Tag: Tim Keller

9/11 Revealed Christian Nationalism before Stephen Wolfe’s “Case”

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Reactions to the terrorist attack then and now (25 years later) have been hard to miss or experience. One conferee this past weekend in Baltimore who gathered to honor H. L. Mencken’s cynical wit (and more), could hardly bottle up tears after stopping at the Flight 93 National Memorial on the way to Charm City.

Tallying Christian responses has also put the recent discussions of Christian nationalism in perspective. As it turns out, Protestants who have a high view of politics and nations (who are also invariabley pietist) rushed to find Christian meaning in 9/11. Confessionalists, in contrast, were reluctant to use Christian doctrine to make sense of the United States’ loss and suffering.

(Sure, this could come across as a case of confessionalists taking a victory lap at the expense of pietists. It might also be instructive about the way a high view of the church deescalates the importance of nations.)

John Fea surveyed evangelical responses to 9/11 from twenty-five years ago in a piece for Christianity Today. The opposition of Religious Right leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to immorality and secularism was clearly a forerunner to recent calls from ChristNats for laws against blashpemy and Sabbath breaking.

It took only two days for Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority and Liberty University’s chancellor, to publicize his interpretation of the attacks. On Thursday morning, he appeared on televangelist Pat Robertson’s 700 Club and blamed the attacks on all his culture war enemies.

“I really believe,” he said, “that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”

. . . A few days later, as the nation watched George Bush’s National Day of Prayer and Remembrance at the National Cathedral, Falwell spoke to cable news trying to walk back his comments. He told CNN, in the outlet’s paraphrase, that “only the hijackers and terrorists were responsible for the deadly attacks”—but even then he could not stop talking about his enemies.

Falwell again accused the ACLU of having “secularize[d] America” and “removed our nation from its relationship with Christ on which it was founded,” thereby causing God to “lift the veil of protection which has allowed no one to attack America on our soil since 1812.” (The editors of Christianity Today later quipped that Falwell spoke “as if America enjoyed a spotless record of righteousness until the 1960s.”)

. . . Many evangelicals, whatever they thought of Falwell’s specific targets, seemed to share his underlying assumption: God was sending the United States a message through September 11. This was the old rhetoric of the Puritan jeremiad, sermons that called Massachusetts Bay to repentance in the wake of a society-wide tragedy. Puritans believed God used Indian raids, earthquakes, and losses of charters to punish the colonies’ inhabitants. Now, in these attacks, some evangelicals were sure God was again punishing his new chosen people.

Radio psychologist James Dobson pointed to America’s “pride and arrogance,” the “killing [of] 40 million unborn babies,” and the “mainstreaming of pornography.” He told his readers to “accept the truth that this nation will suffer in many ways for departing from the principles of righteousness.”

At the Nicotine Theological Journal, the editors adopted a different stance. One article, “God Damn Mr. Laden,” questioned the ubiquity of the phrase, “God bless America”:

The phrase, “God damn,” is one that devout Christians are not supposed to utter. Depending on how it’s said, it violates the Third Commandment which, as the Heidelberg Catechism puts it, forbids blaspheming and misusing the name of God “by cursing, perjury, or unnecessary oaths.” “God damn” would appear to fall into the category of cursing. That may explain why the only time I’ve heard a minister of the gospel say these words, and with noted effect, was when describing Jesus Christ on the cross, who bearing the sins of his people, was at that moment a “God-damned sinner.” The rest of those in the congregation that Sunday morning shifted nervously.

The recent terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, combined with the response of many Americans with a show of flags and the singing of “God Bless America,” have raised questions about Third Commandment and taking the Lord’s name in vain. Why is it wrong to say “God damn” but okay to say “God bless”? Surely the latter phrase isn’t a form of cursing by the lights of Heidelberg’s authors. But does “God bless” qualify, as Q&A 99 goes on to say, as the use of God’s holy name “with reverence and awe.” When it is as common as hand-painted messages on the rear windows of cars mixed with America’s civil religion of national messianism, the phrase “God bless” could legitimately be counted as a kind of cuss word. And yet few Christians seem to be aware that the Third Commandment requires the careful invoking of God’s name. In fact, because the idea that God has a special affection for the United States runs so deep in the American Protestant soul, responding to the terrorist attack with the phrase, “God bless,” is as natural as the Irish Catholic uttering “glory be” in reaction to a marvelous or unusual occurrence.

Another piece, “Faulty Towers,” noticed that invocations of Augustinianism were less coherent than what biblical theology gleans from the story of the Tower of Babel:

In reading some Internet “pastoral letters,” one common irony emerges. Pastors are frequently invoking the name of Augustine, and yet Augustine is being cited on behalf of some very un-Augustinian sentiments about American destiny and its role in the unfolding of the kingdom. Consider two messages from PCA pastors. “America is not the new Israel,” writes Larry Ball (on PCAnews.com), but “America has been special to God.” Now God is judging us, because “we have ejected the Christian God from our schools by denying prayer and refusing to teach his law.” Chief among American culprits was the immoral and heretical former administration (which seems to cast some doubt on God’s timing). America is a “cesspool of immorality and lawlessness . . . America has lost her peace because America has lost her righteousness.” It should not surprise us that God has used ungodly people to judge us, because that is the way he chose to judge Israel. America is not Israel, but she’s pretty darn close.

Slightyly more nuanced are the pastoral reflections from Tim Keller, a PCA pastor who ministers in Manhattan. He commends the mayor and governor for their public vision of the “resurrection” of New York City. “I personally believe that this is the right way for NYC to deal with its grief. It must reflect the gospel dynamic of death-into-resurrection at a civic level. Through this New York could become less a place of individualistic achievement and more of a community. Through this Americans could become on the one hand humbler and more sensitive to the injustice and pain in the world and yet more committed to and (rightly) proud of our nation than ever before. In summary, we could become stronger through this weakness, not just in spite of it. That is the basic gospel dynamic.”

This is as profoundly anti-Augustinian as you can get. To whatever extent New York City recovers, it is not in any sense being resurrected or redeemed. It remains the city of man, and therefore, at best, an instrument of God’s restraining grace. It does not reflect any reestablished role of America’s special purpose, nor is its recovery marking the breakthrough either of the gospel or the kingdom.

