Tag: Randall Balmer

Creatures of Habit

Published on by D. G. Hart13 Comments

Just watch students over the course of a semester. They have free wills to choose whichever seat they want. After the first week of classes, they have found the seat from which they will not depart for the rest of the semester. It is “his” seat. We have no need for assigned seating. We create our own assignments.

The same applies to worship. Liturgy repeats itself even in the most anti-liturgical of sectors of Christendom. Just ask Randall Balmer:

The biggest change in evangelicalism is its worship, which has become almost formulaic. Virtually every evangelical gathering these days opens with “praise music,” which generally consists of simple lyrics and a lilting, undemanding melody — all led by a “praise band” or “worship team” consisting of guitarists, a keyboardist, a drummer and several vocalists clutching microphones. The music is hypnotic. Members of the congregation raise their hands in the air, and the singing seems to last forever. As my friend Tony Campolo says, five notes, three words, two hours.

The second part of evangelical worship is the sermon or, as evangelicals prefer, the “message.” Whereas the preachers in my youth wore suits and neckties, the standard these days is jeans and T-shirts, and probably a nest of tattoos. If the first part of the service is “feel good,” the second part is “be good.” Again, it’s formulaic. Sometimes it’s a political sermon disguised as theology, but more often the preacher enjoins the congregation to behave, to adhere to evangelical standards of morality, which are usually expressed in negative terms, with a heightened emphasis on sexual behavior. And then, with a prayer and maybe another song, it’s over.

What’s missing here? When I attend evangelical gatherings these days, I generally leave asking myself, What was “church” about that? I sang a few songs and listened to a sermon, but where was Jesus? Yes, the preacher may have invoked his name a couple of times, but in the absence of the Eucharist or Holy Communion, evangelical worship these days strikes me as barren.

Whereas Episcopalians or Roman Catholics believe in the “real presence” of Christ, that they encounter Jesus himself in the bread and wine of Holy Communion, most evangelicals take a dim, even dismissive, view of the sacraments. At most, they offer communion once a month or even once a quarter, and the bread and wine (actually, grape juice, a hangover from the temperance movement) merely remind us of Jesus.

So are the habits good or bad?

The Jimmy-Carter Roots of Jerry Falwell

Published on by D. G. Hart19 Comments

I have long suspected that the acrimony between left and right in U.S. politics stems not only from the Religious Right and the inevitable upping of the ante of civil matters to moral or eschatological significance, but also to the self-righteousness that accompanies the conviction (w-w alert) that one’s policy or vote is an expression of faithfulness to God. I also have long felt that Jimmy Carter exhibited the latter tendencies — self-righteousness — and was a particularly poor sport in the way he took Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980. I thought then that Carter believed he had lost to a dumber and inferior man, and so was responsible for launching the Democrats’ sense of intellectual superiority. (Republicans counter with patriotic/civil religious superiority.)

It turns out that I (all about me) not have been that far off, and this from Jonathan Yardley who voted twice for Carter (thanks to John Fea):

Religion is a tricky business, never more so than when it gets mixed up with government. Although Balmer pays due respect to the argument that “religion functions best from the margins of society and not in the councils of power,” that “once a religious group panders after political influence, it loses its prophetic voice,” he does not convince me that Carter, either as governor of Georgia in the early 1970s or as president in the second half of that decade, really “understood that the Christian faith had flourished in the United States precisely because the government had stayed out of the religion business.”

To the contrary, Carter brought religion (religiosity, too) into the national government more directly and intensely than any president before him in the 20th century. He campaigned as a religious man, speaking repeatedly, openly and almost boastfully about his religious convictions, about the centrality of prayer to his daily life, about the joy he took in being “born again.” Balmer sees this as a redemptive response to the cynicism and venality of the Nixon years, and unquestionably there is some truth to that. But Carter made religion a campaign weapon as well as a private belief, which was not appreciably less calculating than Nixon’s disregard for the Constitution and the common decencies.

If Carter’s presidency was indeed redemptive, why is it that in the 31 / 2 decades since it ended, American politics has been plunged into one of the most bitterly partisan periods in the country’s history? Granting for the sake of argument Balmer’s apparent belief in the sincerity of Carter’s religious beliefs and his commitment to “progressive evangelism,” it remains that it was Carter who brought religion into the public arena and thus opened the way for others whose evangelical beliefs are the polar opposite of his own. Balmer would have us believe that the rise of the religious right was in large part due to the clever political manipulations of Paul Weyrich, Jerry Falwell and others, but it was Carter who made it possible for them to present themselves as a legitimate political opposition. If it is permissible to grant a political role to “progressive evangelism,” why is it any less legitimate to grant a similar role to those whose evangelism “emphasized free-market capitalism, paid scant attention to human rights or the plight of minorities, and asserted the importance of military might as resistance to communism”?

