Tag: Manhattan Declaration

The Bodh Gaya Declaration

Published on by D. G. Hart6 Comments

Ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue always emerge from social and political, not theological, convictions, as the Manhattan Declaration showed in its capacity to apply the fig leaf of ecumenism to the private parts of shouting matches about American culture. But the Vatican, with its universal jurisdiction, can always outdo American Christians who can be so parochial about the size of the Big Apple. Pope Francis has his sights set on a collaborative endeavor with Buddhists:

The Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue (PCID), in collaboration with the Catholic Bishops’s Conference of India and Religions for Peace, held the Vatican’s fifth Buddhist-Christian Colloquium February 12-13, 2015 at Bodh Gaya, India. Bodh Gaya is the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment and was chosen for a dialogue since it has temples and monasteries from many different types of Buddhists.

The theme was “Buddhists and Christians Together Fostering Fraternity” and the goal was to build a foundation for interreligious peacebuilding. Sixty leaders of both religions from eight countries took part in discussing the following topics: “We belong to One Human Family,” “From a Culture of Diversity to a Culture of Solidarity,” “Fraternity, a Prerequisite for Overcoming Social Evils,” “Fraternity wipes away Tears,” and “Together Fostering Fraternity: The Way Forward.” This is an example of how the pope’s new “dialogue of fraternity” seeks a higher level of relational engagement in order to address social ills.

Participants agreed that it is not religion per say that causes conflict, but individuals who exploit religion for personal, commercial and political gains. They agreed to return home and pursue the following in the spirit of fraternity:

• Strengthen interfaith connections in communities, neighbourhoods, educational institutions, and places of worship
• Build programs of interreligious awareness and peacebuilding for children, youth, and families in educational institutions and workplaces
• Forget and forgive the past negative history of conflict and violence and move forward to build peace-loving people in solidarity
• Train younger generations in formation houses to overcome prejudice, study other religions, and build solidarity
• Build interreligious fraternity (brotherhood/sisterhood) to support and revitalize family life in order to make society prosper.

… Now, Pope Francis is expanding the dialogue further by emphasizing the need to develop a sense of “fraternity” as a foundation for the dialogue of action that addresses the social ills of our world. True solidarity in such action must be based on fraternity in its original sense of “brotherhood/sisterhood.” The papers presented on this third day discussed two topics: the notion of “Fraternity among Human Beings” in Christianity and Buddhism, and “Building a Fraternal World” together.

The final day of the dialogue was devoted to exploring social issues in the United States that the participants felt need to be addressed today, and how Buddhist-Catholic collaborations of fraternal interreligious social action could be advanced in the United States. The participants had a private audience with Pope Francis who encouraged them to “plant seeds of peace” in their cities. In their Joint Statement, the participants agreed to return to the US and explore together the following kinds of joint interreligious social action initiatives:

• Addressing global climate change on the local level
• Creating outreach programs for youth
• Collaborating in prison/jail ministries and restorative justice matters
• Developing resources for the homeless such as affordable housing
• Educating and providing resources to address the issue of immigration
• Collaborating to create projects with local Catholic parishes and Buddhist communities to address neighborhood social issues
• Developing social outreach programs for value education to families

… I conclude with the words of Pope Francis about this new dialogue of social action: “This interreligious experience of fraternity, each always respecting the other, is a grace.” (Press Conference on Board the Flight from Colombo to Manila, January 15, 2015)

I hope Susan, James, and Mermaid know that bickering with Presbyterians at Old Life does not count as interreligious dialogue. Statues of Buddha can be purchased here.

Is Infant Baptism (or the Mass) a Life-Style Choice?

