In two words, “sphere sovereignty.” That Craig Bartholomew, in Contours of the Kuyperian Tradition,  has a full chapter on Kuyperian sphere sovereignty shows (to me at least) his attunement to the issues still alive today but also to the issues Kuyper himself was facing.

First, the context for Kuyper’s theory of sphere sovereignty:

The overwhelming background of Kuyper’s concept of sphere sovereignty is the reconstruction of nations and societies that developed out of the Enlightenment. [revolutionary starting all over again] … Their challenge was to develop an alternative, modern, Christian philosophy of society, and this culminated in the doctrine of sphere sovereignty (132).

It starts with Calvin: “1. the sovereignty of God; 2. God s authority over human and state life; 3. the relative freedom of each sphere of life under God; 4. the divine origin of the state to preserve humankind in the face of sin; 5. the mutual obligation of rulers and subjects in constituting civil society; 6. the antirevolutionary spirit of obedience on behalf of the citizens; 7. the necessity of positive civil law; and 8. the possibility of just government flowing from the common grace of God” (133). [SMcK: I’d like to see these, esp. 3, documented in Calvin himself. I don’t doubt this being accurate; I’d like to see it in Calvin myself.]

Bartholomew then discusses Johannes Althusius, Friedrich Julius Stahl (denies state absolutism) and then Groen van Prinsterer (with an echo or two of Francke in Germany’s Lutheran pietism). Again at issue is the authority of man and reason in the revolutionary spirit of the age; the counter was the authority of Scripture, gospel and church. This sets the stage for Kuyper and Dutch Calvinism, a kind of worldview still very attractive to many in the USA.

On Prinsterer, this summary from Bartholomew, with important themes for comprehending Kuyper himself:

As a good Calvinist, for Groen van Prinsterer God is sovereign, and all authority comes from him and should be subject to him. He remained a monarchist and advocated against separating church and state. He did not emphasize distinct spheres over against the state. He defended some autonomy in the lower spheres but viewed society as a hierarchy around the central organ of the state. In his battle for education reform, he stressed the rights of parents and sought to decentralize control of schools, arguing for the control of provinces and local communities as opposed to central government; he did not, however, recognize the nonpolitical character of family life and education (137).

The crucial section in this chp is the Kuyperian tradition itself. It begins with God’s sovereignty, and God alone. Does God delegate authority to one sphere or to many? Here is Kuyper:

Call the parts of this one great machine “cogwheels,” spring-driven on their own axles, or “spheres,” each animated with its own spirit. The name or image is unimportant, so long as we recognize that there are in life as many spheres as there are constellations in the sky and that the circumference of each has been drawn on a fixed radius from the center of a unique principle, namely the apostolic injunction hekastos en toi idioi tagmati [“each in its own order’ 1 Cor 15:23]. Just as we speak of a “moral world,” a “scientific world,” a “business world,” the “world of art,” so we can more properly speak of a “sphere” of morality, of the family, of social life, each with its own domain. And because each comprises its own domain, each has its own Sovereign within its bounds (138, quoting from Kuyper’s famous address).

In other words, Babel-like, God disperses authority/sovereignty into spheres, each with its own. This is a clear case of anti-absolutism in state, and that concern about the state shapes Kuyper’s theory. The state protects the sacredness of each sphere.

There is no earthly power above the state, and thus the vitality of the life spheres is crucial if the state is to be constrained to play its role without undue interference in the spheres. Kuyper is clear that God instituted the state to mediate his justice on earth. But it cannot and should not interfere in the tasks of the other spheres. However, when one sphere violates the boundaries of another, it is the states duty to intervene and protect the boundaries of the different spheres (139). [SMcK: I don’t know political history enough, but this sounds a bit like Erastianism.]

Sphere sovereignty is created; state sovereignty is not. Jesus broke the power of the state to restore faith as the foundation for the spheres. SMcK: someone must have studied the relationship of the separation of church and state in comparison with sphere sovereignty.

Without faith the whole thing collapses into the authority of humans and reason and state. Creation, then, is contingent or it all becomes idolatrous. All human authority then is delegated by God, not determined by man (Montesquieu and Paine, hear that). Each sphere then gains its meaning in its proper relation to God.

The spheres are interrelated and interact with one another. If they do not there develops dualism and thus each can be misdirected. Thus, Kuyper fought for a Christian version of each sphere (144-145, as I read him). But withdrawal, Bartholomew argues, is for reengagement.

On government:

Sphere sovereignty is insightful in its recognition of the importance of government as a gift from God to restrain evil and establish public justice. Inherently, the Kuyperian tradition is thus positive toward government and has much vested in encouraging Christians to respect the state and to be model citizens. But it unequivocally rejects any absolutization of the state, since this would be to bow the knee to Caesar. The state has a unique but limited role. It is the sphere of spheres in the sense that it is there to ensure the freedom of the different spheres and to ensure that they do not unfairly encroach on each other (147).

