Tag: James Bratt

What Hath Amsterdam To Do with Tertullian?

Published on by D. G. Hart92 Comments

While James Bratt writes about being sick of “every square inch” rhetoric, Greg Thornbury (friend of Eric Metaxas and Tim Keller and all hip New York evangelicals) is proving Bratt’s point.

First, from the very biographer of Kuyper himself:

Here’s my beef. In announcing that any work can be God’s work, we run the risk of saying that any work is God’s work. That whatever we want to do, we may do and put a God stamp on it. Wherever, however, with whomever, with all the standard rewards in that field. You don’t need Kuyper to crown the main chance with piety; all sorts of Christians in every tradition have been at it for centuries. Plus the inference is a whole lot short of what Kuyper said, and what the Gospel teaches. So if we’re going to intone “every square inch,” let’s have some riders attached.

Mind you, Bratt is not dismissing Kuyper’s objections to dualism (more on that to come), but he does worry that neo-Calvinism has become simply a pious sounding rationale for doing whatever a Christian wants to do:

“There’s not a square inch in the whole domain of human existence over which Christ, who is Lord over all, does not exclaim, ‘Mine’!” This has become Kuyper’s most famous statement, at least in North America. So popular that most people don’t get the quotation right, sometimes not even close. But the sentiment’s attractive, and the line’s becoming something of a mantra among culturally engaged evangelicals. I worry lest it join other phrases on what I call the evango-babble list. Like haveyouacceptedtheLordJesusChristasyourownpersonalsavior. Like juswanna: Lordwe/IjuswannathankyouhereLordforyour/my/ourfillintheblankitude. Everysquareinch—Kuyper doesn’t deserve that fate.

And then we have Greg Thornbury, the new president of King’s College (NYC) who in this interview claims in that every-square-inch-way Friedrich Hayek and free markets for Christ:

Jerry: I watched your convocation address and found it fascinating, and I watched your orientation address to the incoming students as well. You had a great little section under the heading, “I want to go to there,” on Friedrich Hayek and on how you as a Christian philosopher think about a guy like Friedrich Hayek. Can you kind of give us a little bit of that now?

Dr. Thornbury: Sure. The point that I was making to our student body – and this actually ties into what we just came from, about “how do we be relevant to the culture of our time?” – I was describing (again, to talk about a post-world [war] environment), a situation in which you have young men and women who had served in the armed forces and in supporting capacities to that great conflict. Those who looked in the face of totalitarianism and fascism and a century of holocaust and said, “What are the ideas that keep people free?” The point that I was making was that Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was a bestseller. It was pulp nonfiction. They were selling it at supermarkets in the middle of the war; it went through fifteen pressings in the UK. In other words, it answered a fundamental question: what is going to get you through the blitzkrieg? What do you want to have in your hands when you come out of the underground by dawn’s early light? What’s going to steel you in courage to think that, “We’re going to get through this!” It is this notion that after this is over we are going to be able to reboot society on the basis of liberty, and consecrated self-direction, and the kinds of things that lift people out of the bog of collectivist notions that led, certainly, Germany and Italy to the most gruesome and bloody century ever known to man. I see my role as the president of The King’s College as re-enchanting a new generation with those animating ideals that once made Western civilization great in general, and American society distinctive in particular.

Jerry: Should a Christian be a Hayekian? Do you see overlap there?

Dr. Thornbury: I definitely see overlap for this reason: I think that when you study the texts of particularly the New Testament, although it has its origins in the Mosaic Law, I think what you see there is the seedbed of freedom of conscience. You see democratic religion in the pages of the New Testament. So whereas some people in Acts chapter 5 see some kind of nascent socialism, actually what you’re seeing is free people electing to gather together in solidarity around key principles and ideals and goals, and the people who joined in that were people like Lydia. There was a mercantile aspect to the early Christian movement. When I read Hayek and I see his argument for the link between private property and freedom, I see a direct line going all the way back to those pages of the New Testament, because what the Apostle Paul and others were representing was an alternative to totalitarianism. When you look at the Apostle John – and whatever else you think the Book of Revelation says about the future—what it definitely was, was the greatest political protest letter ever penned in the history of the world, because he was saying, “The state has no business telling us how we should govern our own life together.” And when I say “society” or “culture”, here’s how I’m defining that, Jerry: I take a nineteenth century definition by Johann Herder, who many recognize as the founding father of modern sociology. He said, “Culture is the lifeblood of a civilization. It’s the flow of moral energy that keeps a society intact.” So, when I see Hayek talking about making sure that we stay free of tyranny, I see the entailments of that going all the way back to the emperor and Domitian and the Apostle John.