Published on by D. G. Hart7 Comments

George Weigel comments on the anniversary of the Edict of Milan (313). I agree with this (though leveling the dangers of coercion to Protestants and Roman Catholics when Inquisitions were a Roman Catholic reality until 1870 is a bit much):

The immediate effects of the Constantinian settlement, both good and ill, were limned with customary wit and literary skill by Evelyn Waugh in the novel Helena. After 313, the tombs of the martyrs were publicly honored; so were the martyr-confessors, often disfigured by torture, who emerged from the Christian underground to kiss each other’s wounds at the first ecumenical council. Before those heroes met at Nicaea in 325, though, grave theological questions had gotten ensnared up in imperial court intrigues and ecclesiastical politics. Later unions of altar and throne led to a general cultural forgetting of Lactantius’ wisdom, as the Church employed the “civil arm” to enforce orthodoxy. Protestantism proved no less vulnerable to the temptation to coercion than Catholicism and Orthodoxy; one might even argue that the seventeenth-century Peace of Westphalia, which ended the European wars of religion by establishing the principle of cuius regio eius religio (the prince’s religion is the people’s religion), reversed the accomplishments of the “Edict of Milan”—and was, in fact, the West’s first modern experiment in the totalitarian coercion of consciences.

But then he shows the addling effects of preoccupation with the political outcomes of faith:

Very few twenty-first-century Christians would welcome a return to state establishments of religion as the accepted norm. So however much the Constantinian settlement led Christianity into what some regard as a lengthy Babylonian captivity to state power, the “Edict of Milan” also affirmed truths that have proven stronger over time than the temptation to use Caesar for God’s work. Today’s challenge is quite different: it’s the temptation to let Caesar, in his various forms, reduce religious conviction to a privacy right of lifestyle choice.

What about when Christ’s followers reduce religious conviction to a privacy right? What Weigel doesn’t see is that the churches are as complicit in privatizing religion as the Obama administration. When Manhattan Declarationists, including Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox, defend religious freedom in the name of the gospel, when the Gospel Coalition understands its union of Presbyterians, Baptists, and independents as defending the gospel, or when participants at Vatican II recognize Muslims, Jews, and Protestants as on the way to salvation, the particularities of Christianity like baptism and the Lord’s supper fall into irrelevance almost as quickly as it takes to say the Pledge of Allegiance.

Now lest I fall prey to the same error of leveling George Weigel to President Obama’s status, I will grant that the Manhattan Declaration, the Gospel Coalition, and Vatican II mean/meant well. Then again, so does the president. And in both cases the means of grace, word, sacrament, and prayer, that I spend so much time defending (as part of my private responsibilities) make as much difference to the Declarationists, the Allies, and the Cardinals (and their ecumenical observers) as the Seventy-Sixers do to professional sports.

Is This Good or Honest History?

Published on by D. G. Hart52 Comments

Rather than issue another “Declaration,” the Manhattan (is that Kansas?) Declarers are soliciting more signatures for their efforts to identify Christianity with the ongoing fights about the culture. I received an email from the folks at Christianity Today, no less, asking me if I have yet to sign MD. (It did make me wonder how many times Old Bob has signed it.)

So I went back to read the Declaration and gave up after going through the “wouldn’t-it-be-nice” historical narrative that apparently justifies the statement and is supposed to reassure non-Christians that Christianity has always been a source of sweetness and Golden Retrievers:

Christians are heirs of a 2,000-year tradition of proclaiming God’s word, seeking justice in our
societies, resisting tyranny, and reaching out with compassion to the poor, oppressed and suffering.

While fully acknowledging the imperfections and shortcomings of Christian institutions and communities in all ages, we claim the heritage of those Christians who defended innocent life by rescuing discarded babies from trash heaps in Roman cities and publicly denouncing the Empire’s sanctioning of infanticide. We remember with reverence those believers who sacrificed their lives by remaining in Roman cities to tend the sick and dying during the plagues, and who died bravely in the coliseums rather than deny their Lord.

After the barbarian tribes overran Europe, Christian monasteries preserved not only the Bible but also the literature and art of Western culture. It was Christians who combated the evil of slavery: Papal edicts in the 16th and 17th centuries decried the practice of slavery and first excommunicated anyone involved in the slave trade; evangelical Christians in England, led by John Wesley and William Wilberforce, put an end to the slave trade in that country. Christians under Wilberforce’s leadership also formed hundreds of societies for helping the poor, the imprisoned, and child laborers chained to machines.

