Tag: John Calvin

Why Religion Goes Private

Published on by D. G. Hart154 Comments

This story about religious dissenters at Ontario York University is one of those reality checks for 2k’s critics who say that the notion of faith being a private affair is audaciously perverse or perfidious:

J. Paul Grayson, a professor of sociology at Ontario’s York University, received what he described as an unusual request from a student in his online research methods class last fall. The student requested that he be exempt from an assignment requiring him to meet in-person with a group of his peers, writing to Grayson,

One of the main reasons that I have chosen internet courses to complete my BA is due to my firm religious beliefs, and part of that is the intermingling between men and women… It will not be possible for me to meet in public with a group of women (the majority of my group) to complete some of these tasks.

Grayson ultimately refused the student’s request for an accommodation, believing that to grant it would be to render him, and the university, “an accessory to sexism.” Grayson said that the student, whom he surmised is either Muslim or Orthodox Jewish – his identity has not been revealed for privacy reasons – graciously accepted the decision. He has since completed the assignment in question.

It would seem to be a case in which a sensitive situation was resolved satisfactorily enough. However, Grayson’s denial of the student’s request came over and above the objections of York administrators, including the dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, Martin Singer, who, in email correspondence shared by Grayson, said that the university had a legal obligation to accommodate the student’s religious beliefs and argued that to exempt him from group work would “in no way have ‘substantial impact’ on the experience or human rights of other students in the class.” Although, in what Grayson described as a tacit acknowledgement of a potential impact, the dean also wrote to Grayson, “It is particularly important, especially as you are concerned about the course experience of our female students, that other students in 2030.60B are not made aware of the accommodation” (a directive that Grayson said he is currently challenging through the York faculty union as a violation of his academic freedom).

Is it just (all about) me, or do believers, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Mormons, not have an obligation to accept the standards of an institution — such as religious pluralism and no religious tests for enrollment or teaching — when they decide to take courses and pay tuition? If a non-Christian enrolled at Moody Bible Institute and then complained that he was shocked, just shocked to find so much Bible and prayer in classrooms, wouldn’t Christians think the secularist should have known what he was in for? So why doesn’t this logic apply to believers at public institutions? Why do they think that when they arrive on campus, all of a sudden the place is going to turn faith-friendly or maybe even emulate the norms of their faith community?

So, when we have an institution — university or civil polity — that includes a diverse array of believers, believers have to figure out a way to distinguish their public conduct from their religious convictions. (What I say in my prayer closet is not what I say in the classroom.) One way to do that is to say that I am a Christian all the time but this religious identity is not going to be visible or public when participating in a community and abiding by a set of rules where Christianity is not the norm. Perhaps some forms of Christianity are incapable of making such a distinction. If so, then Christians should have nothing to do with religiously mixed polities or institutions. The Amish take that position (and I have great respect for it). But continuing to insist that public institutions comply with a person’s religious convictions when such an institution includes a variety of believers is either disingenuous or just plain recalcitrant.

And thankfully, we have the apostle Paul and John Calvin to sort this out. In his comments on 1 Cor 5: 12-13 — “For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. “Purge the evil person from among you” — Calvin writes:

There is nothing to hinder us from judging these also — nay more, even devils themselves are not exempt from the judgment of the word which is committed to us. But Paul is speaking here of the jurisdiction that belongs peculiarly to the Church. “The Lord has furnished us with this power, that we may exercise it upon those who belong to his household. For this chastisement is a part of discipline which is confined to the Church, and does not extend to strangers. We do not therefore pronounce upon them their condemnation, because the Lord has not subjected them to our cognizance and jurisdiction, in so far as that chastisement and censure are concerned. We are, therefore, constrained to leave them to the judgment of God.” It is in this sense that Paul says, that God will judge them, because he allows them to wander about unbridled like wild beasts, because there is no one that can restrain their wantonness.

Callers' Cognitive Dissonance

Published on by D. G. Hart623 Comments

Ross Douthat wrote recently about the odd reaction of liberal Roman Catholics to the notion that Pope Francis may change church teaching. He referred to Damon Linker’s surprise when doing an NPR talk show and a liberal Roman Catholic caller indicated that Linker was wrong to think that Francis changing the church’s stands was a potentially big deal:

After reading an endless stream of gushing commentary by liberal Catholics on Pope Francis, I’m beginning to wonder if they ever really cared about reforming doctrine in the first place.

The seeds of doubt were planted a couple of weeks after my TNR essay was published, when I appeared on an NPR radio show to discuss the pope. I repeated my argument, but then a caller challenged me. Describing herself as a progressive Catholic, she dismissed my skepticism about the likelihood of Francis reforming church doctrine. “Doctrine for a Catholic, now, is not even an issue,” said Trish from Kentucky (you can listen to her beginning at 24:43). “Catholics do not care about doctrine,” she said, adding, “It’s irrelevant. It’s a non-issue for Catholics.”

That, to be honest, is something that I hadn’t considered when I wrote my essay. As I indicated in my remarks responding to Trish, I had assumed all along that liberal Catholics wanted to liberalize Catholic doctrine — that they wanted to bring the church, as I wrote in TNR, “into conformity with the egalitarian ethos of modern liberalism, including its embrace of gay rights, sexual freedom, and gender equality.”

But here was a liberal Catholic telling me I’d gotten it all wrong. The pope’s warm, welcoming words are “everything,” Trish said, because doctrine, including that covering contraception and divorce, is “useless.”

Douthat concedes that this form of liberal Roman Catholicism may be more prevalent in U.S. circles than he had imagined (though you’d never know that from CTC):

The Commonweal-reading wing of liberal Catholicism would certainly reject the latter idea [i.e., “Roman Catholicism” just happens to be the name of the stage on which your purely individual spiritual drama is taking place], but the kind of “post-Catholic Catholicism” Linker describes is clearly more of a force in our culture today than it was during the early days of the American Church’s post-Vatican II civil war (it’s hard to understand the controversy over American nuns, for instance, without recognizing its impact), and the Trishes of the culture have a strong wind at their back in a way that would-be reformers of the old, 1960s-era school of liberal Catholicism arguably do not.

