Tag: Westminster Seminary California

Faint Resemblance

Published on by D. G. Hart53 Comments

One of the truisms of intellectual exchange is the need to represent other persons’ views correctly so that they recognize their position or argument. Even when you disagree — or especially when you do — for debate to clarify more than antagonize you need to present your opponent’s views in such a way that he would recognize and even affirm them.

With that tepid truth out of the way, I find John Frame’s list of Escondido Theology affirmations, which he produces in the preface to his book, to be the intellectual equivalent of a Picasso portrait in one of his abstract phases. You can make out the eye, the ear, another eye, a neck, but the features are out of place and aside from the color the overall effect borders on grotesque.

Frame’s portrait of the Escondido theology is similarly abstract but lacks the pretty colors. When I look through the list (below), I recognize a faint resemblance — a whiff of teaching about preaching, a few strands of thought about Scripture, a dab of color about the duties of magistrates. But his painting is a distortion (whether intentional or not) and an abstraction.

Before responding to Frame’s points, I’d like to ask the help of Old Life readers. I am pasting below first Frame’s list of Escondido affirmations. Then I have rearranged these “theses” under various themes. What I would like help on is whether this effort to order Frame’s cubist rendering makes sense. If so, I plan in future posts to rephrase Frame’s distillations to help both critics and affirmers of 2k alike.

Here’s Frame’s list:

• It is wrong to try to make the gospel relevant to its hearers.
• Scripture teaches about Christ, his atonement, and our redemption from sin, but not about how to apply that salvation to our current problems.
• Those who try to show the application of Scripture to the daily problems of believers are headed toward a Christless Christianity.
• Anything we say about God is at best only an analogy of the truth and is therefore at least partly false.
• There is no immediate experience of God available to the believer.
• The only experience of God available to the believer is in public worship.
• Meetings of the church should be limited to the preaching of the word and the administration of the sacraments.
• In worship, we “receive” from God, but should not seek to “work” for God.
• The “cultural mandate” of Gen. 1:28 and 9:7 is no longer in effect.
• The Christian has no biblical mandate to seek changes in the social, cultural, or political order.
• Divine sovereignty typically eliminates the need for human responsibility.
• The gospel is entirely objective and not at all subjective.
• We should take no interest in our inner feelings or subjective life.
• Preaching should narrate the history of redemption, but should never appeal to Bible characters as moral or spiritual examples.
• Preaching “how tos” and principles of practical living is man-centered.
• To speak of a biblical worldview, or biblical principles for living, is to misuse the Bible.
• Nobody should be considered Reformed unless they agree with everything in the Reformed confessions and theologians of the 16th and 17th centuries.
• We should not agree to discuss any theological topics except the ones discussed by Reformed thinkers in the 16th and 17th centuries.
• Jonathan Edwards and D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones were not Reformed.
• Theology is not the application of Scripture, but a historical investigation into Reformed traditions.
• There is no difference between being biblical and being Reformed.
• To study the Bible is to study it as the Reformed tradition has studied it.
• God’s principles for governing society are found, not in Scripture, but in natural law.
• Natural law is to be determined, not by Scripture, but by human reason and conscience.
• Scripture promises the believer no temporal blessings until the final judgment.
• We can do nothing to “advance” the Kingdom of God. The coming of the Kingdom, since the ascension of Christ, is wholly future.
• The Sabbath pertains only to worship, not to daily work. So worship should occur on the Lord’s Day, but work need not cease.
• Only those who accept these principles can consistently believe in justification by faith alone.
• Reformed believers must maintain an adversary relationship with American evangelicals.
• Worship should be very traditional, without any influence of contemporary culture.
• Only those who accept these principles can be considered truly Reformed.
• These principles, however, represent only desirable “emphases.” There are exceptions.

And here is my first attempt to make these points coherent:

WORSHIP/PIETY
• It is wrong to try to make the gospel relevant to its hearers.
• Worship should be very traditional, without any influence of contemporary culture.
• The Sabbath pertains only to worship, not to daily work. So worship should occur on the Lord’s Day, but work need not cease.
• There is no immediate experience of God available to the believer.
• The only experience of God available to the believer is in public worship.
• Meetings of the church should be limited to the preaching of the word and the administration of the sacraments.
• In worship, we “receive” from God, but should not seek to “work” for God.
• We should take no interest in our inner feelings or subjective life.
• Preaching should narrate the history of redemption, but should never appeal to Bible characters as moral or spiritual examples.
• Preaching “how tos” and principles of practical living is man-centered.
• Those who try to show the application of Scripture to the daily problems of believers are headed toward a Christless Christianity.

