The Latest Heretical Movement

Last updated on: December 17, 2022 at 6:09 pm By Gene Veith

Among the signs of the End Times are false prophets, false Christs, and miracle workers. So in accord with the Advent theme of “watching,” this would be a good occasion to make ourselves aware of the latest heresy afflicting contemporary Christianity.

We Lutherans tend to be insulated from what is going on in other churches, but I suspect some of you from other traditions have encountered the New Apostolic Reformation.

Douglas Geivett and Holly Pivec have recently published a book entitled Counterfeit Kingdom: The Dangers of New Revelation, New Prophets, and New Age Practices in the Church. They have also written a guest post at the Patheos blog Theological Apologetics entitled The New Apostolic Reformation, A Threat Within The Church?

Here is how the post begins:

A dangerous set of teachings is shaping America’s worship songs, ministries, and political engagement. This new movement is influencing many churches and individual Christians, often without their realization.

The New Apostolic Reformation movement (NAR) is a popular, fast-growing movement of Christians who claim God is giving new revelation through new apostles and prophets. They say they are giving strategies the church requires for all Christians to learn to work miracles—such as prophesying, healing the sick, and raising the dead—and “bring heaven to earth.” This movement is called the New Apostolic Reformation because its leaders teach that a new reformation—much like the Protestant Reformation but even more significant—is underway. This reformation is bringing authoritative, governing apostles back to the church. All other church leaders, including pastors and elders, must “align” with them (a euphemism meaning they must submit to them). Those who follow the apostles will play a pivotal role in the unfolding of God’s end-time plans for the world. Those who don’t will sit on the sidelines as mere spectators.

The NAR emphasizes “signs and wonders,” including healing the sick, personal revelations, and other miracles. In this they are like other Pentecostals. But they take this to extremes, teaching that God always wants every sick person to be healed. They also incorporate what Geivett and Pivac call “New Age” practices, “examples being ‘prophetic activation exercises’ and the use of Christianized versions of tarot cards. NAR leaders claim New Agers have stolen practices from Christians and now they must be redeemed and reclaimed by Christians because they are important tools for advancing God’s kingdom.”

NAR is fixated on the End Times, but unlike most evangelicals with this interest, they seem to be post-Millennial. That is, they believe that Christians “bring on” the Second Coming of Christ by establishing a Christian kingdom on earth. This brings us to their “dominionism.” They believe that Christians should establish a theocratic rule over the whole earth. They will do so by fulfilling the Seven Mountain Mandate, establishing Christian dominance of the seven “mountains” of society: family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government. Again, Christians have long wanted to extend a Christian influence in these areas, as in all of life, but, again, NAR takes this to an extreme.

This is manifested, for example, in NAR political activism. Many of the most zealous “evangelical” supporters of Donald Trump, for example, are followers of the New Apostolic Reformation. They supported him not so much because he would appoint pro-life judges or the like, as other evangelicals did, but because they are convinced he fulfills Biblical prophecy and will help Christians attain political power.

NAR is selling its own translation of the Bible, the “Passion Translation,” which renders the Bible so that it supports NAR teachings and which, according to Geivett and Pivac, was “produced by a NAR apostle without expertise in the original languages who publicly claims that ‘secrets of the Hebrew language’ were ‘downloaded’ and ‘breathed’ into him by Jesus directly.”

This, in turn, brings us to the definitive teaching of the New Apostolic Reformation: the authority of God-inspired “apostles” and “prophets.” Geivett and Pivac say this about them:

The core NAR teaching—which separates NAR from all others—is that present-day apostles and prophets must govern the church. And influential NAR leaders have made it clear that—when it comes to church governance—apostles are first in God’s “order of priority.”. . .

NAR apostles and prophets also claim to receive face-to-face visits from Jesus and angels, to make trips to the courtroom of heaven, and to receive revelations for the global church.

The Wikipedia article on the movement says that it “seeks to establish a fifth branch within Christendom distinct from Catholicism, Protestantism, Oriental Orthodoxy, and Eastern Orthodoxy.” But since the movement conceives of itself as a “Reformation,” on a par with that of Luther, the NAR seeks to spread its influence beyond a few Pentecostal megachurches into all of Christianity.

In their book, Geivett and Pivac trace this influence, showing how, for example, much contemporary Christian music, including many popular praise songs used in contemporary worship–such as that of Hillsong–originated in the NAR movement.