But Douthat is hopeful of another way of reading the situation, one he found among Jewish Americans whose conflicted and at times hypocritical observance of Judaism’s norms translated into children more observant than their parents.

[The problem is] how to make its hardest rules seem like aspirations rather than just judgments, and how to deal with the many fine personal gradations that can exist between orthodoxy and apostasy, fidelity and dissent. And I suspect there are many Catholics who would be classified as “liberal” who want . . . room to dissent from a teaching or fail to live up to it in practice, but they don’t necessarily want the church to change that teaching so that the dissonance or tension they feel simply goes away. Hence their positive reaction to Francis’s rhetorical shift and their lack of urgency about actual doctrinal change. They aren’t necessarily all Trishes who have decided that they don’t care about what the Catechism says. Some of them, at least, might be more like the Orthodox Jews who parked their cars around the corner without demanding that the rabbi be okay with it, and whose children turned out to be more observant, rather than less.

Whatever this post may indicate about the more than cognitive dissonance — call it denial — that Protestants-turned-Roman Catholic must face when seeing how broad the spectrum of Roman Catholicism in action and possibly wondering why nothing of consequence happens, it does lead to a curious point that many miss about Protestantism, Douthat included. I can actually imagine describing the OPC as the kind of place where the room for dissent that Douthat imagines exists — a church that makes room for dissenters to turn into people with children who become much more disciplined in their observance. After all, we have plenty of public disputes in Reformed circles about the application of redemption, about the law, about biblical interpretation. An ordinary church member doesn’t need to worry about any of this, but also may follow the latest blogs with great zeal. At the same time, our officers know the procedures for negotiating such dissent. We have well prescribed rules and frameworks of jurisdiction that allow for discipline to be real and serious. If you cross the line as an officer, you will suffer, and the people who can make you suffer know what to do. As a lay person, if you don’t adhere to church teaching (as long as you don’t sin), you simply can’t teach Sunday school. Sabbath observance is arguably the best case of this. In many congregations, if you don’t attend both services you won’t be considered for special office. If you don’t return to church at night, no one is going to shame you into a puddle of remorse. Sanctifying the Lord’s Day is the norm, the standard, and it may even be an aspiration. Either way, the rules governing church discipline — which is in the hands of a variety of officers at a number of levels, thus insuring mixed government (hello, ecclesiastical subsidiarity) — give officers a clear sense of how to enforce the norms, even supplying a dose of wisdom by forcing an officer particularly zealous about the Lord’s Day to calculate how his charges against a fellow church member will go with other members of session, presbytery, and even General Assembly.

What Rome seems to lack, in contrast, is any mechanism for dissenters, bishops, priests, Knights of Columbus, Nancy Pelosi to know how to process dissent and its flipside. The Vatican has the levers of power but they are remote from ordinary priests, lay people, religious. In which case, dissent becomes as much a piece of ecclesiastical furniture as papal power. Dissent and papal power are there, but it’s just white noise. There’s no manual for how to adjust the volume or turn off the machine. (And what’s particularly odd about this state of affairs is that Rome has had over a millenium to try to figure this out, and with all that charism no less!)

Thanks to Calvin’s Ecclesiastical Ordinances (based on Scripture, of course), Presbyterians have the instructions.

Postscript: Here’s an example of the kind of white noise that dissent and authority comprise for the superior mechanism of an infallible pope. It is from John Allen’s story about papal representatives’ testimony in Geneva before the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Church about the child-abuse scandal:

Second, most of the immediate blowback against Thursday’s presentation by Tomasi and Scicluna focused on the claim that Rome is not responsible for supervising the more than 400,000 Catholic priests of the world, which falls instead to local bishops and religious superiors. Repeatedly, Tomasi and Scicluna offered statements of principle as to how the church ought to operate, but were then forced to concede that implementation varies widely at the grassroots.

Critics found the claim that the Vatican can’t take direct control of the situation disingenuous.

“We’re very saddened that such a huge and powerful church bureaucracy continues to pretend it’s powerless over its own officials,” said a statement from the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

In fairness, insistence on the autonomy of the local church is perfectly consistent with both official Catholic ecclesiology and actual practice in the church. It’s worth noting that a federal judge in Oregon, who’s a Mormon with no dog in Catholic fights, took a close look at the contention that priests are “employees” of the Vatican in a lawsuit related to the abuse scandals in 2012 and ruled that they clearly aren’t.

Nevertheless, the skepticism those claims elicited Thursday illustrates the uphill climb the Vatican faces in trying to persuade people that it couldn’t impose its will if it really wanted to.

In truth, this has long been one the paradoxes generated by the sex abuse mess. For decades, church reformers (especially on the liberal end of things) have clamored for greater collegiality in Catholicism, and they applauded vigorously when Pope Francis pledged support for a “healthy decentralization” in his recent document, Evangelii Gaudium. Yet when it comes to sex abuse, they seem to want the exact opposite — they want the long arm of the law to reach down from Rome and crack heads.

What this perhaps suggests is that theologians working on the nature and limits of papal authority and the relationship between local churches and Rome need to sit down with the child protection people to make sure that the real-world experience of the abuse scandals is brought into the conversation.

The truth of it may be that a strong pope is a bit like a lawyer — everybody loves to complain until they need one.

Turns out that papal authority is great for apologetics, not so great for running the church.

Why Not Lutheranism?

Published on by D. G. Hart141 Comments

While Joe Carter is yet again telling me what I should do, this time how to think about October 31st, Protestants (and others) in Hillsdale will be observing Reformation Day with a book talk by (all about) me on Calvinism. What follows is an excerpt:

Why Calvinism (Why not Lutheranism?)