Have neo-Calvinists and their evangelical progeny made it impossible for Protestants to enter a world where a Christian like Tertullian would ask with a straight face, “what has Jerusalem to do with Athens,” and answer not much? With all the effort to turn every piece of the cosmos into a reality with redemptive significance, the transformers appear to think a separation between the world and the faith is somehow foreign to Christianity. But such a thought was entirely plausible to the first Christians who were highly aware that the world was different from Christianity.

Seeing the World through Kuyperian Lenses

Published on by D. G. Hart170 Comments

Speaking of childish notions, when I was a youth my mother told me I should only have Christian friends. She and my father never enforced this policy. But growing up in a fundamentalist home gave me a pronounced wariness of “the world.” It also meant that I tried to fashion my childhood heroes according to pious wishes.

Case in point: Richie Allen. He was the 1964 rookie of the year who played third base for the Philadelphia Phillies. He was my favorite player. Some might say that the Phils provided few options, but Tony Gonzalez, Tony Taylor, and Johnny Callison all had appeal. What set Allen apart was the long ball. He could hit towering homers over the quirky architectural features of Connie Mack Stadium.

To justify my fondness for Allen, I turned him into a Christian. Yes, I truly believed for a good 18 months or so that Richie Allen was a born-again believer. Why? Because I was not supposed to show such admiration for non-Christians. Wonderful solution then to turn Allen into a Christian hero. But that bubble burst during one telecast of a Phillies game when the camera panned the dugout and there sat Richie doing what he did frequently — smoking a cigarette. I was devastated because in my fundamentalist w-w I knew that a Christian did not smoke (or that if they did they were in serious trouble). Up went my first man crush in nicotine-infested smoke. (Not that anyone cares, but I continued to root for Allen and this may have been the beginning of my 2k life where I separated what was common from what is holy.)

Recent comments at Old Life by neo-Calvinists about Machen the tranformationalist (along with Bill Evans’ assessment of 2k) have reminded me of my attempt to make the world fit my conception of it. I don’t deny that Machen had his Kuyperian sounding moments. What the neo-Calvinists have yet to do, though, is actually account for those Old School Presbyterian hours in Machen’s writings. Could there have been a tension between Machen the postmillennial Calvinist and the Old School, amillenial church reformer, the way I experienced cognitive dissonance between my loyalty and love of my Christian parents and my baseball rooting interests? Could — horrors — Machen and Kuyper actually disagree in some important ways, ways that reflect the different trajectories of Old School Presbyterianism and neo-Calvinism? Recent neo-Calvinist sightings at Old Life suggest that no such tension may exist. Abraham Kuyper hung the moon and all Reformed Protestants must follow to his decrees.

This is an odd way to read Machen (though it does seem to fit the w-w pattern of forcing reality into ideal schemes) if only because folks close to Kuyper and his legacy have no trouble spotting important differences between the archbishop of neo-Calvinism and the fundamentalist Machen (at least that’s how neo-Calvinists used to regard him). I posted this before, but Jim Bratt’s comparison of Kuyper to American Presbyterianism is useful for noticing the variety of Reformed Protestantisms:

Put in Dutch Calvinist terms: if forced to choose, Machen would let the Christian cultural task give way to the confessional church; Kuyper would force the confessional church to take up the cultural task. Put in American Presbyterian terms, Kuyper had some strong New School traits where Machen had none. To be sure Kuyper’s predestinarianism was at odds with the New Schools Arminian tints and his movement had a low impetus for “soul-saving,” but his organizational zeal was like Lyman Beecher’s in purpose and scale, his educational purposes at the Free University recalled Timothy Dwight’s at Yale, and his invocation of the “city on a hill” to describe the church’s place in a world recalled the charter image of Puritan New England which was ever the New Schools’ aspiration. In fact Kuyper honored New England as the “core of the American nation” and shared its definition of Christian liberty as a communal opportunity to do the right thing. At that Machen would only shudder. He indicted the “angry passions of 1861″ by which New England trampled on southern rights, and defined Christian liberty as the individual’s protection from the wrong thing. When put to the test, Machen endorsed the political model of Thomas Jefferson. At that Kuyper would only shudder back. (“Abraham Kuyper, J. Gresham Machen, and the Dynamics of Reformed Anti-Modernism,” Journal of Presbyterian History Winter 1997 75.4, 254)

Does this prove that Machen didn’t mean what he said to Christian school teachers? Hardly. But it does reflect a historical interpretation that takes into account far more than an isolated quote or two, one that also situates both Kuyper and Machen in particular church and political contexts. And here Bratt is useful again for highlighting the political differences between the two men. In his new biography of Kuyper, Bratt identifies the neo-Calvinist leader with the sort of progressive politics that dominated the Transatlantic world at the beginning of the twentieth century:

For all their differences, however, progressive movements shared three motifs. All yearned for a fresh form of politics to replace decrepit regimes. All felt liberated from the dead hand of laissez-faire orthodoxy to intervene in the economy — at least to blunt the hardest edges of the new industrial order, at most to move toward real “democracy” in economic as well as political life. And all anticipated that these changes would unleash a new personal vitality that would lead (one more crucial assumption) to a more harmonious society. Kuyper shared everyone of these hopes. (Bratt, Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat, 299)

In contrast, Machen’s politics ran in the exact opposite direction of progressivism. All the major reforms of American Progressives, women’s suffrage, prohibition, child labor reform, public education reform, Machen opposed. The reason was that Machen was a Southern Democrat who took a libertarian line on most political matters, informed by the Southern tradition of States’ Rights and strict construction of the Constitution.

Does that mean that Kuyper is a bad Calvinist or that Machen is one? I frankly suspect that Kuyper would have not doubted Machen’s Calvinism despite his Southern Democratic instincts (or 2k views for their stress on the church as the kingdom of Christ). Kuyper believed that uniformity was the curse of modern life and wrote an essay with that title. Kuyper likely acknowledged what many of his his adherents cannot, namely, that other forms of Calvinism, just as legitimate as Kuyper’s, exist, and that they do not need to be squeezed into a tube of neo-Calvinist uniformity. Does that make Kuyper 2k? David VanDrunen has well answered that question. But it does echo the kind of willingness to tolerate diversity that neo-Calvinists’ most vociferous critics cannot summon.

New Schoolers, Neo-Calvinists, and Fundamentalists

Published on by D. G. Hart147 Comments

After Darrell Todd Maurina kicked up some dust with his post at the Baylyblog on 2k, he made the following comment:

Men such as Dr. Darryl Hart have accused me in the past of holding the same position as the Bible Presbyterians and Carl McIntyre. That is an important accusation and it needs to be rebutted. If men such as Clark, Horton, Hart, and Van Drunen manage to successfully argue that they are in the heritage of Old School Presbyterianism while their opponents are New Schoolers, great damage will be done to the cause of those who oppose “Two Kingdoms” theology within the conservative Reformed world.

