Tag: Phil Ryken

Baseless?

Published on by D. G. Hart23 Comments

I am not in the habit of making political predictions, nor do I follow the polls or pundits sufficiently to feel comfortable doing so. But I did tweet on the eve of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Obamacare that if the President’s plan was upheld, then he would lose the November election. The reason is that the Supreme Court’s decision would energize the GOP’s base at a time when its November candidate is hardly inspiring too red meat conservatives.

Obama had no control over the Court’s decision or timing (on the eve of the election), but he has had some say in other matters that are also energizing social conservatives, such as immigration or gay marriage, and for some reason the Obama campaign doesn’t seem to worry about riling up all of those people who listen to Rush, Sean, Bill (Bennett), Michael (Medved), and Hugh (Hewitt). Maybe these guys are the smartest people in the nation. Or it could be that they are tone deaf to Red State politics.

A further indication of Obama unwittingly helping Romney came yesterday with the news that Wheaton College is joining with the Catholic University of America to file a lawsuit against the Obama administration’s contraception mandate. In an interview with Christianity Today, Wheaton’s president Phil Ryken explained why despite the timing this should not be construed as a partisan political act:

Wheaton College is not a partisan institution and the effect of our filing on any political process has played no part at all in any of our board discussions on the issue. The timing of things is driven primarily by the mandate itself. Wheaton College stands to face punitive fines already on January 1, 2013, and I am welcoming incoming freshmen in two weeks. It’s already an issue for us in terms of our health insurance and what we provide for this coming academic year. Although we wanted to wait for the Supreme Court decision out of respect for the legal system, we do not believe that we can wait any longer.

I too regard this as simply the prudent action of a college administration in response to unwise federal policy. And that is what is remarkable. Wheaton College is hardly part of the Religious Right. Ryken is no culture warrior. In fact, if anything the college is as uncomfortable with the GOP as many evangelical colleges and universities (compared to the 1980s). And yet, Obama and company have put Christians, with all sorts of reasons to be sympathetic to him, on the defensive at a time when they may revert to Republican habits of vote.

Odd.

Wheaton Is Calling (and I Wish They'd Stop)

Published on by D. G. Hart5 Comments

Within roughly two years, Philadelphia has lost two good Presbyterian pastors to the evangelical capitol of Wheaton. The first to go was Craig Troxel, who left Calvary OPC in the city’s suburb of Glenside to take a call to Bethel OPC in Wheaton. And now comes word of Phil Ryken, senior pastor at Tenth Presbyterian Church (PCA) taking the reins as president of Wheaton College. Perhaps because Phil’s departure brings back difficult memories of losing my wife’s and my dominie, Troxel, the news of Ryken’s imminent departure from the capitol city of American Presbyterianism rocks my Old Life world more than I would have expected. (I confess to having bad dreams Saturday night over the news.) Having recently relocated to center city, only a few blocks away from Tenth Church, Phil’s presence was more reassuring than I likely realized when we decided to move (even though we continue as members at Calvary). Phil strikes me a honorable fellow, good scholar, capable preacher, and all round mensch. I am deeply saddened that I will not be running into him as a fellow resident of William Penn’s original city plan.

What Ryken’s departure means for Tenth will not be evident for some time, not simply until they call a successor but also because historical developments don’t make sense for a good twenty years. Tenth’s bones are as good as they can be for a church that I wish were more Old School Presbyterian than its practices allow. The church’s history is almost two centuries long, and its identity is not bound up with the recent past of its denomination, the PCA. This means that Tenth will likely not be caught up in PCA efforts to be hip, relevant, or influential. Tenth has been a church in the city for a much longer time than the sirens of urban ministry have been calling the PCA to transform the culture through its metropolitan centers. In other words, Tenth is comfortable being urban – it doesn’t have to try. Also, Tenth’s tradition of sacred music, though not necessarily following Reformed strictures about special music and organs, has prevented praise bands from cluttering the front of the church with the permanent apparatus of drums, music stands, and microphones. The church will likely continue to be what it is – an evangelical church with solid Reformed commitments even if not allowing those convictions to dislocate Tenth’s older patterns of worship (which is sensible, restrained and respectful), or its use of parachurch ministries for missions and other forms of devotion.