One of the stranger features of religion in the United States is the level of comfort that Americans seem to have with Calvinism even though it is a version of Christianity that many, along with H. L. Mencken, place in their “cabinet of horrors” – the Baltimore journalist put it on the shelf right next to cannibalism. One way to illustrate this peculiarity is to compare Americans’ familiarity with Calvinism to their general indifference to and ignorance of Lutheranism. If you do as I do and have Google alerts set up for both Calvinism and Lutheranism, you will daily receive an email with at least three or four references to Calvinism. You will also usually go three or four days between emailings with a reference or two (at best) to Lutheranism.

This is odd at least for a couple of reasons. First, Lutherans are the ur-Protetstants, the original Christians who broke with the papacy, and yet few Protestants in the United States seem to have any awareness of the debt they owe to Martin Luther – or the reasons for convening this lecture in competition with costumes and candy on a day known as Reformation Day, the alleged date when in 1517 Luther nailed a piece of paper to a cathedral door and destroyed the sacred canopy of Christendom in Europe. Second, Lutherans far outnumber Calvinists in the United States. The mainline denomination, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is almost 6 times larger than the mainline Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. – roughly 6 million compared to 1 million. And outside the mainline denominations, Missouri Synod Lutherans are almost 30 times larger than the Orthodox Presbyterian Church – roughly 3 million compared – ahem – to 30,000. Even the Wisconsin Synod, the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, to be precise, a communion that even with “evangelical” in its name is unknown to most American Protestants – even the Wisconsin Synod is larger than the Presbyterian Church in America, a denomination that thanks to Tim Keller’s popularity in the Big Apple seems to be poised to transform America into a nation of urban chic Protestants. The Wisconsin Synod has roughly 400,000 members and the PCA has only 300,000.

But does that kind of history and those raw numbers make American pundits, scholars, and laity take notice of Lutherans? Hardly. If you want to glom on to an influential form of Protestantism, one with world-shaping significance, in the English-speaking world you go not to Lutheranism but to Calvinism.

To illustrate Calvinism’s appeal – again which is hard to believe because of its associations with teaching total depravity and predestination, thus qualifying for Mencken’s cabinet of horrors – think back to this past summer when Baptists of all people, Southern Baptists specifically, received a report about the propriety of Calvinism within the Southern Baptist Convention. For several years, fellows like Al Mohler and Russell Moore, both at the oldest Southern Baptist seminary in Louisville, had carved out a place for Calvinist teaching in the denomination. But Baptists have long been hostile to Calvinism, even if some Baptists have gone by the name of particular or Calvinistic. To make this point we need only think of Hillsdale College’s origins. It began as a Baptist college and only severed its church ties in 1913 – one hundred years ago. It was associated with a particular brand of Baptist churches – the Free Will Baptists. And these Baptists were not at all comfortable with Calvinism’s teaching about the bondage of the will (thanks to the fall) or to Calvinism’s notion that Christ’s death was effective only for those God elected or predestined to save. One Kentucky preacher spoke for many Free Will Baptists and other democratic Protestants when he sniffed, “We are not personally acquainted with the writings of John Calvin, nor are we certain how nearly we agree with his views of divine truth; neither do we care.” And those words would likely have likely received support from Hillsdale College’s original board of trustees.

So why would Baptists like Mohler and Moore today find Calvinism to be a brand of Protestantism worthy of emulation? Why do we hear about Protestants like John Piper, the famous pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, being called a Calvinist or Reformed Baptist? Why not a Lutheran Baptist? Why is the former unexceptional but the latter – Lutheran Baptist – why does THAT sound oxymoronic? Isn’t Calvinist Baptist just as much of an oxymoron? After all, Calvinism has as many foreign Christian elements as Lutheranism. If Lutherans have funny views about baptism and the Lord’s Supper, so does Calvin. If Lutherans don’t sing revival hymns, Calvinists don’t even sing hymns – or at least they didn’t used to; they only sang psalms. And if Lutheranism has odd notions about church membership, Calvinism has its own set of difficulties for Protestants who prize congregational autonomy and rule by church members. It was Calvin, after all, who wrote an order for church government, conveniently excerpted in Hillsdale’s Western Heritage Reader, which lays down a precise Presbyterian polity that would drive Baptists, who thrive on congregational autonomy, batty.

Last summer a writer for the conservative journal, First Things, tried to account for Baptist preferences for Calvinism over Lutheranism. He observed that when Lutherans came to North America, they actually had a far more flexible form of church government than Calvinism. Yet the irony is that Lutheranism is associated much more than Calvinism with a fixed understanding of church organization, whereas Calvinism is associated almost exclusively with ideas not about the church but about salvation – as in the Five Points of Calvinism, or T-U-L-I-P. Gene Veith, academic dean at Patrick Henry College, and a Missouri Synod Lutheran himself, weighed in on the spectacle of Calvinstic Southern Baptists and argued that Lutheran theology cannot be detached from its understandings about the nature of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The same would have been said of Calvinism at least in the sixteenth century.

But by the time English Protestants had appropriated Calvinism, they had concocted an idea that could not only be severed from Calvin’s own views on the sacraments but also potentially from much having to do with Christianity. Indeed, a common occurrence among pundits in the United States and the United Kingdom is to associate Calvinism with aspects of modern life well beyond the church – politics, economics, education, science, art. In other words, quite apart from the merits or defects of Calvinism’s ideas – human sinfulness to the point of total depravity, the scope of the benefits of Christ’s death, and divine sovereignty in relation to human freedom – Calvinism has become for English-speakers a familiar term, even a brand, that makes it as easy to talk about the effects and influence of Calvin and Geneva as it does to talk about Thomas Jefferson and Jeffersonianism. Calvinism, no matter what it actually means, is a word with which most English-speakers are comfortable. In contrast, Lutheranism feels like a foreign word, sort of like Hegelianism. If you are going to drop that into a sentence or two to explain developments in the West, you better be sure you know what you are talking about. But with Calvinism, English-speakers know enough (they think) to use it to account for a host of world-wide developments, which again is strange since Lutheranism, the original Protestantism, did as much to disrupt Europe’s received patterns, and was as much on the ground floor of world-changing significance as Calvinism – perhaps even more so. After all, Calvin didn’t start to make things happen in Geneva – the 1540s – until the very last years of Martin Luther’s life.