Is it too much to suggest that the better biblical metaphor to recall is the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11? In a consistently Augustinian understanding, the fall of the Tower of Babel was both judgment and blessing upon the city of man. In Meredith Kline’s words, it was a blessing in the sense that God was frustrating the “apostate ideology infecting the city of man,” frustrating their dialogue and “so ungluing the bonds of their ecumenical union.”

To close by saying that 9/11 stands above theological posturing may seem like a kind way to avoid using the tragedy to score religious points. In fact, the point of drawing on theology to interpret events in the life of a nation is to indicate that no success or failure of a political body is independent of theological interpretation. In which case, the choice of theological material for assessing dramatic events in the life of a nation is telling.

Does Aaron Renn Really Think Elites Will Save Us?

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Trying to situate Aaron Renn on the landscape of twenty-first century American Protestantism is a tall order. The Indiana native, who consults on urban planning and opines about churches, describes himself as a writer who covers “the human, cultural, and institutional foundations of American flourishing during an era of transition.” (Full disclosure: as someone who considers himself an urbanist, I regularly read and benefit from Renn’s social media links and commentary on urban planning, politics, and economies.)

Renn came to the attention of many with his First Things article (Feb. 2022) on the three worlds of evangelicalism, a scheme that identified 2014 as the beginning of an era when being Christian in America was no longer an asset but a defect. This was around the same time that he helped to found “American Reformer” as an outlet for aggressively Protestant reflection about politics and society. Over time, “American Reformer” became a platform for pronouncements on Christian nationalism, though Renn never seemed to embrace the label. His outlook about the importance of Christians establishing culture-shaping institutions is clearly compatible with Christian nationalism but Renn himself has not waded into those turbulent and sometimes dirty waters.

One other part of Renn’s body of work so far to attract attention is his lament about the absence of evangelical elites. Again at First Things (where the editor, Rusty Reno, features an odd selection of Protestant writers), Renn wrote the provocative article, “The Problem with the Evangelical Elite” (December 2025). The problem comes at readers fast and hard in Renn’s opening paragraph:

The problem with the evangelical elite is that there isn’t one. All too few evangelical Christians hold senior positions in the ―culture-shap―ing domains of American ―society. Evangelicals don’t run movie studios or serve as editors in chief of major newspapers or as presidents of elite universities. There are no evangelicals on the Supreme Court. There are hardly any leading evangelical academics or artists. There are few evangelicals at commanding heights of finance. The prominent evangelicals in Silicon Valley can be counted on one hand. There are not even many evangelicals leading influential conservative think tanks and publications, despite the fact that evangelicals are one of the largest and most critical voting blocs in the Republican coalition.

Renn goes on to offer an explanation for the problem. Evangelicals stress soul-winning over vocation and lack institutions that incubate leaders in business, law, technology, and higher education. But his analysis comes with a reason to be concerned about the lack of evangelical elites. Renn views the United States as a society coded Protestant. Consequently, for the country to go forward in a healthy way, it needs people who come from America’s historic religious heritage. “America needs Protestants to take on the leadership burdens of society,” he writes, “and in view of the dramatic decline of mainline Protestantism, they must come from evangelical ranks.”

Renn does concede the presence of evangelicals in certain elite positions but deems this inadequate for providing real leadership. The one place where evangelicals produce “elites” is in Christian ministry. Renn writes, “evangelicals overwhelmingly fund and support people who focus on Christian ministry” and create “pathways to sponsorship for missionaries, church planters, and campus ministers.” They do not do the same for “people engaged in secular domains and activities.” Renn used Grok to supply the receipts. When asked about the top evangelical leaders, AI supplied the names of “fifteen evangelical elites” that was “100 percent pastors and other professional Christians.” A similar query for Roman Catholics produced a list where only 20 percent were clergy.

Renn’s nonchalance about evangelical pastors and theologians may explain why he pays so little attention to the communions that belong to NAPARC. He does not say this explicitly, but it comes through in the people he does interview on his podcast. He has hosted leaders of the Reconquista in mainline Protestantism, both Jake Dell (another contributor to First Things), a Congregationalist in Woodbury, Connecticut, and Richard Ackerman of Redeemed Zoomer fame, as an apologist for the PCUSA. In fact, when Rusty Reno interviewed Renn as a follow up to his article on evangelical elites for the First Things podcast, the Hoosier consultant praised the Social Gospel, political Progressives, and the mainline churches that spread those movements a century ago. This is not meant to score points by brushing Renn with the guilt of Progressivism and the Social Gospel. It is, though, an observation that suggests Renn has a soft spot for Protestants whose theology and practice did not measure up even as they transformed (for a time) American society.

NAPARC does register occasionally on Renn’s radar. At “American Reformer,” Renn wrote positively about two PCA pastors who have articulated a “positive vision for America.” One is C. R. Wiley’s First Presbyterian Church of Battle Ground, Washington. Renn observes that this church is “creating well-paying jobs and paying taxes, turning vacant downtown buildings into a farmers’ market and bakery, and building an architecturally significant new church that provides needed community and conference-center space.” More than a church, First Presbyterian is also building community.

The other NAPARC exception is the exceptional Tim Keller. Renn argues that Keller’s book Every Good Endeavor explains the doctrine of vocation in a way that “comprehends the exercise of power—that validates and valorizes people who reform public policy, invent new technologies, become presidents of elite universities, acquire major media properties or foundations, organize research teams, or serve as Supreme Court justices.”

Renn also credits Keller’s last white paper, “The Decline and Renewal of the American Church,” with calling for the “creation of a think tank, the endowment of chairs at top universities, the creation of grants for young Christian scholars, and the establishment of a Christian equivalent to the Federalist Society.” This is the sort of infrastructure necessary to cultivate evangelical elites. In his “American Reformer” article, Renn added “people today could learn from figures like Keller, who built an influential institution grounded in an expansive vision of the future.” The New York City PCA pastor was doing what Protestant leaders “have done throughout our national history,” namely, created “the institutions and norms that are absent today.”

What is especially odd about Renn’s reflections on Protestant churches and American society is that the institution-building conservative Protestants performed after liberalism and the Social Gospel captured the mainline denominations – creating seminaries, denominations, colleges, magazines, publishing companies – don’t register on Renn’s elite Protestant meter. Of course, they should not because these conservative Protestant institutions are not producing the leaders of Silicon Valley or qualifying for nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court. But for a man who pays attention to institutions, it is surprising that Renn pays so little to the institutions that comprise NAPARC — the very institutions that shaped Renn’s beloved Keller. Instead, he himself starts new institutions like “American Reformer.”

