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On August 15, 2017 By In Politics

Abraham Kuyper and the Pluralist Claims of the Liberal Project, Part 3: What Liberalism Implies for the Two Pluralisms

In Part 2 we examined the implications of Kuyperian and liberal pluralisms for ecclesiology, that is, our understanding of the nature and authority of the institutional church. We noted, in particular, that liberalism, following John Locke, is compelled to reduce it to a mere voluntary association of like-minded individuals.

There are two implications to this liberal move. First, it is incapable of accounting for structural differences among an assortment of communities. State and church are not essentially different from the garden club or the Boy Scouts. Whatever differences appear to the casual observer can be ascribed to the collective wills of the individuals who make them up. Proponents are persuaded that, even if different groups of citizens operate out of divergent comprehensive doctrines, they must be made to look beneath these commitments to what are believed to be the raw data of human experience that bind all persons together. These data are, of course, the constituent individuals themselves.

Every community can be easily understood as a collection of individuals who choose to be part of it for reasons peculiar to each member. There is nothing unusual about this approach, the liberal insists. Michael Ignatieff believes himself justified in asserting that liberal individualism is not peculiarly western or historically conditioned; it is human and universal: “It’s just a fact about us as a species: we frame purposes individually, in ways that other creatures do not.” Therefore if the claims of groups and individuals come into conflict, as they inevitably must, Ignatieff confidently concludes that “individual rights should prevail,” despite the contrary claims of nationalists, socialists and many conservatives of a communitarian bent.

The second implication flows logically from the first. If liberals claim that individualism is simply human and universal, then this implies that their own worldview must be privileged above any that denies this. Liberal tolerance is thus conditioned by a worldview that explicitly denies that it is a worldview, and thus finds no difficulty positioning itself as a supposedly neutral arbiter of the competing claims of the other alternative worldviews.

Yet there are those who object to this sleight of hand. Karl Marx, for one, famously denies that such neutrality is possible and argues that political institutions, like all other human agents, always act in behalf of a particular economic class, even if they claim impartiality. There is, in short, no neutrality in the global class struggle. Liberation theologians in Latin America and elsewhere refer to this lack of neutrality as a “preferential option for the poor,” an oft-used expression that does not sit well with the liberal emphasis on the autonomous freely-choosing individual.

However, one need hardly be a Marxist or a liberation theologian to recognize what is at work here. James Kalb points to what he calls the tyrannical character of liberalism, despite its proponents’ undoubtedly well-intended pleas for tolerance of religious differences. The liberal strategy for tolerance requires that the particular claims of traditional religions be softened to more manageable private lifestyle choices. “Even religion, to be legitimate, must transform itself so that it simply restates established egalitarian, rationalist, consumerist, and careerist values.” Moreover, “No religion can claim superiority over any other religion or over irreligion. Each must understand itself as an optional pursuit, and thus as not a religion at all.” Accordingly, the authoritative claims of church institutions will be tolerated only in so far as these institutions accept the norms of a liberal society. The church can continue to claim authority in some fashion over its members, but it cannot do so in a way that might be interpreted to negate the voluntary principle. No one has to belong to a church, after all, and those denominations emphasizing individual choice and free will tend to fit more comfortably into a society governed by a dominating liberal paradigm.

By contrast, an obviously hierarchical church body with a strong confessional identity may be seen as at least potentially disloyal, as was the case with the Roman Catholic Church in nineteenth-century America. As late as 1960, presidential aspirant John F. Kennedy felt compelled to assure the Greater Houston Ministerial Association that he would not be taking orders from the Pope in the conduct of his office. Similarly, in his famous 1984 speech at the University of Notre Dame, New York Governor Mario Cuomo explicitly stated that his belief in his church’s teachings on abortion was a private belief with no bearing on his pursuit of public policy.

Of course, it would be unwise to state categorically that all professed liberals everywhere necessarily follow a consistent individualist approach to human communities and religious diversity. With some spectacular exceptions, most people are generally better than their ideological visions would make them if they were to follow them consistently. Remaining open to correction by the real world is key here.

Nevertheless, one cannot deny the historic tendency of liberalism in its various permutations to downplay the significance of nonvoluntary community and to individualize and relativize the claims of traditional religious worldviews. We see this in the increasing trend in the western world to reconfigure marriage as a mere private contract between (thus far!) two persons and to deny any intrinsic structure that might negate this contractual status and even to stigmatize those who adhere to a “thicker” understanding of the marriage covenant. We see it too in judicial efforts to redefine the limited personal liberties found in the English Bill of Rights and its successors (to, e.g., freedom of speech) as a more expansive and normless individual autonomy (e.g., freedom of expression) whose only limit is conceived in terms of John Stuart Mill’s famous harm principle: “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

However, Mill’s harm principle, despite its superficial libertarian flavour, has totalitarian tendencies in so far as it is suspicious of those communities bound by standards unrelated to this principle. Liberalism thus negates the very pluralism it claims to uphold. This suggests that another approach is needed.

