Details from Presbyterian church history about race relations in the United States are not pretty. Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, for instance, saw members and officers leave when Mariano Di Gangi, predecessor to James Montgomery Boice, preached about racial prejudice, opened the church and session to African Americans, and served on the mayor’s commission on civil rights. At the time, Tenth Church was still part of the Presbyterian Church USA and did not join the Presbyterian Church in America until 1982; but that denomination had hurdles of its own to overcome. Sean Michael Lucas’s history of the PCA’s founding, For a Continuing Church (2015), includes stories of Southern Presbyterian conservatives who defended racial segregation on biblical grounds and sought ways to guard the church from important figures regarded as having erroneous understandings of racial equality.
The OPC herself debated the merits of civil rights during the 1960s in the pages of The Presbyterian Guardian that showed opposition to political reforms designed to end segregation. A black pastor in the church, Herbert Oliver, wrote an article about the positive contribution the Christian church had made to social reforms in the past and that supporting Civil Rights for African-Americans was another instance when Christians could be instruments of social change. Letters to the editor indicated that Oliver had failed to persuade some Orthodox Presbyterians. E. J. Young, for instance, wrote a letter to the editors in which he objected to both a view of egalitarianism that was clearly unbiblical and an understanding of the church’s role in society that failed to highlight the ministry of the gospel. If these instances seem inconsequential, perhaps J. Gresham Machen’s 1913 letter to his mother, strongly objecting to the integration of Princeton Seminary, will show how much ideas of white supremacy afflicted conservative Presbyterians who contemporary Orthodox Presbyterians esteem. If a black man were to take up residence in Alexander Hall, Machen wrote, he would consider moving out, which would have been “a great sacrifice to me.”
Tag: Tenth Presbyterian Church
Spring Break with Tim
I did not plan it this way, but Tim Keller winds up being the subject this week. Reasons for further reflection on the oh so successful Manhattan pastor arise from the missus and my visit to Chicago, which has become a tradition. Truth be told, we are urbanists. We met in Philadelphia, knew something was going to knit us together after concluding that Woody Allen’s Annie Hall and Manhattan were about two of the best American movies ever made, and then found that life in the city was simply more intriguing (for us) than the suburbs in which we had both been reared (Levittown, PA and Levittown, NY — the odds?). Even living in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia’s suburb in the city, for almost 15 years, we drew energy and — dare I say — inspiration from residing in the city. Going to Chicago is a way to recharge the urban batteries (though one-day trips to Ann Arbor have to tide us over).
I hope I’m proving my urban bona fides, and in so doing suggesting that Keller’s awareness of the city’s appeal is plausible (though I still don’t see much appreciation for Woody Allen in TKNY).
My criticisms of Keller, then, are two-fold. I object to his failure to carry out his duties as a Presbyterian church officer. He may be a good evangelical, even an urban one, but I don’t sense a minister who willingly conforms and belongs to the limits that come with belonging to a Reformed communion. Keller is not alone in that. Lot’s of Presbyterian pastors don’t conform to communion expectations. But as celebrity-Presbyterian-pastor-in-chief, Keller makes the way straight for coloring outside the lines.
The other objection is the way Keller benefits from being pro-urban New York City. As I indicated earlier this week, if you put Keller in Chicago or Seattle would his following be as large as it is? I doubt it. Along with this goes a sense that Keller doesn’t tell the whole truth about the city. Even as he seems to think he knows how to educate future urban pastors about how to do city ministry, I don’t think he acknowledges one simple reality — the city is gosh darn expensive. And that means you have trouble keeping families in cities once couples start rearing children. In Philadelphia, you may be able to commute relatively easily from the suburbs to Tenth Presbyterian Church. But once you leave New York’s five boroughs, you are a long way from Manhattan.
Now notice this: families are important to covenant religion.
Marriage was ordained for the mutual help of husband and wife, for the increase of mankind with legitimate issue, and of the church with an holy seed; and for preventing of uncleanness. (Confession of Faith, 24.2)
Families are the only good way of socializing the young. Yes, they have lots of problems. But would you rather the state through its foster system rear children or take your chances with a man and woman who don’t have the true, good, and beautiful figured out? Or how about the church? Is the church better equipped to rear children than parents? I don’t think so.
Why is it then that Keller has so little to say about families? The index to Center Church gives the family only three entries. Google searches reveal only a few sources. Here’s one right from Keller:
Why bring children into such a bleak world? Religious persons, however, have a profound assurance that in the future is final justice, or paradise, or union with God in some form. They have an over-arching hope that makes them more optimistic about bearing and raising children.