In Europe, Christians challenged the divine claims of kings and successfully fought to establish the rule of law and balance of governmental powers, which made modern democracy possible. And in America, Christian women stood at the vanguard of the suffrage movement. The great civil rights crusades of the 1950s and 60s were led by Christians claiming the Scriptures and asserting the glory of the image of God in every human being regardless of race, religion, age or class.

This same devotion to human dignity has led Christians in recent decades to work to end the dehumanizing scourge of human trafficking and sexual slavery, bring compassionate care to AIDS sufferers in Africa, and assist in a myriad of other human rights causes – from providing clean water in developing nations to providing homes for tens of thousands of children orphaned by war, disease and gender discrimination.

Like those who have gone before us in the faith, Christians today are called to proclaim the Gospel of costly grace, to protect the intrinsic dignity of the human person and to stand for the common good. In being true to its own calling, the call to discipleship, the church through service to others can make a profound contribution to the public good.

Sorry, but “while fully acknowledging Christian “imperfections and shortcomings,” the Declarers acknowledged nothing. I see nothing about Michael Servetus, the German nobles response to the Peasant’s Revolt, Edgardo Mortara or Prohibition. This is a Peter Marshall, Light and the Glory, Hallmark version of Christian history. It does nothing to persuade me to sign. If Christians can so selectively and self-centeredly recount their past achievements, I have no reason to trust their assessment of the times in which we live.

Meanwhile, this kind of history does nothing to school Christians about the kind of reception they may face when talking to folks who live in Manhattan. It may even promote idolatry.

Infallibility In Denial

Published on by D. G. Hart92 Comments

Here I thought we had entered a new era of warm relations between Protestants and Roman Catholics. We are almost twenty years from the first iteration of Evangelicals and Catholics Together. The architects of that project, Richard John Neuhaus and Chuck Colson have passed from the scene but the George brothers (in name only), Timothy and Robbie, have extended the spirit of culture war cooperation with the Manhattan Declaration. Add to mix Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom’s Is the Reformation Over? and you have a setting in which the lines dividing Rome, Geneva, Wittenburg, and Wheaton are increasingly fuzzy. That could be a reason for Protestants to convert to Rome since the differences aren’t great. But it could also be a reason to remain Protestant. If the differences aren’t significant, why bother putting up with bad liturgical music when you can keep the lousy praise band in your own congregation?

And then along comes the ex-Prots who write at Called to Communion to remind all the partyers that a curfew exists and, oh, by the way, they also called the cops if we don’t break up the revelry. CTC’s heavy handed insistence on older Roman Catholic verities is laudable in many respects but comes as a complete surprise to the world of Protestant-Roman Catholic relations. If some wonder why objections to CTC have been so pronounced at Old Life of late, the reason has something to do with how out of synch CTC seems to be with the rest of the Roman Catholic world and the vibe Protestants get from that Roman universe. Instead of telling us how much we share in common with them the way most Roman Catholics do these days, CTC is there to remind us how far Protestants fall short of the fullness of glory that is Rome. Like I say, this bracing splash of alcohol on the wound is welcome at a time when differences between Rome and Protestants look increasingly like personal preference.

At the same time, the other wrinkle in CTC’s project is how little they seem to notice that Rome is not a monolith of fidelity to the teachings of the pope, magisterium, and church councils. The Jesuits, Roman Catholic higher education in the United States, and the nuns are all examples of Roman Catholics out of sync with official church teaching and practice. But when you search around at CTC, you find more about problems among Reformed Protestants than you do about the nuns. Perhaps it is a function of a poor search engine, but if you want to know about the deficiencies of President Obama receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Notre Dame, you’re not going to find it readily at CTC.

CTC’s lack of attention to problems in the Roman Catholic Church has me wondering if CTCers’ insistence on infallibility in ways that would have made Benjamin Warfield’s head swim is responsible for this apparent hiding from Rome’s difficulties. Could it be that if you are so committed to an innerant church hierarchy, you’re predisposed deny errors in your communion?