Who's Afraid of Distinguishing the Temporal from the Eternal?

Published on by D. G. Hart42 Comments

Neo-Calvinists are, is the short answer. Even James Bratt’s kvetch about the abuse of every-square-inch language, offered this resistance to hierarchical distinctions between the world and the spirit:

Over against any kind of body-soul, nature-grace, fulltimeChristianservicevs.secularwork dualism, Kuyper’s words insist that God can—must—be served anywhere and everywhere. No better jobs or worse jobs before the Lord by how “spiritual” they are. No writing off whole sectors of culture or society as inherently worldly, or privileging others as inherently good. No more traditional pietist (Victorian?) hierarchies. I get it, and endorse it.

Lots to unpack there and not enough space in a post to do it. A lot of the spade work needs to go in the direction of “pietist” and “Victorian” as code for some sort of objectionable distinction between the realms of religion and common life. At the same time, the entire history of the West, philosophy, and liberal education makes no sense without some kind of distinction between what Greeks, Romans, and Christians deemed were higher aspects of human existence (the realm of the spirit or philosophy or reason or language) and the lower (eating or sex or wealth). In fact, what continues to bedevil me about neo-Calvinism is this Turrets Syndrome like reaction to binary distinctions. It is as if the West was swimming along sorting out and thriving on the distinctions between spiritual/intellectual and temporal/physical spheres and along came Kuyper and said, “we will have none of it” or “this is all fault of the French Revolution.” And he might have added “we will not pay any attention to similar distinctions between flesh and spirit, or Caesar and God, in Scripture.” “Dualism is bad because all of life, the cosmos (do we hear an echo of Carl Sagan?) needs to be integrated.” So writes Kuyper in his famous Lectures:

. . . wherever two elements appear, as in this case the sinner and the saint, the temporal and the eternal, the terrestrial and the heavenly life, there is always danger of losing sight of their interconnection and of falsifying both by error or onesidedness. Christendom, it must be confessed, did not escape this error. A dualistic conception of regeneration was the cause of the rupture between the life of nature and the life of grace. It has, on account of its too intense contemplation of celestial things, neglected to give due attention to the world of God’s creation. It has, on account of its exclusive love of things eternal, been backward in the fulfilment of its temporal duties. It has neglected the care of the body because it cared too exclusively for the soul. And this one-sided, inharmonious conception in the course of time has led more than one sect to a mystic worshipping of Christ alone, to the exclusion of God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. Christ was conceived exclusively as the Savior, and His cosmological significance was lost out of sight.

This dualism, however, is by no means countenanced by the Holy Scriptures. (118)

What is particularly troubling about Kuyper’s disregard for distinguishing the temporal from the eternal is that paleo-Calvinism used this distinction for making sense of Christianity and the work of the church. For instance, here is the very confession and Kuyper subscribed on the Lord’s Supper:

We believe and confess that our Savior Jesus Christ has ordained and instituted the sacrament of the Holy Supper to nourish and sustain those who are already born again and ingrafted into his family: his church.

Now those who are born again have two lives in them. The one is physical and temporal– they have it from the moment of their first birth, and it is common to all. The other is spiritual and heavenly, and is given them in their second birth; it comes through the Word of the gospel in the communion of the body of Christ; and this life is common to God’s elect only.

Thus, to support the physical and earthly life God has prescribed for us an appropriate earthly and material bread, which is as common to all as life itself also is. But to maintain the spiritual and heavenly life that belongs to believers he has sent a living bread that came down from heaven: namely Jesus Christ, who nourishes and maintains the spiritual life of believers when eaten– that is, when appropriated and received spiritually by faith.
To represent to us this spiritual and heavenly bread Christ has instituted an earthly and visible bread as the sacrament of his body and wine as the sacrament of his blood. He did this to testify to us that just as truly as we take and hold the sacraments in our hands and eat and drink it in our mouths, by which our life is then sustained, so truly we receive into our souls, for our spiritual life, the true body and true blood of Christ, our only Savior. We receive these by faith, which is the hand and mouth of our souls. (Belgic Confession, Art. 35)

Parenthetically, if you apply this distinction then you might distinguish between the eternal words of Holy Writ and the temporal words of Shakespeare, which would in turn shape the way you understand the task of Christian education and the relationship between the humanities and divinity.

But if neo-Calvinists have their way, then Belgic makes a distinction that partakes too much of a pietistic or Roman Catholic or Greco-Roman view of the sacrament.

Meanwhile, Calvin himself relied on this very distinction between the temporal and eternal when trying to understand the relation of church, state, and the heavenly kingdom:

Having shown above that there is a twofold government in man, and having fully considered the one which, placed in the soul or inward man, relates to eternal life, we are here called to say something of the other, which pertains only to civil institutions and the external regulation of manners. For although this subject seems from its nature to be unconnected with the spiritual doctrine of faith, which I have undertaken to treat, it will appear as we proceed, that I have properly connected them, nay, that I am under the necessity of doing so, especially while, on the one hand, frantic and barbarous men are furiously endeavouring to overturn the order established by God, and, on the other, the flatterers of princes, extolling their power without measure, hesitate not to oppose it to the government of God. Unless we meet both extremes, the purity of the faith will perish. We may add, that it in no small degree concerns us to know how kindly God has here consulted for the human race, that pious zeal may the more strongly urge us to testify our gratitude. And first, before entering on the subject itself, it is necessary to attend to the distinction which we formerly laid down (Book 3 Chap. 19 sec. 16, et supra, Chap. 10), lest, as often happens to many, we imprudently confound these two things, the nature of which is altogether different. For some, on hearing that liberty is promised in the gospel, a liberty which acknowledges no king and no magistrate among men, but looks to Christ alone, think that they can receive no benefit from their liberty so long as they see any power placed over them. Accordingly, they think that nothing will be safe until the whole world is changed into a new form, when there will be neither courts, nor laws, nor magistrates, nor anything of the kind to interfere, as they suppose, with their liberty. But he who knows to distinguish between the body and the soul, between the present fleeting life and that which is future and eternal, will have no difficulty in understanding that the spiritual kingdom of Christ and civil government are things very widely separated. Seeing, therefore, it is a Jewish vanity to seek and include the kingdom of Christ under the elements of this world, let us, considering, as Scripture clearly teaches, that the blessings which we derive from Christ are spiritual, remember to confine the liberty which is promised and offered to us in him within its proper limits. (Institutes IV.20.1)

None of this means necessarily that neo-Calvinists are wrong and 2kers are right. Maybe Kuyper came along and corrected a deep flaw within both Reformed Protestantism and the West more generally. But since distinctions between spiritual and worldly affairs haunt the pages of Scripture, not to mention the leading texts of Western civilization, neo-Calvinists have some obligation to explain why they reject (or appear to) the categories that practically all Europeans and their offspring have used to make sense of the world and Christianity.