Well, if you look at the historical scholarship, Darrell, it gets even worse than you imagine. Consider first of all one inference that George Marsden drew in his first book, a study of New School Presbyterianism:

The most striking illustration of the similarities between nineteenth-century New Schoolism and twentieth-century fundamentalism is found in the sequel to the Presbyterian division of 1936. The newly formed Presbyterian Church of America itself was divided over a complex set of issues remarkably similar to those of 1837. The majority in the new denomination, led by J. Gresham Machen until his death . . . and then by his immediate associates at Westminster Seminary, took clearly Old School positions on each of the issues. The minority, which withdrew to form the Bible Presbyterian Synod, was led by the militant fundamentalist, Carl McIntire. McIntire, who had envisaged the Presbyterian Church of America as part of a wider “twentieth century Reformation,” soon found that he was not at home in a strict Old School tradition. The specific programs for which he fought were 1) toleration of a doctrine (dispenstational premillennialism) that the majority in the Church considered incompatible with the Westminster Confession of Faith; 2) continuation of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, rather than forming an official denominational mission board; and 3) adoption by the General Assembly of a statement that total abstinence from all that may intoxicate is “the only truth principle of temperance – exactly the same statement first adopted by the New School General Assembly of 1840. These programs, together with McIntires’s claim to represent “American Presbyterianism (a former New School phrase), his avid (anti-Communist) patriotism, his zeal for revivalism and legalistic reforms, his emphasis on interdenominational cooperation, and his lack of concern for strict Presbyterian polity – all indicate a continuation of the distinctly New School traditions with the fundamentalist wing of Presbyterianism. . . .

Perhaps the greatest difference between the New School evangelical movement and fundamentalist was that the nineteenth-century movement was largely successful, while the twentieth-century movement was not. The New School was not characterized by an almost total repudiation of the cultural and scientific advances of the age. Rather, it met those challenges without losing its own respectability. The New School thus advanced toward the center of American cultural and religious life, while fundamentalism was forced to retreat to the hinterlands. This, of course, is a crucial difference and makes a characterization of the New School as proto-fundamentalist s misleading as proto-liberal. The New School was in many respects a constructive and progressive religious intellectual movement with marked success in shaping American culture at large. (247, 249)

In case Darrell and other New School-like Protestants get bogged down in McIntire’s peculiarities, the point here is not that Maurina or the Baylys are dispensationalists or tee-totalers. The point is that they put the nation and its politics ahead of their theological and confessional commitments the way New Schoolers did. They want an American Presbyterianism, a faith that shapes America. In contrast, the Old School was willing to consider Reformed Protestantism as something independent or a matter than transcended the nation. The New Schoolers were Americans first and Americans second. Old Schoolers (at least some of them) were Presbyterians first and Americans second. If the United States and Presbyterianism are not the same, the order in which you put “Presbyterian” and “American” matters. (For Presbyterians from Canada or Ireland that makes perfect sense.)

But for those inclined to think that Dutch-American (notice the order) Reformed Protestants escape these parallels and analogies, consider this point that James Bratt made in an article about Kuyper and Machen:

Put in Dutch Calvinist terms: if forced to choose, Machen would let the Christian cultural task give way to the confessional church; Kuyper would force the confessional church to take up the cultural task. Put in American Presbyterian terms, Kuyper had some strong New School traits where Machen had none. To be sure Kuyper’s predestinarianism was at odds with the New Schools Arminian tints and his movement had a low impetus for “soul-saving,” but his organizational zeal was like Lyman Beecher’s in purpose and scale, his educational purposes at the Free University recalled Timothy Dwight’s at Yale, and his invocation of the “city on a hill” to describe the church’s place in a world recalled the charter image of Puritan New England which was ever the New Schools’ aspiration. In fact Kuyper honored New England as the “core of the American nation” and shared its definition of Christian liberty as a communal opportunity to do the right thing. At that Machen would only shudder. He indicted the “angry passions of 1861″ by which New England trampled on southern rights, and defined Christian liberty as the individual’s protection from the wrong thing. When put to the test, Machen endorsed the political model of Thomas Jefferson. At that Kuyper would only shudder back. (“Abraham Kuyper, J. Gresham Machen, and the Dynamics of Reformed Anti-Modernism,” Journal of Presbyterian History Winter 1997 75.4, 254)

So if folks like Maurina are going to talk about lines of historical continuity in the Reformed world, they may want to get their ducks in a row. And by the likes of these historians who taught/teach at Calvin College, the ties among Lyman Beecher, Abraham Kuyper, Carl McIntire, Francis Schaeffer may be stronger than the anti-2kers imagine.