Tag: Tony Campolo

When the Evangelical Left and Theonomic Presbyterians Agree

Published on by D. G. Hart23 Comments

Shane Claiborne mocks Jerry Falwell for tweeting this:

Jesus said love our neighbors as ourselves but never told Caesar how to run Rome-he never said Roman soldiers should turn the other cheek in battle or that Caesar should allow all the barbarians to be Roman citizens or that Caesar should tax the rich to help poor. That’s our job.

Such two-kingdom thinking is heretical for the student of Tony Campolo:

Honestly, this is some of the worst theology I’ve ever heard. And this heresy is from the president of the largest Christian university in the world.

Not only is this “bad” theology… it is also deadly theology. Similar ideology was used to justify apartheid and to excuse Hitler… this notion that sin is personal but rulers are immune to it.

The idea that Caesar or a Roman soldier… or anyone… is exempt from God’s command to love our enemy, care for the poor, or welcome the stranger is heresy. Jesus said we will ALL be asked how we cared for “the least of these.” (Mt.25)

Larry Ball has a similar gripe against two-kingdom theology (inspired by Andrew White’s run for the governor of Texas):

Both natural law and the democratic process determine civil law for the body-politic. The Bible has no place in the body-politic. The Bible is a religious document and it must be restricted to the realm of the church and personal faith. The State must remain neutral toward religion.

Thus, the result of two-kingdom theology is that Religion (Christianity) is personal, restricted to the heart, and the rules for the body politic must not be determined by the Bible. In America all religions are equal, and therefore all religions are equally irrelevant in the public square. Religion is only useful in so far as it makes people good citizens who are obedient to the law of the land.

Either natural law or the voice of the Supreme Court makes right in society as a whole. Mr. White admits that he and his wife would personally not choose abortion, but this is only a personal and therefore a religious matter. The Bible must not be brought into the arena of the civil magistrate. This is to mix church and state.

Two-kingdoms aside and whether Jesus had anything to say about God and Caesar, why is it so hard for evangelicals to separate what America does from what they as believers do? I don’t build bridges, therefore the United States government should not. I would not declare war on another nation or shoot another person, therefore American governments should not fight or enforce the law by force? Can you say delusions of grandeur? Sure you can.

But if you want to side with the feminists that the personal is political, then welcome to evangelical political reflection.

If More Congregationalists Read Machen

Published on by D. G. Hart52 Comments

They might understand the difference between a Baptist and Presbyterian. But to UCC pastor, Peter Laarman, Tony Campolo and Shane Claiborne’s proposal to re-brand evangelicalism (post-Trump) is a fool’s errand:

Campolo and Claiborne even get their history wrong. What they regard as the first successful re-branding of Bible-centered “orthodox” American Christianity in the early 20th century was in fact a complete failure, just as their proposed “Red Letter” re-branding will be this era.

They cite Carl F.H. Henry as the principal re-brander in the 1930s, but Carl Henry was not really a force to be reckoned with prior to the 1940s and 1950s. Moreover, Carl Henry’s beliefs were immediately understood to be contaminated by the same poisons that had fatally tainted Fundamentalism: i.e., a rigid view of biblical inerrancy (including a literalist view of the miracle stories), insistence that mere individual conversion fulfills God’s will, complete acceptance of the old patriarchal frame, etc.

It would be hard to find any daylight at all between the theological commitments of Carl Henry and those of J. Gresham Machen, who was heralded during the 1930s as the single brightest light among the Fundamentalists.

See what he did there? Machen signals fundamentalism (and Laarman didn’t even give Orthodox Presbyterians a trigger warning). Therefore, invoking Carl Henry is really to say you haven’t progressed beyond fundamentalism (yuck!), which makes Campolo and Claiborne even more clueless from a mainline Protestant perspective than even progressive evangelicals can fathom.

The problem is that you can see separation between Machen and Henry if you actually care more about theology, sacraments, and polity than about being in the American mainstream. Henry may have been a Calvinist on soteriology but his Reformedness didn’t go much beyond that (plus his high view of the Bible). Henry also refused to baptize babies, which puts Machen closer to Laarman than to Henry. And then Machen took Presbyterian polity seriously — hello, his church refused interdenominational cooperation in settings like the National Association of Evangelicals where Henry was an intellectual guru.

But that kind of Protestant fussiness only comes up fundamentalist for mainliners. Even though telling the difference between Congregationalists and mainline Presbyterians is impossible (and something you’re not supposed to do in polite Protestant ecumenical company), if you do did in your heels on denominational identity you are merely a separatist. You lack the good graces and tolerant bonhomie of mainstream, well-connected Protestantism. Never mind that after 135 years of ecumenical activism, the UCC and the PCUSA remain — get this — separate. And by all means don’t notice that Congregationalists and Presbyterians descend from the mother of all church separations — 1054, the year that the church Christ founded (as some put it) split up.

Lots of separations out there in church history, but the UCC puts “United” in church unity. As if.