How Calvin Might Have Sounded Had He Been a Neo-Calvinist

Published on by D. G. Hart3 Comments

When they read about “taking every thought captive,” goosebumps follow.

Paul declares that he is not one of this class, inasmuch as he is furnished with other weapons than those of the flesh and the world. Now, what he affirms respecting himself is applicable, also, to all true ministers of Christ, including parents, magistrates, and school teachers. For they carry an inestimable treasure in earthen vessels, as he had previously said. (2 Corinthians 4:7.) Hence, however they may be surrounded with the infirmities of the flesh, the spiritual cosmic power of God, nevertheless, shines forth resplendently in them.

The warfare corresponds with the kind of weapons. He glories in being furnished with spiritual cosmic weapons. The warfare, accordingly, is spiritual cosmic. Hence it follows by way of contraries, that it is not according to the flesh. In comparing the ministry of the gospel to a warfare, he uses a most apt similitude. The life of a Christian, it is true, is a perpetual warfare, for whoever gives himself to the service of God will have no truce from Satan at any time, but will be harassed with incessant disquietude. It becomes, however, ministers of the word and pastors and parents, magistrates, and school teachers to be standard bearers, going before the others; and, certainly, there are none that Satan harasses more, that are more severely assaulted, or that sustain more numerous or more dreadful onsets. . . . But by what weapons is he to be repelled? It is only by spiritual cosmic weapons that he can be repelled. Whoever, therefore, is unarmed with the influence of the Holy Spirit, however he may boast that he is a minister of Christ, will nevertheless, not prove himself to be such. At the same time, if you would have a full enumeration of spiritual cosmic weapons, doctrine, Shakespeare, biology, philosophy, and law must be conjoined with zeal, and a good conscience with the efficacy of the Spirit, and with other necessary graces. Let now the Pope go, and assume to himself the apostolic dignity. [Bold added for effect] (From Calvin’s Commentary on 2 Corinthians 10:1-5)

Trouble is, Calvin distinguished between the temporal and the eternal, between the spiritual and the earthly, the way Paul did.

Differentiation of Ecclesiastical and Civil, Differentiation of Ecclesiastical and Civil (rinse, chant, and repeat)!

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

Tim Bayly is at it again with a post containing his talk at a CREC gathering. It is another instance of that Framean habit of mind which blurs categories simply because topics sort of sound or look alike. In this case, he is for integration — as in integrating faith and politics, faith and learning. But he also believes he can score points against 2kers by upholding the integration of races. So bringing up the racism of Southern Presbyterians who affirmed and taught the spirituality of the church is another way of making the point that 2kers are against integration — that is, we split church and state, faith and learning, whites and blacks.

The problem is that Tim can’t quite stay on track. He brings up his father’s decision to start a Christian school in the 1940s located in the suburbs of Philadelphia. The integration here is faith and learning, and racial, since well before the Civil Rights movement Tim’s dad founded a school that welcomed blacks and whites. But what proves integration also proves separation. The Baylys school was not part of the public school system. It segregated Christians from non-Christians (and even other Christians) in the public schools. You can’t have integration all the time in a neo-Calvinist world that runs on the fuel of anti-thesis. In fact, the Bayly’s MO is largely one of underscoring the difference between true Christians and fake ones, between people who are good for America (Christians) and those who aren’t (professors at Covenant Seminary and gays). Integration can’t quite circle the square. But that’s okay. It allows Tim to feel superior in an integrated way.

The difficulties in Tim’s assessment also lead to such woppers as this:

Who is the Reformed group who is whole-hog into patriotism today? Which men are wrapping themselves in the flag, crying out “my country, right or wrong?” Who are the Reformed men who are zealous to gag God’s prophets of righteousness, instead casting their lot in with the ACLU, the powers that be inside the Beltway, and the chattering classes up and down the seaboards, Eastern and Western as they all chant: “Separation of church and state! Separation of church and state!”

I think the answer is supposed to be 2kers, but last time I checked, it was 2kers who actually wonder out loud about the propriety of patriotism in Christian circles, such as the display of the U.S. flag in churches. 2kers have also been known to avoid commenting on politics, thus leaving the subject to the deliriums of folks like the Baylys and other neo-Calvinists. Try telling these guys that Christ’s kingdom transcends the politics of any nation and see who starts bellyaching about “my country.”

Even so, Tim goes to Cornel Venema for apparent help to undermine any sense that the 2k position enjoys some kind of standing historically among the Reformed churches:

…the two kingdoms doctrine is alleged to be the venerable, original position of the Reformed churches. …(This) historical claim on the part of two kingdoms advocates… represents a tendentious reading of the historical record.

The difficulty for Venema and Bayly is that the Reformed churches have historically affirmed a differentiation between the civil and ecclesiastical spheres.