To illustrate the point, I refer to the recent remarks at Old Life about development of doctrine and certain caricatures of Rome that may have surfaced. In one of my comments, I believe, I questioned the persuasiveness of an exegetical case for Rome’s view of justification since it didn’t seem to me that the Bible figures all that prominently in CTC defenses of Rome (minus Matt. 16:18 which is for CTCers what John 3:16 is for Free Will Baptists). Jason Stellman responded that this was a bit of a cheap shot since Roman Catholics care about the Bible do do exegesis. Only children who are ignorant make the mistake of saying that Roman Catholics don’t read and know their Bibles.

Well, that’s not what David Carlin says over at CatholiCity:

According to the poll, 25 percent of Evangelical Protestants read the Bible daily, as do 20 percent of other Protestants, while daily Bible-reading is done by only 7 percent of Catholics. Now this result didn’t bother me very much, since one can be very familiar with, and very greatly influenced by, a book without reading it on a daily basis. I myself don’t read the Bible daily; nor do I give a daily reading to Plato or Shakespeare; and it’s years since I read Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. Yet I know that all these writing have had a strong influence on the way I look at life and the world.

Far more disturbing was the poll result that showed that 44 percent of Catholics “rarely or never” read the Bible, while this is true of only 7 percent of Evangelicals and 13 percent of non-Evangelical Protestants. The level of religious vitality must be very low in a Christian church in which 44 percent of the membership almost never bothers to read the Bible.

Carlin explains this phenomenon by appealing to Trent, and part to the sacramental nature of the church:

All this changed, officially at least, at Vatican II, which dropped the Church’s 400-year-old “defensive mode of being.” Lay Catholics were now at long last given the green light to read the Bible; indeed, they were encouraged to read it. Yet today, nearly a half-century later, 44 percent of American Catholics “rarely or never” read the Bible, and only 7 percent read it on a daily basis. How can this be?

Part of the answer, of course, is inertia. Four centuries of a certain policy cannot be changed immediately overnight – any more than an aircraft carrier at sea can make a turn of 180 degrees on a dime. Another part of the answer is the sacramentalism of the Catholic Church: To save your soul, it is more important to participate in the sacraments than to read the Bible. But a third part of the answer is, alas, that the leadership of the Church (I mean its bishops and priests) have not stressed the importance of Bible-reading for shaping the Christian mind and heart.

Carlin’s point about Trent’s defensiveness on Bible reading is confirmed by an article in the old New Catholic Dictionary (1910) on Bible Reading by Laity (the date is important because this is a description of the Roman Catholic Church prior to Vatican II:

The Council strictly prohibited the reading of all heretical Latin versions, unless grave reasons necessitated their use. The Council itself did not forbid the reading of the new Catholic translations, although even these later fell under the ban of the Index Commission which Trent set up for the supervision of future legislation regarding the Bible. In 1559 the Commission forbade the use of certain Latin editions, as well as German, French, Spanish, Italian, and English vernacular vereions. Two centuries later, however, it modified the severity of this legislation by granting permission for the use of all versions translated by learned Catholic men, provided they contained annotations derived from the Fathers, and had the approval of the Holy See. Our present discipline grows out of the decree, “Officiorum ac Munerum,” of Leo XIII. This decree states that all vernacular versions, even those prepared by Catholic authors, are prohibited if they are not, on the one hand, approved by the Apostolic See, or, on the other hand, supplied with proper annotations and accompanied by episcopal approbation. However, it contains a provision whereby, for grave reasons, biblical and theological students may use non-Catholic editions as long as these do not attack Catholic dogma.

This does not prove that Roman Catholics can’t or should not do exegesis. The point instead is about the conservative Roman Catholics who are more intent on showing Protestantism’s errors than the problems in their own ecclesiastical home. And I cannot help but think that an emphasis on infallibility produces a culture in which denial is a habit of mind if not a w-w.