On church:

Sphere sovereignty is particularly helpful in delineating a sphere that all Christians have a vested interest in, namely the institutional church. It is vital to distinguish between the gathered church for worship (the institutional church) and the life of the people of God as a whole. The institutional church is qualified philosophically as a structure by faith and is all about worship in the narrow sense of the word, about the Word, faith, prayer, sacraments. The institutional church is there as our mother in the faith to continually nurture our trust in and dependence on the living God, who has come to us in Jesus Christ. A church can engage in many activities, but worship and the formation of disciples through Word and sacrament must always be central to its life (148). [SMcK: what I care about here is not discussed; the minimization of church as one sphere alongside others, and this description seems to make it only a group at worship.]

On apartheid:

The Kuyperian tradition is controversial in South Africa because of its use to support apartheid. Kuyper himself is partially responsible for this. … His critique of British arrogance and imperialism is valid, but disastrously, in his defense of the Boers, he affirms as a virtue their refusal to socialize with “inferior” black Africans: [he quotes Kuyper here:] The Boers are not sentimental but men of practical genius. They understood that the Hottentots and the Bantus were an inferior race, and that to put them on a footing of equality with the whites, in their families, in society, and in politics, would be simple folly.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was especially among the liberal tradition in South Africa, much of which was Christian, that voices could be heard calling for justice for all in South Africa.78 Alan Paton (1903-1988) was one such voice.

… but there is no direct line between sphere sovereignty and apartheid. … Hie view of the state as being there to provide public justice for all citizens runs entirely counter to the sort of oppression of the majority experienced under apartheid. It
is a tragedy and a scar on Kuyper s thought that he was so inconsistent when it came to black Africans.

In my academic life — from my college days until today — I have heard the Yeas and the Nays about developing a Christian worldview. As a college student I read Francis Schaeffer and Hans Rookmaaker and came away with a worldview. They were advocating worldview as a theory. Those were heady days for someone like me who had not been exposed to alternatives.

A few years back I read David Naugle’s Worldview. I found Steve Wilkens and Mark Sandford’s Hidden Worldviews.

So it was interesting to read Craig Bartholomew’s discussion of worldview — actually defense of worldview theory — in his Contours of the Kuyperian Tradition. Bartholomew contends, and it seems quite reasonable to me, that as we know it today the worldview theory is a Kuyperian and Reformed tradition.

Worldview theory changed Bartholomew’s life as a South African:

Naming it was huge; it enabled me to see that the gospel is comprehensive and relates to all of life as God has made it, including politics, which was the rubicon one dared not cross as an ordinary South African evangelical. I had been locked into a type of Christianity that provided a church view, but now the whole of creation opened up before me as the theater of God’s glory. My faith remained as real, but the vista before me opened up immeasurably…. In fact, quite the reverse; it enabled me to see that the gospel could and should be brought to bear critically on all aspects of life, including the racism of apartheid in South Africa.

Worldview language emerges out of Kant, Schelling, Hegel and then found a Christian counter-point worldview in the Scotsman James Orr and Dutch Abraham Kuyper. Kuyper’s famous book is called Lectures on Calvinism. As such, from the outset Christian worldview countered modernity and modernism and liberalism.

His focus is Kuyper:

Calvinism, on the other hand, is a worldview because it developed a distinctive theology and church order, and then a form for political and social life, through which one could interpret the world order, and finally a distinctive approach to art and science.

It operates with a relationship with God, with others, and with the world. Thus, redemption is first and it is not Kuyperian worldview until redemption is acknowledged as it is redemption that works into the fallen human being. Only the redeemed can perceive the world as God intends it to be perceived. In relationship with others Kuyper was big on equality of all humans as fallen and in need of redemption and made in the image of God, so there is an inherent democratic theory of life. The redeemed human then knows how to perceive the world as God’s creation and the theater of God’s glory.

It is important to Kuyperian thinking that all humans are fallen and cannot know God’s way apart from revelation and redemption. Unlike Carl Henry and Francis Schaeffer there is a stronger emphasis against the autonomy of human reason in Kuyper.

Modern proponents include James Sire but it is a pity Bartholomew doesn’t interact with Wilken and Sanford, whose book is an outstanding teaching book.

What are the problems with worldview theory?

1. 1. It intellectualizes the gospel.
2. It universalizes the gospel.
3. It relativizes the gospel.
4. It becomes disconnected from Scripture and thus becomes vulnerable to the spirits of the age.
5. Rather than leading to the transformation of society, a worldview entrenches middle-class Christianity and leads to unhealthy messianic activism.

How does Bartholomew define worldview?

Worldview is an articulation of the basic beliefs embedded in a shared grand story which are rooted in a faith commitment and which give shape and direction to the whole of our individual and corporate lives.

In his exceptional book Contours of the Kuyperian Tradition, Craig Bartholomew lays out five models of how Christians relate to the world, or how they perceive what they do in terms of the mission of God in the world. Or, to use terms philosophers like, five models of the relationship of nature and grace. Here they are:

1. Grace against nature (gratia contra naturam) (Anabaptism)
2. Grace over nature (gratia supra naturam) (Roman Catholicism)
3. Grace alongside nature (gratia iuxta naturam) (Lutheranism)
4. Grace within nature (gratia intra naturam) (Calvinism)
5. Grace equals nature (gratia instar naturae) (liberalism)

For Bartholomew, who has written the best explanation and exposition of Kuyperianism I have read, and I consider both Kuyper’s own work as well as Rich Mouw’s to be very good, the Calvinist view/Kuyperian view wins. Which means, #4 wins.