God, the supreme Lord and King of all the world, hath ordained civil magistrates, to be, under him, over the people, for his own glory, and the public good: and, to this end, hath armed them with the power of the sword, for the defense and encouragement of them that are good, and for the punishment of evildoers. (WCF 23.1)

That’s the magistrate’s duty. It is hardly the same or comparable to the church’s:

Unto this catholic visible church Christ hath given the ministry, oracles, and ordinances of God, for the gathering and perfecting of the saints, in this life, to the end of the world: and doth, by his own presence and Spirit, according to his promise, make them effectual thereunto. (25.3)

And that has something to do with what synods may or may not do:

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)

This may not be exactly an endorsement of the separation of church and state, but the distinction between civil and ecclesiastical spheres is certainly more in the 2k ballpark than one where integration rules, which means it is far more venerable and original that Venema indicates. I mean, if you want the integration of church and state, you likely don’t distinguish overly precisely the work of the church from the task of the magistrate, which is exactly what is missing in those who advocate a Christian America or Christian schools. Introduce the distinction between the civil/temporal and ecclesiastical/heavenly and these folks think you are a bastard child of Thomas Jefferson.

And then if you question whether the church or Christians or both should be inaugurating God’s kingdom, the way Calvin did, then you are definitely a blasphemer. And yet, those early Reformed Protestants seemed to be able to keep their wits about the direction of history and not trying to associate cultural or political advances or set backs with God’s divine plan:

THE SECTS. We therefore condemn all who deny a real resurrection of the flesh (II Tim. 2:18), or who with John of Jerusalem, against whom Jerome wrote, do not have a correct view of the glorification of bodies. We also condemn those who thought that the devil and all the ungodly would at some time be saved, and that there would be an end to punishments. For the Lord has plainly declared: “Their fire is not quenched, and their worm does not die” (Mark 9:44). We further condemn Jewish dreams that there will be a golden age on earth before the Day of Judgment, and that the pious, having subdued all their godless enemies, will possess all the kingdoms of the earth. For evangelical truth in Matt., chs. 24 and 25, and Luke, ch. 18, and apostolic teaching in II Thess., ch. 2, and II Tim., chs. 3 and 4, present something quite different.

I have no doubt that being a confessional Reformed Protestant is hard. It is easier to look at big churches, celebrity pastors, and religiously boisterous politicos as bearing the marks of the coming kingdom. Seeing the world through the eyes of faith, and not being duped by externals or cultural decay requires sobriety, restraint, and patience in ways that conflict with our own desire for either justice to prevail or self to be vindicated. But if Calvin could summon up such discipline even in the glory days of Reformed Geneva, surely Tim Bayly can do the same in the face of Obamacare:

We must, therefore, know that the happiness which is promised to us in Christ does not consist in external advantages—such as leading a joyful and tranquil life, abounding in wealth, being secure against all injury, and having an affluence of delights, such as the flesh is wont to long for—but properly belongs to the heavenly life. As in the world the prosperous and desirable condition of a people consists partly in the abundance of temporal good and domestic peace, and partly in the strong protection which gives security against external violence; so Christ also enriches his people with all things necessary to the eternal salvation of their souls and fortifies them with courage to stand unassailable by all the attacks of spiritual foes. Whence we infer, that he reigns more for us than for himself, and that both within us and without us; that being replenished, in so far as God knows to be expedient, with the gifts of the Spirit, of which we are naturally destitute, we may feel from their first fruits, that we are truly united to God for perfect blessedness; and then trusting to the power of the same Spirit, may not doubt that we shall always be victorious against the devil, the world, and every thing that can do us harm. To this effect was our Saviour’s reply to the Pharisees, “The kingdom of God is within you.” “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation,” (Luke 17:21, 22). It is probable that on his declaring himself to be that King under whom the highest blessing of God was to be expected, they had in derision asked him to produce his insignia. But to prevent those who were already more than enough inclined to the earth from dwelling on its pomp, he bids them enter into their consciences, for “the kingdom of God” is “righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost,” (Rom. 14:17). These words briefly teach what the kingdom of Christ bestows upon us. Not being earthly or carnal, and so subject to corruption, but spiritual, it raises us even to eternal life, so that we can patiently live at present under toil, hunger, cold, contempt, disgrace, and other annoyances; contented with this, that our King will never abandon us, but will supply our necessities until our warfare is ended, and we are called to triumph: such being the nature of his kingdom, that he communicates to us whatever he received of his Father. Since then he arms and equips us by his power, adorns us with splendour and magnificence, enriches us with wealth, we here find most abundant cause of glorying, and also are inspired with boldness, so that we can contend intrepidly with the devil, sin, and death. In fine, clothed with his righteousness, we can bravely surmount all the insults of the world: and as he replenishes us liberally with his gifts, so we can in our turn bring forth fruit unto his glory. (Institutes, II.15.4)

Religious Liberty in Geneva

Published on by D. G. Hart7 Comments

Okay, I know this is going to be anachronistic, to suggest that Calvin’s Geneva should conform to United Nations policy, but it may help to clarify differences between 1555 Geneva and 2013 United States.

First the eighteenth article from the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Then Tommy Kidd’s commentary on the Obama administration:

This statement is definitive because it is so specific. Religious liberty does not just entail the oft-criticized phrase “freedom of worship” that the Obama administration has often employed instead of the 1st amendment’s guarantee of “free exercise of religion.” Here religious liberty includes the freedom to convert to another religion, or to renounce religion altogether. This freedom is most obviously curtailed in the Muslim world, but also in places like China where many pay a steep political or legal price for openly professing faith.

It also entails the liberty to “manifest,” or to make public, one’s religion by expressing opinion, engaging in advocacy, and yes, attending worship services. This guarantee would also presumably include the freedom from government coercion requiring people of faith to engage in practices that violate conscience (such as military service or, more controversially, providing consumer wedding or church services to gay and lesbian couples, or offering contraceptive and abortifacient coverage to employees).

Debates about our current president aside, this is a pretty tall standard set for religious liberty. It was not the view that Calvin or Luther for that matter advocated. It did not become a desirable outlook until the late eighteenth century with the American and French revolutions. It may have become universally desirable during the middle decades of the twentieth century.

That rough historical schema should prompt readjustments to those who would attribute the American founding to Calvinism.

