when they start to pontificate about all of life, I’ll take my chances with guys who write for American Conservative.

Theologians Who Write about Art

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

Since Francis Schaeffer has taken a drubbing lately from both secular journalists and Christian secularists, I thought it might be good to remind the younger generation that there was a time when Schaeffer was the lone evangelical talking about art and philosophy, sort of the way that Woody Allen was the lone movie director talking about Russian literature on love and death.

In Art and the Bible (1973), Schaeffer wrote:

Modern art often flattens man out and speaks in great abstractions; sometimes we cannot tell whether the subject is a man or a woman. Our generation has left little place for the individual. Only the mass of men remains. But as Christians, we see things otherwise. Because God has created individual man in His own image and because God knows and is interested in the individuals, individual man is worthy of our painting and of our writing. . . .

. . . a Christian artist does not need to concentrate on religious subjects. After all, religious themes may be completely non-Christian. The counterculture art in the underground newspaper in which Christ and Krishna are blended – here is religious art par excellence. But it is comply anti-Christian. Religious subjects are no guarantee that a work of art is Christian. On the other hand, the art of an artist who never paints the head of Christ, never once paints an open tomb, may be magnificent Christian art. For some artists there is a place for religious themes, but an artist does not need to be conscience-stricken if he does not paint in this area. Some Christian artists will never use religious themes. This is a freedom the artist has in Christ under the leadership of the Holy Spirit.

A post over at No Left Turns reminded me of those heady days when the little man from Switzerland was inspiring young evangelicals to take philosophy classes and go to museums. The post quoted from the Pope Benedict on beauty. Here’s one:

Therefore, may our visits to places of art be not only an occasion for cultural enrichment — also this — but may they become, above all, a moment of grace that moves us to strengthen our bond and our conversation with the Lord, [that moves us] to stop and contemplate — in passing from the simple external reality to the deeper reality expressed — the ray of beauty that strikes us, that “wounds” us in the intimate recesses of our heart and invites us to ascend to God.

No offense to the Bishop of Rome or those in fellowship with him, but Benedict’s sweeping comments on art strike me as having the same sort of broad scope that Schaeffer’s young admirers found disappointing in their intellectual mentor when they began to read more deeply about art and beauty. For some Christians, a theologian writing about art is a novelty, something that makes the young and restless take the faith of the theologian more seriously. The problem for Schaeffer’s admirers, though, which may turn out to be a similar affliction for Roman Catholicism, is that the deeper you go into the faith of your inspiring theologian, the less your aesthetics resonate with the technical doctrine behind the beauty. In other words, the converts to Reformed Protestantism that Schaeffer encouraged turned out in many cases not to care for all of the Reformed rigor they found in Presbyterian churches and upon which the apologist with the funny pants represented implicitly.

But, as I say, there was a time when Schaeffer was the rare evangelical thinker who was writing about such matters. That gave him a large audience. And I do sense that the similar breadth of the recent papacy’s writings on philosophy and culture is also responsible for the appeal of Rome to Christians hoping to preserve western civilization. The question remains how solid a base such a cultural approach to the faith will be for the long, hard road of pilgrimage.

Worldview Politics

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

As I have come to understand it, a Reformed world-and-life-view is a hard outlook to acquire. It starts and requires regeneration by the Holy Spirit, or so it would seem since a worldview is a basic reality to a person’s existence. Seeing through the glasses of faith, accordingly, requires having faith, something that comes only through effectual calling. This worldview also needs doses of philosophy and theology so that viewers of the world have the intellectual equipment to construct the theories and apply truth to real life. A worldview goes so deep, as readers of Machen keep reminding me, that even the great Westminsterian would say that “two plus two equals four” looks different to a Christian compared to a non-believer. (Though it is still unclear whether all settings in life – from the family dining room to the halls of Congress need to bear all the weight of such metaphysical significance. For instance, does the unbelieving cashier need to admit her reliance on borrowed capital before I receive my change? I don’t think so.)