Here are some of the big ideas of this most important chapter two: (1) it’s about grace restoring nature, which means grace restoring all of nature and not just the spiritual life. Thus,

Kuyper points out that in the Reformed confessions it is clear that everything in this world has Christ as its aim and that the body of Christ is at the center of God s work in history so that we can and must say that “the church of Christ constitutes the center of world history.” [SMcK: I’ll get to a particular criticism I have of what’s being said here, but I want to keep to Bartholomew’s description of Kuyper and Bavinck first.]

Kuyper makes clear through this chain of questions that the work of Christ extends beyond the salvation of individuals to include the renewal of the entire creation. God s grace in Christ thus certainly saves individuals but is also aimed at restoring the creation and leading history toward that destination for which it was always intended.

The danger for Kuyper is dualism, a spiritual life and a secular life. It creates, he contends, a vocational pyramid in which pastors and missionaries do what’s most important while everyone else gets by with their lesser callings.

(2) Behind the grace of redemption is common grace, or God’s restoring graces to all humans and creation this side of the Fall.

(3) Redemptive grace, thus, penetrates into every facet of life. Here Kuyper expresses himself in ways that everyone Kuyperian likes but I sense some inadequacies.

… that he will one day triumph over all enemies in that world; and that the culmination will be not that Christ will gather around himself some individual souls, as is presently the case, but that he will reign as King upon a new earth under a new heaven—then of course all this becomes entirely different and it becomes immediately apparent that grace is inseparably linked to nature, that grace and nature belong together.

The question becomes for Whom and Over what does he reign?

(4) Kuyper thinks “re-creation” is better than creating anew. Bartholomew steps in to clarify that the famous lines of 2 Peter 3:10 are not about destruction so much as purgation.

(5) Bavinck raises Kuyper’s thought to a higher level. “The natural,” he says, “is just as divine as the church” (46). This one beggars definitions but Bartholomew doesn’t provide them. Grace for Bavinck affirms and restores nature. Resurrection and incarnation are important, and thus so too is culture making.

(6) In this chp, then, Bartholomew turns to the five models above as they were developed by Al Wolter, and then he turns into evaluation of each, reserving special evaluation of both the Anabaptist view and the Lutheran view.  He admits contemporary Anabaptists — Thomas Finger, Yoder, Hauerwas — are more nuanced than the “grace against nature” or what Niebuhr called Christ against culture.

A few observations:

First, Bartholomew’s sketch of the Kuyperian-Bavinckian tradition does not have an adequate theory of World, the Powers or systemic evil at work. It’s all about restoring grace penetrating culture and society. More needs to be said here. When powers and world emerge in this chp it is because of the anabaptists, and rather than grabbing them for Kuyper he assigns them to the anabaptists.

Second, there is insufficient attention to the redemptive threshold that alone marks the Christian from the world that then marks the threshold into the church vis a vis the world, which then creates the anabaptist theory of the church as politics, the church as restored grace.

Third, in spite of his attention to eschatology it is left anemic and general. What will happen in that Eschaton determines what is done here and now. That is a theme he presses for Kuyper but once one admits that systemic structures will be destroyed and the Powers rule we need to have on the table the War with the World in a nature-grace conversation and not just an influentialism and transformationalism.

He admits this:

Where the Kuyperian tradition needs to listen carefully to the Anabaptist tradition is in its stress on the extent to which the fall penetrates public life. Especially in separatist groups such as the Amish, we often witness a radical alternative to the global consumer culture of which most Christians in the West form a relatively uncritical part. The Anabaptist tradition prophetically provides a conscience for Kuyperians in terms of the extent to which we have uncritically become complicit in the misdirected structures of creation. Kuyperians readily affirm cultural development, but amid global consumerism and the industrial military complex, groups such as the Amish and the Anabaptists in general raise in an acute fashion the question of the creational norms for development.

I really like this admission. It’s right. Now I want to see it played out in his nature-grace discussion.

This is what he says on Bonhoeffer:

For Bonhoeffer the world is the place of concrete responsibility, which is given to us in Christ. He articulates a keen sense of the particularity of implacement: our task is not to transform the world but “to do what is necessary K at the given place and with a due consideration of reality.” Grace comes to the human in his or her place, and it is in this place that we are called to hear and respond to Christ’s call. “The calling is the call of Jesus Christ to belong wholly to Him; it is the laying claim to me by Christ at the place at which this call has found me; it embraces work with things and relations with persons; it demands a ‘limited field of accomplishments,’ yet never as a value in itself, but in responsibility towards Jesus Christ.’
’

[I don’t know how he can then say this:] Bonhoeffer s theology seems to me far closer to a transformational worldview than to the paradoxical vision. [DB says “our task is not to transform the world” but he wants him to be more Kuyperian than he was/is.]