Part 4: The Kuyperian Alternative

Part 1: Liberalism and Two Kinds of Diversity

Part 2: The Church as Voluntary Association

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On August 8, 2017 By In Politics

Abraham Kuyper and the Pluralist Claims of the Liberal Project, Part 2: The Church as Voluntary Association

As we noted in Part 1, liberalism attempts to guarantee pluralism by empowering the individual, often at the expense of the very communities that go into shaping her. But in so doing, liberalism denies these communities any authority not reducible to the wills of the component individuals.

If, for example, we were to agree with John Locke’s definition of the church, we would find ourselves in territory foreign to the mainstream of the historic faith. According to Locke, “A church, then, I take to be a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord in order to the public worshipping of God in such manner as they judge acceptable to Him, and effectual to the salvation of their souls” (emphasis mine). While there are undoubtedly many Christians, especially protestants in the free-church tradition, who would implicitly agree with Locke’s definition, the mainstream of the Christian tradition has viewed the church as the covenant community of those who belong to Jesus Christ, who is its Saviour and head.

Moreover, the gathered church, as distinct from the corpus Christi which is more encompassing, has been generally recognized to be an authoritative institution with the power to bind and loose on earth (Matthew 16:19, 18:18). As such it is more than the aggregate of its members but is a divinely-ordained vessel bearing the gospel to the world and especially to the church’s members.

Throughout the last two millennia, ecclesiastical councils have been convened on occasion to decide authoritatively on difficult doctrinal issues threatening to divide the church. These have yielded creeds and confessions considered binding on the faithful, such as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, deemed authoritative for the major Christian traditions in both east and west. The (Pseudo-)Athanasian Creed is most direct in its claims: “Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith; Which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.” It is, in short, the church, and not individual Christians, that defines the content of the faith.

It would be difficult to imagine an account of the faith and the church more inconsistent with the voluntaristic ecclesiology of Locke, who asserted that “everyone is orthodox to himself.” By contrast, from the earliest centuries the church as an institution has claimed the authority to determine what is and is not orthodox. Those Christians professing to be orthodox are in effect acknowledging that the terms for their membership in the church are not theirs to set as individuals. Beginning already with the Jerusalem council recorded in Acts 15, the church as a body asserted its authority, under the direction of the Holy Spirit, to resolve potentially divisive issues in binding fashion. To dissent from such decisions was regarded as schismatic and thus sinful.

In past centuries political authorities assumed that ecclesiastical schism was a danger to public order and thus sought to uphold the church’s authority in such matters to protect the unity of the realm. Although some observers like to describe this as a Constantinian settlement, it might better be labelled Theodosian, because it was the Emperor Theodosius who officially established Christianity as the favoured religion of the Roman Empire near the end of the fourth century.

It need hardly be emphasized that, two millennia into the Christian era, most of us live in polities characterized by a diversity of sincerely- and not-so-sincerely-held faiths. We in the west have become concerned, not with the presence of multiple faiths in our own societies, but with the lack of toleration of such multiplicity elsewhere, especially in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, where ancient Christian communities are increasingly besieged by the forces of radical Islam.

Nevertheless, the presence of faith communities adhering to a variety of ultimate beliefs is not without potentially troublesome political implications. This is something that our pre-modern forebears may have understood better than we do. Is law given by God or by the gods? And if by God, the God of Muhammad or the God who revealed himself in Jesus Christ? Few Christians would wish to live under Sharia law, but increasing numbers of devout Muslims believe they are called to establish Sharia as the law of the land, whether in Pakistan, Iraq, Nigeria or Great Britain. In the face of such evidently divisive efforts, how are we to go about living with each other? How can we come up with political principles enabling us to strike a modus vivendi with citizens of other faiths?

For several centuries now professed liberals have come up with what they believe to be the answer to this vexing question, and they think it sufficient to command the loyalties of all citizens irrespective of the “thick” comprehensive doctrines or worldviews to which they otherwise adhere. This liberal solution has profound implications for both directional diversity and societal pluriformity, and it amounts to this: every community and claimed communal obligation must be reduced to its component parts, namely, the wills of the individual members. To the extent that communal obligations exist, they can be justified only in so far as they conform to the voluntary principle. Communities, with all of their supposed differences, must be recast as mere voluntary associations.

We have seen how Locke did this with the gathered church institution, but he more famously did this with political community and even with marriage. In Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, a social contract among individuals comes to be deemed the source of all political obligation, as graphically illustrated in the famous frontispiece to the first edition of Hobbes Leviathan. Any authority that the state might claim over the individual can be legitimated only with reference to this originating contract.

In the later liberalism of Immanuel Kant and John Rawls, we see a certain level of abstraction added to the social contract, which is reworked such that individuals now use their common reason, ostensibly disconnected from their thicker worldview commitments, to articulate principles of right agreeable to all. Sounds good in theory, but, because it is based on a faulty understanding of human nature and ignores the role ultimate beliefs inevitably play in life, it is unworkable in practice.

Part 3: What Liberalism Implies for the Two Pluralisms

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On August 7, 2017 By In Politics

Praying In The Spirit

At this present time in whole of the created order, there is a hauntingly bright symphony being performed. The creation is groaning and travailing in the pains of childbirth like the deep, resonating, sad tones of a cello. The groans of the cello are joined in the same melodic progression by the violins of Christians’ groaning. As Christians we find ourselves in harmony with the creation, giving it further voice because we share in the same pain, waiting with the rest of creation for the redemption of our bodies. But there is a third voice; a voice deeper and more fundamental in this symphony that is controlling it and moving it toward its conclusion. It is the double bass of the Spirit, groaning out wordless music to the Father. We and the rest of creation with us have joined with him so that we are taking up his groans and he is taking up our groans in this symphony of prayer.