Since a worldview is such an acquired taste, I have found it unendingly odd to see people without a Reformed world-and-life-view defending those political candidates and their intellectual influences who possess a Reformed world-and-life-view. I find this particularly odd since the proponents of worldview would typically regard those without a worldview as being at odds with their understanding of total truth. I am referring in particular to recent posts by journalists and religious historians who discount the dominionist spin that is still being put to Michele Bachmann and Francis Schaeffer. (Truth be told, I talked to one of these authors – Charlotte Allen – for the better part of an hour while she was preparing her column. And I was frustrated to see that the illumination I may have offered did not make a dent in her aim of discrediting the bias of liberal journalists. She even took down the exact title of my recent book to include in her column. Oh, the missed fame! Oh, the loss of royalties!!!!!!!)

No matter what the folks without a correct worldview make of Francis Schaeffer’s ties to dominionism, it is hard to read his account of the antithesis and find trustworthy people like Ross Douthat, Charlotte Allen, and Matt Sutton who apparently do not have either the faith or the theological and philosophical training to attain to a worldview.

Here’s one example from How Should We Then Live?

. . . in contrast to the Renaissance humanists, [the Reformers] refused to accept the autonomy of human reason, which acts as though the human mind is infinite, with all knowledge within its realm. Rather, they took seriously the Bible’s own claim for itself – that it is the only final authority. And they took seriously that man needs the answers given by God in the Bible to have adequate answers not only for how to be in an open relationship with God, but also for how to know the present meaning of life and how to have final answers in distinguishing between right and wrong. That is, man needs not only a God who exists, but a God who has spoken in a way that can be understood. [81]

I wonder what Douthat, Allen, and Sutton think about the power of their own intellects as they survey the reactions to Bachmann and Schaeffer. Or have they been checking their perceptions against the pages of holy writ?

But if the non-worldviewers are a little uncomfortable with Schaeffer’s distinction between the Bible and autonomous reason, they might experience real pain when reading his application of the antithesis to the American experiment. About the Moral Majority he wrote in A Christian Manifesto:

The Moral Majority has drawn a line between one total view of reality and the other total view of reality and the results this brings forth in government and law. And if you personally do not like some of the details of what they have done, do it better. But you must understand that all Christians have got to do the same kind of think or you are simply not showing the Lordship of Christ in the totality of life. [61-62]

It does seem strange that a Reformed world-and-life-view would find its fulfillment in a political organization comprised of Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Jews, and headed by a fundamentalist Baptist. But we are talking about the United States, which H. L. Mencken called “the greatest show on earth.”

Schaeffer did not stop there. He also argued that the United States was the fruition of the gospel:

The people in the United States have lived under the Judeo-Christian consensus for so long that now we take it for granted. We seem to forget how completely unique what we have had is a result of the gospel. The gospel indeed is, “accept Christ, the Messiah, as Savior and have your guilt removed on the basis of His death.” But the good news includes many resulting blessings. We have forgotten why we have a high view of life, and why we have a positive balance between form and freedom in government, and the fact that we have such tremendous freedoms without these freedoms leading to chaos. Most of all, we have forgotten that none of these is natural in the world. They are unique, based on the fact that the consensus was the biblical consensus. And these things will be even further lost if this other total view, the materialistic view, takes over thoroughly. We can be certain that what we so carelessly take for granted will be lost. [70-71]

Again, I wonder where Schaeffer’s defenders fall on the spectrum of the two competing worldviews, and how much they actually embrace the biblical consensus that allegedly informed the work of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Ben Franklin.

The problem here is not that people should consider Schaeffer to be scary. Like many of his defenders have said, either explicitly or implicitly, he really didn’t mean what he seemed to say. He was not really so intolerant as his antithetical outlook demonstrated. He did not want a theocracy. But if that is so, then just how important is this worldview thing? If it results in high-falutin’ rhetoric and pragmatic reality, then what is the point of promoting all of those books and institutions that teach a worldview?