John Clarifies Confusing Johns

Published on by D. G. Hart310 Comments

John Calvin, the Genevan reformer who had the most influence on the theology of the colonial clergy, taught that rebellion against civil government was never justified: “If we keep firmly in mind that even the worst kings are appointed by this same decree which establishes the authority of kings, then we will never permit ourselves the seditious idea that a king is to be treated according to his deserts, or that we need not obey a king who does not conduct himself towards us like a king.” Calvin added: “we must honour the worst tyrant in the office in which the Lord has seen fit to set him,” and “if you go on to infer that only just governments are to be repaid by obedience, your reasoning is stupid.” He taught that Christians must “venerate” even those rulers who were “unworthy” of veneration. As political scientist Gregg Frazer has argued, “One cannot legitimately employ Calvin to justify rebellion, which is why the patriotic preachers argued in terms of ‘Mr. Locke’s doctrine’ rather than Calvin’s.” In the end, today’s Christians who are interested in understanding the relationship between Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2 and the American Revolution must come to grips with the fact that many patriotic clergy may have been more influenced in their political positions by John Locke than the Bible. (John Fea, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? 118-19)

Where Do Unbelievers Go for a Trial?

Published on by D. G. Hart148 Comments

One of the other themes of the Twenty-Seven Propositions describing two-kingdom theology is the notion that the Bible is binding on all people:

7. Scripture is not given as a common moral standard that provides ethical imperatives to all people regardless of their religious standing.

The Reformed confessions testify that the moral imperatives of Scripture are binding on all men everywhere.

This does make the world safe for theonomy and for theocracy, since another common assertion of 2k critics is that special revelation must interpret general revelation, which implies that only those whose souls have been regenerated by the Holy Spirit may interpret general revelation, because only those with the eyes of faith can interpret Scripture aright, the necessary lens for interpreting the light of nature.

Aside from the covenantal implications of Scripture which make havoc of this critique of 2k, Scripture itself confounds this criticism. For if Paul were writing to the Corinthians with this anti-2k outlook, he could never write the following:

When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, then, matters pertaining to this life! So if you have such cases, why do you lay them before those who have no standing in the church? I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to settle a dispute between the brothers, but brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers? To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded? But you yourselves wrong and defraud—even your own brothers! Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? (1 Corinthians 6:1-9 ESV)

Notice that this is an imperative that according to the anti-2k outlook applies to all people (even though Paul is writing directly to the saints at Corinth). If Paul believed that Scripture was given for believers and unbelievers alike, then his admonition here would be to tell unbelievers to take their cases to ecclesiastical courts. And if unbelievers take their cases to those who rule outside the church, they are guilty of sinning. Talk about being damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

But Calvin doesn’t fall for this folly.

. . . if any one has a controversy with a brother, it ought to be decided before godly judges, and that it ought not to be before those that are ungodly. If the reason is asked, I have already said, that it is because disgrace is brought upon the gospel, and the name of Christ is held up as it were to the scoffings of the ungodly. For the ungodly, at the instigation of Satan, are always eagerly on the watch for opportunities of finding occasion of calumny against the doctrine of godliness. Now believers, when they make them parties in their disputes, seem as though they did on set purpose furnish them with a handle for reviling. A second reason may be added — that we treat our brethren disdainfully, when we of our own accord subject them to the decisions of unbelievers.

In other words, Calvin, who ministered in a town very much unlike Corinth, where the rulers of Geneva were members of the church, still recognizes that these words Paul apply to Genevan Christians, that is, that they should not look for justice with fellow Christians but should bear each other’s burdens patiently and endure slights and offenses.

I acknowledge, then, that a Christian man is altogether prohibited from revenge, so that he must not exercise it, either by himself, or by means of the magistrate, nor even desire it. If, therefore, a Christian man wishes to prosecute his rights at law, so as not to offend God, he must, above all things, take heed that he does not bring into court any desire of revenge, any corrupt affection of the mind, or anger, or, in fine, any other poison. In this matter love will be the best regulator.

This is moral instruction, in other words, that applies to Christians not to unbelievers. Christians are capable, by the work of the Spirit, of not seeking revenge. Paul concedes that unbelievers are not.

What is also interesting to observe is that Calvin does not believe that Paul is invalidating the rule of ungodly magistrates, as if it were wrong to take certain civil matters to the courts, or as if the ungodliness of rulers invalidates their rule:

Paul does not here condemn those who from necessity have a cause before unbelieving judges, as when a person is summoned to a court; but those who, of their own accord, bring their brethren into this situation, and harass them, as it were, through means of unbelievers, while it is in their power to employ another remedy. It is wrong, therefore, to institute of one’s own accord a law-suit against brethren before unbelieving judges. If, on the other hand, you are summoned to a court, there is no harm in appearing there and maintaining your cause.

Calvin also goes on to distinguish in ways that would send neo-Calvinists, in the worlds of Ralph Kramden, “bang, zoom, to the moon” between the public matters before magistrates and private matters of Christians.

We must always keep in view what causes he is treating of; for public trials are beyond our province, and ought not to be transferred to our disposal; but as to private matters it is allowable to determine without the cognizance of the magistrate. As, then, we do not detract in any degree from the authority of the magistrate by having recourse to arbitration, it is not without good reason that the Apostle enjoins it upon Christians to refrain from resorting to profane, that is, unbelieving judges.

So if anti-2kers want to argue that biblical morality applies to all human beings, they may want to take up their case with the apostle Paul. Or they could reconceive their claims with the same scrupulosity they apply to 2k advocates.

Five Burroughs (obsolete variation of borough), Eight Kingdoms

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

To what kingdom does New York City belong? Cutting through the redemptive historical hooey surrounding certain claims made on behalf of Manhattan Island, may we speak of New York City as a kingdom? Hardly. Even Michael Bloomberg’s efforts to restrict Big Gulps is not going to make him a divine right monarch. So, when thinking about two kingdom theology is it possible even to apply the word “kingdom” to civil polities that are not ruled by monarchs?