At this point you might think I would simply say “Yay for religion, it is the friend of the family!” It is not that simple. While secularism in the West tends to make an idol out of the individual and his or her needs, traditional religion has often made an idol out of the family. According to theologian Stanley Hauerwas of Duke University, Christianity was the very first religion or world-view that held up single adulthood as a viable way of life. Jesus himself and St. Paul were single. “One…clear difference between Christianity and Judaism [and all other traditional religions] is the former’s entertainment of the idea of singleness as the paradigm way of life for its followers.” (Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character, p.174.) Nearly all religions and cultures made an absolute value of the family and of the bearing of children. There was no honor without family honor, and there was no real lasting significance or “legacy” without leaving heirs. By contrast, the early church not only did not pressure women to marry but it institutionally supported poor widows so they were not forced to remarry as they were out in the culture at large.
Notice the standard third-way positioning. I’m not for singles, nor for families, but here is the via media. Great. But tell me how families are going to afford to live in Manhattan. And also why not tell parents how important they are for rearing children, catechizing, setting examples in the home? Any reflection also on if you can afford to live in Manhattan and both parents need to work, what do you do with a hiring a Christian nanny? Family in this Keller post is an abstraction (that does not dent his larger abstraction of the city).
I also found this, the urban pastor who came around to Keller’s idea that it takes a city to raise rear a child:
[Keller] acknowledges that three factors make it a hard place to raise kids. First, because of the prohibitive cost of everything you’ve got less disposable income to invest in your family. Secondly, he talks about the ‘physical logistics on the front nine’ make it harder to get round the city with small kids. In others words transporting small kids in the city can be a real pain. But after that, the ‘back nine’ is a real joy. Thirdly, the educational terrain is complex and hard to navigate since there are so many options and so little cash!
That is the problem. The solution? Kids turn out hip, believers, and real (really!?!).
That said he then lists eight counterbalancing factors that sway the pendulum in favour of staying put and not giving flight.
1. The kids will grow up thinking that they live in the real world rather than growing up in the suburbs and straining at the leash to get to the real world. Of course everywhere is the real world but they don’t think like that. The city is where it’s at and they know that. That’s why they want to escape surburbia or the regions as soon as they can. But if they grow up in the city they know that they live in the ‘real’ world.
2. The kids grow up knowing that you have a real faith. They want to believe that their parents’ faith is disconnected to reality. It gives them permission to be disparaging about Christianity. But they can’t do that if they know that you’ve had to work out your Christian discipleship in the real world. It undermines their desire for unbelief.
3. The kids will grow up and become self reliant, independent and confident because nothing freaks them out. As a country boy who went to sixth form with mates from the city who then moved to the ‘big smoke’ in his mid twenties, I’ve got to say he’s absolutely right on that one.
4. The kids grow up being adept at handling diversity. Most surbuban white kids don’t grow up with Muslim neighbours and Afro-Caribbean mates. But you do in the city. Their breadth of cultural engagement will far outweigh the kids who grow up out of town.
5. The kids grow up being pushed into family. The city is a relationally intense environment. It ‘forces’ families to spend lots of time together. The commute is less, the house is smaller, there aren’t any fields to escape to. It all adds up to lots of ‘face time’. If you’re into relating with your kids, that’s a good thing.
6. The kids grow up with Christian role models. In the suburbs kids grow up with a peer group. But do you really want them learning about the faith from their teenage mates? On reflection, not really. In the city they get to their teenage years and they see the Christian life being modelled by credible ‘trendy twenties’ whom they respect. In the suburbs they get to see the Christian life being lived out by guys with kids. But who grows up wanting to be like their Dad! In the city they don’t have to.
7. The kids grow up facing the issues. They’ll be exposed to a whole range of ethical issues a long time before the suburban or rural kids. Because London is like a massive University Campus we get to go to College with them before they’re even old enough to apply! They’ll come across homosexuality, drugs, alcohol, crime, sex and so on and we’ll be with them when they do. Unlike the parents in the suburbs who live out there to escape from it we have to confront it and get to help them deal with it.
8. The kids grow up without the pressure to conform. The city is so accommodating of diversity that it’s hard to think of a fad, fashion or obsession that it wouldn’t tolerate. And so the kids get to grow up being themselves, without having to become a carbon copy of others.
