What seems missing to me from the Dordt oath that Z has cited (and from historical Reformed praxis), is something of the form:

“We promise that, if in the future we discover that that any articles or points of doctrine set forth in the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, or the Canons of Dort in any way disagree with the Word of God, WE WILL CHANGE THEM!”

Practically speaking, the Achilles’ heel of reformed confessions may be that, as originally written, Westminster and the 3 Forms are so close to perfect, that nobody is willing to change them! This could be one driving force behind why the common understanding of subscription has weakened. It’s just easier to subscribe less, than to fix the confessional artifacts so that full subscription is enforceable.

In my Presbyterian (OPC/PCA) tradition, I know of only the one change since the original Westminster, namely the 1789 American revision that scrubbed Theonomy. And has there ever been a change to any of the three forms? How many CRC/URC pastors actually believe that Paul is the author of Hebrews, and are willing to apply the third mark of the church to those who do not?

You may say I am a nitpicker, putting such weight on something so trivial, but isn’t that the point? Do we want full subscription, or do we want subscription to the parts of the confessions that we (individually and subjectively) determine to be nontrivial?

At the same time, leaders on both the right and the left have, at various times, expressed their conviction that things are progressively improving, even as they lament the slippage that occurs when the opposition is in power. Ronald Reagan famously claimed that it is always morning in America. Talking heads on the right regularly equate progress with economic improvement and argue that if the federal government would simply step aside, a new era of economic prosperity would dawn. Commentators on the left argue that if conservative culture warriors would stop trying to pry into the private lives of others, peace and happiness would reign. In recent years, it is impossible not to hear politicians, on the left and the right, speak of “moving forward” or “moving ahead.” Apparently, they all assume that forward is the only viable direction and that things will get better if we continue to press onward. In other words, the doctrine of progress seems deeply embedded in American political discourse. If partisans of both left and right express themselves primarily in terms of individual rights and think of politics in terms of an underlying and open-ended progress, then we don’t really need the term “conservatism” at all. Both sides are firmly rooted in the soil of liberalism. They agree about the purpose of government (to protect individual rights) and the direction of history (progress). They may disagree about which individual rights to privilege and what, specifically, constitutes progress, but these are really in-house debates among liberals.

Besides the fact that such an outlook, when really mulled over, might irritate the in-house status quo politics of “conservative” Christians (Reformed being no exception) who think in terms of individual rights, I can’t help but notice how the ideological view here expressed at the Front Porch Republic has an uncanny resemblance to the theological argument put forth in The Lost Soul of American Protestantism.  Both suggest that, for all intents and purposes, the categories of “conservative” and “liberal” are useless as they actually denote simply different shades of progressivism. To Hart’s lights, the better taxonomy is actually confessional versus evangelical. Substitute Ronald Reagan (and Obama) with Billy Graham, and the general socio-political speech of the Front Porch entry with the generally sunny outlook on the individual and the world in the garden variety evangelical (Reformed being no exception again), and one might be tempted to re-think his skepticism over the reality of a parallel universe.

Now the question may be, Why do some convinced of something like Hart’s theological argument also sign on as Facebook Fans of Glenn Beck?

A visitor recently asked when the Outhouse might post on the CRC adopting the Belhar Confession. I’m not sure. But here is the next best thing. The RCA has.

The Rev. Mark Kleinheksel, pastor of South Blendon Reformed Church near Hudsonville, said he initially opposed the confession due to its possible support for homosexuality, but changed his mind.

“The risk is outweighed by the benefit of the Belhar,” he said.

That is a pretty good example of the inner conflict between an evangelical’s fundamentalist and liberal. (The liberal won this time.) This contrasts nicely with Luther’s formula designed for the confessionalist whose daily war is between his inner sinner and saint, which he deemed “Simul justus et peccator.”

(HT: HB)

Being something of one of his many modern incarnations, it is little wonder John Piper gushes as he does over George Whitefield.  Oh! the tempatations celebrity affords. Apparently, popularity really is important. Me and my silly admonitions to my children to avoid, as the kids call it, “the cliques” on the playground.