For the five cents that it’s worth, my own political views are far closer to Carter’s than to those who carry the banner of the religious right — I actually voted for him twice, though holding my nose the second time — and Balmer is right that there is more than a little to admire in the record of his brief presidency, but he was his own worst enemy: smug, self-righteous, sanctimonious, humorless, vindictive and exhibitionistic about his piety. He was too haughty and aloof to deal effectively with friends and foes in Congress — foreshadowing the presidency almost three decades later of Barack Obama — and he never understood how to talk to the American people, as made all too plain by his well-intentioned but tin-eared address to the nation in July 1979 about the “crisis of confidence” from which the country ostensibly was suffering.

Two Kingdom Tuesday On Where's Waldo Wednesday

Published on by D. G. Hart1 Comment

I have encountered what seems to me a strange notion — in several places where Federal Vision Worldviewism has left its mark — that the differences between Reformed and Anglicans are not that great, and that historically speaking it is wrong to distinguish them. Along with this perspective usually comes great regard for Richard Hooker as providing a proper critique of the Puritans’ ecclesiology and a correction to Calvin’s excesses.

But when you consdier the way the Dutch Reformed and the English Anglicans (I know it’s redundant but you need a place and a tradition and the English made the mistake of confusing the two) related in colonial New Netherland (later New York), you may understand why the Reformed churches were not wild about the English or the way they ran their church. The following is an excerpt that should point Reformed Christians away from the Canterbury Trail (high church Calvinism doesn’t need a bishop):

Dutch Calvinists had brought this notion with them to the New World. Writing in 1628, Dominie Jonas Michaelius, the first clergyman in New Netherland, conceded that although “political and ecclesiastical persons can greatly assist each other, nevertheless the matters and offices belinging together must not be mixed but kept separate, in order to prevent all confusion and disorder.” Indeed, quite often throughout the New Netherland period the clergy and the West India Company directors-general found themselves at odds; the most notorious such conflict occurred between Domine Everardus Bogardus and Director-General Willem Kieft, who battled each other so fiercely that they sailed together back to Holland for arbitration only to be shipwrecked and perish off the coast of Wales.

This adversarial relationship of church and state was foreign to Restoration Englishmen, however. Building on the writings of Thomas Erastus, a sixteenth-century political theorist, Anglicans believed that the church should be subject to the powers of the state. Richard Hooker, apologist for the Church of England, wrote that “there is not any restraint or limitation of matter for regal authority and power to be conversant in, but of religion whole, and of whatsoever cause thereto appertaineth, kings may lawfully have charge, they lawfully may therein exercise dominion, and use the temporal sword.” (Randall Balmer, A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies, pp. 20-21)

It does seem that most of the Reformed leaning folks today who advocate that magistrates get the true religion and enforce it (good and hard) are largely Erastian, while the 2k position is deeply rooted in those Reformed theologians and pastors that were always opposing Erastus and the magistrates who appealed to him. I guess another option is out there. Theonomy.

"The Stakes Have Never Been Higher"

Published on by D. G. Hart20 Comments

Really?

According to ABC News, and its report on the resignation of Bruce Waltke from Reformed Theological Seminary, both sides agree that the stakes are indeed that high. Higher than the Scopes Trial? I was glad that they did not bring up William Jennings Bryan and his difficult testimony before Clarence Darrow’s badgering. But from what I could tell, the stakes this news reporter discovered are completely beside the point.

The way the press usually treats these things, it is a case of intolerance versus open mindedness, or science versus dogma, or a religious group’s retrenchment and inability to cope with modern ideas versus a community of faith that swims along quite elegantly in the waters of modern knowledge. And they can generally find religious scholars like Pete Enns and Randall Balmer who, siding more with the reporters than their fellow believers, will back up this set of contrasts (but who actually should know that there are more than two sides since they are experts on religion and the reporters aren’t).

This set of tensions could apply to the Waltke-RTS situation, but they don’t. The major contention has been the historicity of Adam, not whether he emerged from an evolutionary process. And beyond that, the questions have been largely theological, not scientific: what happens to the doctrine of original sin or federal headship if Adam was simply a mythical figure? And what happens to Paul’s two-Adam construction of covenant theology if one of those Adams is an ethereal character of unknown identity who may have hooked up with the mother of all humanity (that mother being confirmed by geneticists and anthropologists and thus supplying the evidence necessary for the unity of the human race).

So have the stakes ever been higher for federal theology? I’m not so sure. I’d need the help of historical theologians to make that call.

But to the idea that if Christians do not accept the idea of evolution they run the risk of becoming a cult, I wonder if Waltke or his supporter Enns, or ABC’s expert interviewee, Balmer, ever considered what belief in the resurrection of Christ makes the church look like before the scientifically knowledgeable world. Granted, the Genesis account of God’s creation of the parents of the human race may from a scientific perspective be hard to believe. I, frankly, am not sure that the naturalistic accounts of human origins are any easier to understand or believe. Be that as it may, do the Christians advocating evolution – and I am not going to give them too hard a time since one of my favorite theologians (sorry, Gary), Benjamin Warfield was one of them – really think the idea of Christ’s resurrection makes Christians soft, cuddly, and scientifically mainstream?

