With regard to the meme that Magisterial Protestantism does not have the resources to cope with our current post-Christendom context (requiring, of course, a shift in allegiance to neo-Anabaptism), consider some of the beginning paragraphs of Calvin’s dedication of his Institutes to the King of France:

But I perceived that the fury of certain wicked persons has prevailed so far in your realm that there is no place in it for sound doctrine. Consequently, it seemed to me that I should be doing something worth-while if I both gave instruction to them and made confession before you with the same work. From this you may learn the nature of the doctrine against which those madmen burn with rage who today disturb your realm with fire and sword. And indeed I shall not fear to confess that here is contained almost the sum of that very doctrine which they shout must be punished by prison, exile, proscription, and fire, and be exterminated on land and sea. Indeed, I know with what horrible reports they have filled your ears and mind, to render our cause hateful as possible to you. But, as fits your clemency, you ought to weigh the fact that if it is sufficient merely to make accusation, then no innocence will remain either in words or in deeds.

Suppose anyone, to arouse hatred, pretends that this doctrine, an account of which I am trying to render to you, has long since been condemned both by the verdict of all estates and by many judgments of the courts. This will surely be saying nothing other than that it has in part been violently rejected by the partisanship and power of its opponents, and in part insidiously and fraudulently oppressed by their falsehoods, subtleties, and slanders. It is sheer violence that bloody sentences are meted out against this doctrine without a hearing; it is fraud that it is undeservedly charged with treason and villainy. So that no one may think we are wrongly complaining of these things, you can be our witness, most noble King, with how many lying slanders it is daily traduced in your presence. It is as if this doctrine looked to no other end than to wrest the scepters from the hands of kings, to cast down all courts and judgments, to subvert all orders and civil governments, to disrupt the peace and quiet of the people, to abolish all laws, to scatter all lordships and possessions—in short, to turn everything upside down! And yet you hear only a very small part of the accusation, for dreadful reports are being spread abroad among the people. If these were true, the whole world would rightly judge this doctrine and its authors worthy of a thousand fires and crosses. Who now can wonder that public hatred is aroused against it, when these most wicked accusations are believed? This is why all classes with one accord conspire to condemn us and our doctrine. Those who sit in judgment, seized with this feeling, pronounce as sentences the prejudices which they have brought from home. And they think they have duly discharged their office if they order to be brought to punishment no one not convicted either by his own confession or by sure testimony. But of what crime? Of this condemned doctrine, they say.

But with what right has it been condemned? Now, the very stronghold of their defense was not to disavow this very doctrine but to uphold it as true. Here even the right to whisper is cut off.

Two thoughts occurred to me while reading this:

(1) Even apart from the historical record which shows us that they did, wouldn’t it be rather strange if the magisterial Protestants did not consider how they ought to respond in the face of (highly) unsympathetic regimes, if this was the kind of treatment they received?
(2) If they thought of how they ought to act in the face of actual social rejection and state persecution, why wouldn’t their responses be useful today, in our “post-Christendom” context, which is nowhere near as hostile as what, say, the Huguenots experienced in France?

Joshua Foer’s fascinating book Moonwalking with Einstein: the Art and Science of Remembering Everything concludes its first chapter with the following reflection. I may write more about the subject when I’m finished the (well-written and entertaining) book, but for now I’ll just leave our readers with his thoughts (pp. 18-19):

Once upon a time, memory was at the root of all culture, but over the last thirty millennia since humans began painting their memories on cave walls, we’ve gradually supplanted our own natural memory with a vast superstructure of external memory aids—a process that has sped up exponentially in recent years. Imagine waking up tomorrow and discovering that all the world’s ink had become invisible and all our bytes had disappeared. Our world would immediately crumble. Literature, music, law, politics, science, math: Our culture is an edifice built on externalized memories.

If memory is our means of preserving that which we consider most valuable, it is also painfully linked to our own transience. When we die, our memories die with us. In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we’ve created is a way of fending off mortality. It allows idea to be efficiently passed across time and space, and for one idea to build on another to a degree not possible when a thought has to be passed from brain to brain in order to be sustained.

The externalization of memory not only changed how people think; it also led to profound shift in the very notion of what it means to be intelligent. Internal memory became devalued. Erudition evolved from possessing information internally to knowing how and where to find it in the labyrinthine world of external memory. It’s a telling statement that pretty much the only place where you’ll find people still training their memories is at the World Memory Championship and the dozen national memory contests held around the globe. What was once a cornerstone of Western culture is now at best a curiosity. But as our culture transformed from one that was fundamentally based on internal memories to one that is fundamentally based on memories stored outside the brain, what are the implications for ourselves and for our society? What we’ve gained is indisputable. But what have we traded away? What does it mean that we’ve lost our memory?