How do Christians relate to their cultures, their communities, their states and their nations? There was a time when many Western nations — northern and southern hemispheres — were “Christian nations” in that they had institutionalized a state church. Think England, think Scotland, think the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, think Denmark, think Italy, think South Africa, think Brazil, think Mexico.

Today’s world is not the same. We need to think again.

Which is what Craig Bartholomew is doing in his new book, Contours of the Kuyperian Tradition.

American Christianity, especially the evangelical sort, operates on some kind of spectrum between between Kuyperian and Niebuhrian thinking, and perhaps the Niebuhrian model of “transformation” or “influentialism” (Niebuhr: Christ the transformer of culture) are the simplest ways of expressing this approach. The Christian is to be the “salt and light” in society, influencing the society toward the ways of God (often called the kingdom of God) and even transforming society into a far more Christian society (which quickly starts to veer toward Constantinianism at some level).

At two different periods in my life I decided to read more on the Kuyperian tradition, mostly because those around me were so Kuyperian (or something like it). The first time I simply read Lectures on Calvinism, Kuyper’s famous book. The second time I read Bratt’s Abraham Kuyper and then I read his collection of essays by Kuyper, and then to get a solid Kuyperian reading of Kuyper, I read some essays by Rich Mouw (in which he engaged Yoder) and then read his little book Abraham Kuyper. I have considered my guide to Kuyper, and I have used his summaries even when I would like to express them in different ways. Kuyper studies are flourishing today with some reprints and new prints of Kuyper’s works.

Kuyperianism is a tempting totalism when it comes to Christian and society. Parts of it are undeniably the best thinking we have; terms are used that irritate this Bible professor; the activism advocated by Kuyper is noble. But I have my differences, some of them so major I can’t call myself Kuyperian.

But I’m willing to listen, and so to Bartholomew I’m listening (and getting a little irritated already).

Bartholomew is a South African, so he begins with the church (Reformed Christianity) in South Africa, and he notes the ever present temptation to Constantinian alignments (he doesn’t use this expression) to align with a party:

Ethically, a political party is simply inadequate as the final authority, and yet when under pressure it is appeal to the party that we hear again and again.

This describes too much of Christianity in the USA and in some nations with church-state relations. His point is important from a South African.

The issue is how. How does the church relate to the society when the church is losing credibility? I like what Bartholomew argues:

Numbers alone will not avail in developing countries if Christians do not attend to (1) plausibility structures and (2) worldviews.

Plausibility is an embodied reality so close to the ground it creates believability.

Plausibility refers to the personal, communal, and social embodiment of the life of the kingdom so that when Christians do speak they are listened to.

Here is where I get nervous about Bartholomew.

Mission is easily reduced to evangelism and church activities, and indispensable as these indeed are, mission is much broader. As David Bosch points out, “Mission is more than and different from recruitment to our brand of religion; it is alerting people to the universal reign of God.”

I like David Bosh though I think his “missio Dei” theory has a whole lot more pizzazz in name that in reality, and it has less in Bible and theology than it admits, but it’s everybody’s lingo or buzz term. (As with the word “missional” or “incarnation.”) More importantly, when we speak of church activities as too narrow and is not “recruitment to our brand of religion” who will agree with pejorative language like that? Who doesn’t want to “alert” people to the “universal” vision called the “reign of God”? Well, I do because what do we mean by “alert”? Is it different than what the Bible teaches about “evangelism”? And what does “universal” mean here? Sounds good but could wind its way into universalism or water itself down to “common grace.” And “reign” of God starts to sound like late 19th Century Germany’s decision to move kingdom away from its Jewish and territorial context and start sound like common grace, cultural Christianity, or even like 20th Century evangelicalism’s decision to turn “reign” into “personal decision for Jesus.”

I know Bartholomew’s a sophisticated thinker so I’ll be reading him in front of you for awhile and see where he takes us!

The numbers are imbalanced: far more are leaving Catholicism or Orthodoxy for evangelicalism (in a broad sense, including Pentecostalism) than leaving evangelicalism for Catholicism or Orthodoxy. If Catholic leaders are concerned about the exodus of Catholics for evangelicalism, some evangelical leaders are concerned with evangelicals crossing the Tiber.

One who is is Ken Stewart, and in the last chapter of his book In Search of Ancient Roots he describes what appear to me to be his impressions and conclusions of why evangelicals turn toward Catholicism and in some cases Orthodoxy. Here are his six conclusions:

For some, a return to the church of one’s upbringing.

The search for the “historic church” as a haven from sectarianism.

The desire for liturgical and doctrinal stability.

Attraction to a style of worship that is “objective.”

An admiration for the Catholic intellectual and theological tradition.

A strong tendency, long present in American evangelicalism, to aim at recovering the “primitive” yet in eclectic fashion.

