Tag: Jeremy Lin

What New Calvinists Can Learn from Old Calvinism — Failure

Published on by D. G. Hart5 Comments

Collin Hansen lists the top-ten theology stories of the year. Number ten is the boom-and-bust cycle of Tim Tebow and Jeremy Lin. Hansen goes on to wonder why Christians follow celebrities and don’t reflect on failure (possibly because the Gospel Coalition is built on fame and ignores the troubles of folks like C. J. Mahaney):

Tebow wasted away on the New York Jets bench behind an inept starter after the Broncos traded him and prospered under the precision passing of Peyton Manning. Lin also left his team when the Knicks declined to mach an offer from the Houston Rockets, where’s he’s played reasonably well. Why would God not want these men to succeed and spread the gospel through a growing platform in the nation’s largest city? How can they testify to Christ in failure and disappointment? Too few have explored these questions with the same fervency that greeted their ascendance to international celebrity.

If the young and restless would-be Calvinists read much in the history of Calvinism they would know that failure and defeat is par for the course of the church militant (neo-Calvinists’ postmillennial optimism to the contrary). Here is one sober perspective on Calvinist history that suggests if the young and restless read the past less for inspiration and more for understanding, they would have the tools for handling disappointment (they might even get over their celebrity fetish):

For the better part of two hundred years the Corinthian temptation has been to regard Reformed Protestantism’s importance in cultural and political terms. This was a perspective held not only by Reformed believers. Think of Max Weber and his theory about Calvinism and capitalism, or of Alexis de Tocqueville and Calvinism’s contribution to democracy, or of Robert Merton on Calvinism and the rise of modern science. These older arguments do not have the force they once did, but even a couple of years ago at the academic conference in Geneva that marked the five hundredth anniversary of Calvin’s birth, most of the scholarly presentations explored not the sorts of ecclesiastical reforms that characterized Reformed Protestantism but the way that Calvinism shaped the modern world. Such assessments have prompted Reformed believers to think of Calvinism less as a churchly movement than as a religiously-based source for social transformation. Of course, the rise of neo-Calvinism and the inspiring words of Abraham Kuyper have contributed mightily to this estimate of Reformed Protestantism.

But even before Kuyper, the temptation to regard Reformed Protestantism for its political and cultural significance was constant for Presbyterians. How could it not be since the rise of Reformed Protestantism was bound up with European politics. . . . However we estimate the size, scope, and power of the modern nation-state, the reality is that Reformed Protestantism was on the ground floor of the construction of modern Europe and its colonial proliferation, a period that ran from 1600 at least to World War II. No wonder, then, that conservative Reformed believers pine for the days when their faith mattered to the mission of a particular nation. Scottish Presbyterians still long for the days of the National Covenant. Abraham Kuyper endeared himself to Reformed believers by evoking a golden age of Dutch history. Meanwhile, American Presbyterians have their own version of this nostalgia and attempt to construct a Christian founding of the United States even though the very point of the new nation was to bring an end to the pattern of confessionalization that had torn apart Europe (and especially England) during the seventeenth century. . . .

If Reformed Protestantism was chiefly an instance of ecclesiastical reform and renewal, then against that measure the OPC may be a worthy heir to the mantle of Reformed Protestantism, even meriting a celebratory toast. To be sure, the history of the OPC is strewn with believers who still want the church to be more than the church, to be at the forefront of maintaining and promoting social righteousness. But just as important to the OPC’s history has been a growing contentment with the church as simply the church. The word “simply,” of course, understates this sense because the church’s mission is hardly simple or ordinary. But to recognize that the church has a responsibility that no other institution does, and that God has instituted the church uniquely for his redemptive purposes, is the start of a broader sense of restraint and resolve that the OPC, while lacking many of the attributes and features that impress the Corinthian minded, is doing a good and important work no matter how quiet or routine.

Celebrating Celebrity Law-Breakers

Published on by D. G. Hart57 Comments

It may seem like an easy shot, but for a group of Christians who think of themselves as and talk about being Reformed, the blatant disregard of one of the most characteristic marks of Reformed devotion is breathtaking. The Co-Allies have done it again and failed to understand the importance of sanctifying the Lord’s Day.

Joe Carter posted about Bubba Watson’s victory at the Masters Tournament. What matters to Carter is Bubba’s witness, not whether the golfer conforms to God’s revealed will (though to the credit of some readers, a discussion of the Fourth Commandment did ensue):

Last month Watson’s Tweeted before his third round: The most important thing in my life? Answer after I golf 18 holes with @JustinRose99. #Godisgood

Later that day he posted on his account, “Most important things in my life- 1. God 2. Wife 3. Family 4. Helping others 5. Golf”

“Lecrae said it the best,” Watson said of the Christian rapper he listens to on his iPod. “He doesn’t want to be a celebrity. He doesn’t want to be a superstar. He just wants to be the middle man for you to see God through him.”

Of course, the Co-Allies do not neglect of the Sabbath or exhibit inconsistency alone. Evangelicalism is awash with Protestants who want public officials and school board superintendents to post the Decalogue in court and schools rooms, all the while failing to pay attention to the first table of the law and what it says about Sundays and worship.

But is it too much to ask followers of Jesus Christ to keep his day holy? Maybe it is thanks to the instruction from neo-Calvinists that all the days belong to Christ equally. I mean, if all the days now need to show Christ’s Lordship, then maybe I need a break from that week-long holiness on the day that previous generations of saints believed was reserved for holy duties. How do you keep the Lord’s Day holy when everything I do 24/7 is holy?

