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By In Culture

Our Need for a Creed

In a recent Sunday service, our church sang a rather uncharacteristic hymn not found in the denominational hymnal: My Faith Has Found a Resting Place. I associate this hymn with chapel services at the Baptist university I attended in Minnesota in my youth, as well as in the affiliated church of which our family was part around the same time. In many respects it’s a great hymn, nicely communicating the message of the gospel and the assurance of salvation.

My faith has found a resting place,
Not in device nor creed;
I trust the Ever-living One,
His wounds for me shall plead.
I need no other argument,
I need no other plea;
It is enough that Jesus died,
And that He died for me.

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By In Culture

Misreading Kuyper? Stewart, Hawley, and The New York Times

Earlier this month Katherine Stewart, writing for The New York Times, published an article that many are reading to aid in understanding what happened in Washington, DC, on 6 January: The Roots of Josh Hawley’s Rage. Joshua Hawley is the junior United States Senator from Missouri, having served in that capacity since 2019. A graduate of Yale Law School, he is the author of Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness. A professing Christian, he played a small role in the storming of the Capitol, as Stewart recounts:

In today’s Republican Party, the path to power is to build up a lie in order to overturn democracy. At least that is what Senator Josh Hawley was telling us when he offered a clenched-fist salute to the pro-Trump mob before it ransacked the Capitol, and it is the same message he delivered on the floor of the Senate in the aftermath of the attack, when he doubled down on the lies about electoral fraud that incited the insurrection in the first place.

After a photographer captured this clenched fist, NBC reported that Hawley had become a pariah even in his own party. That he had dragged the 19th/20th-century Dutch statesman Abraham Kuyper into his rhetoric appeared to discredit Kuyper himself, with Stewart leading the charge:

Mr. Hawley’s idea of freedom is the freedom to conform to what he and his preferred religious authorities know to be right. Mr. Hawley is not shy about making the point explicit. In a 2017 speech to the American Renewal Project, he declared–paraphrasing the Dutch Reformed theologian and onetime prime minister Abraham Kuyper–“There is not one square inch of all creation over which Jesus Christ is not Lord.” Mr. Kuyper is perhaps best known for his claim that Christianity has sole legitimate authority over all aspects of human life.

“We are called to take that message into every sphere of life that we touch, including the political realm,” Mr. Hawley said. “That is our charge. To take the lordship of Christ, that message, into the public realm, and to seek the obedience of the nations. Of our nation!”

I will not offer a detailed response to this article, as others are likely better positioned than I to do so. Nevertheless, I will make what should be an obvious point: misinterpretations of a person’s writings do not by themselves discredit that person. But have Hawley and Stewart misread Kuyper? Yes and no.

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By In Culture

Cultural dysfunction and public policy

Hours before the failed insurrection of 6 January, I had finished reading J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, the young author’s absorbing autobiography of growing up in an extended Appalachian family in a failing industrial town in Ohio. Reading it prompted me to consider the unique features of specific cultures and subcultures, deeply rooted factors that make for flourishing and those that obstruct it over the long term. In recent decades we have come to assume that all cultures are equal and that the different ways of doing things that separate distinctive groups of people are equally valid. If one group suffers disproportionately from poverty and social instability, we are generally loathe to examine internal contributing factors for fear of being accused of blaming the victim. Nevertheless, if we take seriously the status of our fellow human beings as responsible agents, we cannot afford to overlook these factors. This has profound public policy implications.

Although I was raised in suburban Chicago and now make my home in Canada, I have hillbilly roots on my mother’s side. My maternal grandmother was born in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, best known as the home of John Fox, Jr., author of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. Her frequently absent father moved the family to a farm near Adrian, Michigan, around 1914, to join his mother and her latest husband. My grandmother was married four times, my mother having been fathered by her third husband, a Finnish American from Michigan’s remote upper peninsula. The epidemic of fatherlessness in that line goes back to the middle of the 19th century, as far as we know—something which my generation was mercifully spared.

I have extensively researched that side of the family through an online genealogy site, and I have discovered much that fleshes out the larger story. Most of my relatives have lived in the region where Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky meet west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Their lives have often been short, and it’s not always easy to keep track of the marriages or where they were living at any moment. One distant cousin even married a Vance. Our forebears have lived there since the 17th and 18th centuries, descended from the Howards, the Booths, and the Plantagenet monarchs of England. A Hyder ancestor fought in the War of Independence. One line goes back to a certain “Irish” Andrew Culbertson (1694-1746), whose family was originally from Scotland, thus being part of the great wave of Scots-Irish settlers to populate the Appalachian region.