In the book Hauna Ondrey and I wrote called Finding Faith, Losing Faith, I outlined the following reasons why evangelicals on the basis of the reasons converts give. These reasons emerge from my study of the “crisis” phase of religious conversion, and I call this “Leaving Wheaton, Finding Rome”:

A desire for transcendence is a crisis about the limitations of the human condition and a desire to go beyond the ordinary human experience. This occurs, for the ERC [evangelical conversion to Roman Catholicism], in four manifestations. First, the ERC wants to transcend the human limits of knowledge to find certainty; second, the ERC wants to transcend the human limits of temporality to find connection to the entire history of the church; third, the ERC wants to transcend the human limits of division among churches to find unity and universality in the faith and church; and fourth, the ERC wants to transcend the human limits of interpretive diversity to find an interpretive authority. These four desires— certainty, history, unity, and authority—are the four manifestations of the ERC’s crisis of transcendence.

Stewart’s analysis then, so it seems to me, is too theological and does not take into sufficient consideration the reasons converts actually give. He’s right with each one but, to sound a bit like Flannery, “he ain’t right enough.”

I would add to what Stewart says and what is in my own study this: the politicization of the evangelical movement has driven many out of evangelicalism and some of them have found their way into Catholicism, Orthodoxy and other denominations (including Anglicanism).

The Political Turn of Evangelicalism is toxic to the soul of evangelicalism. I jump from this onto another, but parallel, discussion. In his new book, Contours of the Kuyperian Tradition, Craig Bartholomew, a South African, says “Reformed Christianity,” whose representatives helped create apartheid, “lacks credibility in South Africa.” Evangelicalism, not in the same way and only perhaps not with the same devastating impact, lacks credibility and its incredibility is growing every day. The apartheid of social capital in our culture must be resisted by the prophetic voice of Jesus embodied in the church, and evangelicalism needs to stand up to be counted in that embodiment.

Having said that our reasons for leaving are not the same, our agreement extends to the basic solution: teaching evangelicals about the breadth and history of the church and its deep theology. Had evangelicalism of the 20th Century, and at least the second half, spent more of its energy teaching — catechizing — converts into the deep history of the church and its creeds some of these conversions would not have occurred.

Put differently, it was the absence of the catechizing converts into the deep traditions of the church that permitted the superficiality of so much of modern non-denominational evangelicalism’s grasp of theology that created a vacuum that leads both to the resurgence of Calvinism (seen as a deep tradition) and the turn toward the liturgical and historic traditions of the church.

It will take more than a generation of serious education — in seminaries, in Christian colleges, and in local churches — to remedy this disordered understanding of the church, its theology, and its history. In a day when many — far too many — clamor for relevance and the newest thing in leadership and any number of idolatries substituting for the gospel, it is even harder to advocate for a course or two in the patristics and in the creeds and in the Reformation. There are signs of many evangelicals wanting to study the patristics. In a search I was involved in at North Park we had a hundred or so candidates in church history and theology, and we had not one who majored in the Reformation. They were either in patristics or in modern theology or church history.

Will this interest work its way into seminaries, colleges and churches?

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN: THE RELIGIOUS LIFE OF A FOUNDING FATHER

Thomas Kidd is distinguished professor of history and associate director of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor. He is the author of several books on early American history. In 2015, he was interviewed on his book about George Whitefield.

The following interview revolves around Professor Kidd’s latest book, Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father.

David Moore conducted the following interview. You can find Dave’s work at www.mooreengaging.com and www.twocities.org.

Moore: What (or who) was the impetus that led you to write this book?

Kidd: There is no more controversial historical topic in America today than the faith of the Founding Fathers. Writers on the topic tend to go to one of two extremes. Popular Christian writers often try to claim most or all of the Founders as Christians, while secular writers say the Founders were “godless” and even closet atheists. The truth, as usual, is more complicated.

I had started to look at Franklin more closely while writing my biography of the evangelist George Whitefield. Franklin and Whitefield were friends for decades. Franklin was one of the two most skeptical Founders (along with Thomas Jefferson), but Franklin was still haunted by the deep biblicism of his Puritan childhood. The tension between his Calvinist heritage and the skepticism of his adult life is the organizing theme of the book.

Moore: Several times you mention how much Franklin appreciated the ethical system of Christianity, but not the theology that undergirds it. Did he ever see any inconsistency in picking one while discarding the other?

Kidd: He was definitely experimenting with a new system of religion that I call “doctrineless, moralized Christianity.” He admired Jesus’s moral teachings and loved the practical works of Christian benevolence, like hospitals and orphanages. Franklin just wasn’t convinced that you needed to embrace particular doctrines in order to get Christian virtue. Christian friends and family members, such as George Whitefield and Franklin’s closest sibling Jane (Franklin) Mecom, definitely saw inconsistency in doctrineless, moralized Christianity. They insisted that he needed to experience the “new birth” of salvation, and believe in Christ as Savior, in order to enjoy God’s transforming power. God’s power produced enduring virtue.

Moore: In one of my marginal notes I wrote that Franklin could not tolerate “pedantic, polemical, and prideful Presbyterians.” Doctrinal fidelity is crucial to the integrity of the Christian faith, but we can go too far in our zeal for secondary and tertiary doctrines. What can we learn about all this from the response of Franklin to the doctrinal “precisionists” of his day?