However unintended, the post here does give me another title to my nurture-your-inner-confessionalist reading list:

“Harry Stout, professor of history at Yale, is not as sure about the purity of Whitefield’s motives as Sarah Edwards was. His biography, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitfield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism, is the most sustained piece of historical cynicism I have ever read. In the first 100 pages of this book, I wrote the word cynical in the margin 70 times.”

If Stout’s work is the most sustained piece of historical cynicism Piper has ever read then I wonder if his sketch here could be said to be one of the most sustained pieces of religious naiveté ever written. After all, as I read Piper’s thumbnail I wrote the word naïve, well, I lost count. But I don’t think it was a nice, round number like Piper’s.

Dr. Carl Trueman’s lecture, Martin Luther, Pastoral Revolutionary, from the 2008 Reformed Fellowship annual meeting is now online HERE. From THIS PAGE.

Good stuff.  Worth a listen.

Through a series of private and public exchanges during the recent and somewhat embattled, certainly frustrating and ultimately failed candidacy of Randy Blacketer at Calvin Christian Reformed Church, there was plenty with which to disagree. He is not a subordinatonist. He seems to deny the “well-meant offer” in the gospel. Of course it comes with the territory in certain Dutch Reformed enclaves, but he is an unapologetic transormationalist, even as he publicly chastises the likes of James Dobson and Tony Campolo for merely putting into practice the very same principles as any transformationalism. (While we agree in our shared disparagement of the religious right and left, it seems it is for different reasons.) His transformationalism necessarily means he is an unblinking champion of Christian day schools. He finds nothing to scrutinize in Stan Mast for his adoption of Willow Creek models to patronize and “meet the felt needs of high-culturalists.” And he is way too distracted by the content of the cup over against its frequency; true enough, we ought to be drinking wine, but grape juice every week beats wine every month any day of the week, as it were. (I’d link where he has made such views public on his blog, but that is part of what I mean about his candidacy being embattled. Suffice to say that making potentially controversial views accessible to every Tom, Dick and Harry, including those on a search committee or Council, may not be the best idea for someone seeking a pulpit. He appears to have learned as much the hard way, making his blog quite secure and discreet.)

Even so, this he gets right and always has. It may have something to do with our shared experience of coming to the Reformed tradition more deliberately than most others around us in the CRC that he can easily recognize the blatant under-confessionalism in the effort to revise the Form of Subscription. When he says that “we in the Christan Reformed Church seem to be increasingly lukewarm toward our own confessional heritage,” even as outsiders with backgrounds like Randy and me are clamoring for more, he is getting after that which I have suspected for some years now: in the CRC there is a move away from narrow Reformed confessionalism and toward a broad evangelicalism. It actually makes a good measure of sense, since body and soul ought to be conjoined. The letter of broad evangelicalism should link up with the spirit. And the spirit has been quite victorious in the CRC for a while now.

Sure, Blacketer’s notion that there is room for diversity between those who “put more stress on piety, others on social action” does give chunks of his broader argument away. Allowing for these things to exist on their own and apart from a tighter Reformed theology, piety and practice opens the way for hapless doctrinalism, pietism and activism. And his transformationlism coupled with elitist sympathies for the new measures of high-culturalist Revivalism in the absurd and hugely irrelevant “worship wars” sure don’t help matters. But I have learned to take what I can get anymore. And Randy nails it about as well as anyone can in the CRC.

At the WHI taping I attended, the topic was “Selling Jesus: Consumerism and Market Values in the Church,” and OHS Clark jumped in early with a quote from Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity:

Amidst this population boom [1775-1845], American Christianity became a mass enterprise. The eighteen hundred Christian ministers serving in 1775 swelled to nearly forty thousand by 1845. The number of preachers per capita more than tripled; the colonial legacy of one minister per fifteen hundred inhabitants became one per five hundred. … Twice the number of denominations competed for adherents, and insurgent groups enjoyed the upper hand.

This was only a few days after Echo sent me a fascinating article about a trend towards political moderation in the Religious Right. Adam Smith, in Wealth of Nations, observed similar revivalism and denominational proliferation in the Britain of his day (1776):

Smith observed a relationship between these revivals and the process that we now call urbanization. Young people, arriving in cities in search of work, faced new opportunities and temptations without the structure that village life—with its communities of relatives and others that watched and guided young people—had provided. “A single week’s thoughtlessness and dissipation is often sufficient to undo a poor workman forever,” wrote Smith about life in London. But the city’s small sectarian religious congregations gave rural immigrants a social-support network and a moral code that could keep them on the straight and narrow as they built new lives. These movements were a response to the dislocations of modernity; there was no reason to expect them to fade away.