THEOLOGY/METHOD
• Divine sovereignty typically eliminates the need for human responsibility.
• The gospel is entirely objective and not at all subjective.
• Anything we say about God is at best only an analogy of the truth and is therefore at least partly false.
• The “cultural mandate” of Gen. 1:28 and 9:7 is no longer in effect.
• Theology is not the application of Scripture, but a historical investigation into Reformed traditions.

HISTORY
• There is no difference between being biblical and being Reformed.
• To study the Bible is to study it as the Reformed tradition has studied it.
• Only those who accept these principles can be considered truly Reformed.
• Nobody should be considered Reformed unless they agree with everything in the Reformed confessions and theologians of the 16th and 17th centuries.
• We should not agree to discuss any theological topics except the ones discussed by Reformed thinkers in the 16th and 17th centuries.
• Jonathan Edwards and D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones were not Reformed.

POLITICS/ETHICS
• God’s principles for governing society are found, not in Scripture, but in natural law.
• Natural law is to be determined, not by Scripture, but by human reason and conscience.
• Only those who accept these principles can consistently believe in justification by faith alone.
• The Christian has no biblical mandate to seek changes in the social, cultural, or political order.
• To speak of a biblical worldview, or biblical principles for living, is to misuse the Bible.
• Scripture teaches about Christ, his atonement, and our redemption from sin, but not about how to apply that salvation to our current problems.

BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION
• We can do nothing to “advance” the Kingdom of God. The coming of the Kingdom, since the ascension of Christ, is wholly future.
• Scripture promises the believer no temporal blessings until the final judgment.

WISDOM
• These principles, however, represent only desirable “emphases.” There are exceptions.
• Reformed believers must maintain an adversary relationship with American evangelicals.

If this is a fair arrangement, I’ll be examining each of these topics in subsequent posts.

One initial observation: for all of the hullabaloo about 2ker’s views about politics, transformationalism, and the Lordship of Christ outside the church, what appears to animate Frame most is worship. And on worship he is the most on thin Reformed ice. He may prefer Calvin’s Geneva for politics. But that preference would likely end once he realized that he could not play the organ during worship, not to mention that the consistory would want to have a frank chat with him about his arguments for praise bands. I suspect that the Geneva authorities might have put Frame under house arrest for his views.

Love that Bob

Published on by D. G. Hart38 Comments

In his new book on the so-called Escondido theology, John Frame tries to establish a link between the two-kingdom views of certain authors and Meredith Kline, who taught at Westminster California for almost two decades. This analysis fails in two respects. The first is that I, whom Frame includes as an Escondido “theologian,” never studied with Kline. If truth be told, I’m still only about one-fifth of the way through Kingdom Prologue (did someone say “fifth”?).

The other reason why Frame’s analysis fails is that he neglects the real source of Westminster California’s alleged uniqueness, namely, its president, W. Robert Godfrey. Bob Godfrey was Old School before any of us knew what Old School was and even before Bob himself began to lecture on the American church. He introduced his students to strands of Reformed Protestantism that were older than J. Gresham Machen and Abraham Kuyper. Students who heard his lectures on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became aware of a world of topics and battles that had been vital to the Reformed churches. And some of those students, the Escondido “theologians” especially, learned from those lectures and tried to reappropriate for the contemporary church the faith and practice of the historic Reformed and Presbyterian churches. Most students were aware that some adjustments would have to be made. We cannot go directly to 1560 Geneva (we can’t have the state execute idolaters). But we also knew that Machen and Kuyper were not the last word on what it meant to be Reformed.

This is an important perspective to keep in mind — and which Frame entirely ignores — because so many of the hits upon Westminster California have come from people who are shocked, just shocked, to learn that some might call themselves Reformed who do not follow lock step with recent understandings of Reformed Protestantism. So if someone sounds different from Gaffin or Murray on union — horrors! — even if they can find historic Reformed sources that don’t say it the same way as Westminster Seminary theologians, they aren’t Reformed. Or if someone discovers that the doctrine of republication was taught and developed among older Reformed theologians, they will need to suffer for departing from Murray. If someone notes that Reformed churches did not believe in “every member ministry” but had a high view of pastoral office and the duties of ministers, they must be faulted for not following the advances of Jack Miller and Tim Keller. If someone brings up the fact that Reformed Protestants only sang psalms and did not tolerate special music, well they must be trouble makers because all of our churches today now sing hymns and sometimes have choirs. If someone finds that justification was more important than union in the development of Reformed soteriology during the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries, well they must be “Lutheran” because they are not following the faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary. Or if someone learns that Calvin and Rutherford did not construe the nature of the church, the state, and Christ’s kingdom the way Kuyper did, then they must be in error because Kuyper set the standard for all Reformed political reflection.