The other odd part of Renn’s institutional analysis is a failure to see where churches becoming leaders in the community leads. This is a lesson that ChristNats should also consider. The mainline churches a century ago abandoned the teaching of orthodox pastors and theologians who were not obvious leaders in their communities but leaders in the church, charged with trying to remain true to the teachings of Scripture and the practices of their communions. What led to the failure of Protestantism in the United States at elite levels was the loss of Protestant faith at elite levels. Mainline Protestants remained moral and culturally Protestant (especially in opposition to Roman Catholicism and in support of American exceptionalism). But in the words of H. L. Mencken, they tried “to get rid of all the logical difficulties of religion” and were left with “ a row of hollow platitudes, as empty as of psychological force. . . as so many nursery rhymes.”

Aaron Renn is a smart fellow and well worth reading about urban planning, economic development, rents, architecture, traffic rotaries, and mass transit, but he has apparently yet to consider the paradox that haunts Christianity. Christ taught in Matthew 16:25: “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” That verse need not relegate Christians to a perpetual underclass of underachievers. But Christ’s words suggest a paradoxical relationship between Christian devotion and cultural success that moved John Newton to write in his famous hymn, “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken”:

Fading is the worldling’s pleasures,
all his boasted pomp and show;
solid joys and lasting treasures
none but Zion’s children know.

Every honest student of church history has seen near term success turn into fool’s gold of apostasy. Surely, Renn could offer a few warnings about the dangers of elite Christianity.

The Latest Nicotine Theological Journal

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The October 2023 issue just went out to “subscribers.” The issue will be posted at this website in three months — but the way the editors keep schedules, don’t hold your breath.

For now, here’s a taste of the really late latest:

Celebrity Pastors Think, We Don’t Have To

Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind came out in 1994 about midway in the era of peak evangelical intellectualism. This was a period, 1980 to 2010, when evangelicals embraced the scholarly task with a zeal not before evident among born-again Protestants. The former date – 1980 – marked the founding of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals (ISAE) at Wheaton College. Launched by Mark Noll and Nathan Hatch, with inspiration from George Marsden, at the Harvard of the Bible belt, the ISAE sponsored important scholarship from historians who studied American Protestantism. The center of energy at Wheaton became a path for evangelical colleges (most notably Calvin College – now University) to receive grants from foundations in support a variety of research projects from scholars across the disciplines. The year 2010 is notable for the cover story in The Atlantic, “The Opening of the Evangelical Mind,” by the Jewish-American sociologist, Alan Wolfe, that highlighted the strides evangelicals had made in the corridors of American higher education.

Coming mid-way in this golden age of evangelical scholarly output, Noll’s Scandal warned about not going back to old ways of thinking. The old evangelical habits – perhaps characterized as hyper-spiritualized or biblicistic – led to fundamentalist fears of theological compromise, revivalist fixation on soul-winning, and premillennialist obsession with Christ’s immanent return. Each of these intellectual tics and spiritual instincts undermined the mental discipline required for genuine scholarship. At the same time that Noll was warning about the past, he was also cheering on contemporary evangelical scholars and hoping college and seminary administrators would nurture even more scholarship. It did not hurt that this was a period when foundations like Pew and Lilly were bankrolling evangelical institutions. Pew was the most significant and reflected an effort to move beyond theological education into the arts and sciences. The Lilly Endowment’s support, typically reserved for mainline Protestants, was a recognition that evangelical scholars were catching up to scholars within the network of established Protestant institutions.

Since 2010 the evangelical mind has been buffering (like when your web browser has too many cookies). The closing of the ISAE in 2014 was one indication that either evangelicals did not have scholars to carry on what Noll and Hatch had started or that leaders of evangelical colleges no longer thought scholarship was sufficiently important for Christian higher education. Christianity Today’s decision to cease publishing Books & Culture, was another indication of evangelical mental fatigue. The magazine had aspired to be evangelicalism’s New York Review of Books. Even so, Books & Culture had always depended on subsidies from its parent company or from foundations. By 2016 the heads of Christianity Today gave up on the dream of a heady evangelical publication that monitored books and ideas.

After all of this thinking, did evangelical scholarship prevail over the scandal about which Noll warned? Do evangelicals think about the world and their faith better now than they did before the evangelical renaissance? One test is to see whether evangelicals read non-evangelicals for insights into the world. After all, evangelical scholars, if they are doing good scholarship need to keep abreast of the best scholars in their field – most of whom are not Christian. If evangelical scholars know how to use and evaluate the work of non-Christians, can ordinary Protestants in a similar way take counsel and instruction from pundits and observers who make no profession of faith?

Tim Keller may have benefitted as much as any pastor from the flowering of the evangelical mind. His ties to the seminary world (Gordon-Conwell, Westminster, Reformed) prevented his easy circulation among the historians and philosophers at colleges who were at the forefront of the evangelical mind. But Keller’s years of greatest influence coincided with those of peak evangelical mind. The atmosphere of evangelical scholarship made plausible a pastor in the wealthiest and most influential city in the world conducting a ministry that made Christianity seemingly plausible to secular elites. Evangelical minds also encouraged pastors to have a take on contemporary affairs and to do so in a distinctly Christian voice.

In 2020, the most recent Year Zero, Keller wrote a series of articles on the current things that were agitating the American people and the rest of the world (thanks in part to a global obsession with Donald Trump). The topics that absorbed Keller’s attention were Race, Racism, and Justice. The last article in the group – the big finish – was “A Biblical Critique of Secular Justice and Critical Theory.” This was precisely the sort of thinking the evangelical mind was supposed to produce. Keller spent 6,900 words – the average length of the NTJ – showing how he evaluated social justice as a Christian thinker. . . .

David French is No Tim Keller (even if he thinks he’s third-wayist)

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My instinct tells me that Tim Keller’s fingerprints are on the PCA’s invitation to David French to participate on a panel on polarization in American politics. The people responsible for the invitation and the program continue to think of the PCA as an influential denomination that has pundits like David French in its network of influencers. I also suspect that the people who issued the invitation are unaware of how polarizing a figure David French is — mainly because they do not follow politics closely or the arguments in the conservative world carefully. They likely perceive that French, who used to be a member in the PCA, is a Christian with a presence at the New York Times and that makes him someone people in the church would likely want to hear. If French is receiving criticism, it must be from extremists because otherwise he is the political conservative that many liberals like to read. That must make him neither hard-left or extreme-right but safely in the faithful Christian middle.