The Law Coalition

Published on by D. G. Hart42 Comments

While working on a talk for a conference last week hosted and attended by academic conservatives, I revisited the Manhattan Declaration. My point was that so many who think themselves conservative think they also take religion seriously by injecting faith into public affairs. But what ends up happening most often is that the complexities and depth of faith are sacrificed for the sake of a common cause, and that commonality is almost exclusively moral and comes from the Second Table of the Decalogue. Listen, for instance, to the way that the Manhattan Declaration’s writers (and the Baylys and Rabbi Bret may well want to follow along) turn the sanctity of human life, traditional marriage, and religious liberty into “the Gospel.”

We are Christians who have joined together across historic lines of ecclesial differences to affirm our right—and, more importantly, to embrace our obligation—to speak and act in defense of these truths. We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence. It is our duty to proclaim the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in its fullness, both in season and out of season. May God help us not to fail in that duty.

Which gospel would that be exactly? The one professed by Southern Baptists, Roman Catholics, or Eastern Orthodox? J. Gresham Machen, in one of the quotations I used recently, might have a very different understanding of such joint endeavors:

I am bound to say that the kind of discussion which is irritating to me is the discussion which begins by begging the questino and then pretensd to be in the interests of peace. I should be guilty of such a method if I should say to a Roman Catholic, for example, wthat we can come together with him because forms and ceremonies like the mass and membership in a certain definite organization are, of course, matters of secondary importance – if I should say to him that he can go on being a good Cathoilc and I can go on being a good Protestant and yet we can unite on comon Christian basis. If I should talk in that way, I should show myself guilty of the crassest narrowness of mind, for I should be shoing that I had never taken the slightest trouble to understand the Roman Catholic point of view. If I had taken that trouble, I should have come to see plainly that what I should be doing is not to seek common ground between the roman Catholic and myself but simply to ask the Roman Catholic to become a Protestant and give up evertyhing that he holds most dear.

In other words, if Trent still matters, or the the Westminster Confession still matters, the signers of the Manhattan Declaration were in serious denial about the gospel.

What is also important to observe, though, is that they are also in mega-denial. For the law that they affirm, merely calling it the gospel, is only a few brief rules outlined in Scripture. For starters, God’s law also says a fair amount about worship and church polity that again would drive Roman Catholics and Protestants not together but apart — can you say the Mass, or how about apostolic succession? (The same can be asked of the Gospel Coalition — are they ignoring the means of grace, or ecclesiology in order to affirm a meager understanding of the gospel?)

So why is it conservative to affirm the law as revealed in holy writ during public debates if you don’t affirm all of the law? And how conservative can it be to rename the law “gospel”? This is not conservative. It is actually liberal and may border on being modernist.

But saying so makes you an antinomian and a secularist? Shazam!

What Glenn Beck and Peter Lillback Need to Know about the Church and Social Justice

Published on by D. G. Hart57 Comments

The church’s mission is not social justice if, by such equity we mean the punishment of wickedness and the reward of virtue. One way to substantiate this assertion is by looking for the word “justice” in the church’s corporate witness. A word search reveals in the Belgic Confession, for instance, that justice appears in the discussion of God’s treatment of sin and the remedy in Christ (Article 20) and in the work of the magistrate (Article 36). A similar use of the word occurs in Calvin’s catechism where he talks about the justice of God in punishing sin (Q. 154), and penalties for stealing (Q. 205). Calvin also speaks of justice in connection with the second petition of the Lord’s prayer (Q. 269), and the respect for justice that accompanies sanctification (Q. 290). In the Westminster Confession, “justice” appears only in chapter three on the eternal decree (3.7), providence (5.1), the work of Christ (8.5), justification (11.3), the function of the civil magistrate (23.2), and the last judgment (33.2). If the earliest Reformed Protestants believed the church should promote social justice, they were remarkably silent both about that part of ecclesiastical duty and the very idea itself.