The NAR emphasis on the Holy Spirit’s revelation through human leaders reminds me of a statement attributed to Luther. (If any of you know the source, please mention it in the comments.) He said that the “enthusiasts”–that is, those who look to a “God within” and expect direct revelations apart from God’s Word–are essentially the same as his other antagonist, the “papists,” who believe the Holy Spirit speaks through the Pope. Enthusiasts are actually worse because they have lots of popes, whereas Rome only has one.

As we contemplate the End Times for Advent, we must recall Christ’s own words when His disciples asked him about signs of the End. Among other things, He said, “false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect” (Matthew 24:24).

Notice that while “signs and wonders” were prominent in the days of the Old and New Testaments, in the last days, they will come from the other side! I am not aware of any spectacular miracles performed by the NAR folks, though they must claim some. To be sure, God can still heal people and perform other miracles, but emphasizing them and using them as evidence of spiritual validity–whether defending Catholicism by the miracles of the saints or NAR prophets claiming supernatural powers–should make us suspicious.

Christians are indeed inspired and empowered by the Holy Spirit. This happens when we read the Bible and hear the preaching of God’s Word. The Church is certainly apostolic, because it is grounded in the teachings of the Apostles who wrote the Bible. And the Gospel is about what God’s grace and the work of Christ do for us, not what do or our achievement of an earthly dominion. We do indeed take our faith into every area of society. This is called vocation. We do not put our hope in attaining earthly power and glory–God’s “is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever.” We put our hope in the cross of Jesus Christ and understand that we too must bear our crosses.

Scripture, Christ, Grace, Faith–that’s all we need. That’s the message of the Old Apostolic Reformation. And they are still all we need.

Illustration from Amazon.com

Premium Content

What Now After the “Respect for Marriage Act”?

Last updated on: December 11, 2022 at 4:45 pm By Gene Veith

0 Comments

Same-sex marriage is now the law of the land. It became so in 2015 when the Supreme Court so ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges, and now that judicial action has been written into statutory law with the House and the Senate passing, with significant support from Republicans, the “Respect for Marriage Act.”

That law provides protections for religious dissenters, though some observers say those protections are very weak. The debate about whether or not conservatives should get behind the legislation as “the best deal we can get” or reject it entirely is now over. The bill passed. It will take time and many lawsuits to find out exactly what its impact will be on religious liberty. But in the meantime, Christians with Biblical convictions about sex and marriage need to figure out where to go from here.

Some are saying that we should just split off Christian marriage from civil marriage. The state can define marriage any way it wants, while the church can be faithful to its own conviction and only marry men and women. I have heard some pastors say that they should just conduct weddings without even worrying about requiring the couple to get a marriage license from the government.

That would seem to solve the problem for both sides. The state could operate without religious considerations and the church could operate without legal considerations. Men could marry men and women could marry women at the courthouse. Or, if they wanted a religious wedding, they could find a mainline liberal Protestant congregation that would be happy to accommodate them. Conservative churches could not be compelled to perform the wedding–the text of Respect for Marriage Act includes that safeguard–so everyone should be happy. Right? Well, it is more complicated than that.

Jake Meador of Mere Orthodoxy has written a thoughtful, balanced, but ultimately orthodox discussion of the issue entitled Tolkien Was Right: Notes on the Respect for Marriage Act and the Post-Boomer Church. He notes that C. S. Lewis in his book Christian Behavior, later incorporated into Mere Christianity, proposes something similar in how the church might deal with the marriage issue of his day, the liberalization of divorce laws.

Lewis suggested having two tracks for marriage: church marriages, following the Christian view of marriage, would be for life, while civil marriages, following the current cultural norms, would be more permissive. Lewis’s friend J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of Lord of the Rings, vehemently disagreed.

An editor going through Tolkien’s papers after his death found in his copy of Christian Behavior a letter that he had written to his friend Lewis but never mailed. I’ll let Meador tell about it:

Tolkien objected strongly to the idea and wrote an aggressive letter to his friend saying so. “No item of Christian morality,” Tolkien said, “is valid only for Christians.”

In other words, Christian morality is human morality because Christianity is a true account of reality, including the human person. You can’t create bifurcations between a kind of privatized religious morality and the real public morality that governs our common life together. Tolkien continued,

The foundation is that (Christian morality) is the correct way of “running the human machine.” Your argument reduces it merely to a way of (perhaps?) getting extra mileage out of a few selected machines.