This is praying in the Spirit.

What the writers of Scripture exhort in shorthand in other places, Paul describes in Romans 8. From here we begin to learn what prayer is. Prayer is not some impersonal spanning of a great distance between us and God through the medium of words. Prayer is participation in the eternal divine conversation. Father, Son/Word, and Spirit have been in this communion of conversation forever. In grace our Triune God has made us members of his family and, therefore, the conversation. We are family members who share the relationship of the Son with the Father because of the Spirit uniting us to the body of Christ. As Paul says to another church, “For through [Christ Jesus] we both [i.e., Jews and Gentiles] have access in one Spirit to the Father.” (Eph 2.18) Prayer is joining the loving conversation that the Holy Trinity is having. As Christians we are not outsiders who somehow hope to gain the ear of our distant God. We are not far off but rather have been brought near in Christ Jesus. We share the same relationship with the Father that Jesus himself shares. Being in the Son is the only reason we can call God, “Father.” But being in the Son means that we do, indeed, have that privilege with Jesus. And it is the Spirit of the Son that God the Father has given us who causes us to cry out, “Abba, Father.” (Gal 4.6)

By the Spirit we are fully incorporated into this family and the family conversation. The Spirit doesn’t merely create a bald status of being a child of God. Rather, he pours the love of God out in our hearts (Rom 5.5) so that we share the love of God. That is, we love what he loves, hate what he hates, want what he wants; we share his sorrows, his joys, his anger, his jealousy, his compassion, his mercy, and his grace. As we pray in the Spirit, these shared desires are given expression. “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Our wills are becoming one with his will. Our hearts are in harmony with the Father, Son, and Spirit. That’s what it means to pray in the Spirit.

When we look around us and see that things are not right, that God’s will is not done on earth as it is in heaven, that the creation is in pain, our hearts groan. But we discover that these groans are not just our own, but they are also the groans of God himself being expressed by the Spirit in us and on our behalf to the Father. When we groan in this way, we are finding ourselves caught up in this symphony that is ultimately being conducted and played by our Triune God. When we find ourselves there, we have found the place of prayer.

Because these groans are not our own but participation with the Holy Trinity, we have the assurance that our groans are not pointless pain. Rather, we groan in hope. The God who groans with us is the same God who is working all things together for good (Rom 8.28). Yes, the creation is subjected to frustration, but it is subjected in hope (Rom 8.20). God has secured this hope through the death and resurrection of his Son and by the giving of his Spirit who is making a new creation. Our groaning prayers will not go unanswered. The haunting music that fills our souls with the rest of creation at present will modulate into the joyful music of dancing in the end.

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On August 1, 2017 By In Politics

Abraham Kuyper and the Pluralist Claims of the Liberal Project, Part 1: Liberalism and Two Kinds of Diversity

Although it can be misleading to seek the meaning of commonly-used words and expressions in their etymological origins, in the case of liberalism, the linguistic connection with liberty is all too obvious. The promise of liberty is an attractive one that holds out the possibility of living our lives as we see fit, free from constraints imposed from without. We simply prefer to have our own way and not to have to defer to the wills of others.

Yet even the most extensive account of liberty must recognize that it needs to be subject to appropriate limits if we are not to descend into a chaotic state of continual conflict, which English philosopher Thomas Hobbes memorably labelled a bellum omnium contra omnes, a war of all against all.

Here I propose to compare two approaches to liberty, viz., those of liberalism and of the principled pluralism associated with the heirs of the great Dutch statesman and polymath, Abraham Kuyper. Although each claims to advance liberty, I will argue that the Kuyperian alternative is superior to the liberal because it is based on a more accurate appraisal of human nature, society and the place of community within it.

Arising in the context of an early modern repudiation of ancient, and seemingly outmoded, customs and mores, liberalism proposed to anchor human community in rational principles oriented around the self-interest of sovereign individuals. From Locke to Rawls the liberal project has sought to liberate public life from the particularities of the “thick” accounts of reality rooted in the ancient religious traditions. Why? Because these had apparently proven hopelessly divisive in previous centuries, engendering nearly continual warfare from Luther’s initial efforts at reforming the church 500 years ago to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

Better, it was assumed, to anchor political order, not in a highly disputable claim of divine revelation, but in principles capable of being affirmed by all. Such principles would have to be rooted in a rationality whose only underlying assumption would be that individuals pursue their own interests as they themselves understand them.

Liberalism is thus more than just about liberty. Even in its mildest form it assumes that community is rooted in the collective wills of its individual members, thereby privileging the voluntary principle, that is, the belief that human flourishing depends on the free assent of sovereign individuals to their multiple obligations. The liberal project represents an effort to address the central dilemma of human life famously summed up by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the following maxim: “Man is born free but is everywhere in chains.”