Kidd: Franklin grew up in a world of intractable conflict between and within different Christian denominations. His culture was far more biblically literate than ours, and that resulted in more prominent fights over theology. For his part, Franklin was sick of it. He was especially repulsed by Philadelphia Presbyterians’ disciplining of his favorite pastor, Samuel Hemphill, in the mid-1730s. That episode led to the single greatest outburst of Franklin’s religious writing in his career, as he jumped into technical debates about grace, works, and the imputed righteousness of Christ.

Doctrinal orthodoxy, as you suggest, must be a priority for faithful Christian churches. But there’s also a major risk of churches and Christians becoming known primarily for fighting about theology (or perhaps fighting about politics).

Moore: You mention that King Philip’s War “was, by percentage of population killed, the deadliest conflict in American history.” I know you have much respect as I do for J.I. Packer and Leland Ryken. I have read and reread both of their fine introductions to the Puritans. Surprisingly, neither one mentions King Philip’s War. Why do you think that is?

Kidd: I suspect it is a difference resulting from genre. Theologians of the Puritans are understandably focused on the Puritans’ beliefs. I am fascinated with theology, too, but as a historian I also tend to ask questions about the way that cultural context makes a significant imprint on theology.

Moore: Joseph Addison’s writings made a big impact on Franklin. It was not just what Addison said, but how he said it. Unpack that more for us.

Kidd: Addison was one of the greatest essayists of eighteenth-century England. His writing was deeply learned but Addison also had a caustic wit. When Franklin discovered Addison’s essays as a young man, he found his most profound literary influence. Franklin devoured just about any literature he could get his hands on in those years, and he was deeply influenced by other English luminaries such as John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe. But Addison was his most significant model as a writer.

Moore: Many times Christians view Deism as a monolith, but you mention that there were different kinds of Deists. In what ways did Franklin fit and not fit the Deist category?

Kidd: He called himself a “thorough Deist” in his Autobiography, so this is certainly a valid place to start. As you suggest, Deism could mean a lot of things in the eighteenth century. Some Deists were really just critical of certain points of Christian theology, especially Calvinism. Others were closer to today’s agnostics, adopting the classic “watchmaker” view of an absent creator God. Franklin was uncertain about the Bible’s reliability and the divinity of Jesus. But especially as he grew older, he drifted back toward his parents’ view of the sovereignty of God over history. He also thought that God might act in response to prayer. This explains the otherwise perplexing scene of the “Deist” Franklin proposing that the Constitutional Convention open its sessions with prayer in 1787.

Moore: What are a few things you would like your readers to take away from this book?

Kidd: For those who might have seen Franklin as irreligious and entirely skeptical, I would want them to understand what a deep imprint that biblical concepts and the Bible itself made on Franklin. His skepticism about traditional faith was undeniable, but the Puritan legacy left a huge legacy in the way that Franklin thought, wrote, and spoke. The Founding Fathers were a diverse bunch with regard to personal faith, but Franklin illustrates how even the skeptics could not escape the influence of the biblicist culture of the Founding.

For those Christians who might be eager to turn Franklin into a faithful believer, however, I would want them to take a sober look at Franklin’s own statements just five weeks before he died, when he said that he could never quite believe that Jesus was divine. He also said that he feared Jesus’s teachings had been corrupted in the form they had been passed down to us (i.e. in the Gospel

As a young man I heard a church history professor say he minimized the patristics because too many young students get too excited by them and convert to Catholicism. (Some convert to Orthodoxy too, but he didn’t mention that.) His emphasis, no surprise, was the Reformation. So a narrative has taken shape: evangelicalism doesn’t  know the patristics. Which means, if you want to find a faith shaped by and deep into the patristics, Go East or Go to Rome!

Kenneth Stewart decisively defeats this narrative, but I’m not sure he solves the problem. Stay with me here. I’m referring yet again to the really engaging book  In Search of Ancient Roots: The Christian Past and the Evangelical Identity Crisis. The argument is that the modernistic world is too rationalistic, or a disembodiedness, or that we need the fathers.

The question is, is this current fascination with the early church really something new for evangelical Christianity?

We must be frank in admitting that such writers have reached their conclusions on the basis of perceptions gleaned from within the strands of evangelical Christianity in which they were nurtured. … Iheir judgments have involved a readiness to extrapolate from the evangelical movement as they have personally experienced it to the whole of it.

I propose that this line of explanation ought to be that the current resurgence of interest in early Christianity is not a swing of the pendulum toward something neglected for the five centuries of Protestantism’s existence. It is, in fact, a return to emphases regularly present in historic Protestantism.

So, he turns to show the deep interest and scholarship and even some preaching that were all deeply engaged with the patristics, and we need not mention all the names, but they include the production of the Nicene Library (now with Eerdmans, and I think Hendrickson], BB Warfield, John Wesley, John Calvin and Martin Luther (later in his career but not early).

Calvin was deep into humanism and humanism had informed him about the patristics and he saw in them divergence from Catholicism.

It was this humanist predisposition to prefer the teaching of Christian antiquity rather than the teaching of the church in more recent history (the onset of which coincided roughly speaking with the sack of Rome in 410 or, at very least, the papacy of Gregory the Great circa 590-604) that separated such early Protestants from current Catholic theology, which viewed Christian theology as an unbroken continuum from antiquity to the present. Such a Protestant stance had been “served up whole” by the humanistic studies of the day.