Will those who offered the invitation think differently now that they see the way David French nurses a grudge? I actually hoped that he would rise above the rescinded invitation and go on with his opining. How could not speaking at 8:00 in the morning to Presbyterian officers from a smallish conservative denomination make any difference to a man who has risen through the ranks of opinion-journalism? If French were simply a professional, and tried to rise above whatever personal embarrassment came with the PCA’s about-face, he might keep score, be wary of future involvement with the denomination, but let the whole affair go. Instead, he used the convening of the PCA’s General Assembly (this week in Richmond) to write about his experience with and history in the PCA. No surprise, the meaning of the incident is all about hhiiiimmmmmm:

When I left the Republican Party, I thought a shared faith would preserve my denominational home. But I was wrong. Race and politics trumped truth and grace, and now I’m no longer welcome in the church I loved.

David French claimed to be a friend of Tim Keller. He was probably but a lot of people who looked up to the New York City and had spent time with him considered Keller to be a friend of some kind. Whatever is the case, when James Wood wrote a piece critical of Keller (sort of kind of), French pounced. Wood’s point was that Keller’s version of apologetics were no longer as plausible in a negative world. To which French wrote:

it’s because my friend Tim shuns political tribalism (emphasizing a “third way” between red and blue) and strives, in Wood’s words, to be “‘winsome,’ missional, and ‘gospel-centered’” in his approach. Wood says that Tim recognizes “though the gospel is unavoidably offensive, we must work hard to make sure people are offended by the gospel itself rather than our personal, cultural, and political derivations.”

The rescinding of the Kuyper Prize from Princeton Seminary to Keller was one of Wood’s examples of the change in American society. But French scoffed that this was some sort of leading cultural indicator:

Imagine trying to even explain this to an apostle. “There’s this famous and influential Christian pastor, and . . .” Paul would stop you right there. That very idea would be novel to him, as would the idea that revoking a prize but delivering a lecture would be evidence of any kind of crisis requiring one to change a “winsome, missional, and gospel-centered” approach to the public square.

Did David French imagine what Paul would have thought if a church had disinvited him from speaking at a conference? The apostles modelled being thick skinned only to make the world safe for French’s thin variety?

In fact, French’s admiration for Keller’s reaction to Princeton’s cancelling the award — the New York pastor even suggested to the seminary’s president how to save face by not giving the award and allowing Keller to go forward with the Kuyper Lecture — suggests he learned very little from Keller’s moderation. It’s as if being a friend of Keller gives French a sense of being on the right side of current Christianity, which in turn means that any critics are low, mean, and bigoted.

But if he could counter James Wood’s criticism of Keller with an appeal to the fruit of the Holy Spirit, couldn’t he self-apply that exhortation?

Paul called Christians to exhibit the fruit of the spirit even when they were being nailed to crosses and clawed by lions. Peter called on Christians to give a defense of their faith with “gentleness and reverence” even when they “suffer for righteousness.”

Someone is tempted to think — okay I am — that David French has no sense of optics and that without that awareness he makes life even more difficult for himself and his family than he can imagine.

And then you (I) remember that David French is a columnist at the New York Times, and if you can make it in New York you can make it anywhere.

Biblicism

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(From the current issue of the Nicotine Theological Journal)

Tim Keller is a biblicist (at least more than you think). Carl Trueman is not. Now for an explanation.

. . . Ever since Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self caught a wave among New and Old Calvinists – not to mention the following he has cultivated at First Things as the Presbyterian edition of Christopher Rufo – early returns on the book were striking for not mentioning the author’s insights into Scripture. Trueman did not even go to the w(orld)-(vie)w tool kit of applying the anti-thesis – the chasm between the regenerate and unregenerate – to explain contemporary society’s capitulation to gender fluidity and its related detritus. He was seemingly only loosely on board with Van Tillianism while he taught at Westminster Seminary but the Van Tillians’ praise for his book has been a wonder to behold.

Instead of the Bible or the transcendental method, Trueman relies on the work of Philip Rieff (Jewish-American sociologist), Alasdair McIntyre (Roman Catholic philosopher) and Charles Taylor (Roman Catholic philosopher) to assess the current debates about self-expression. This is actually a virtue of the book at least for those who complain that evangelicals and Reformed are insufficiently conversant with (and seemingly unwilling to use) the knowledge produced by thinkers who do not start from Christian truths or draw insights from Scripture. Trueman unwittingly freed up conservative Protestants to think thoughts after writers who do not start with God or the Bible.

. . . The same cannot be said for Tim Keller, at least when he dissects Critical Race Theory, a buzz word whose excitement seems to have dampened thanks to the price of consumer goods (rising) and bail (falling). The retired Presbyterian pastor, in a two-part series at the online quarterly, “Gospel In Life,” goes right to the heart of the issue when he starts with a contrast between biblical and non-biblical justice. Amid all the debates and contrasting views of justice, Keller argues, the biblical understanding is best even if believers seldom know it or appeal to it.

To set up his exposition of biblical justice, Keller clears the ground in a non-biblicist way – like Trueman – by using Alasdair MacIntyre to show that Enlightenment notions of justice have run out of gas (good for the climate, though). The idea that society could leave religion behind in pursuit of secular justice has proved an intellectual quicksand. For Keller, all notions of moral goodnesss, without a transcendent reference, are merely constructed. This would have been another time when a former Westminster professor might have used Van Til for good effect.

Would Moderates Let Slavery Split the PCA?