If by social justice, like the way that Peter Lillback used it on the Glenn Beck show, one means various ways to improve a person’s material circumstances, such as education for the ignorant, relief for orphans, welfare for the poor, food for the hungry, and medicine for the sick, the matter of the church’s duties is contested. Word and deed advocates insist that the church carries out such work indiscriminately, that is, it provides welfare to everyone irrespective of their standing within the church (no matter whether a given congregation has the capacity to provide medical or educational assistance). Word and sacrament advocates in contrast hold that diaconal work is an important and necessary ministry but that the church’s role in alleviating misery extends only to the saints (except in extraordinary circumstances). Even then, the diaconate’s commission is not nearly as broad as the welfare state’s. Diaconal work is not an excuse, then, for the church to establish hospitals, orphanages, schools, and kitchens under the oversight of the church. The doctrine of sphere-sovereignty has long put limits on the church and given many of these functions to the family.

By the way, why exactly should the church be involved in the work of humanitarian relief or social justice when a perfectly good nation exists – in the United States, anyway – for carrying out such functions? Political conservatives may well object to the idea that the American government is perfectly good or whether the state should have nanny-like responsibilities. The Bible may not vindicate the political conservative position, but given the affinity of Mr. Beck and Dr. Lillback to the Republican party, and hence to some form of conservatism, one might think that objections to the culture of dependence fostered by the welfare state (one of the many unintended consequences of good intentions) might occur to anyone who thinks the church should give out aid as freely as the state. In fact, Paul’s counsel to Timothy in his first letter (chapter five) indicates that the apostle himself was well aware of the problem of giving assistance to the undeserving poor (in this case, widows).

So if the church’s mission is not social justice or material welfare (beyond the work of the diaconate), then why is the church constantly tempted to pursue social justice? In his interview with Beck, Lillback implied that the problem of social justice comes when it is part of a liberal theological package. What he fails to see is that the church’s involvement in social reform and political activism is the way by which churches become liberal. In other words, no good form of ecclesial social justice exists. Even if the church still preaches the gospel, social justice is the means by which the church loses sight of her purpose and the significance of her message. The reason is that to argue that the church has an obligation to pursue a political or social agenda (or even a program of material welfare), the church has already become confused about the gospel and its benefits. In the words of the sociologist, Peter Berger, social justice is a form of “works righteousness.”

Three historical examples might help to make this point plausible. The first comes from the reunion of the Old and New School Presbyterians in 1869. The language of the plan for reunion was lush with references to the political circumstances of the United States after a grueling Civil War. The implicit logic was that the nation needed a Presbyterians to unite as much as it had needed to avert southern secession. Here is how the report put it:

The changes which have occurred in our own country and throughout the world, during the last thirty years – the period of our separation – arrest and compel attention. Within this time the original number of our States has been very nearly doubled. . . . And all this vast domain is to be supplied with the means of education and the institutions of religion, as the only source and protection of our national life. The population crowding into this immense area is heterogeneous. Six millions of emigrants, representing various religious and nationalities, have arrived on our shores within the last thirty years; and four millions of slaves, recently enfranchised, demand Christian education. It is no secret that anti-Christian forces – Romanism, Ecclesiasticisim, Rationalism, Infidelity, Materialism, and Paganism itself – assuming new vitality, are struggling for the ascendency. Christian forces should be combined and deployed, according to the new movements of their adversaries it is no time for small and weak detachments, which may easily be defeated in detail. . . .

Before the world we are no engaged, as a nation, in solving the problem whether it is possible for all the incongruous and antagonistic nationalities thrown upon our shores, exerting their mutual attraction and repulsion, to become fused in one new American sentiment. If the several branches of the Presbyterian Church in this country, representing to a great degree ancestral differences, should become cordially united, it must have not only a direct effect upon the question of our national unity, but reacting by the force of a successful example on the old World, must render aid in that direction, to all how are striving to reconsider and readjust those combinations, which had their origin either in the faults or the necessities of a remote past.

Now this reunion had not addressed the theological problems that had created the Old School-New School split in the first place, namely the teaching of the New Haven Theology and the denial of the federal theology on which the Presbyterian Church’s confession depended. By the 1860s those doctrinal problems seemed to be insignificant compared to the pressing needs of the nation. This was the church of Charles Hodge, by the way.