I am currently working on a biography of the late pastor-historian Arnold Dallimore, author of the magnificent two-volume biography of George Whitefield. My book is to be published with Evangelical Press in the UK. My original deadline for the first draft was January 2012. As with most deadlines, I look back on it with fond, if not nervous memories. I’m only on chapter three…

Last autumn I took the opportunity to visit Dr. Dallimore’s widow, May Dallimore, to interview her about her husband. I was so struck by my time with her that I put pen to paper and sent off a piece to Grace Magazine in Britain about my first interview experience. I’ve entitled it “Visiting Mrs. May Dallimore” (click here–oddly, you’ll be sent to another link, click that one also). Actually, my original title was “Visiting Mrs. Dallimore,” which was a play on Martin Amis’ “Visiting Mrs. Nabokov.” But, as editors are wont to do, the title was changed.

The eminent Particular Baptist preacher, theologian, and exegete, John Gill (1697-1771) stands as powerful proof, if any were needed, that the thought of English nonconformity and, within that category, English Baptist theology, is in large part an intellectual and spiritual descendant of the thought of those Reformers, Protestant orthodox writers, and Puritans who belonged to the Reformed confessional tradition. This must be acknowledged despite the pointed disagreement between Baptists and the Reformed confessional tradition over the doctrine of infant baptism: this one doctrine aside, their theology is primarily Reformed and what disagreements remain are nonetheless disagreements with and often within the Reformed tradition rather than indications of reliance on another theological or confessional mode.

Richard A. Muller, “John Gill and the Reformed Tradition: A Study in the Reception of Protestant Orthodoxy in the Eighteenth Century” in Michael A. G. Haykin ed., The Life and Thought of John Gill: A Tercentennial Appreciation (Leiden: E. J. Brill, ), 51.

Here’s another quote by Muller, this one more extensive:

John Gill (1697-1771) was one of the most eminent British theologians of the eighteenth century and one of the most biblically and theologically erudite writers of his time. This eminence and erudition are all the more remarkable because, as a Baptist and Dissenter, barred from the English universities, Gill was largely self-educated. He gained broad proficiency in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew through private study. His writings evidence not only a consistent use of these languages but also avast absorption of the international theological literature of his own and the preceding century. His work is of interest today from several perspectives. First, Gill stands as perhaps the primary exponent and codifier of Particular Baptist teachings in the eighteenth century. He was a cogent defender of the doctrines of election and adult baptism. Second, in a slight broadening of the first point, he was a pivotal figure in the development of what, rather imprecisely, has come to be called “hypercalvinist” theology after the time of Crisp and Saltmarsh. Third, more broadly still, with the exception of his repudiation of infant baptism, he stands in the trajectory of the older Reformed orthodoxy and was, with writers such as Thomas Boston and John Brown of Haddington, one of its significant mediators to eighteenth-century Britain. Unlike these other eighteenth-century orthodox writers, moreover, Gill typically identified his sources carefully, making clear his relationship to the older orthodox or scholastic tradition of Protestant thought. Fourth, in relation to each of these theological trajectories, Gill remains one of the most significant representatives of so-called precritical exegesis in eighteenth-century Britain.

Richard A. Muller, “Review of The Collected Writings of John Gill by John Gill,” in Calvin Theological Journal 38.2 (2003), 380.

For some of John Gill’s works see his page at the Post Reformation Digital Library.

Steven and Peter over at The Calvinist International have begun a highly worthwhile project of evangelical resourcement, which I think any of our evangelical readers (at least) should be highly interested in. In their introduction to the project, they say:

The two 20th century men TCI regards as specially exemplary, CS Lewis and Francis Schaeffer, both pointed their readers ad fontes, toward the great sources; and not “back” to these, but rather, “up into” them; they both conceived engagement with the works of great Christian teachers as an elevation, not a retrogression. Schaeffer especially tried to correct certain tendencies prevalent among modern evangelicals- individualism, parochialism, ignorance of history- and called his readers to realize their status as heirs of a great tradition.

Unfortunately, many of those who heard that call often didn’t bother to correct that ignorance of history, which Schaeffer himself had diagnosed, before they did so; then, confusing the evangelical faith as such with the meager offerings of much modern evangelicalism, they often left the evangelical faith altogether, thinking that the only fontes deep enough to drink from were ancient and medieval ones, and consequently, any supposedly direct continuations of those- which “continuations” in fact, though, were very often simply unreformed appropriations of earlier patrimony.

But Schaeffer and Lewis both knew better. The Reformation tradition produced writers, deeply rooted in the truths of the ancient and medieval Christendom, who excelled in and advanced all branches of learning, both sacred and mundane; and helped build the world we live in today- for better, but sometimes for the worse too. But, even with respect to the flaws of the Reformation traditions, one has to understand them first in order to judge them and their effect on us now. Part of what we wish to do here is to offer a comprehensive view of the Reformation traditions especially, so that readers who do take the urgings of Lewis and Schaeffer seriously can do so in an informed manner.

Newsweek ran a provocative article by Andrew Sullivan today, “Christianity in Crisis”. Because Sullivan addresses so many important issues in one place, it provides a helpful occasion to lay out what I see to be the problems with his overall vision of the Christian faith and its relation to politics, as well as my own preferred alternative.