Our very survival as a species in the face of hostile forces of nature depends on our ability and willingness to co-operate with each other for common purposes. If we do not do so, we are doomed at best to poverty and at worst to death. Nevertheless, in so far as we are interdependent, our individual wills are necessarily constrained by the rules we draw up to facilitate this co-operation. This is the paradox that Rousseau tried to address in his own proposals for political order. Although Rousseau, in his Social Contract, took these ideas in a superficially liberal direction, his recipe has definite totalitarian implications, thereby threatening to crush the very diversity that makes politics necessary and indeed possible.

According to the late British political scientist Sir Bernard Crick, politics is all about the peaceful conciliation of diversity within a particular unit of rule. What is meant by this diversity? Richard Mouw and Sander Griffioen identify three basic types: (1) directional or spiritual diversity, viz., the plurality of ultimate beliefs that bind particular communities but are potentially divisive of the larger body politic; (2) contextual diversity, viz., the diversity of customs and mores that come from people living together in local communities that are relatively isolated from each other; and (3) associational diversity, which might better be described as societal pluriformity, viz., the plethora of communal formations characterizing a mature differentiated society. While liberalism represents a longstanding effort to address all three kinds of diversity, for our purposes we shall examine its relationship to numbers one and three, viz., directional diversity and societal pluriformity. Although these two kinds of diversity are logically distinct, any effort to address one inevitably affects the other as well.

An obvious way in which these two types of diversity intersect can be seen in the often vexing church-state issue. If one is an unbeliever, one is unlikely to accord the gathered church a distinct status apart from the state except as a voluntary association of like-minded believers. In denying the authority of the gathered church institution, the political order formed out of this belief will nearly inevitably subordinate it to the political authority of the state, along with a variety of other voluntary associations, such as the Boy Scouts, the local garden club and little league baseball. This, of course, has profound implications for the protection of religious freedom, which is thought to belong only to individuals, and not to the institutions that have shaped them. A liberal worldview privileging individual rights, a particular manifestation of directional diversity, has effectively denied societal pluriformity, or Mouw and Griffioen’s associational diversity.

Crick believes that ordinary politics requires the tolerance of multiple truth claims. While he is undoubtedly empirically correct in his observation, we must be wary of attaching a normative character to this reality because it may effectively mask the extent to which a particular conception of church-state relations is itself rooted in a religiously-based worldview. And, if so, we will need to be prepared to admit that not all pluralisms are created equal.

Part 2: The Church as Voluntary Association

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On July 31, 2017 By In Politics

The Conundrum of Hope

Suffering comes in all shapes and sizes. From common illnesses to terminal illnesses, from putting to death the sinful deeds of the body to being put to death by those who hate the gospel, from fighting enemies within to fighting enemies without, the church suffers. It is our calling. The work of salvation that Jesus definitively began in his life, death, resurrection, and ascension will not be complete until his body, the church, is also bodily raised from the dead at the last day. Between this time and that we have been called to endure the suffering that comes in a creation that has not yet been completely liberated from the corruption of sin.

This suffering, however, is not without a purpose. It is not a fight that ends in a draw. It is a training camp for Christians to learn to rule the creation as it ought to be ruled. Just as Jesus did in his life, so we learn obedience through the things that we suffer. And like him, we are being matured through what we suffer (cf. Heb 5.8-9). Somehow and some way that is not presently clear to us, God is working all of our sufferings for our good and, consequently, the good of the rest of creation, which will be saved when we are revealed to be the sons of God through the redemption of our bodies (that is, in the resurrection; Rom 8.19-21, 28).

The question is, What gives us the strength to endure these present sufferings? Hope. More specifically, the hope of glory. (more…)

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On July 25, 2017 By In Politics

Jesus at Dinner: Salvation Through Hospitality

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.” –Jesus, Revelation 3:20

The old hymn commands, “let every heart prepare him room!” This is what a Christian is, after all: one who has welcomed Jesus. Welcoming has been part and parcel of Christian faith and practice since the beginning—first century Christians adopting diseased children, Paul instructing Philemon to receive his former slave back home as a brother, Jesus eating with the outcast, Israel welcoming the sojourners. Even if it isn’t easy to do, we can at least understand how to show hospitality to the weak and vulnerable. But God is not weak or vulnerable. How do we open the door of our lives to him? How do we “make him room?”

Mark tells the story (1:35-39) of Jesus being perfectly disciplined. He gets up early, he prays, he orders his time based on God’s mission rather than the opinions and needs of others. What does it look like to show hospitality to one so whole, so absent of need? Miguel Arteta’s beautiful new film Beatriz at Dinner gives us a clue. After her car breaks down at the home of a client, Beatriz—a new age massage therapist and holistic healer—finds herself stranded at an upscale dinner party.

At first glance, the movie is a contrast between Beatriz (Salma Hayek) and Doug (John Lithgow), a high-powered businessman. He is invited to dinner, the guest of honor, she is unexpected; he’s everyone’s employer, she’s an employee to his employee; he boasts, she demurs; he takes life—showing pictures of his prize kill from a recent safari expedition, she gives life.

Early in the movie, Beatriz weeps as she recounts that an angry neighbor killed her pet goat—“murder.” Throughout the dinner, Beatriz swears she recognizes Doug. Was he the man who built a hotel in her hometown that displaced a swath of the community? No, he’s too young. But how does she know him? By the end of the party, after proclaiming, “all tears come from the same source,” she looks Doug in the eye and mater-of-factly states, “you killed my goat.” On one level, the movie is about the conflict between good and evil.