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Maybe it was a different time. It was at least before Mike Brown, Carter Paige, “both sides” in Charlottesville, Robert Mueller, Volodymyr Zelensky, Brett Kavanaugh, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Anthony Fauci — June 2010 to be precise. But it is hard to imagine any moderate or progressive in the PCA today, after George Floyd, describing the place of slavery in the Old School vs. New School Presbyterian split (1837) the way Tim Keller does. This is from his essay about his positive regard for the PCA:

There is a third reason that we should learn to live together. Because we are brethren, we need each other. Let’s recount a sad case study that illustrates this–the issue of 19th century African slavery. The New Schoolers lacked doctrinal robustness but they were strongly abolitionist. The Old Schoolers saw the danger of the New School’s intense campaigns to reform society—they saw how they could distract from the ministry of the Word, evangelism, and the sacraments. They saw how the New School’s cultural accommodation was leading to doctrinal decline. As a consequence, much of the Old School, especially in the South refused to denounce African chattel slavery as being the evil that it was. Mark Noll has shown in The Civil War as a Theological Crisis and America’s God that the church’s inability to agree that slavery was evil directly led to the disaster of the Civil War and that was the reason that evangelicalism has never again had the cultural credibility in the U.S. that it had before the 1830s. Old School leader Charles Hodge was caught in the middle of this, perhaps because he was one of leaders who tried to achieve a balance of confessionalism and revivalism in the Presbyterian church. On the one hand, he saw what poor theological reasoning lay behind the arguments of the abolitionists and the New School. On the other hand, he rightly sensed the danger that ‘the spirituality of the church doctrine’ could lead to cultural captivity in the other direction—the conservative one. Noll points out that Hodge began to criticize slavery too late to have brought about unity within Presbyterianism on the subject. In short, the Old School’s fear of cultural engagement caused it to fail this great test. And yet the New School’s overinvolvement in politics and social reform did indeed lead it later to doctrinal compromise. So both schools were right in their criticism of the other.

Can anyone imagine a PCA pastor today arguing that opposition to slavery resulted in theological decline? For that matter, has anyone but a few conservatives recently worried out loud that Christian support for defunding police, wearing masks, or mocking elected officials could actually be at odds with biblical teaching and church conviction? To his credit, Tim Keller did.

But eleven years later, that same argument against splitting the PCA is part of the set of convictions that run along with Revoice. If slavery shouldn’t have split Presbyterians, surely Presbyterian pastors who identify as homosexual in orientation (not in practice) will never break up the PCA.

Broadening Churches Break, Will the PCA?

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The Broadening Church was the word the title of Lefferts Loetscher’s book about the Presbyterian controversy of the 1920s and 1930s. It was not the epithet of conservatives like J. Gresham Machen. The question was whether a church should attempt to be broad. Perhaps, the better way to put it is whether the church should oppose breadth. Breadth happens. It may be tolerable (Loetscher’s position), it may be objectionable (Machen’s), or it may be welcome (various modernists’). Whatever you think of a broad church, it pretty much goes without saying that conservatives seek communions that maintain doctrinal, liturgical, and ecclesiastical standards, a desire that generally does not go with breadth. On the other hand, those who either accept passively or celebrate broad communions are not conservative.

To look for parallels between the PCUSA and the PCA and raise the question of whether PCA is following a similar set of trajectories as did the PCUSA during the so-called fundamentalist controversy is to assume that the PCA itself is a broad church. If someone leads with the idea that broad and trending liberal go together throughout church history, then some PCA folk who have spoken positively about the denomination’s breadth may pause their identification with a broad church. They want to be conservative. They also want to be broad. So how do you square breadth with conservatism? Maybe the best you can do is Tim Keller‘s “Why I Like the PCA,” an essay which concedes that the New York City pastor’s communion is broad:

I believe that the only way for the PCA to be a place where we own each other is for us to re-affirrm the original boundary markers that the founders set up.

The founders’ drew very specific boundaries at certain points. One that has always been very important has been a high view of Scripture, with a robust, traditional belief in inerrancy. Another has to do with the core of Reformed theology and soteriology—there are to be no “four point Calvinists” in our church. In many other areas where some Reformed denominations have drawn narrower lines—Sabbath observance, worship (e.g. Psalms-only,) eschatology—the founders left room for diversity.

That sounds very different from what happened in the PCUSA where the church actually tried to do an end run around the PCUSA’s boundary markers. Here it may be useful to recall that the controversy started in 1920 with a plan to unite all Protestant denominations into one American church, like the model that informed the formation of the Presbyterian Church of Canada (1925). The president of Princeton Seminary, J. Ross Stevenson, chaired the committee of Presbyterians who approved the plan Stevenson’s faculty opposed the plan strenuously (including B. B. Warfield during the last year of his life). It was a classic instance of “we should be broad” vs. “we want to maintain Presbyterian standards.”

The next phase of the controversy played out in 1922 when congregations in New York City were behaving very broadly. This became common knowledge when Harry Emerson Fosdick, a liberal Baptist preaching as stated supply in a Presbyterian pulpit, gave his famous sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” For Fosdick, the church was divided between those who wanted the church to be narrow and intolerant and those who like himself wanted it to be broad and open to all good souls. Fosdick’s sermon launched judicial proceedings that forced Fosdick out of the Presbyterian pulpit and the New York Presbyterian to explain the anomaly of a Baptist pastor functioning as pulpit supply as a misunderstanding.

Meanwhile, that same presbytery was ordaining ministers would not affirm (nor did the reject) the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. New York’s breadth prompted overwhelming support from officers at the 1923 General Assembly to reaffirm the famous five points of essential and necessary doctrines — which included the virgin birth (which had been affirmed in 1910 and 1916). Some might construe them as boundary markers. But liberals in New York countered with the Auburn Affirmation, which was a plea for liberty in the church (breadth), an interpretation of the essential doctrines in a less than literal manner, and an assertion that the General Assembly lacked power to insist on essential doctrines.

From there it was largely downhill for liberals. The Special Commission of 1925, which had the task of explaining the tensions in the church, blamed conservatives for making unfounded assertions outside the orderly mechanisms of Presbyterian church government. Those un-Presbyterian activities included (by implication) writing books like Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism. The General Assembly followed up with an investigation of Princeton Seminary, again to discover the source of the controversy between Stevenson and his faculty, and between Charles Erdman and Machen. That committee found again that conservatives were the problem and in effect issued a warning that if conservatives continued to criticize liberalism in the denomination those critics could face church discipline. The committee also recommended administrative changes at Princeton that diluted conservative voices (which had been in the majority). Readers should remember that PTS was and remains an agency of the General Assembly (as opposed to independent ones like Westminster, Fuller, and Reformed, or Union Richmond which I believe was founded by a Synod).