This is frankly a bizarre recommendation of the city. Great! Let’s rear kids so they don’t want to be like their dads #6.
Great! Billy and Susie grow up surrounded by sex, drugs, and crime #7. Retreating to the suburbs is so squaresville.
Sheesh.
What about kids who grow up without a smartphone because parents can’t afford one because rents are so high? Does Redeemer have a diaconate that helps families with the costs of living in the most expensive place in the United States?
And then I also saw this from Christopher Lasch:
If conservatism is understood to imply a respect for limits, it is clearly incompatible with modern capitalism or with the liberal ideology of unlimited economic growth. Historically, economic liberalism rested on the belief that man’s insatiable appetites, formerly condemned as a source of social instability and personal unhappiness, could drive the economic machine—just as man’s insatiable curiosity drove the scientific project—and thus ensure a never-ending expansion of productive forces. For the eighteenth-century founders of political economy, the self-generating character of rising expectations, newly acquired needs and tastes, and new standards of personal comfort gave rise to a form of society capable of indefinite expansion. Their break with older ways of thinking lay in the assertion that human needs should he regarded not as natural but as historical, hence insatiable. As the supply of material comforts increased, standards of comfort increased as well, and the category of necessities came to include goods formerly regarded as luxuries. Envy, pride, and ambition made human beings want more than they needed, but these “private vices” became “public virtues” by stimulating industry and invention. Thrift and self-denial, on the other hand, meant economic stagnation. “We shall find innocence and honesty no more general,” wrote Bernard Mandeville, “than among the most illiterate, the poor silly country people.” The “pleasures of luxury and the profit of commerce,” according to David Hume, “roused men from their indolence” and led to “further improvements in every branch of domestic as well as foreign trade.” Both Hume and Adam Smith argued that a growing desire for material comforts, wrongly taken by republican critics of commerce as a sign of decadence and impending social collapse, generated new employments, new wealth, and a constantly rising level of productivity.
Does living in New York City encourage its people to think about living within limits, to regard progress as folly, to be content with less? Is Keller for the city and all its unlimited possibilities? Or does he encourage self-restraint and find ways for his hearers to resist all of the conveniences and temptations of modern urban life? Isn’t he really in favor of a suburban existence #5 — responsible parents, respectful kids, not going into debt, refusing hedonism (except when recommended by co-ally John Piper) — in an environment that as Lasch indicates pushes residents to want to see material comforts increased. Of course, all of America encourages an identification with progress (unless you live in Hillsdale, Michigan). But in NYC this outlook is on steroids (see Lena Dunham).
What if the dangers of urban life are real?
Thanks to President Lyndon Johnson’s so-called “Great Society,” a buffet of new federal programs were established that have been pouring federal dollars into Philadelphia since the mid-1960s. How have those countless billions of tax dollars been spent? In the inner city where the federal dollars were spent by our Democratic politicians, public education is far worse than it was in the mid-’60s; violent crime is far worse; more children are living in poverty; more single-mother families, more homelessness, more hard drug use, more fear, etc. There is not one single criterion under the quality-of-life rubric that has improved in Philadelphia’s inner city since all those billions were brought into the city along with politicians’ photo-ops since the mid-’60s.
But Keller remains optimistic:
Keller believes Christians in New York cannot retreat into homogeneity. They’ll be regularly faced with people who fervently disagree with them. Keller’s church is a multi-ethnic one and even if the believers have a similar religious outlook, they hail from a variety of different backgrounds.
Keller believes serious Christians still belong in cities in general and New York in particular. But it’s a project that will take many more Tim Kellers and much more time. The results, says Keller, are “hard to see except in hindsight, with the perspective of several decades.”
Speaking of retreating into homogeneity, does Keller look at the church as a place of disagreement and diversity? Or has he led modern church planting into a homogeneous place where disagreement goes unanswered and unacknowledged? Can we have a discussion about Presbyterianism in the city? Can we talk about dying to sin and living to Christ in the city? Can we talk about family visitation and catechesis in the city? Or how about the regulative principle in the city?
I wish Tim Keller would think harder about cities and think about them in the light of critics of modernity like Lasch or Wendell Berry. That doesn’t fit with his ministry paradigm. Not reading those critics or interacting with them does not fit the pastor-who-answers-skeptics paradigm.
Postscript: I’d be glad to offer my services as an urban church consultant. I’m a trained social scientist, I like cities, and I’m even a church officer.
Wheaton Is Calling (and I Wish They'd Stop)
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.