The horror of the Christians with whom you disagree (the great majority of all practicing Christians) at legal divorce is in the ultimate analysis precisely that: horror at seeing good machines ruined by misuse…. Toleration of divorce — if a Christian does tolerate it — is toleration of a human abuse, which it requires special local and temporary circumstances to justify (as does the toleration of usury) — if indeed either divorce or genuine usury should be tolerated at all, as a matter of expedient policy.

To be sure, sins and crimes are separate things. There are any number of sins that oughtn’t be made illegal and punishable by the government. But Tolkien here is not arguing for sectarianism or theocracy.

He is merely insisting that we flirt with disaster when we presuppose that the moral law and our nation’s civil laws have (basically) nothing to do with one another. If you can change civil laws in ways that make them explicitly contrary to God’s moral law, Tolkien thinks, you’re headed for trouble.

Later, Meador quotes Tolkien again on how

Elsewhere in his letter to Lewis, he said that the disorders and abuses brought about by more permissive divorce laws would never be limited to more permissive divorce laws:

Wrong behavior (if it is really wrong on universal principles) is progressive, always: it never stops at being “not very good,” “second best” – it either reforms, or goes on to third-rate, bad, abominable.

Of course, an ignorance about the most basic human community in creation —the family — will inevitably manifest as more general confusion about human community writ large. And so here we are.

Indeed, we have gone from controversy over divorce to controversy over same-sex marriage. Today, the church–even conservative churches, except for Catholics–have pretty much come to accept the state’s easy-going divorce laws. Do you think churches will eventually do the same with same-sex marriage?

A two-track marriage system is especially problematic for us Lutherans and other Protestants who deny that marriage is a sacrament. Strictly speaking, as the Reformers insisted, marriage has to do with God’s Temporal Kingdom. Yes, in marriage God joins together a man and a woman (Matthew 19:3-12), but he does so by working through the civil authorities. Marriage is not a sacrament, but a vocation. It is not just for Christians, but for everyone. That doesn’t prevent marriage from being an image of Christ and the church (Ephesians 5: 22-33), and it is certainly appropriate for marriages to be blessed by the church and for pastors to preside at weddings. But a courthouse wedding is just as valid.

I would add that even though marriage falls under the purview of civil authority, that doesn’t mean civil magistrates can define marriage any way they please. Those whom God does not join together cannot be joined together by the state.

So where does that leave us? Help me out here.

It seems to me that Christians who get married should still follow civil law, getting a marriage license where that is legally required, and pastors should still do whatever paperwork they need to do in order to say, “By the authority invested in me by the state of [whatever], I now pronounce you husband and wife.”

Right now, the law, however it distorts marriage, does not prevent Christian marriage. The law allows divorce for any reason, but Christians, for the most part, should not avail themselves of that option. Christians with same-sex attraction should strive for celibacy and not get married to someone of their same sex, even though the law allows them to do so.

As for the controversy between Tolkien and Lewis, I think that Tolkien is right and that Lewis made an uncharacteristic mistake. But the church may not have a choice in the matter. Meador was writing when Christian were debating whether or not to support the Respect for Marriage Act, and I don’t think they should have. But now that it has been passed–and if the religious liberty issues turn out to be as onerous as come critics predict–something like a two-track system may be forced upon us, whether we agree with that or not.

And in other ways, Christian marriages may well come to look more and more different from the secular versions, in which many opposite-sex couples are emulating same-sex couples, for whom sex has nothing to do with conceiving children, to the point of not having children at all.

HT: Steve Bauer

Illustration: “Groom and Groom” by j4p4n via Openclipart, Public Domain

Premium Content

Come, Lord Jesus

Last updated on: November 25, 2022 at 4:41 pm By Gene Veith

0 Comments

We’ve been worrying about politics and sorting through political theories. But Advent is a good time to remember that ultimately none of that matters. The true King has come and is coming again.

The word “advent” is Latin for “come to.” Jesus has not only come, He has “come to” us. He is not only coming again, He is “coming to” us. On that little preposition hangs the Gospel. Yes, He comes to be our judge, as the Te Deum praises, but His coming above all is to us and for us, so as to save us.

In Advent, we meditate on Christ’s coming as celebrated in Christmas, reflecting on the Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah. We also meditate on Christ’s second coming, which we await in hope, just as the Old Testament saints awaited His first coming.