Yet in the teeming religious marketplace of Britain’s cities, Smith also saw pressures that would limit the political impact of religious beliefs and prevent theocracy. With so many competing denominations, he noted, religious leaders could acquire political influence only by finding allies outside their own version of the faith—and the process of forming those alliances would drive them toward agendas that could appeal to a wider, multi-faith audience. To be politically significant, he wrote, religious extremists had to move toward broader and necessarily more-moderate coalitions. Their entry into politics would, itself, moderate them.

Indeed, what is politics, but compromise? (That is a small question, in the middle of a long post, but really it is the core of the post, so stop a second and let it sink in) If the Church’s mission is to “engage the culture” (or even yuckier: “redeem the culture”!) via politics, then success requires compromise, and an uncompromising Church will necessarily be a failure. This is the mentality that got us to our current infatuation with “deeds, not creeds.”

So that was then (18th century Britain, post-revolution U.S.); and this is now. Plus ça change… Yesterday, Clark posted on Heidelblog about the brouhaha currently raging at Westminster Philadelphia (WTSP). While am not intending to analyze WTSP’s situation in particular, this quote is applicable to the church as a whole:

The pressure is immense to conform to the theology, piety, and practice of the evangelicals. There is not a great “market” in North America for Reformed confessionalism. There are at least 60 million American evangelicals. There are probably no more than one half million confessional Reformed folk. Put another way, the evangelicals are at least 120 times larger than NAPARC. Implicitly it has been promised to confessional Reformed institutions that if they will only give a little on Reformed distinctives (e.g. the regulative principle, the sabbath, Word and sacrament) they will be allowed to retain what is “really important” (e.g. predestination) and we will be made “influential” and even wealthy with larger students bodies and more donations. Of course it’s a Faustian bargain. By making such a bargain Reformed folk have allowed others to define them.

I have some additional thoughts, but as this post is long and self-contained enough, I’ll stop here for now.

In the recent Nicotine Theological Journal, some of Carl Trueman’s recent comments at Reformation21 are examined. The words I have found curious, keep coming back to and cannot get out of my head is are these:

“It wasn’t the confessional Presbyterians who told me the gospel; it wasn’t the confessional Lutherans who took the time to teach me the basics of the faith; it was the evangelicals. They cared enough to reach out to me and engage me.”

Well, same for me, Dr. Trueman. But I can’t say that I have quite the same conclusion as to what that might imply, specifically that “I owe everything, almost all my theology, and much of my Christian nurture to such people.” That is quite a thing to say.

Maybe his welcome wagon to the Big Tent included a hatchback full of free Willow Creek tapes and complimentary copy of Mere Christianity from a self-described and charming “Jesus-freak” employing “friendship evangelism.” Maybe he, too, had an attractive evangelical of the fairer sex lovingly invite him to a Bible study led by her intensely likable father who ended up joining him in holy matrimony to her. Such things seem only natural to induce such a swooney sense of allegiance. But I have always been more Augustinian-Calvinist than Troubadour, even when I didn’t know it.

While I share with Trueman the experience of Evangelicals having “…cared enough to reach out and engage me,” what is curiously absent his sentiment is what exactly it was that retained him. Since he has landed as a Presbyterian, I feel safe in assuming that it probably wasn’t, in Trueman’s words, a movement that “…requires the marginalizing of ecclesiastical distinctives.” I wonder what exactly happened between the Sinner’s Prayer and the affirmation of Dordt for Trueman that he yet feels so beholden. It must be that his trek from the Sawdust Trail to Geneva was a whole lot less embattled and fraught than mine. I don’t know how that could be. Maybe it just takes a keener skill set.