The brilliance of the film, however, is found not in the leads, but in the near perfectly cast team of character-actors around the dinner table. As two radically opposing forces collide, we see tension, deflection, amusement, and horror in the onlooker’s faces. At its heart, Beatriz at Dinner isn’t about Beatriz or Doug at all; it’s about the guests at the dinner party, and the choice they’ll all have to make by the end of the evening. On the one hand, Doug offers power. Beatriz, conversely, offers the promise of healing, and healing in a way particular to each of them: cancer in one case, back-pain in another.

As the evening progresses, it becomes evident that what Doug and Beatriz have to offer is mutually exclusive. To whom will each guest show hospitality, Doug or Beatriz? While the woman who first insisted Beatriz come to the party attempts to straddle the fence, she too is forced to take sides. To get Doug’s approval, the guests must grovel—they must earn their place around the table. They can’t seem weak or vulnerable. They are valuable to Doug insofar as they’re useful, but not a minute longer. At one point, he jokes about leaving his third wife for a more attractive guest at the party.

Beatriz’s gift, however, is just that: a gift. It can’t be earned, only received. The difficulty, the predicament, the tragedy, is that no one can let down their pretense and airs to see their need—not now, not at a party, not when so much is at stake. To take hold of the hope Beatriz can offer (the unseen) requires abandoning that which Doug is currently offering (the seen). Alas, one can’t serve two masters.

Back to the Gospel of Mark. After describing how Jesus is whole, Mark immediately tells the story of a man who is broken (1: 40-45). When he encounters Jesus, the man isn’t told, as you might expect, to find healing by doing the good things Jesus just did. He’s not asked to earn his place in Jesus’ presence; he isn’t told how to pull himself up by his bootstraps. Rather, Jesus reaches down, out of pity, and heals the man of his leprosy directly. By running to Jesus the man was running away from every other form of salvation; he came bringing only his need, and that was enough.

Like Beatriz, Jesus joyfully comes to dinner, bringing healing with him. However, it’s not a given that we will welcome him. To the contrary, welcoming Jesus involves the painful, uncertain process of letting go of our pride and self-satisfaction. By showing hospitality to Jesus we’re necessarily neglecting those other masters in our lives who demand our complete loyalty and attention. Jesus stands at the door and knocks, ready to dine with us. How do we welcome him? One hymn tells us to “make him room;” another hymn—reminiscent of Beatriz at Dinner—tells us how:

“Come, ye weary, heavy laden, bruised and broken by the fall; if you tarry ’til you’re better, you will never come at all…. Let not conscience make you linger, nor of fitness fondly dream; all the fitness He requires is to feel your need of Him.”

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On July 20, 2017 By In Culture, Music, Politics

Happy AR Day! a holiday to counter Bastille Day

Twenty-some years ago my sister was in France, studying Gregorian chant with the monks at the Abbaye Saint-Pierre in Solesmes. During her time there, the 14th of July rolled around, when the rest of the country celebrates la Fête nationale, better known to us as Bastille Day. But things were quiet in Solesmes and the surrounding countryside. Curious at this lack of merriment, my sister asked why they weren’t joining in the celebrations and was greeted with faces registering shock. In a heavily Catholic region, they would never consider observing a day that marked the start of a godless revolution that wreaked such havoc on the Church, France and the rest of Europe.

There are now 359 days remaining until the next Bastille Day. As we await its occurrence, I would like to propose for that day a counter-holiday to be titled AR Day, “AR” standing for Anti-Revolutionary. After the generation of war and instability set off in 1789 finally ended with Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, many Europeans, especially those still loyal to the gospel of Jesus Christ, set about attempting to combat the ideological illusions the Revolution had engendered. This entailed breaking with the modern preoccupation—nay, obsession—with sovereignty and recovering a recognition of the legitimate pluriformity of society.

In any ordinary social setting, people owe allegiance to a variety of overlapping communities with differing internal structures, standards, and purposes. These are sometimes called mediating structures, intermediary communities or, taken collectively, civil society. This reality stands in marked contrast to liberal individualism and such collectivist ideologies as nationalism and socialism, each of which is monistic in its own way—locating a principle of unity in a human agent to which it ascribes sovereignty, or the final say.

Recognizing that the only source of unity in the cosmos is the God who has created and redeemed us in the person of his Son, Christians are freed from the need to locate a unifying source within the cosmos. Thus the institutional church can be itself, living up to its divinely-appointed mandate to preach the gospel, administer the sacraments, and maintain discipline. The family is free to be the family, nurturing children as they grow to maturity. Marriage is liberated to be itself, free from the stifling constraints of the thin contractarian version now extolled in North America and elsewhere. And, of course, the huge array of schools, labour unions, business enterprises, and voluntary associations have their own proper places, not to be artificially subordinated to an all-embracing state or the imperial self.