So we pray, “Come, Lord Jesus!” That prayer is the next to the last verse of the Bible (Revelation 22:20), going from the apocalyptic account of what that will be like and what it will mean to the prayer of the church until that happens. It was indeed the prayer of the earliest church as evidenced in St. Paul’s interjection into his Greek epistle of a word in Aramaic, the language of Jesus: Maranatha, which can mean either “O Lord, come!” or “the Lord has come”–both of the senses of Advent.

“Come, Lord Jesus” is echoed in the Common Table Prayer beloved by Lutherans (“Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest/And let these gifts to us be blessed”) which seems like a simple children’s prayer, but is much more, asking for Christ’s presence–a pervasive theme of Lutheran theology–with the family at mealtime, alluding to the teaching that Christ is present in vocation as we love and serve and provide for each other.

At any rate, “Come, Lord Jesus” is the ultimate Advent prayer. Notice how often we pray that phrase in our Advent hymns; for example, “”Savior of the Nations, Come” and “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.”

Philip Jenkins reminds us of an ancient variation, found in the Didache (c.100AD): “Maranatha! Come Lord Jesus. And let the present world pass away!”

Yes, let it! That is an important aspect of Christ’s return! With His second coming, “the former things”–the kingdoms of this world, the first heaven, the first earth, death, mourning, pain–“have passed away” (Revelation 21:1-4).

Living in anticipation of that passing away means that we do not have to be preoccupied with such things, since we know that they will not last and that something better awaits us, either when Christ comes again or when we leave them behind when we die.

But isn’t our life on earth important? Isn’t focusing on the other world a form of spiritual escapism? Aren’t we responsible to obey God by fighting evils and making this world a better place?

Of course, but I think that the perspective that comes from knowing that this world and its kingdoms will pass away and that Christ will “make all things new” (Revelations 21:5) can make us more effective in this world. As C. S. Lewis said in Mere Christianity, “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.”

This is because their hope never fails, despite the setbacks they may encounter, and because they can be confident of the ultimate victory of righteousness in Christ’s judgment. They can act freely, without feeling the burden that everything rests on themselves. And they can act without succumbing to the temptations of power and the disappointments of failed utopias, since they realize their own limitations and the limitations of human ideologies. Such a mindset can help us as we fulfill all of our vocational duties, including our duties of citizenship.

Illustration: “The Last Judgment” by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Premium Content

Identity for the Christian

Last updated on: November 13, 2022 at 9:55 am By Gene Veith

0 Comments

People today are obsessed with identity, probably because they have become cut off from the traditional sources of identity formation, such as family, church, and community. Instead, many people are trying to find their identity in their gender, race, nation, or sexual practices.

Contemporary thought encourages people to define their identity by getting in touch with their victimhood and considering how they are oppressed. This is evident not only in critical race and gender theory, but also in the grievance politics that animates the right as well as the left.

Christians, though, are to find their identity elsewhere. It is astonishing how directly the Scriptures address the preoccupations of our time and put them in their place:

For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:27-28)

For the baptized, their identity is found in Christ. Indeed, their identity is Christ, In the previous verse, St. Paul says, “for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith” (Galatians 3:26). Christ Jesus is the Son of God. Now those who have faith are sons of God.

This goes into the heart of the Atonement: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). We are cursed for violating God’s law, as the chapter explains. But Christ identified with us, in His incarnation, in bearing our sin, and in “becoming a curse for us” by “hanging on a tree.” So now the promise of eternal blessing made to the Offspring of Abraham–that is, Christ–is the promise to us.

When God sees us, He sees Jesus, because we have “put on Christ.” He sees not our sinfulness but Christ’s righteousness. Christ has our identity, so now we have Christ’s identity. Our identity is no longer based on worldly categories, which were operative then and are still operative now.

“There is neither Jew nor Greek.” Our ethnic, national, cultural, or racial identity no longer applies. Neither to our relationship to God, or, as St. Paul is exhorting, to Christians’ relationships with each other.

“There is neither slave nor free.” Our social status, our economic position, our place in society no longer define our identity. And, importantly to today’s issues, as to the slaves who flocked to the church in the Greco-Roman world, our identity is not to be found in our victimhood and our oppression.

“There is neither male nor female.” We are not to find our identity in sex or gender. Not in feminism or the men’s movement, nor in trying to change our gender or in fixating on our sexual proclivities.