Stewart is right: historic evangelicalism and Protestantism have never ignored the patristics for long; there is a deep awareness of the deep tradition. I’ll get to his main points shortly, but this must be said: contemporary evangelicalism is defined far more by populist preaching, megachurch types of theology (or lack thereof), political partisanship and messaging, and non-denominationalism, which in itself is largely an eschewing of theological penetration. Stewart knows this, though he doesn’t say much about it except in passing, but he is intent on showing that historic evangelicalism is rooted in the patristics. He’s right, but the problem is that the evangelicalism of that sort is far more rare today than it was fifty years ago. Many of us could go to church for months without hearing a church father mentioned or quoted. So, it is the case that many grow up without the fathers, the theology they hear is absent that depth, so they are attracted to it.

I’ll say this about The Gospel Coalition. My beef would be that they have defined “gospel” by Reformation theology, so I’ll put it this way: TGC is a coalition of evangelicals who want a deep Reformation theology and they’ve done their best to produce it. Even if some of it is Baptist Calvinism, or Edwardsian or Kuyperian … it’s still a robust and vital theological vision. What leads many to TGC or to Orthodoxy or to Catholicism or Anglicanism is the same problem: evangelicalism without roots.

Stewart is showing the roots are there. And always have been.

Here are his major points:

In summary, as one considers the prevalent fresh appropriation of early Christianity in our own time, one finds on closer inspection that the evangelical Protestant tradition, rather than exhibiting a history of neglect, has quite often been exemplary in investigating and appropriating early Christian theology and practice.

First, the neglect of the early church and its teaching is a relatively modern phenomenon, afflicting both conservative and liberal Protestantism for a period of some three decades early in the twentieth century, and waning since the 1950s.

Second, one hardly finds any evidence in the five hundred years surveyed) of an attitude that cedes the first centuries of Christianity to Roman Catholicism (or to Orthodoxy).

Third, at the dawn of the Reformation, the advocates of reform enjoyed (at least temporarily) the position of “frontrunner” in the appropriation of early Christian teaching and in the advancing of the notion that the early church, because not yet “fallen,” could help to judge the later church.

Fourth, todays fascination with the Christianity of the second century— so powerful an influence on the number of evangelical Protestants who have decamped to Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy—is an attitude very different from that displayed in both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism since the Renaissance.

Fifth, it is urgent that the Protestantism of today recapture the principle, apparently obvious until the twentieth century, that the Reformation was itself a fresh appropriation of all the early Christianity deemed to be consistent with the supreme authority of Scripture.

Sixth, Western Christianity’s ability to draw on and to appraise patristic Christianity has customarily gone hand in hand with the cultivation and maintenance of a curriculum of classical studies of the ancient Mediterranean world, its cultures, and its languages. …Surely, the Christian community should be making its voice heard in favor of a restoration of classical studies at multiple levels.

One of my most edifying reads of this past year was Tony Reinke’s terrific book, Newton on the Christian Life (Crossway). Reinke is a non-profit journalist, author, Senior Writer for desiringGod.org, and the host of the popular podcast, Ask Pastor John.

David George Moore conducted the following interview. Some of Dave’s videos and interviews can be found at www.mooreengaging.com.

Moore: Calvinists today (and I incline in that direction) are not well-known for having a gracious and irenic spirit. John Newton has much to teach us in this regard, doesn’t he?

Reinke: He certainly does have a lot to say! Newton’s life and words sternly rebuke any Calvinist whose theology makes himself proud and arrogant. It’s a false effect. Calvinism, truly understood, makes the exact opposite of a person. Calvinism teaches that we are too sinful to save ourselves and too helpless to find hope in ourselves. If we are saved, it’s only by the unconditional election of God’s sovereign grace.

If those biblical realities make you self-confident and arrogant, you’ve totally missed the point of Calvinism to begin with. Nobody modeled a conviction about the sovereignty of God within a spirit of gentleness like John Newton. He spoke and modeled humble Calvinism, and it’s why his letter on how to engage in theological debate (“On Controversy”) remains one of the most brilliant things he ever inked on paper.

Moore: Newton realized that his letter-writing would be a mainstay of his ministry. How did he discover this?

Reinke: That’s right, and somewhat by surprise and resignation. Newton wanted to be a renowned preacher, but he knew that he was not a great one — perhaps better than average, but nothing in comparison to the popularity of his friend George Whitefield. He wanted to be known as a book author, but his first title (a book on the history of the church) sold rather poorly. At a friend’s request, he first penned his autobiography in a series of thirteen letters, and those letters “went viral,” as we say. They were passed from person to person — because letters were the social media of Newton’s day, intended to be shared among a network of readers. Those letters were collected and published in what became a bestselling book in England under the title *An Authentic Narrative*.

Though his pastoral labors started rather late in life (age 39) and began in a small town (Olney), in those early months of ministry, Newton’s autobiography made him simultaneously a celebrity convert and a celebrity pastor overnight. It also reinforced the reality that his greatest skill was in writing informal letters. He embraced letter-writing and mastered the medium. People wrote from him about any matter of pastoral questions, to which he laboriously responded. There are more than 1,000 substantial pastoral letters from his pen, and they are masterpieces of applied theology.