This pluriformity is something worth celebrating! It may sound perfectly mundane when described in the way I have here, but the fact that the followers of today’s political illusions find it so threatening indicates that we cannot afford to take it for granted. Here are some suggested readings that highlight this dissenting anti-revolutionary tradition:

  • Johannes Althusius, Politics (1614)
  • Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
  • Guillaume Groen van Prinster, Unbelief and Revolution (1847)
  • Abraham Kuyper, Our Program (1880)
  • Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891)
  • Jacques Maritain, Man and the State (1951)
  • Yves R. Simon, Philosophy of Democratic Government (1951)
  • Friedrich Julius Stahl, Philosophy of Law: the Doctrine of State and the Principles of State Law (1830)

I could go on and list many more resources, but these will suffice for purposes of our new holiday. I propose that we celebrate it by holding public readings from these and similar works. The food would consist of such anti-revolutionary delicacies as boerenkool met worst, haggis, Brazilian pães de queijo and pamonhas, and, for the sake of all those Byzantine-Rite Calvinists out there, loaves of white bread with taramosalata, Kalamata olives, and cruets of extra virgin (Greek!) olive oil.

Music will consist of mass communal singing of the Psalms, preferably from the Genevan Psalter. Additional music will be provided by (why not?) the monks of the Abbaye Saint-Pierre in Solesme! Let’s do it!

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On July 17, 2017 By In Politics

The Jealousy Test

In 1 Corinthians 11 Paul gives instructions, sobering exhortations, and explanations concerning the Lord’s Supper as it is practiced in the church in Corinth. Some of the Corinthians were acting like selfish pigs and not waiting on their brothers and sisters to eat. In their refusal to wait and eat with the rest of the family of Christ, they were dividing the body of Christ. They were not discerning the Lord’s body properly (1Cor 11.29); that is, they were, in their actions, judging others as being outside of the body of Christ who were, indeed, in the body of Christ. This is why Paul concludes his instructions with the exhortation, “So then, my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for one another…” (1 Cor 11.33).

The judgment that had fallen on the Corinthians was severe. Their exclusion of certain family members brought divine displeasure upon some. Their lack of discerning the body was the cause of many being weak and ill and some of them “sleeping” (i.e., dying; 1Cor 11.30).

How does Paul know that this is the cause of this divine displeasure? Isn’t it dangerous to interpret events like this and attribute God’s action to them? Generally, we should use extreme caution. Some might say, “Paul was an inspired apostle and could make that judgment.” That’s possible. But there is another possibility as well.

In Numbers 5 God provided a way for a jealous husband to test the fidelity of his wife. If the husband suspected his wife of being unfaithful, he would take her to the Tabernacle and the priest to be vindicated or condemned. The jealousy test was administered when there were no witnesses to the alleged infidelity. Only God would know, so God would have to be the one to expose it.

The man would bring his wife to the priest with a memorial portion of grain. A memorial in Scripture is that which causes God to remember his covenant and act accordingly (cf. e.g., Gen 9.13-15). This grain offering would be a memorial to bring iniquity to God’s remembrance (Num 5.15).

With the grain in their hands, God also provided a holy drink. The process involved taking dirt from the Tabernacle floor (which is holy ground) and putting it into holy water in an earthen vessel (Num 5.17). Eventually, that water would be joined by words of curse that had been written down and then washed off into the water (Num 5.23).

The woman would then drink the water. If nothing happened, she was declared innocent. If she was guilty, her belly would swell and her thigh would rot (Num 5.22). We don’t know exactly what this means, but it seems that she would have a false pregnancy, giving birth to nothing. Her womb would be dead and no children would pass between her thighs. Death was the consequence of infidelity.

We don’t know if this law was ever carried out against any woman in Israel. It might have been intended for the whole of Israel herself. There is a foreshadowing of this law happening at Mt Sinai when the new bride of YHWH commits adultery with a golden calf. The calf is ground to powder, put in water, and the people are made to drink. The guilty ones are then evident, and the Levites inflict the death penalty on them (Exod 32).

This jealousy test, it seems to me, provides at least some of the context for Paul’s interpretation of the events in Corinth. Grain–bread–and holy wine are brought. They are the body and blood of Christ, the Word of God made flesh. To eat and drink this holy food vindicates us or exposes our infidelity. This jealousy test happens every Lord’s Day as we gather around the Table of our husband. Unlike the bride in Numbers 5, we don’t eat and drink the shadows but the substance. Consequently, our vindication is greater but so is our punishment.

The jealousy test aspect of the Lord’s Supper is one of God’s mercies to us. We need any and all infidelities exposed. It is better that they be exposed now than in the final judgment. As they are exposed in the present, we can deal with them through confession and repentance. At the final judgment, there is no repentance.

This is one reason why you shouldn’t avoid the Lord’s Supper as a member of Christ’s church. Not only have you compounded your sin by disobeying a direct command of Jesus who told us to “eat” and “drink,” but you have also cut yourself off from this grace of sin being exposed so that it can be dealt with.

The Lord has many ways to expose sin, not all involving you falling ill or dead on the spot. It may be that your secret sins come to light to the pastor and elders of the church so that the sin can be put to death. You were sneaking around being unfaithful in some way, thinking that you were getting away with living a duplicitous life. You come to the Table, devour the Word of God, and God exposes you in his grace. The Supper is not the problem. Sin is the problem, and it is the grace of God to expose it so that you have the opportunity to kill it through confession and repentance.