True enough, I may still smart over the Jesus-freak who notched me up on his spiritual bedpost and evaporated. Even so, I am not sure what I owe to Evangelicals, if anything. It isn’t so clear to me what I really owe those who may have gotten me in the door but left me to languish from the very beginning. My mother did teach me to offer thanks even for that which was less than fitting. But am I really supposed to be grateful to those who initiated a steady decline from the start, only to be burned-over by the time I stood at the trail-heads of Rome? Or would it be more appropriate to be thankful to those who were more concerned with keeping me than getting me?

By my lights, it seems one thing to be civil and gracious toward someone, quite another to be so manifestly obligatory. And I am not so sure that withholding warm plaudits is the same as “bashing evangelicals,” as Trueman puts it. After all, as one who places a high premium on maintaining happy familial relations with an extended family made up of Evangelicals, I really have no vested interest in bashing. But neither do I feel indebted in a Truemanian sense.

No, as I see it, my undying loyalties really should rest with the confessional Reformed Protestants. If it is all the same to the good Doctor, I think that such affinities and seminal allegiance actually should be ascribed to those who provided more gospel than gospel-ese. It may have been the Evangelicals who reached out and engaged me, but it was the confessionalists who taught me the basics of the faith and told me the true gospel. Indeed, like someone once said, I owe everything, all my theology, and much of my Christian nurture to such people.

Hart writes, “Apparently what we have here are rival ways of being open to evangelicals, of not being narrowly or parochially Reformed. In effect, WTS is now torn between Scott McKnight, Tim Keller and Richard Mouw’s sort of broad evangelicalism and Al Mohler, D. A. Carson and John Piper’s sort of Reformed evangelicalism.”

Maybe it takes having had personal experience in both mainline Protestantism and broad Evangelicalism to appreciate Hart’s point about the dueling taxonomies. But it is exactly this sort of acumen that allows one to be able to write something like “The Lost Soul of American Protestantism” and pin the point about how the correct taxonomies in American religion are not “conservative” or “liberal” but “confessional” and “Evangelical.” This is what allows ex-Liberal Thomas Oden to grasp just how Fundamentalists and Liberals have more in common than either would want to admit. Indeed, this goes to the very title of this blog: the wider household, made up of all sorts of traditions in American religion, is broadly Evangelical. It is those who are confessional that should feel quite in the Outhouse.

I almost swallowed my H. Upmann Churchill whole reading Dr. Scott Clark’s definition of an inductive bible study. To wit: An inductive bible study involves “the approach to Scripture whereby folk try to read it as if no one has ever read it before, where we sit in groups and pool ignorance. It’s the attempt to read Scripture outside of some confession or system.”

Of course the part that got me choking was the pooling ignorance part. And the sitting in groups part brought some pictures to mind that were very close to home. How well I remember the guilt I felt when I began to skip going to “care groups” because I suspected I was wasting time.

The article about which Dr. Clark is commenting above is in reference to inductive bible studies that are the hallmark of the Intervarsity para-church organization – an organization which has carved out a good foothold on many college campuses. Hence, they are dealing with intellectuals – folks who are in the process of being trained to think. So, even though you’d think that students are used to submitting to the authority of experts in their chosen fields of study, it turns out that this approach to religion may very well be the very thing one would expect on a college campus in America in the evangelical climate of the 21st century.

How so? First, rationalism is being groomed at our universities. So much does this come with the territory that such an assertion isn’t all that different from saying all bachelors are unmarried. Since my reason is the master, I don’t need any objective presuppositions in order to master these texts.

Second, the individualistic spirit in America hailing from the post-colonial days has fostered an I-can-do-it-myself attitude that most certainly has had its effect on religion. Nathan Hatch has written an insightful book entitled The Democratization of American Christianity which details the disestablishmentarian mindset that swept aside the notions that a minister might need to be educated to preach the gospel. To this day, American Christianity has a congenital distrust of outside help – which would include confessions, systems, dogmas.

Third, the evangelical climate today with its liberal bent for feeling the Christ within is tailor made for self expression. The thought of an ecclesiastical faith centered around word, sacrament and discipline is nowhere near as appealing as the apparent therapeutic value of  relating what the text means for you.

Finally, what better phrase than “there are no wrong answers” could one offer for a description of post-modernism. Of course, Horton is right when he says that post-modernism is really most-modernism, rationalism on human growth hormone.

Comments? What does this post mean to you? Don’t be shy, there are no wrong answers.