Only four decades later, the ecumenical spirit that led Old and New School Presbyterians to lay aside differences prompted American Protestants more generally to join hands to form the Federal Council of Churches. And the reason for this amazing act of ecclesial generosity was not a church synod or council that had steered a path through the polity, sacramental, and doctrinal divisions among American Protestants. Instead, the reason for unity was social justice, namely, the need for the churches to address antagonisms within the American economy and the nation’s politics that were dividing citizens of the United States along class lines. So the Federal Council’s first act was to write a new creed, a social one:

We deem it the duty of all Christian people to concern themselves directly with certain practical industrial problems. To us it seems that the churches must stand —

For equal rights and complete justice for all men in all stations of life.

For the right of all men to the opportunity for self-maintenance, a right ever to be wisely and strongly safeguarded against encroachments of every kind.

For the right of workers to some protection against the hardships often resulting from the swift crises of industrial change.

For the principle of conciliation and arbitration in industrial dissensions.

For the protection of the worker from dangerous machinery, occupational disease, injuries and mortality.

For the abolition of child labor.

For such regulation of the conditions of toil for women as shall safeguard the physical and moral health of the community.

For the suppression of the “sweating system.”

For the gradual and reasonable reduction of the hours of labor to the lowest practicable point, and for that degree of leisure for all which is a condition of the highest human life.

For a release from employment one day in seven.

For a living wage as a minimum in every industry, and for the highest wage that each industry can afford.

For the most equitable division of the products of industry that can ultimately be devised.

For suitable provision for the old age of the workers and for those incapacitated by injury.

For the abatement of poverty.

To the toilers of America and to those who by organized effort are seeking to lift the crushing burdens of the poor, and to reduce the hardships and uphold the dignity of labor, this Council sends the greeting of human brotherhood and the pledge of sympathy and of help in a cause which belongs to all who follow Christ.

Mind you, this statement, approved by the Presbyterian Church in which Benjamin Warfield was a minister, failed to supply proof texts for these proposals, thereby avoiding the “thus, sayeth the Lord” motivation that social justice needs. Even more telling was that these churches believed they could unite on points of public policy even while divided on liturgical, polity, and doctrinal matters that the Lord had indeed commanded. In other words, the social and political problems of the hour were obscuring the church’s basic teachings and practices.

A similar understanding of the relationship between the religious and the social, or the theological and political is at work recently in the Manahattan Declaration, the very statement that Lillback recommended to Beck at the end of their interview, when he said:

I would like to tell all of your listeners and Glenn, you personally, that you need to put your signature on the Manhattan Declaration. Chuck Colson spoke to me about this some months ago and he said, “Would you help me sign it?”

And I had the privilege of being one of the first 100 signatories. And basically, he said this — we need to bring together the movement of people across this country who are willing to die for what they believe in. And the things that are being challenged where the government is going to come to force us out of the convictions are the sanctity of life, our definition of historic marriage and our resounding commitment to protect rights of conscience of religious liberty.

In the Manhattan Declaration, not only have the differences among Protestant denominations been placed in the background compared to the pressing social demands of the sanctity of human life and religious liberty. Also Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Eastern Orthodoxy are now united in the name of Christ and for the sake of the gospel to advocate certain moral and social causes in the public sphere. One paragraph from the Declaration supplies the “thus, sayeth the Lord” part that the Federal Council missed:

We, as Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Christians, have gathered, beginning in New York on September 28, 2009, to make the following declaration, which we sign as individuals, not on behalf of our organizations, but speaking to and from our communities. We act together in obedience to the one true God, the triune God of holiness and love, who has laid total claim on our lives and by that claim calls us with believers in all ages and all nations to seek and defend the good of all who bear his image. We set forth this declaration in light of the truth that is grounded in Holy Scripture, in natural human reason (which is itself, in our view, the gift of a beneficent God), and in the very nature of the human person. We call upon all people of goodwill, believers and non-believers alike, to consider carefully and reflect critically on the issues we here address as we, with St. Paul, commend this appeal to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God.