It isn’t that all of these categories don’t exist or are not important. They are part of our physical creation and our social and cultural life. The Bible has much to say about them all. But they are not to be identity-defining.

I suspect that the reason so many Christians today miss the power of this Word of God and are often as confused about their identity as everyone else is that we have neglected and failed to realize the magnitude of baptism.

The ultimate signifier of identity is our name. Each of us has a distinct and individual name, according to which we are distinguished from everyone else. Our parents gave us our name, and, in our culture, our family name–either that of our parents and forebears or of the new family that began with marriage–is part of our individual name.

In the rite of baptism, we are named. That is to say, God names us. He gives us our identity. Yes, parents give the pastor the name that they have picked out for the child, or an adult being baptized formally tells the pastor what his or her name is, but the statement of the baptismal candidate’s name is an important part of the rite. Historically, what a person is named at baptism, as recorded on the baptismal certificate, became the official, legal name. This is why a person’s “first name” has been called the “Christian name,” referring to the name given at the “christening.”

And then, most importantly, the name of God is attached to person’s name. In the rubrics of the Lutheran Service Book, the pastor says this as he pours the water over the candidate:

Name, I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

What makes a baptism is not just water but the water plus the name of the Triune God. “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19).

Yes, all of these other things help make us who we are. Their effacement in baptism does not take away the created or the social orders, even as they apply in the church. This says nothing about vocation, other than the call of the Holy Spirit in the Gospel as given in baptism. Our “ID”cards might record our various secondary identities. But our primary identity, the deepest reaches of the self, our individual essence that will live forever, is to be in Christ.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Luther’s Cultural Influence

Last updated on: November 9, 2022 at 1:59 pm By Gene Veith

0 Comments

Following up on our post about the Reformation’s political influence, I offer today a reflection on the Reformation’s cultural influence.

The conservative Methodist Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, has written an article for World entitled Our great debt to the Reformation. Though he speaks of the Reformation generally, he specifically references Martin Luther. Here is Tooley’s take:

Arguably, Protestantism created modernity. That’s either a blessing or a curse, depending whom you might ask. Catholic and Eastern Orthodox critics fault Protestantism for modernity’s failures, including radical autonomous individualism, rabid secularism, ideological extremisms, and hedonism. Humanity would be more in sync with its Creator if Christianity had remained moored to the authority and continuity of Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, they say.

These Catholic and Orthodox arguments have some traction, but they are far from the whole story. By stressing humanity’s direct access to God and the Bible, stressing salvation through faith alone, and also uplifting non-ecclesial vocations and marital life, Protestantism ennobled and liberated much of humanity. Modern literacy, modern science, modern markets and capitalism, constitutional democracy and human rights were all advanced by the Reformation, and in a decisive way. . . .

Luther’s insistence on human direct access to God through Christ dethroned the medieval church’s grasping after inordinate spiritual and temporal power. His stress on direct reading of the Bible by laity in their own language facilitated mass literacy, in order that the Bible might be read. His translation of the Bible into German, amid endless pamphleteering, helped launch modern publishing. His departure from the celibate priesthood, and his wife’s departure from the convent, into a happy marital union, elevated marriage, and family, into godly estates no less than celibacy.

His stress on scholarship and translation from original sources, accompanied by rational discernment apart from direct ecclesial control, contributed to a broadening of scientific analysis and discovery, with free inquiry. His affirmations of professions outside the church dignified labor, trade, and finance, further enabling modern markets. His stress on private conscience and rejection of unquestioned ecclesial authority undermined political and ecclesial authoritarianism. After the Reformation, there was increasing expectation that governance was no longer the exclusive preserve of a favored few but now was a project involving all God’s creatures.

And yet, I wonder if Protestantism created modernity, for better or worse. Certainly, Luther was hearkening back to a more ancient way of thinking when he took his stand on the Bible as the source and norm of the Christian life. In the same way, the Renaissance was seeking a cultural rebirth by recovering the insights of the ancient Greeks and Roman. The move was backwards in time, not forward. Both Luther and Erasmus considered the Medieval scholasticism of their time to be “modern” and sought to recover something older.

Tooley is certainly right about Luther’s emphasis on faith, education, family, and vocation. But when he extrapolates Luther’s translation from the original sources in the Biblical languages–a principle of Renaissance scholarship–into the rise of science and technology, and when he credits Luther for the rise of capitalism, I am not convinced. Calvin is usually credited, or blamed, for the rise of trade, finance, modern markets, and, hence, capitalism. Luther believed countries should stick to their own resources and not trade for things they didn’t need, and he discouraged the pursuit of wealth. He may have been naive about that, but he wasn’t “modern.” There is a huge difference between Luther and Calvin, which other Protestants (as well as Catholics) seem oblivious to.