The meaning of Ryken’s appointment for the College is also not clear, though again history is a useful guide. Ryken himself embodies different strands of Presbyterian identity that have not always found an outlet at Wheaton or the town’s many evangelical institutions. Phil himself grew up at Bethel OPC, a congregation that split soon after he graduated from Wheaton and started at Westminster (Philadelphia). Part of the congregation remained in the OPC where Troxel is now pastor. The other part left to affiliate eventually with the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. Meanwhile, Phil, who worshiped in the OPC while at Westminster, transferred his membership to the PCA when he took the call at Tenth as an associate pastor under James Montgomery Boice. (To be clear, Tenth was in the PCUSA up until 1981 when the congregation aligned with the RPCES, and then with the PCA which in 1983 absorbed the RP’s through Joining and Receiving. The OPC missed the opportunity to join the emerging sideline Presbyterian enterprise in 1986 when an insufficient majority of commissioners voted to become part of the PCA.)

In earlier years of OPC history, Wheaton College produced a number of students for Westminster who eventually became ministers within the denomination. Through the presidency of J. Oliver Buswell and the teaching of Gordon Clark in the philosophy department, until the 1940s Wheaton was a welcome option for OP parents looking for a Christian college for their children. But after Buswell and Clark left Wheaton (partly owing to the trustees’ discomfort with Calvinism), the college of choice for OP parents became Calvin. More recently since the 1970s, Covenant College has filled the niche for many OP’s who are looking for a Reformed liberal arts institution.

This means that Ryken goes to Wheaton at a time when the stars of the evangelical and Reformed worlds are not exactly aligned. For instance, the networks of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals and Wheaton College do not overlap significantly. ACE draws heavily upon PCA ministers and Calvinistic Baptists. Neither of these groups has a big presence at Wheaton College where the church option for those with Calvinistic sensibilities is College Church, a congregation with historic and complicated ties to the Congregationalists. Another important church presence at Wheaton is Bible Church, an independent congregation that split from College Church in 1929 over fears of creeping liberalism within the Congregationalist denomination. But Wheaton has as many churches as most towns have Starbucks. The mainline congregations in town generally have an evangelical sweet spot that attracts college faculty, while sideline Protestants, including Wesleyans, Baptists, and Orthodox Presbyterians, fill in as alternatives.

Will Ryken’s presence at Wheaton bring the worlds of ACE and evangelicalism into closer proximity? Some of the most outspokenly critical Wheaton alums fear so. Indeed, the objections by the evangelical left over Ryken’s membership in the PCA and ACE is one indication of how far apart the worlds of Wheaton and conservative Presbyterianism are. (How recent posts at the Ref21 blog are helping Phil’s cause are not entirely clear either.) Ryken is hardly a flamethrower of the Totally Reformed right. He has historical interests in Puritanism, and has some loyalty to what he learned while an intern from William Still, an evangelical pastor in the Church of Scotland. But even if Phil can sup with high voltage Presbyterians, like Old Lifers, and can even appreciate their arguments, he is hardly on a crusade to make the world to conform to Richard Baxter, John Owen, or John Calvin.

All of that to say, Phil’s appointment is an encouraging sign about Wheaton College to conservative Presbyterians. But for some in the Wheaton constituency, such encouragement is part of a zero sum game where if Calvinists are happy, than evangelicals should be scared. For the moderate middle of Wheaton’s constituency, Phil’s Presbyterian credentials are likely foreign but also formidable enough to be comforting that he will give the College sound theological leadership. Not to be missed are Phil’s training and instincts as a scholar. Having graduated from Wheaton, and having kept a hand in writing and editing, Phil knows a lot about the life of the mind. As Mark Noll well cautioned in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, integrating evangelical faith and intellect is a task that may be as hard to believe as turning the bread and wine of the Mass into the body and blood of Christ. Perhaps less difficult will be integrating conservative Presbyterianism and American evangelicalism, a task that left Buswell and Clark in the 1940s looking on the outside of Wheaton’s Wesleyan leaning piety. But if anyone is up to the task, Phil is arguably the best equipped and well positioned to give it a try. We wish him God’s speed even if I also wish he were sticking around as a neighbor.