The specific public questions that demand a Christian response are as follows:

Because the sanctity of human life, the dignity of marriage as a union of husband and wife, and the freedom of conscience and religion are foundational principles of justice and the common good, we are compelled by our Christian faith to speak and act in their defense. In this declaration we affirm: 1) the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of every human being as a creature fashioned in the very image of God, possessing inherent rights of equal dignity and life; 2) marriage as a conjugal union of man and woman, ordained by God from the creation, and historically understood by believers and non-believers alike, to be the most basic institution in society and; 3) religious liberty, which is grounded in the character of God, the example of Christ, and the inherent freedom and dignity of human beings created in the divine image.

Meanwhile, these Christians who disagree on the gospel – and hence worship God in different communions – are agreed that the matters they address are on the order of the very gospel that divides them. The Declaration states:

We are Christians who have joined together across historic lines of ecclesial differences to affirm our right—and, more importantly, to embrace our obligation—to speak and act in defense of these truths. We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence. It is our duty to proclaim the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in its fullness, both in season and out of season. May God help us not to fail in that duty.

These examples indicate that when churches engage in social or political programs invariably they lose their theological bearings and become liberal – as in, they lose sight of what is orthodox. (I personally do not think that everyone who signed the Declaration sees the tension between their own church’s faith, and the problems of cooperating with Christians who are not in fellowship with their communion. I also don’t know why they could not have formed a committee or association to pursue these matters without appealing to Christ or the gospel. One obvious reason is that a non-religious appeal lacks urgency and purposefulness.)

Conceivably, a historical example might be found that disproved this rule about social and political involvement generating liberalism – though the state churches of Europe would seem to vindicate this point in spades. But behind the historical record is a theological principle, namely, that when a church confuses the benefits of redemption with the comforts of a better life or the equitable workings of the state it has misunderstood the significance of the message it proclaims. Calvin, for what it’s worth, called such confusion, a “Judaic folly,” as in confusing the earthly Jerusalem with the heavenly one.

So what Beck needs is a better account of why social justice is code for liberal theology. Lillback missed a golden opportunity when he failed to tell Beck what the confession of his own denomination teaches about the mission of the church:

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. (WCF 23.3)

P.S. Apologies to NORM! if this is more scholarly than blogs tend to be.

The Virus is Spreading – Spooky

Published on by D. G. Hart175 Comments

virusApparently the Westminster California hermeneutic has now infected the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. Ligon Duncan recently issued a statement that clarified difference among ACE members on whether or not to sign the Manhattan Declaration. (For some of the diversity among evangelicals or conservative Protestants, go here.)

Duncan wrote:

The Alliance has not historically weighed in on social ethical issues, not because they are unimportant, nor because it is inappropriate for Christians to do so, but because of the mission of the Alliance which is “to call the twenty-first century church to reformation, according to Scripture, so that it recovers clarity and conviction about the great evangelical truths of the gospel and thus proclaims these truths powerfully in our contemporary context.” Specifically, we are an alliance of confessional Protestants (and heirs of the historic Reformed Confessions) who work together to “promote the reform of the church according to Scripture, and to call the church to be faithful to the Scriptures, by embracing and practicing the teaching of Scripture concerning doctrine, life and worship.”

So if the Bible speaks to all of life, including marriage, and the sanctity of human life, and ACE is committed to reforming the church according to Scripture, then why wouldn’t the Alliance advocate the Manhattan Declaration for the church in ministering the word of God? Could it be that even when the Bible does speak to some moral matters, it does not do so in a way suitable for the larger society?

In other words, could it be that the kind of distinction between kingdoms for which Westminster California is notorious is not so radical but even appeals to the good confessing evangelicals that constitute ACE? Hmmmm.

Where is Justin Taylor When You Need Him?

Published on by D. G. Hart6 Comments

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

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

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

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

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