Seven years later Machen led in the founding of an orthodox, narrow, and tiny church, the OPC (name to come in 1939). Meanwhile, the PCUSA had managed to remain unified even as it encompassed a spectrum of positions in the church.

Here is how the contemporary broadening of the PCA differs from the PCUSA. You could argue it begins with Good Faith Subscription. According to “Looking Forward – Together,” the determination of the General Assembly twenty years ago was pivotal:

Good Faith Subscription (GFS) was formalized into our Constitution almost twenty years ago to put an end to such unfounded assertions. Two back-to-back General Assemblies and two-thirds of our presbyteries came to a previously and since-unprecedented level of unity to make this Constitutional formulation that allows for meaningful and biblical adherence to our Standards (acknowledging where the Bible allows good men to differ according to a very careful system of checks and balances, where every difference is recorded, approved by entire presbyteries, and submitted for examination to the General Assembly)! The adoption of GFS made recording confessional exceptions mandatory for presbyteries, and has been extraordinarily effective in strengthening our confessional commitments.

Somehow this revision in church life allowed the PCA to do exactly what the denomination had done twenty-five years earlier without the advantages of GFS: “The latitude that our denomination has allowed for, within the bounds of our orthodoxy, protects us from the kind of centralized control or hidden compromise that brought peril to the denomination the PCA left in 1973.”

In other words, GFS accomplished what the PCA had always stood for — latitude (which is synonymous with breadth) even though the PCA in 1973 was formed precisely because the sort of broad church that the PCUSA had achieved in the 1930s was also occurring within the PCUS.

GFS is not what the Auburn Affirmation was. But it is a form of subscribing that is compatible with breadth. GFS is also an action of a General Assembly. The Auburn Affirmation was merely a statement in search of signatures. That is why “Faithfully” can sound sort of threatening to conservatives the way that PCUSA turned out to be with Machen and other critics of liberalism.

Online blogs, Facebook posts, online news agencies, and emails have generally been the modes of much attack, innuendo, and ridicule, with little or no personal interaction with those attacked and cited. In the process, specific brothers in good standing have been labeled – and hurt, but even more frequently, “straw men” are erected without proof. These communications assert that large segments of our church are abandoning Scripture and our Confessional standards. Every sin does violence to God’s world and forsakes his Word, whether the sin of homosexuality, the sin of slander, the sin of compromise, or the sin of divisiveness.

In fact, “Faithfully” implies that conservatives in the PCA are engaged in a power play:

We disagree with digital and social media characterizations that turn suspicions into speculations that become accusations without proof – to achieve political ends within our church. Where compromise or sin is true and can be proven, we have sessions, presbyteries, and judicial processes to engage. We are wrong to presume that all of these are populated by brothers who are less committed to our faith than those ringing alarm bells in internet discussions and news agencies.

That explains why this letter’s appeal to GFS is an important part of the argument. GFS is the law of the church. Anyone who challenges it is running contrary to the settled practice of the PCA. In which case, while the Auburn Affirmation was a plea for liberty in the church, “Faithfully” is a threat against those who challenge the existing breadth in the PCA.

One other important difference between the PCUSA’s becoming broad and the PCA’s current breadth is the degree to which the broadists talk about the relationship between church and society (or hint at a Social Gospel). The Auburn Affirmation was generally silent about society. Progressives in the PCUSA had to worry more about carving out space for themselves in the church than they did about their role in social reform. This is not the case for the PCA, at least by one reading of “Faithfully.” Here are some of the ways, according to the authors of the letter, the PCA has shown it’s commitment to “biblical integrity, ecclesiastical polity, and gospel focus” (none of which sounds very confessional or subscriptionist):

We are seeing a healthy, biblical consciousness for issues that were previously unaddressed in the denomination, including racial reconciliation, refugee care, domestic violence, the vital role of women in advancing the mission of the church, the gospel-centeredness of all Scripture, the importance of mercy ministries and crisis care in the advancement of Christ’s message of hope, and the precious power of God’s covenant care in a society of sexual and family brokenness. For example, without sacrificing our commitment to biblical integrity, the involvement of godly women has been sought for insight on difficult issues affecting children, churches, and families, as evidenced in the recent PCA study committees on the role of women and domestic violence.

Say what you will about those matters and whether the doctrine of the spirituality of the church, which is in the Westminster Confession (ch. 25), was part of the PCUS (and explains why it took until 1983 for the Southern and Northern churches to reunite), and was clearly part (not the whole) of the PCA’s founding, that is not a list of endeavors that would characterize a non-broad or strictly confessional Reformed church. For “Faithfully” to mention these as pretty much obvious signs of the PCA’s health is also to indicate a measure of confirmation bias that in turn construes one sector of a diverse church for the whole.

A similar confusion of broad consensus with actual disagreements is evident in “Faithfully”‘s discussion of the elephant in the PCA room — namely, Side B (or same-sex attracted) Christianity. To avoid that particular matter, “Faithfully” renders the issue as whether or not to ordain practicing homosexuals:

You may have heard that there are PCA pastors who desire to ordain practicing homosexuals – This could not be further from the truth, and is an example of using extremes to ignite alarm and enflame passions among brothers. We agree that any unrepentant sinner or sinful lifestyle makes ordination not only impossible, but also reprehensible. We know of no pastors or elders in the PCA who in any way desire for practicing homosexuals to be ordained.

Fine. But what about pastors who identify as homosexual (though non-practicing) Christians? Would anyone object to a pastor calling himself an adulterous Christian because he is sometimes attracted to women other than his wife? Are these questions ones that agreeing on a basic set of “gospel” commitments while allowing for diversity on variety of indifferent matters will be easily answered? What if basic gospel commitments about sin, human nature, repentance, regeneration — all matters covered under Pastor Keller’s “Reformed theology and soteriology” — actually bubble up into questions about church and society? And what if Side B Christianity is a way to project that the PCA is a tolerant sort of place for residents of large metropolitan areas where people are generally uncomfortable expressing opposition to homosexuality?

Again, breadth seems to be afflicting the PCA. The affliction is certainly different from the broadening of the PCUSA roughly one hundred years ago. But in one way it is similar. “Evangelicals” like Charles Erdman, professor of practical theology at Princeton and opponent of Machen within the seminary and the church, believed a denomination could be broad and committed to the essentials of the gospel. The progressives in the PCA seem to be in a similar position. They are not making the church safe for pastors who question the Virgin Birth. But they, like Erdman, want to avoid being part of a restrictive church.