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By In Culture

Herman Dooyeweerd: Christian Philosopher

I have recently completed a reading of Marcel E Verburg’s massive book, Herman Dooyeweerd: The Life and Work of a Christian Philosopher (Paideia Press, 2015). For those unfamiliar with him, Dooyeweerd (1894-1977) taught jurisprudence for decades at the Free University of Amsterdam, a Christian university established by Abraham Kuyper in 1880. As an undergraduate, I came into contact with his unique philosophical school, known in Dutch as De Wijsbegeerte der Wetsidee and in English as the Philosophy of the Law-Idea. Eventually I would write a dissertation at the University of Notre Dame on Dooyeweerd’s political thought, comparing it with that of neo-Thomist philosopher Yves René Simon (1903-1961). (more…)

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By In Culture

A Minnesota Murder and its Aftermath: A Lament

More than forty years ago I was a student at a Christian university near St. Paul, Minnesota. During my last year there several friends and I rented a house on Chicago Avenue in south Minneapolis, a neighbourhood with a racially mixed population. During my studies I was attending a vibrant United Methodist congregation in that same part of the city. Many of the families were mixed-race, something I had failed to notice until a row of parents and young teens stood at the front of the church for confirmation one Sunday. Obviously they felt welcome there, and I cannot recall anyone going so far as even to mention this reality.

Fast forward to the start of the third decade of this century. Minneapolis resident George Floyd was allegedly murdered by a police officer within walking distance of that house we lived in. The uproar following this heinous event brought back all the emotions many of us felt during those long hot summers of the mid-to-late 1960s, when race riots consumed entire districts of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Detroit. I remember the fear I experienced on hearing of the assassination of Martin Luther King in April 1968, recognizing that this single event would set off explosive unrest throughout the United States. Indeed it felt as though the country was falling apart. (more…)

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By In Culture

The Synthetic Gospel of Liberation Theology

As an undergraduate student, I was briefly attracted to liberation theology while never completely signing on. At the time I fancied myself something of a campus radical, relishing the responses I received from my fellow students at our American Christian university in the upper midwest. To be sure, we weren’t UC Berkeley, and I wasn’t Abbie Hoffman or Daniel Cohn-Bendit. I searched through Karl Marx’s writings to find a pithy slogan to put on my dormitory wall, but, to my disappointment, found nothing worthy of even the bare plaster of a monastic-like cell. I genuinely believed that the Christian faith in which I was raised demanded structural social change. Liberation theology was not the first choice in my efforts to apply my faith to the ills of society, but I believed I had to take it seriously and at least look into it.

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By In Culture

Authority: There’s No Getting Away from It (Nor Would We Want to)

We North Americans have an uneasy relationship with authority. We admit that we need it to order our lives in community, yet we are suspicious of it at the same time. “Question authority” is an adage that appeals especially to the young, as they struggle to find their own place in the world after moving out of the parental home. But some would go even further, as the image above indicates: “Stop believing in authority; start believing in each other.” At first glance, this sounds appealing. We should all look out for our neighbours and readily co-operate with them for the common good.

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By In Culture

Online Church Shopping

During the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, our church has of necessity made the move to an online presence. We have had a YouTube channel for a few years now, so the technical infrastructure was already in place to permit this. For the past several weeks, we have worshipped from home, tuning in from our televisions while seated on our living room sofas, whose cushions are more comfortable than the 112-year-old wooden pews in our sanctuary. We even celebrated the Lord’s Supper on Palm Sunday, each of us providing bread and wine and having it consecrated from 2 kilometres away by our minister. It’s not the same, of course, but it will have to do for now. We can be thankful to God that our technical means have come so far that we can worship in this way, which we would not have been able to do even twenty years ago.

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By In Culture

Sabbath Rest Amid Plague

Despite the efforts of medical science to eradicate disease, and despite impressive successes against such ancient maladies as smallpox and polio, illnesses of some type are always with us, though they may recede to the recesses of our awareness between outbreaks. Now we are in the midst of a COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. The illness appears to have transitioned from animals to human beings as recently as late last year in China. Few could have predicted that the consequences would be global in scope. For the foreseeable future we are all learning to live in a different way.

Many people are worried about what will happen as the economy slows down. Indeed many of us have seen our retirement investments take a severe hit in recent weeks. But I would like to suggest that, rather than worry about how to keep everything moving, perhaps we should recover the biblical principle of sabbath. It is difficult, of course, to expect a society with a religiously mixed population to honour a principle so firmly anchored in Scripture. Yet biblical principles are not just arbitrary; they are intended to enable God’s image to flourish as we live our lives before the face of God.

We all know the fourth commandment: “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8). Many Christians take this to apply to sunday observance and refrain from anything that approximates work on that day. Yet for God’s people of the old covenant, sabbath was not just a weekly occurrence. The entire society was structured around multiples of seven, spaced out over many years. When the Israelites were leaving Egypt for the land of Canaan, God gave them instructions on how to live in this new land through his servant Moses.