Still, some Christian athletes did try to honor the day. Eric Liddell, the Olympic caliber runner featured in Chariots of Fire, is one that comes to mind. Just the other night at Hillsdale we saw Chuck Chalberg (who does a pretty good Mencken, by the way) perform his one man show on Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers who signed Jackie Robinson. Turns out that Rickey was reared a holiness-seeking Methodist who promised his mother that he would never play baseball on the Lord’s Day. And speaking of Dodgers, what about Sandy Koufax who would not pitch on the first day of Passover? Precedents do exist for devotion-based sacrifices.

Of course, the problem for athletes of the professional variety is that they would never become celebrities if they did not play sports on the Lord’s Day. Jeremy Lin, Tim Tebow, and Bubba Watson, would not have careers if they reserved Sunday for rest and worship. And without celebrity, Lin, Tebow, and Watson would be useless to those inspiration-deprived believers who need their pastors and mentors to be popular and famous if they are going to believe that God is really in control and carrying out his plan of salvation.

As a cure for this affliction, I recommend Bible reading. It is hard to see in stories of Israel or the early church any kind of fame or power or celebrity. Celebrity is not something that characterizes exiles and pilgrims.

I Didn't Know Brian McLaren was Asian-American

Published on by D. G. Hart9 Comments

Preoccupation with Jeremy Lin continues among evangelicals and it has produced an effort to distinguish Asian-American evangelicalism from white evangelicalism. The result, in the case of Carl Park’s piece, is an attempt to avoid the constraints of one kind of particularity (the white kind) by appealing to the experience of another kind of particularity (Asian-American). (Why folks can’t recognize that Asian-American is as much a construction devoid of particularity as “white” I do not know. After all, Park is a name associated with Koreans and Lin is of Thai Taiwanese descent and Asian hardly does justice to differences among all the ethnic groups produced by Asia. China and Taiwan are vying for Lin, which raises an entirely different problem for the concept of Asian-American.)

Asian American evangelicals also have a different history than white evangelicals. We have, by and large, never been a part of the Religious Right. We never marched after Roe v. Wade, and we didn’t know who Pat Robertson was. We knew James Dobson from Focus on the Family tapes, but we did not know his politics.

We weren’t a part of the fundamentalist-liberal divide from the early 20th century. So we, as gospel-pondering Christians, might attend a debate about whether or not social justice is an essential part of the church’s mission, but we’re sort of perplexed by the question. In our history, immigrant churches preached the gospel and took care of the everyday needs of the immigrant community—explaining the water and electric bills, providing loans to one another, helping each other’s children get into college—without any bifurcation or angst.

Our Presbyterians spoke in tongues, our mainline pastors preached the exclusivity of Jesus. We wondered how any Christian could have qualms about something called “liberation theology,” until we read Cone and Guttiérez, and we were shocked to learn that some “Christian” seminaries do not confess the Nicene Creed. Our piety and worship tend to feel trans-denominational. Today, Asian American evangelicals in New York who don’t join a predominantly Asian American church are happy to be a (large) part of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, but we are also happy to be with Times Square Church. Both churches’ spiritualities feel familiar.

We aren’t quite Emergents or New Calvinists, because we’re not emerging from a white 80s-and-90s megachurchish spirituality that those groups take to task. We can identify with some aspects of those groups—we are urban and charismatic-friendly, and we were the Other long before it was cool to be—but much of the rhetoric does not connect. We have had more than our share of problems, but a mechanistic or programmatic model of church has not been one of them, and our parents’ churches sang plenty of hymns.

If Park’s point is that evangelicalism a religious identity that obliterates ethnic differences and the history of distinct peoples, well, he has a point. And that point applies in spades to distinct Protestant communions (which happened to fall along ethnic [read: national] lines). Evangelicalism can’t do justice any more to Thai-American Protestants than it can to Reformed Protestants.

But what is curious about Park’s piece is how he is willing to affirm the particularity of ethnicity but not grant a similar import to the specificity of fundamentalism, neo-evangelicalism, or the Religious Right. It is a denial similar to the one that emergents make of evangelicalism; you reject the political provincialism of Falwell for the social justice cosmopolitanism of Campolo. But how that works for affirming ethnic identity is a question that needs more attention. (BTW, interesting to see how this cosmopolitan, yet ethnic, faith is comfortable at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City where Presbyterian particularity is often in short supply compared to identities supplied by modern urban demographics.)

Aggregators and the Aggregated

Published on by D. G. Hart31 Comments

Justin Taylor does an interesting job of posting various and sundry. But as always, I have a few questions:

1) Do we need to read Piper in order to have access to the high priest of Christian hedonism, Jonathan Edwards? Why can’t we receive Edwards without a mixer?

2) Has Jed been reading Chuck Colson? It seems that the evangelical hierarchy is headed toward civil disobedience.

3) Why do evangelicals need professional athletes to show the importance of faith? (This may be one of the greatest indicators of a difference between young “Calvinists” and Reformed Protestants — Mike Horton doesn’t know anything about sports.) BTW, how could anyone outside metropolitan New York in good conscience root for the Knicks?

4) Why did Justin miss this one, an editorial (you need to read to the end of the post for the original editorial) that seems to have gone viral among Southern Baptists? Gerald Harris, editor of the Christian Index, is worried about the spread of Calvinism in the SBC. What is interesting is how the associations between Calvinism and Mark Driscoll (yuck!) are hurting the appeal of Reformed theology among Baptists. Those associations may have something to do with the way that Southern Baptist leaders seem to be backing away from the Calvinist label. Plant T-U-L-I-P under a bushel? Yes!