“Presbyterian” by definition means not Lutheran, not Anglican, not Baptist, not Congregationalist, not Quaker, not Methodist. Of course, someone can be not a Baptist in a disagreeable manner. But if the metric for offensiveness is calibrated to the ethos of cosmopolitan urban centers, the bar for giving offense was just set really low.

How Liberal Protestantism Happens (and it’s even worse when it claims to be conservative)

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When you ask the church to do something that it can’t, you have a problem.

Here is the premise for Mark Tooley’s brief for churches building community: Matt Yglesias.

Left leaning commentator Matthew Yglesias, who’s Jewish, tweeted today: “Think I’m becoming a Straussian/Putnamist who instrumentally wants to get everyone to go to church again.” Columnist Ross Douthat, who’s Catholic, responded: “Be the change you seek.” Yglesias retorted: “Not gonna sell out the chosen people like that! But I’m gonna go neocon and root for the Christians vs the post-Christians.”

Tooley then goes on about how much Protestant churches civilized America:

Churches and denominations were central to building America’s democratic ethos. They civilized and socialized the early frontier. They created a wider civil society supporting politics, education, charity and community building. Regular church goers have never been a majority in America. But churches as institutions were foundations and pillars of wider society that benefitted all. Typically savvy non religious people have recognized their centrality to American culture and civic life.

He even defends civil religion:

What critics of civil religion fail to see is that Christianity has a duty to society to help create the language and architecture for constructive civil life that benefits all. Christianity wants all to be fed, clothed, housed, provided health care, treated with dignity, given security, and equipped with the political tools to live harmoniously in peace. Christians seek the common good for all society, not just what directly benefits themselves. But this promotion of the common good certainly benefits Christians and itself witnesses to the power, grandeur and truth of the Gospel.

This is out of the playbook of Tim Keller on the church and social capital.

Tooley thinks that evangelicals and secularists fail to see the value that churches add to civil society:

Nondenominational Christianity and evangelicalism often lack this long history and self-understanding as cultural stewards. They often focus more exclusively on individual faith and spiritual needs sometimes from a consumerist perspective. Sometimes their adherents see themselves more as a tribe or a subculture than as parcel to wider society with wider responsibilities.

That could be the reason for some. But for others, the problem is that the social mission of the church is not only hard to find in Peter or Paul or Jesus (is that bar too high?), but also that when Protestants were best at creating social capital, they forgot about Jesus and the world to come. That’s why Machen was important. He saw what the social purpose of the church was doing to stuff like doctrine, preaching, evangelism, and missions.

The rejection of the Christian hope is not always definite or conscious; sometimes the liberal preacher tries to maintain a belief in the immortality of the soul. But the real basis of the belief in immortality has been given up by the rejection of the New Testament account of the resurrection of Christ. And, practically, the liberal preacher has very little to say about the other world. This world is really the center of all his thoughts; religion itself, and even God, are made merely a means for the betterment of conditions upon this earth.

Thus religion has become a mere function of the community or of the state. So it is looked upon by the men of the present day. Even hard-headed business men and politicians have become convinced that religion is needed. But it is thought to be needed merely as a means to an end. We have tried to get along without religion, it is said, but the experiment was a failure, and now religion must be called in to help. (Christianity and Liberalism)

How does Tooley think the mainline churches went off the rails? Some conservatives believe it happened because pastors let this world become as important as the world to come, not to mention that talking about otherworldliness with members of Congress and professors at Yale produces cringe.

But if you want to see Tooley’s argument salvage a Protestant liberal as a conservative, look at Geoffrey Kabaservice’s rendering of William Sloane Coffin, Jr., who according to the New York Times combined the social gospel with 1960s activism (at Riverside Church, “an institution long known for its social agenda — he used his ministry to draw attention to the plight of the poor, to question American political and military power, to encourage interfaith understanding, and to campaign for nuclear disarmament”).  But liberal Protestantism can become conservative when it supplies social glue:

In doctrinal terms, Coffin was indeed a conservative, even an orthodox one. He retained the traditional Protestant liturgy, from the opening prayer to the confession to the benediction, resisting the wave of reform that swept over most denominations in the 1960s. His congregation sung the powerful old New England hymns. . . . The civil rights and antiwar activism of the 1960s seemed part of a much older American history when set to the hymn’s ominous, rolling cadences and the spine-tingling words of McGeorge Bundy’s ancestor, the nineteenth-century poet James Russell Lowell: “once to every man and nation / Comes the moment to decide, / In the strife of truth with falsehood, / For the good or evil side; / Some great cause goes by forever / ‘Twixt that darkness and that light.”

If social ministry can turn Coffin into a conservative, even doctrinally orthodox Protestant, Tooley has some work to do.

Here’s maybe not the but a thing: civil society does not depend on Christians. Believers often make good neighbors, though you’d never know from evangelical scholars these days. Invariably, Christians take out the trash, support Little League, donate books to the public library’s book sale fund raiser, approve of taxes to support police and fire departments. They also vote, which can be an anti-democratic form of social behavior if the ballot goes for the wrong candidate. If civil society has declined in America, it is not because of churches or their members. Rotary, the Elks, and Odd Fellows have also faded in the fabric of American society. For a host of reasons, Americans don’t join a host of voluntary organizations any more. One hunch is the social world that the internet has created. Another factor may be the outgrown size of national politics in the attention of journalists, teachers, and even radio talk show hosts.

But even if the path to a health America went through the social capital generated by churches, the question remains: is this what Scripture teaches?

Evangelical History written by Mainline Presbyterian Abides

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Some obsess about Jerry Falwell, Jr., other about Tim Keller. This time the latter obsession runs to Keller’s recommendation of a book that came out over forty years ago and remains seminal for him. Richard Lovelace’s Dynamics of Spiritual Life (1979) is what made Redeemer NYC tick. As Keller admits, “Anyone who knows my ministry and reads this book will say, ‘So that’s where Keller got all this stuff!'” (He has help from other allies.)