Knowing that you will be tested this next Lord’s Day now encourages you to be much more aware of your private fidelity throughout the week. It matters not if no one sees your web activity because you are wily enough to hide it from everyone. That paramour that you meet on business trips out of the city will never be found. But God knows, and for your good, he will make it known. If he doesn’t, you’re in bad shape for the final judgment.

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On July 10, 2017 By In Politics

In The Flesh Or In The Spirit?

The old flesh gets blamed for quite a bit in Christians’ lives. If someone blows up on you in anger, you might hear, “That’s just the old flesh coming out in me.” The reasoning behind this is something like this: I’ve got a good part of me that is controlled by the Spirit, and I have a bad part of me that is controlled by the flesh. The flesh, in this way of thinking, is the old man to which a new man was somehow added. You might even hear illustrations about how we carry around this dead man, a rotting corpse, on our backs like some old Roman punishment. As Christians we have multiple personalities. This makes it all too convenient when we sin to shift responsibility to the “flesh-side” and act as if we really don’t have any control. That’s just kind of the way we are and the way we’re going to be until we die and leave this flesh behind in a grave somewhere enjoying disembodied bliss in heaven.

That picture is not exactly accurate. Yes, there is a sense in which the flesh is still a reality in our lives as Christians. Our “mortal bodies” (our “death bodies”) are still associated with the flesh; that corruptible and corrupted existence that we inherited from Adam. These death-bodies still have those desires of the flesh (Rom 6.12) that plague us and want to bring us under dominion. We still have the desires in our bodies to sin, and we do sin.

However, as those who have received the Spirit of Christ, there is another sense in which we are not in the flesh. Paul says this emphatically in Romans 8.9: “Y’all are not in the flesh but in the Spirit.” How can Paul say this? Is he speaking out of both sides of his mouth?

Being “in the flesh” is more than just having a body. Being in the flesh is living as if Jesus had never died, risen again, and given us his Spirit. Being in the flesh is living under the dominion of sin and death. It is to be in bondage to the desires of the flesh and, thus, opposed to Christ’s kingdom program (see Rom 8.5-8). As Christians, we are not in the flesh but in the Spirit. Being in the Spirit means that we have adopted Jesus’ kingdom program for ourselves, swearing our allegiance to him as Lord, and fighting against the flesh.

When the Spirit dwells in us, the body is “dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness” (Rom 8.10). The Spirit now inhabits this death-body. What the Spirit does with dead bodies is raise them from the dead. He gives life to this mortal flesh both now and when he raises our bodies from the grave.

As you walk in the Spirit, you will not fulfill the desires of the flesh (Gal 5.16). The Spirit is working in us and with us to put to death the deeds of these death bodies (Rom 8.13). The Spirit is doing with us (generally) over a long period of time what he did with Jesus in a short period of time: transform our dead bodies through resurrection.

He works in this way as we hear the Word read and taught, as we gather with other saints to pray around the Lord’s Table, and as we encourage one another daily. The Spirit is ministering through the other members of the body of Christ transform us from glory to glory (2Cor 3.18).

One thing that Paul is doing here, as he says in Romans 8.12, is telling us that we are not debtors to the flesh to live after the flesh. We have no obligations to obey the flesh. In other words, we can’t say (as a riff on an old Flip Wilson line), “The flesh made me do it.” You don’t live under the kingship of the flesh but of the Spirit. You don’t have to obey. You are not a helpless victim. God has provided means through which his Spirit will minister to you; whether through counselors, pastors, friends, the ordinary life of the church, or similar things.

Faith accepts this reality, understanding that this is who God has made me in Christ Jesus, and then walks in lock-step with that reality. When you obey the desires of the body and sin, you own the full responsibility for your sin, you confess and repent of it, and keep moving forward.

You are not a subject in the kingdom of the flesh. Don’t let anyone, even yourself, convince you that you are. God has given you his Spirit and with him all the power you need to put to death the deeds of the body.

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On July 7, 2017 By In Politics

Protestantism’s Lost Soul

Guest Post by Peter Leithart

D. G. Hart’s The Lost Soul of American Protestantism vividly clarifies the differences between evangelical and Confessional Protestantism. In part, the book is a manifesto for historians of American religion. Hart argues that historians of American Protestantism have operated with a simplistic binary contrast of evangelical/conservative v. liberal/progressive. At best, historians refine this binary scheme by distinguishing between fundamentalism, that literalistic, vulgar, and anti-intellectual brand of Christianity, and evangelicalism, which gave fundamentalism a decent haircut, a suit and tie, and a diploma from a prestigious university, and thus made fundamentalism tolerable, if not quite welcome, in polite society.

This model is flawed, first, because it obscures the inner continuity between evangelical and liberal. To Hart, the key problem is the American Protestant obsession with relevance. He states his argument provocatively in the opening pages: “the Protestant-inspired notion that faith produces compassion, virtue, and harmony . . . is what is wrong with American Protestantism” (p. xvii). This is a “fundamentally utilitarian view of belief,” and he claims that the pragmatic effort to make Christianity a means for improvement of private and public morals has led American churches to abandon “large pieces of their Christian heritage” (xviii). Hart suggests that both evangelical pietism and liberalism are guilty of this utilitarian abandonment of the faith. Seeking to gain the world or at least America, both liberals and evangelicals lose their souls.