The Lord said to Moses on Mount Sinai, “Say to the people of Israel, When you come into the land which I give you, the land shall keep a sabbath to the Lord. Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard, and gather in its fruits; but in the seventh year there shall be a sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a sabbath to the Lord; you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. What grows of itself in your harvest you shall not reap, and the grapes of your undressed vine you shall not gather; it shall be a year of solemn rest for the land. The sabbath of the land shall provide food for you, for yourself and for your male and female slaves and for your hired servant and the sojourner who lives with you; for your cattle also and for the beasts that are in your land all its yield shall be for food (Leviticus 25:2-7).

This is not a passage that appears frequently in our lectionaries or in sermons, but it has influenced academia, ministry and other fields whose practitioners take sabbatical years. Our farmers similarly practise crop rotation and allow fields to lie fallow periodically, recognizing that over-cultivating can lead to soil depletion. In recent decades, we have become aware that our physical environment needs to be cared for and that we cannot continue to abuse it without suffering negative consequences. All this is part of what it means to live out the sabbath.

Not living out the sabbath incurred God’s judgement on his people, as we read in several passages. While the Israelites were slowly making their way to the promised land, God warned them of what was to come if they did not obey his statutes, including those mandating sabbath observance: “Then the land shall enjoy its sabbaths as long as it lies desolate, while you are in your enemies’ land; then the land shall rest, and enjoy its sabbaths” (Leviticus 26:34). “But the land shall be left by them, and enjoy its sabbaths while it lies desolate without them; and they shall make amends for their iniquity, because they spurned my ordinances, and their soul abhorred my statutes” (26:43). When the Babylonians finally came and destroyed Judah centuries later, the country’s punishment was linked directly to the violation of sabbath: “[The king] took into exile in Babylon those who had escaped from the sword, and they became servants to him and to his sons until the establishment of the kingdom of Persia, to fulfil the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed its sabbaths. All the days that it lay desolate it kept sabbath, to fulfil seventy years” (2 Chronicles 36:20-21).

I would not necessarily argue that the current pandemic is God’s punishment for our not keeping sabbath. Nevertheless, violating God’s standards inevitably brings negative consequences, of which disease may be one. Staying up too late or drinking heavily will have a deleterious effect on one’s health. Keeping the economic engine running at full throttle 24/7 may have harmful side effects on our communities and on ourselves. When Ontario repealed its decades-old Sunday closing laws in the 1990s, residents of the province were not liberated from a supposedly outdated religious practice; they were increasingly atomized into individual units plugged into the market quite separately, making time together more difficult for families and friends to pull off. That this was accomplished by a professedly socialist government is all the more ironic.

Yet it may be that our enforced experience of being home with our loved ones for protracted periods is giving us a taste of sabbath’s meaning and its continued relevance for us. Indeed what if the current pandemic were to change our approach to life? What if we were all to slow down and take stock of where we are and of what God has given us? It must have taken great faith on the part of the Israelites to believe that “the sabbath of the land shall provide food for you.” Similarly, we may have difficulty believing that God will care for us during a time when we cannot visit the stores several times a week and cannot travel very far outside our own immediate communities.

We cannot see where all this will lead and what we will be doing weeks much less months from now. But I suggest that we take the opportunity to nurture our relationships with those closest to us. Break out the board games. Put down your phones and tablets. Cook and dine together. Gather together to pray and cultivate your relationship with God. Go ahead, give it a try.

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By In Culture, Theology, Wisdom

Kuyper’s Flawed Example: Sphere Sovereignty on the Personal Front

In book 2 of Plato’s Republic, Socrates’ conversation with his young friends takes an unexpected turn. Plato’s brothers Gaucon and Adeimantos have challenged Socrates to defend justice for justice’s sake and not merely to gain a reputation for being just. Why would people wish to do justice if they were deprived of its tangible rewards? To answer this question, Socrates memorably shifts the discussion to the building of a city. Why? Because if he can demonstrate what justice is within the city, he can by analogy reason back to locating justice in the individual person, which he and his companions undertake to do in the succeeding books of the dialogue.

I was reminded of Socrates’ rhetorical strategy several years ago as I read James Bratt’s magisterial biography of one of my heroes, Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat. Kuyper, as readers may know, originated the term “sphere sovereignty,” a translation of the Dutch expression sovereiniteit in eigen kring, or “sovereignty in one’s own circle.” Facing the twin threats of liberal individualism and socialist statism, Kuyper, based on his reading of the Bible and the larger Christian tradition, came up with this rather inelegant phrase to describe his party’s unique approach to society. (more…)

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