The stakes have been what they’ve always been. The Bible contains a lot of events and ideas that are hard to believe, whether you are scientific or not (think of all the premoderns who saw and heard Christ and did not believe). If not for the longevity of Christianity in Europe and North America, reporters might actually think that Christianity resembles Mormonism more than it does the Unitarian Church.

But for the record, when a three-time presidential nominee and one of the nation’s leading attorneys square off in courtroom proceedings that are broadcast nationally – which is what happened in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925 – the stakes are pretty high, higher I’d say than the recent unpleasantness between Waltke and RTS. (And those stakes had more to do with majority rule and local government than with reason versus faith — but that’s another story.)

Would Jesus Forgive Ken Starr?

Published on by D. G. Hart6 Comments

A little over a month ago I attended an evening of offbeat film where one of the archivists responsible for the program introduced himself as hailing from Raleigh, N.C. He said that he used to say this was the home of Slim Jims (I think) and Jesse Helms. But since the cooking of spicy meat bi-products was going on somewhere else, and since Jesse Helms had died, he could no longer talk that way about his home. At the point where he mentioned Helms’ death, the mostly academic and artsy crowd began to applaud.

Now I know conservatives are regularly guilty of bad taste and the examples of Rush and Glen provide daily reminders to non-conservatives of how mean the Right is supposed to be. But I find it hard to believe that even the vox talk-radioli greeted the news of Edward Kennedy’s death with the same glee evident at this evening of film. Granted, everyone on planet earth is a sinner and so constantly guilty of hypocrisy (which is sort of Paul’s point in Romans 1 and 2, right?). So I shrugged off the incident and despite discomfort with the egregious bad taste stuck around for the movies (plus, I had paid my $7). But I do scratch my head at the liberal talking point that conservatives are meanies when instances like this, not to mention various hosts at MSNBC, seem to balance the scales of meanness between the Right and the Left. If liberals want conservatives to stop being mean, shouldn’t they embody the niceness that supposedly typifies their understanding of a good society?

I was reminded of this incident when reading Randall Balmer’s recent reflections about the appointment of Kenneth Starr as president of Baylor University. I myself think that the Republicans treatment of Bill Clinton during the Lewinski scandal was in the ballpark of Clinton’s own shameful behavior – maybe not at home plate, but still inside the white lines. But liberals don’t forgive and forget anymore than conservatives, hence the helpings of meanness that fill up both the Right’s and the Left’s plates.

Balmer writes:

Starr’s appointment is not surprising because it apparently reflects the right-wing leanings of the regents, if not necessarily the faculty or the students. Starr as special prosecutor, of course, sought to bring down the Clinton administration. (Was it my imagination, or did Starr seem just a tad too interested in the tawdry Monica Lewinsky business?) Starr also has been dean of the notoriously right-wing Pepperdine Law School, and he has been in the forefront of supporters for California’s Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that reversed the legalization of same-sex marriages.

At the announcement of his appointment, Starr sought to play down his past. “Baylor’s pursuit of knowledge,” he intoned, leaning closely to read his notes, “is strengthened by the conviction that truth has its ultimate source in God.”

As a person of faith, I have no quarrel with that statement. But the real question for the faculty and students at Baylor is how the new administration approaches the “pursuit of knowledge” at the university. What if the pursuit of knowledge entails stem-cell research or leads to the conclusion (gasp!) that evolution is the most satisfactory explanation of human origins? What if a member of the religion department or the divinity school faculty notices that Jesus really had little or nothing to say about homosexuality or that Paul’s statement that in Christ there is no distinction between Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female merits a capacious interpretation?

The difficulty for Balmer here is even greater than the one that afflicted my fellow movie watchers. On a minor level, he should know that universities, their trustees, and presidents regularly engage in activities that are inconsistent with the ideals they uphold. Think, for instance, of the welcome that Balmer’s institution, Columbia University, gave to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But an even greater problem is that Balmer identifies with the evangelical left, a group of believers who supposedly point to the kinder and gentler Sermon on the Mount, as opposed to the Right’s harsh Ten Commandments, as the model for Christians getting along. So if Christians are to do as Jesus did, turn the other cheek, and forgive at least seventy times seven, why is Balmer publicly bearing a grudge against Starr? If the love and forgiveness that Jesus taught and practiced is supposed to provide a different model of Christian engagement in public life and discourse, wouldn’t it be good either to let this editorial against Starr go, or extend the right hand of fellowship and thereby embody the sort of ethic that Balmer finds lacking in the Religious Right?

It could be that wherever you get your law, either from Moses or Jesus, it is awfully demanding and so fails to produce the Rodney King-like society for which that liberals and evangelical lefties pine. Or it could be that Balmer is simply regretting that his most recent book has come out with Baylor University Press. At least he can explain that it wasn’t issued on Starr’s watch.