Sullivan’s Argument:

Sullivan believes, like many do, that we have entered a time of religious crisis in our society. Roman Catholicism has (he says) discredited itself in its many child abuse scandals, and evangelicals have turned into a fearful bunch, trying to hide from the real world in ghettoes of imaginary construction and behind real threats of violence to the other. Further, both have become concerned with things that Jesus either did not mention (homosexuality and abortion), and have ignored things he was concerned with (the problem of divorce, celibacy in light of what he believed to be the immediate end of the world). Sullivan believes there is a rise in atheism and “spirituality”, and that this expresses an awareness in our society that our current situation characterized by emptiness, distraction, and warring is not good enough, and that we want some kind of fundamental spiritual change.   (more…)

Chris Huebner, in a thought provoking article, “Radical Ecumenism, or Receiving One Another in Kaula Lampur,” in The Ecumenical Review, vol 57 no. 4 (2005), writes about the pitfalls that ecumenism can fall into, and frankly, I can’t help but concur with him based on my own experience in dialogue with people across traditions.

And yet while ecumenical dialogue rightly serves to complicate our theological discourse, it walks a fine line in doing so. Even as it encourages an appreciation of the difficulty of Christian speech, there is a sense in which it risks giving rise to certain monothematic and tidy tendencies of its own. Indeed, it might be suggested that the promise of ecumenism is in a strange way bound up with precisely the sorts of problems Hauerwas, Williams, and Eagleton identify. When taken as a whole, ecumenical conversations often contain glimpses of the dialogical virtues noted above. But from a case-by-case perspective, looking at specific statements and contributions to the conversation, one often gets a sense of the corresponding vices. While the meetings in Kuala Lumpur contained many instances of genuine theological dialogue, I also find myself wondering about the temptation to deploy certain favourite words and functional, self-legitimating descriptions in representing our various traditions. Driven by a desire to make a meaningful contribution on behalf of one s tradition, to ensure that its distinctive voice makes it to the table, and perhaps equally a sense of obligation that this is the role we are expected to fill, there appears to be an all too seductive temptation to make caricatures of ourselves. From the other end, in an attempt to be as inclusive as possible, to say something that everyone can identify with, statements often read like a checklist of all the favoured categories Hauerwas points to. The unfortunate result in both cases is that we end up saying very little, if anything at all, that a reasonably informed dialogue partner might not already be able to anticipate. Needless to say, this does not make for much of a conversation. On the one hand, there is a deadening sense of being stuck in a repetitive cycle of introductory niceties that make it difficult to move on to the more interesting and important matters of nuanced detail. On the other hand, behind the surface posture of hospitality, one can often hear the shrill ring of single-issue, special-interest group political manoeuvring that runs counter to any meaningful conception of ecumenical unity. [375]

[This post's title comes from here.]

Yours truly was interviewed by Andrew Rozalowsky at his blog “a living sacrifice.” Andrew is an M. A. student at McMaster Divinity College under Stan Porter, and an all around good guy. He asks me questions about historial theology and biblical studies. It was kind of him to ask.

Among many other important points, Stephen J. Grabill, in his well-needed book, Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics, makes clear Calvin’s support of the existence and knowability of natural law. One such text is from the Reformer’s commentary on that great Psalm ode to the law, Psalm 119:

[Psalm 119:]52.I called to mind thy judgments of old, O Jehovah! In this psalm, the judgments of God are generally taken for his statutes and decrees, that is, his righteousness. … In this place, in consequence of the qualifying phrase, of old, it is more probable that they refer to the examples by which God has made himself known as the righteous Judge of the world. Why does he say that the law of God has been from everlasting? This may to some extent be accounted for from the righteousness here mentioned not being of recent growth, but truly everlasting, because the written law is just an attestation of the law of nature, through means of which God recalls to our memory that which he has previously engraved on our hearts.  [Grabill, 73]

The last phrase, of course, alludes to Romans 2:15 as it has been commonly interpreted, as a reference to the knowledge of right and wrong that God has provided to all people.

This element of Calvin’s teaching is very relevant for the current church, at least in my opinion. It shows that one of the biggest sources of the Reformed tradition was in continuity with the natural law tradition, and that Karl Barth and the Barthians have radically departed from the Reformed tradition on this matter. It also, hopefully, will make it easier for many who have great love for the Reformer to begin to appreciate the expansive and foundational natural law tradition, with its careful analysis of the human person and all the variegated moral situations he can find himself in. Perhaps, through that, the Reformed church might once again be able to reclaim their part in that ongoing project, a project which has untold riches of wisdom on many important contemporary issues, if only we would look.

My friends Steven Wedgeworth and Peter Escalante have created a new web presence which I want to direct our readers to. I can’t really summarize the purpose of the site as well as Escalante himself has done here (do read it), except to say that it’s about fostering a kind of Calvinism that is learned and very much “in the real world”, intentionally avoiding escapist mentalities. In other words, it’s trying to bring back the old school.

Enjoy!

(As a post-script, I want to note that I discussed the concept that the title of their site expresses, some time ago.)