One oddity is thinking back to what you were reading forty years ago and then seeing whether it still holds up. Since Keller has ministered in NYC, he has read a lot of books that other pastors and theologians do not typically read — works in sociology, history, urbanism, journalism. He is the pastor as intellectual. Someone might think that reading historical scholarship over the course of a career would give you a different estimate of a history of revivalism, one not written for a university press and that reflects more the debates among 1970s evangelicals than it does what happened with Whitefield and Edwards. This is sort of like mmmmeeeEEE today recommending Francis Schaeffer’s He Is There and He Is Not Silent as the key to understanding God and revelation. After reading Schaeffer in the 1970s, I went on to read a number of theologians and confessions that let me know how little I had understood from reading Schaeffer (who at the time was a great aid). I now turn to Ursinus, Berhkof, Calvin, and Bavinck. Aren’t I special.

Equally odd but also perhaps revealing of Keller’s place in PCA dynamics are a number assertions and arguments that Lovelace, who was ordained as a minister in the PCUSA while teaching at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, makes about evangelicalism around the time the book was written. These may reveal less about planting churches or carrying out the ministry than they do about ways of perceiving the church in the United States.

Lovelace abounds in identifying the polarities of a dynamic and then shooting for the middle, the third way, which of course is classic Keller:

Currently our denominations seem to break down into two categories: smaller, conservative separatist bodies maintaining the pure church ideal with antisceptic discipline so strong that it occasionally sterilizes their own creativity; and the large, historical descendants of earlier separations, now so indiscriminately inclusive that to Evangelicals they resemble mission fields. Evangelicals themselves, similarly, are divided into those who might be characterized as white corpuscles, members of separated churches committed to rigorous discipline, and red corpuscles, those who have tried to adapt themselves to the large, pluralistic bodies in order to feed and serve their memberships. (291-92)

Notice the biological metaphors and think the Gospel Ecosystem.

Here’s another contrast that makes the way straight for the via media:

In the early twentieth century the immense thought storm of secular humanism, made up of apparently consistent and convincing alternates to the biblical world view, burst upon the church and shattered the clarity of its thinking and hence the unity of its forces. Live orthodoxy might have weathered the storm and risen to the educational challenge humanism presented, setting out to construct a consistently biblical counter-position which would seek to integrate all the new data pouring into human consciousness. But [Evangelicalism] broke into two. Half of it emulated the ostrich, turned its back on the culture, immersed its head in the biblical world and almost became an enculturated folk religion. The other half grappled with the task of integrating modern and biblical thought but often lost its biblical moorings and slipped away into another kind of enculturalst: conformity to the secular mind. (281)

Actually, that does remind me of Schaeffer, sweeping historical claims with remarkable confidence. A sentence distills a book and a century of developments (or not). Who does that after reading at all widely in history and knowing how accidental and contingent the past was?

Where you do see in Lovelace a forerunner to Keller’s operations is this:

What about transdenominational renewal within the ecumenical movement? We have noted above that there is already a functionally Evangelical ecumenical movement. The recognition of this fact is remarkably apparent in the recent admirable decision of the Presbyterian Church of America (the product of secession from the Northern and Southern Presbyterian Churches) not to form its own Department of Missions, but rather to use the existing network of interdenominational Evangelical faith missions to disseminate its Reformed doctrinal position throughout the church. (332)

Come to think of it, with Redeemer City-to-City in mind, the blueprint for Keller’s ministry very well have been in Lovelace’s book (except that City-to-City, though interdenominational, is not OMF International, Africa Inland Mission, and Ethnos 360).

Transcending Partisan Politics is Sectarian

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

Evangelical Protestants suffer from a tic. It is an unwillingness to identify with a political party. Evangelical writers about politics can spot the defects of both the left and the right, though they don’t often calculate which side has the most flaws. They act as if Christians really are above politics. When believers follow the Bible, they will not have to settle for either what liberals or conservatives propose.

A couple examples: the first on race.

The danger is that Christians who rightly reject the first (conservative) view as sub-biblical will merely pick up the second (progressive) view uncritically and use the terminology that it provides. But both are secular, reductionistic and simplistic. The Bible’s account of justice includes both individual and systemic dimensions—and more. We are not merely individual and social, but also soul and body. Indeed, the term “world” (kosmos) in the New Testament has not only a material reality (as in God loving the world of human beings, John 3:16), but also a spiritual reality, an inevitable tendency to make counterfeit gods out of good created things (1 John 2:15-16). “Doing justice” on the basis of the biblical view will include extraordinary prayer and evangelism along with everything else. The biblical view of justice gives full weight to both personal responsibility and social structures while based on a rich understanding of human life that goes well beyond the world’s reductionistic alternative views.

The second on communism.

Liberation theology, which puts a Christian face on Marxist social analysis, retains an enormous mystique on the Christian left. This isn’t because left-leaning Christians admire Stalin but because they are profoundly skeptical of the alternative to communism: economic systems built on property and contract rights protected by the rule of law. These systems produce economic growth, but as wealth has grown we’ve also seen a growing worldliness and materialism in our cultures. Christians on the left (most famously Gregory Paul) point to the radical economic community of the church in Acts 2–5 and ask if this doesn’t implicitly delegitimize market systems of price and exchange.

Right-leaning Christians, meanwhile, often seem indistinguishable from secular conservatives. They rail against communism, yet almost none of them seems to have read serious theological analysis of communism—not even from anti-communist Christians like Chambers. In almost every case, their top priority is to protect free markets and economic growth rather than oppose the atheistic inhumanity of the communist worldview. And their zeal to defend free markets often leads them to downplay, or even celebrate, the worldliness and crass materialism that have been associated with economic growth.

Why is the church haunted by communism, even though in Christ crucified we already possess the real answer to the world’s suffering and injustice? Because the church hasn’t put a Christian economic ethic into practice systematically. We need, but don’t know how to develop, an organized and operational Christian economic life.

Actually, the Amish have developed an economic system by some measures. But even their herculean efforts to retain Christian solidarity depends on the “English’s” society of property, currency, a legal system, and the political process that functions in, with, and around economic systems. Talk about systemic.

This does not mean that Christian academics should refrain from connecting dots between revelation (general and special) and politics or economics. What it does mean is that Christians trying to be Christian about everything, including politics and economics, separate themselves from the institutions most responsible for those areas of society. Christian w-w thinking is really a product of a ghetto that is isolated from bodies of learning and institutional structures in which political and economic decisions are made.

It is functionally Amish. Is that where New Calvinists want to be? Sectarians on the margins?