A binary of liberal/evangelical is flawed, secondly, because it ignores an important swath of the fabric of American religious life, that is, orthodox Protestant traditions that have resisted both the evangelicalism and liberalism. Hart labels this a “Confessional” tradition in American Protestantism and describes these as “churchly or liturgical Protestant traditions” that include “Lutheranism, the Reformed churches, Presbyterianism, and Anglicanism” (p. xxiii).

With the introduction of “Confessionalism” as a third church type, Hart’s book moves from description to prescription. The Confessional tradition is the lost soul of American Protestantism, lost not only to historians who bundle it together with evangelicalism under the heading of “conservative Christianity,” but lost as well to American Christianity, which has abandoned the wisdom embodied in these Confessional churches. If liberals and evangelicals have lost their soul by pursuing relevance, they can regain their soul by embracing the studied irrelevance of Confessional Protestantism.

For Hart, Confessionalism’s strength lies partly in its recognition of a strict separation of holy and profane.  The church’s business is the salvation of souls, not the improvement of human life in time or the shaping of the public square, and the church attends to this business by pastoral care through word and sacrament. As this sacred/secular divide focus the church’s attention on its spiritual ministry, it simultaneously frees Christians to participate fully in a pluralistic public world. In Hart’s view, J. Gresham Machen’s view that the church is spiritual rather than political or temporal gives the church freedom to maintain its intolerant insistence that it has the truth, while at the same time avoiding the despotism of public intolerance. When Machen intervened in public debate, as he did in opposition to public schools as well as to prayer and Bible reading in public schools, he did so not for religious but for political reasons (p. 93). A Confessionalist like Machen had no interest in making faith relevant to public life, and as a result, he could engage in public debate without trivializing or defiling the holy faith.

In addition to its clarity and the pungent, the sometimes pugnacious vigor of Hart’s prose, his book has a number of substantive merits. He is surely correct that Confessional Protestantism forms a distinct thread of American Christianity, and also correct that this third party has been as invisible to American church historians as the Constitution Party has been in American politics. He is also quite right, in my judgment, to admire a number of the features of Confessional Protestantism, right to admire especially those features that run against the grain of American culture. Confessional Protestantism insists, for example, on the irreducible necessity and value of ecclesial forms – governmental, liturgical, and confessional forms as well as patterns of pastoral care and community life. For pietist evangelicalism, forms matter much less, if at all (p. 37). As a result, evangelical Christians often speak of their relationship with God as if it were an instance of what British sociologist Anthony Giddens has called a “pure relationship.”

Along similar lines, Hart endorses Machen’s arguments in favor of intolerant creeds (pp. 88-98), and he sings the praises of Reformed sectarianism (ch. 5). I would qualify my support for both of these, but Hart is correct to argue that Confessional Protestantism has weapons of resistance that non-confessional evangelicalism lacks. A church whose ministers adhere to the Westminster Confession has a ballast that prevents it being blown by winds of doctrine that is lacking in a Bible Church with no creed but Christ. A church with liturgical forms rooted in Scripture and sanctified by tradition can fight off pressure to conform to the liturgies of popular culture – the liturgical forms embodied in pop music, PowerPoint, the demand for casualness and informality. Insofar as sectarianism means standing against worldliness, the church cannot do without sectarianism.

Despite these strengths, the book has significant weaknesses, some of which are historical. For a church historian, Hart displays a surprisingly ahistorical view of the Confessional tradition of Presbyterianism and the Reformed churches. He admits obliquely that “the downside of confessions is that they may be wrong” (p. 107), and recognizes that the Confessional churches offer constitutional avenues for reforming their confession. But neither he nor the Confessionalists whose views he summarizes recognize the import of the fact that the Westminster Confession, for instance, is a historically particular document, forged in specific historical and cultural circumstances, shaped by the intellectual categories dominant in that day. Machen argued, in Hart’s summary, that “if a church allowed a variety of interpretations of the doctrines contained in the Westminster Confession of Faith . . . it would be in exactly the same position ‘as to have no confession at all’” (p. 105).

The Westminster Confession came from an Assembly whose members differed on various doctrines, an Assembly that strove at various points to produce formulas flexible enough to embrace those differences while fixed enough to be meaningful. Further, the fact that Westminster comes at the end of a century and more of Calvinist Confession writing raises questions about any univocal reading of the Confession. When Westminster formulates Reformed doctrine with different emphases and nuances than earlier Confessions, does that indicate a repudiation of earlier confessions or is it a contextually specific response to debates within the English church? More generally, non-Confessional evangelicals suspect, with some justice, that the Reformation’s “sola Scriptura” gets swallowed up by traditionalism in Confessional churches.

My more important disagreements with Hart are theological, though these too are partly historical. Hart’s addition of “Confessionalism” to the spectrum of American Protestantism enriches the historian’s palate but does not capture the full range of options. This is most obvious in Hart’s inclusion of orthodox Anglicanism among the “Confessional” traditions. Few Anglicans think themselves “Confessionalists,” but neither can we classify Anglicanism as a form of evangelicalism. (more…)

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