The problem that really needs some ‘splaining is not whether Schaeffer is scary but the strange disparity between the deep-down diving nature of worldview – it is part and parcel of new life in Christ – and how easily accessible it is, and even attractive, to those without such a worldview. A high octane version of worldview should reveal and make poignant the discrepancies between the lost and the saved, between the philosophically initiated and the believing simpletons. But it does not. A worldview, even of the antitheticial variety taught by Schaeffer, is for non-worldviewers like a puppy mutt – maybe not the first choice to take home from the pound but still a cute dog. Was the antithesis really supposed to be so easily domesticated?

Of course, I understand the angles that historians and journalists have in this contretemps over Bachmann. A writer like Douthat – whom I admire greatly and read for profit – may not qualify as a Kuyperian or neo-Calvinist-lite – but he can see the value of evangelical readers of Schaeffer to electoral politics in the United States. He also sees a way to point out the bias of liberal journalists, such as when they score points against Bachmann’s spiritual influences but not against Obama’s. All is fair in the coverage of religion and politics.

But the reception of Schaeffer and the watering down of worldview sure does cheapen what was supposed to be such a distinct and unique part of Reformed Protestantism. I wonder why more worldviewers are not objecting to the debasement of their valuable coin.

Kingdom Sloppy: Michele Bachmann and Her Interpreters

Published on by D. G. Hart20 Comments

Mollie Hemingway, our favorite Lutheran journalist, over at GetReligion has alerted readers to a Lutheran slur against Michele Bachmann (who grew up in the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod — who knew? — which is a communion to the right of the Missouri Synod). Mollie herself does not think much of Lutheran theology stuck with Michele:

I’m a confessional Lutheran. Ostensibly, Michele Bachmann was a member of a more conservative but also confessional Lutheran church body. And for years, whenever I heard her speak, she never sounded even mildly Lutheran to me. The “the Lord put it on my heart” type language. The “the Lord anointed me” stuff. This is not how Lutherans speak, although I won’t bore you with all of the why. Her other affiliations have always been more evangelical than Lutheran, going back decades.

But the point of Mollie’s piece is a story in The Atlantic which attempts to make Bachmann look bad because of her former church’s teaching (chances are the reporter could not find a confession or creed from Bachmann’s current church):

Michele Bachmann is practically synonymous with political controversy, and if the 2008 presidential election is any guide, the conservative Lutheran church she belonged to for many years is likely to add another chapter due to the nature of its beliefs—such as its assertion, explained and footnoted on this website, that the Roman Catholic Pope is the Antichrist.

Mollie responds:

Now, as anyone who knows anything about church history can tell you, the papacy is not a feature of Protestantism. And if you followed the Reformation or knew anything about the abuses of Pope Leo X or the anathemas of the Council of Trent, it’s not really newsworthy that the reformers looked at what Scripture says are the marks of the anti-Christ and basically said “yep — the papacy has those.” What makes the church to which Michele Bachman was once joined slightly different is that while most Lutheran church bodies will talk about the historical context into which they were made, the Wisconsin Synod says that basically they’re still Protestants who still don’t believe in the papacy and still think it sits in opposition to the Gospel of Christ.

And, again, if you don’t know that Catholics and Protestants have very strongly held different views on whether the papacy is on the whole a really good or really bad institution, you should repeat 8th grade or whatever.

The irony, of course, is that if the reporter had studied Lutheran theology further, he would have discovered a doctrine of the kingdoms what would allow a political candidate to affirm that the pope is the anti-Christ and also promise to serve Roman Catholic citizens according to the laws of the United States. In fact, there is a better chance that Bachmann’s studies with Francis Schaeffer, not the teaching of WELS, make her less flexible in negotiating the the claims of Christ’s lordship over greatest nation on God’s green earth.