In other words, Bob Godfrey taught his students to read the past not by looking at the present and then cherry picking historical precedents, but by judging the present in the light of the past. He unlocked a door that allowed students to see arguments and practices that sometimes nineteenth- and twentieth-century conservative Reformed churchmen had themselves neglected or forgotten. This is not to say that Bob Godfrey is to blame for the Escondido Theology. It is to say that he deserves credit for rediscovering an older part of the Reformed heritage that his students have tried to recover for the contemporary church. And it is important to see that the opposition to Godfrey’s students comes most often from people who regard the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as THE AGE of Reformed orthodoxy.

The Return of This and That

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

kitchen sinkHide it under a bushel? No! But under camouflage? Yes. At least that the implied message of the new “Camo” edition of the American Patriot’s Bible. (Thanks to our mid-West correspondent.)

This pocket version of the popular American Patriot’s Bible reminds Christians of the Bible’s living legacy in the history of America, a nation built on the biblical values of God and family.

If it is fair to describe The Law is Not of Faith book as embodying the Escondido Hermeneutic, would it also be fair to describe the Kerux Apologetic as evidientialist?

And if union was as important to Calvin as many allege, why does he bury his catechetical instruction on the topic in the section on the Lord’s Supper? (Do a word search of the 1545 Catechism – who wants to read all 340-plus questions? – and check it out.)

(BTW, if we’re going to follow Calvin on union, why aren’t we also following him on eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ? If you’re going to take Calvin literally on union, don’t you also have to take him literally on Christ’s real presence in the Supper?)

Master. – Do we therefore eat the body and blood of the Lord?

Scholar. – I understand so. For as our whole reliance for salvation depends on him, in order that the obedience which he yielded to the Father may be imputed to us just as if it were ours, it is necessary that he be possessed by us; for the only way in which he communicates his blessings to us is by making himself ours.

Master. – But did he not give himself when he exposed himself to death, that he might redeem us from the sentence of death, and reconcile us to God?

Scholar. – That is indeed true; but it is not enough for us unless we now receive him, that thus the efficacy and fruit of his death may reach us.

Master. – Does not the manner of receiving consist in faith?

Scholar. – I admit it does. But I at the same time add, that this is done when we not only believe that he died in order to free us from death, and was raised up that he might purchase life for us, but recognise that he dwells in us, and that we are united to him by a union the same in kind as that which unites the members to the head, that by virtue of this union we may become partakers of all his blessings.

Master. – Do we obtain this communion by the Supper alone?

Scholar. – No, indeed. For by the gospel also, as Paul declares, Christ is communicated to us. And Paul justly declares this, seeing we are there told that we are flesh of his flesh and bones of his bones-that he is the living bread which came down from heaven to nourish our souls-that we are one with him as he is one with the Father, &c. (1 Cor. i. 6; Eph. v. 30; John vi. 51; John xvii. 21.)

Master. – What more do we obtain from the sacrament, or what other benefit does it confer upon us?

Scholar. – The communion of which I spoke is thereby confirmed and increased; for although Christ is exhibited to us both in baptism and in the gospel, we do not however receive him entire, but in part only.

Master. – What then have we in the symbol of bread?

Scholar. – As the body of Christ was once sacrificed for us to reconcile us to God, so now also is it given to us, that we may certainly know that reconciliation belongs to us.

Master. – What in the symbol of wine?

Scholar. – That as Christ once shed his blood for the satisfaction of our sins, and as the price of our redemption, so he now also gives it to us to drink, that we may feel the benefit which should thence accrue to us.

Master. – According to these two answers, the holy Supper of the Lord refers us to his death, that we may communicate in its virtue?

Scholar. – Wholly so; for then the one perpetual sacrifice, sufficient for our salvation, was performed. Hence nothing more remains for us but to enjoy it.