Tooley’s Reformation sounds more like the Enlightenment, plus evangelicalism. The missing link is Pietism, whose emphasis on human experience led naturally to an emphasis on the human mind.

Moravian Pietists converted John Wesley, who gave us Methodism, which is Tooley’s tradition. And though some Pietists held on to Luther’s theology, others went in other directions, opposing Lutheran orthodoxy in favor of a more individualistic and later more “enlightened” faith. That is to say, they became more “modern.”

But just as we don’t have to accept the progressive paradigm of human society getting better and better, we don’t have to accept the Procrustean bed of pre-modern, modern, and post-modern. Those categories are far too broad to capture the nuances of history. Surely there was a huge difference between the classical and the medieval–are both “pre-modern”? And what about the differences between ancient Greece and ancient Rome? And where does Romanticism fit in? Is it “modern” like Enlightenment rationalism is modern?

Suffice it to say that reforming the church around the Gospel of Christ and the Word of God, as inaugurated by Luther, was much needed. And it did a great deal of good, not only for European culture but for the world. And that in our broken culture today we would do well to draw on that influence again.

Illustration: “Luther Making Music in the Circle of His family” by Gustav Spangenberg (ca. 1875), Museum der bildenden Künste, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Premium Content

The Political Influence of the Reformation

Last updated on: November 9, 2022 at 1:58 pm By Gene Veith

0 Comments

In this political season and amidst the debates about liberal democracy, we would do well to reflect on the political influence of the Reformation.

Hillsdale professor of politics Adam Carrington sums up that influence in his RealClear Religion article On October 31, Remember the Political Contributions of the Reformation.

With the Reformation teaching of “Sola Scriptura,” he says, the authority of a written text (the Bible) was held to be greater than that of a human ruler (the Pope). This gave us the concept of the rule of law, particularly as seen in the role of the American Constitution.

“Sola Scriptura” also led to the push for universal education, so that people of both genders and from every walk of life could read God’s Word. “This massive expansion of who could read opened the door for increased political participation, both based on Biblical principles and on the increased capacity to read other documents besides Scripture, such as political pamphlets and newspapers.”

The doctrine of the priesthood of all believers did away with spiritual hierarchies and so undermined political hierarchies. “The equality of human beings before God naturally bolstered ideas of human equality in the political realm.”

The concept of “covenant,” an emphasis to be found among the Reformed more than the Lutheran, had to do with a binding agreement, both between God and man (in the Bible) and also between other human beings (as in the Mayflower Compact). This, says Prof. Carrington, would lead to social contract theory, according to which “legitimate governments are formed by the people agreeing among themselves and/or with a ruler on a state’s purposes, procedures, and structures.”

I’m glad to see that Prof. Carrington also recognized the importance of the doctrine of vocation. This teaching exalted “the dignity of the common man.” This teaching “recognized dignity in all persons’ work and carried political implications to codify that view into law. In our own time, when some tend to denigrate working-class jobs, this Reformation principle defends the dignity of all work and thus of all workers.”

The Reformation also contributed to the rise of the nation-state, with its emphasis on local rulers (as opposed to the Holy Roman Emperor) and the development of national churches (as opposed to transnational Catholicism). “Contra global, transnational trends, Protestantism often reinforced national identities even as it saw underlying unity among churches across national borders. Thus, current movements seeking to respect and preserve the nation-state and the goods attending it owe a great debt to the Reformers.”

In light of the current controversies, all of this makes me think that those of us in the Reformation tradition should be in favor of liberal democracy, Constitutionalism, and small government conservatism. And, indeed, most of the “integralists”–who have problems with individual liberty and popular rule, who prefer a more authoritarian “big government conservatism,” and who get nostalgic about multi-national empires over individual nation-states–are Catholics.

Illustration: “The Dream of Frederic the Wise of Saxony” by Jan Barentsz. Muyckens (1643), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. [Referring to an alleged dream the Elector had on the night before Luther posted his theses, of a monk writing something on the door of the Castle Church with a quill so long that it reached to Rome and knocked the tiara off the pope’s head.]

Premium Content