This may seem a tad precious, but it is a question that the recent posting of Twenty-Seven propositions about two-kingdom theology invites. Matt Tuininga has already reacted and not so favorably (which may show how fruitless it is to interact with folks who are more intent on finding contradictions or tensions than they seem to be in actually promoting the kingdom of God). Here are several of the assertions that caught my eye (bold is supposedly the 2k view):

22. The family is part of the common kingdom.

The institution of the family is formed by God and is to be directed to the glory of God. It is agreed that it is an institution shared by unbelievers, but unbelievers misdirect or suppress the direction the institution should take.

23. The Christian is a dual citizen, as a citizen of both the spiritual kingdom and a citizen of the common kingdom.

It is agreeable that we share and interact with unbelievers but the term “kingdom” could confuse if such activities are thought in spatial terms as some “realm” governed by some different king or different ethic.

24. The unbeliever is a citizen only of the common kingdom.

This is generally agreeable, but with same caveat as #23 on the definition of “kingdom.”

25. The Christian lives under a dual ethic, namely, the natural law-justice ethic governing life in the common kingdom and the grace-mercy ethic governing life in the spiritual kingdom.

The Reformed confessions and scripture testify we live under a unified Biblical Christian ethic, not a dual- antithetical ethic that depends on which “kingdom” we are operating in. Thus, for example, the Christian family is not guided solely by an ethic of lex talionis justice, but also an ethic of mercy and forgiveness.

26. The common kingdom pertains to temporal, earthly, provisional matters, not matters of ultimate and spiritual importance. It includes matters of politics, law, and cultural life more generally.

The Reformed confessions do not exclude the kingdom of God as being manifest in these earthly matters of law, politics, and cultural life more generally.

27. The spiritual kingdom pertains to things that are of ultimate and spiritual importance. Insofar as this spiritual kingdom has earthly existence, it is found in the church and not in the state or other temporal institutions.

See comment on #26.

One thing that is highly dubious about these propositions and responses is the language of “the Reformed confessions do or do not” assert this or that. In point of fact, the Reformed confessions say little about kingdoms. When they do they apply the language of kingdom almost exclusively to spiritual realities. The civil magistrate has nothing to do with actually promoting or extending these spiritual realities because the magistrate’s rule (obviously the Westminster Divines and Guido de Bres were hardly fans of monarchs) only extended to outward not to internal or spiritual realities.

For instance, the Belgic Confession uses the word kingdom only one and it does so in Art. 36 by invoking the “kingdom of Jesus Christ.” The magistrate may “promote” the kingdom of Christ but does not establish it, something only God can do, and something to which the word, sacraments, and prayer are means and the magistrate may not minister.

In the Westminster Standards, we see eight uses of the word kingdom (“heaven” 8.5, 23.3, 30.2; “Lord Jesus Christ” 25.2; “God” WLC 53; “Satan” WLC 191, WSC 102; “power” WLC 191; “kingdom” simply WLC 196, WSC 107; “grace” WSC 102; “glory” WSC 102). The only time the word occurs close to the work of the magistrate is in Chapter 23 where the confession says explicitly that the magistrate may not assume the use of the keys of the kingdom of heaven.

The attempt then by critics of 2k to assert that the kingdom of Christ, or of heaven, or of grace, or of glory may be identified with the kingdoms or boroughs of this world is to confound the kingdom theology that undergirds the Reformed churches in their understanding of the church and its ministry. It is also why the critics of 2k are at odds with John Calvin who wrote at the beginning of his discussion of civil governments the following:

. . . before entering on the subject itself, it is necessary to attend to the distinction which we formerly laid down (Book 3 Chap. 19 sec. 16, et supra, Chap. 10), lest, as often happens to many, we imprudently confound these two things, the nature of which is altogether different. For some, on hearing that liberty is promised in the gospel, a liberty which acknowledges no king and no magistrate among men, but looks to Christ alone, think that they can receive no benefit from their liberty so long as they see any power placed over them. Accordingly, they think that nothing will be safe until the whole world is changed into a new form, when there will be neither courts, nor laws, nor magistrates, nor anything of the kind to interfere, as they suppose, with their liberty. But he who knows to distinguish between the body and the soul, between the present fleeting life and that which is future and eternal, will have no difficulty in understanding that the spiritual kingdom of Christ and civil government are things very widely separated. Seeing, therefore, it is a Jewish vanity to seek and include the kingdom of Christ under the elements of this world, let us, considering, as Scripture clearly teaches, that the blessings which we derive from Christ are spiritual, remember to confine the liberty which is promised and offered to us in him within its proper limits. For why is it that the very same apostle who bids us “stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not again entangled with the yoke of bondage” (Gal. 5:1), in another passage forbids slaves to be solicitous about their state (1 Cor. 7:21), unless it be that spiritual liberty is perfectly compatible with civil servitude? In this sense the following passages are to be understood: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female” (Gal. 3:28). Again, “There is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all and in all” (Col. 3:11). It is thus intimated, that it matters not what your condition is among men, nor under what laws you live, since in them the kingdom of Christ does not at all consist. (Institutes IV.20.1)

I understand that Calvin’s Geneva is not the United States of America and that the civil magistrates there enforced some laws congenial to critics of 2k. But those are the same magistrates that executed heretics and forbade Roman Catholics from worshiping within the city. I doubt they would have allowed Mormon congregations or Jewish synagogues either. Which is to say, for the zillionth time, the critics of 2k have no coherent understanding either of the theology that prompted an pastor employed by the state from identifying the kingdom of Christ with the urban polity of Geneva or the political arrangement for which they long. (Ironically, the Netherlands in the hey day of the Synod of Dort was a republic where folks like Descartes and Spinoza could hold their views freely and that also was a home to arguably the largest population of Anabaptists in Europe.) If they want the magistrate to enforce all of God’s law, they will receive a lot more than they bargain for.

Then again, if all they want is to criticize 2k, have at it. It’s a free country that allows grousing about the magistrate (instead of honoring the emperor as Paul and Peter teach). It’s even a free church where their views of the kingdom of grace, falling as they do outside the confessions’ precise discussion of the kingdoms, do not get them in trouble. We will continue to forebear with them even if they are not as charitable.