As J.I. Packer wrote in his kind endorsement to my book: “As the Lord Jesus Christ, crucified and reigning, was the life-giving focus of the Evangelical Revival, and as George Whitefield was its supreme awakener, and John Wesley its brilliant discipler, so ex-slave trader John Newton was its peerless pastoral counselor and perhaps the greatest Christian letter writer of all time.”

My job was to get my arms around everything Newton wrote in those situational letters and to be the first to systematize his counsel, with the goal of helping modern-day Christians see and apply what he wrote.

Moore: Newton is well known for loving the depressed William Cowper. This was not an easy thing to do. What gave Newton the capacity to show love by patiently caring for Cowper?

Reinke: Well, in this very extreme case, Newton saw it as nothing short of pastoring someone from the bridge-edge of suicide. It required a tremendous amount of creative energy to get Cowper to focus on his work (which is what the Olney Hymns project was intended to do for him). It worked to some extent, although Cowper attempted to kill himself multiple times, most ironically to me, the evening after Cowper sang “Amazing Grace” at church, the first time Newton’s hymn was unveiled in public.

Moore: You have a quote from Newton where he speaks of Jesus as the “Sun of the intellectual world.” What did Newton mean by that, and what are some of its implications for learning any subject?

Reinke: Well, that phrase comes in a sermon and Newton offers us no elaboration. Newton himself was not formally educated beyond age 11, and I suspect that he is hesitant to lecture on the place of Christology in academics. But here he follows a long lineage.

In 1758, Jonathan Edwards had been called to the presidency at Princeton University, a fitting post for America’s greatest theologian. Back in 1642, the founders of Harvard in their “Rules and Precepts Observed at Harvard College” wrote: “Let every student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning. And seeing the Lord only giveth wisdom, let every one seriously set himself by prayer in secret to seek it of him (Proverbs 2, 3).”

Newton follows this structural reality for education, and it’s something the Reformers got right: You cannot know anything rightly until you know a thing in relationship to its Creator and Sustainer, Jesus Christ. To us that sounds radically religious, but within a Christian worldview this is Academics 101. Newton, of course, has the vernacular to preach the centrality of Christ beautifully and he does so for his entire ministry, though it would be hard to make a detailed academic case for this priority from his works.

Moore: Newton speaks poignantly on how great Christians are many times unknown. In our infatuation with celebrity, what do you think Newton would say to our fascination with only honoring the well-known?

Reinke: Well, Newton was a celebrity pastor. There’s no question about this (and Newton was self-aware of it!). He was also acutely aware that the adrenaline buzz of fame could be confused for the authentic, Spirit-wrought holiness that pleased God. It’s easy to look and act holy when a conference room has all eyes on you. It’s a very different thing in private when only God is watching. It’s in the privacy of the bedroom or workroom or prayer closet when holiness emerges or evaporates. And so Newton harbored a clear awareness that the bedridden poor woman, abandoned by the world, probably enjoyed a healthier and more robust relationship with Christ, than he, the celebrity pastor. He fully anticipated that the old woman would get more rewards in heaven, and our perception of prominent Christians should be patterned accordingly.

Moore: Your section on Newton and politics ought to be a stand-alone booklet. I wish every American Christian would read it! Newton was not against Christians being involved in politics. He, of course, was formative in convincing Wilberforce to stay in the British Parliament. However, he found many people incompetent and prone to speculation. Would you unpack that some for us?

Reinke: Well thank you, David. Yes, in the last 18 months of political chaos in the U.S., Newton has kept me sane. It was a blessing that I worked through his political teachings a few years back in order to be prepared for the phenomenon we’re living through now, and I have returned several times to that section in my book to be re-discipled by Newton.

The problem Newton saw was that in seasons of heated political debate, Christians get sucked in, and it’s tragically easy to give the world the impression that political victory is the most important thing in the world. It’s not. Christ is. Christians know this. The world does not. And so when Christians feed the political frenzy, we offer a disservice to our neighbors.

The Christian’s great hope and solace rests in the first and ultimate sovereign cause of all things: “The LORD reigns” (Ps. 93:1, 96:10, 97:1, 99:1). Newton argued that this phrase should be printed as the top story and the leading bold black headline at the top of every newspaper, every day. It was Newton’s firm and resolved statement on politics and politicians. Or, as Newton would say, “There is a peace passing understanding, of which the politicians cannot deprive us.”

And yet, Newton encouraged Wilberforce into politics to help end the British slave trade. Newton understood the need to be both in the world, but not of the world; to be in politics but not overtaken by it. In any case, his political direction for Christians was incredibly God-centered and soul-steadying — relevant for us today.

Moore: I was thrilled to see that Newton believed that John Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress and Augustine’s Confessions were two of the best things Christians could read. These two are the ones I regularly recommend myself. What are a few other books that were formative for Newton?

Reinke: Newton was self-taught and he loved to read and commend specific books by Augustine, Bunyan, Richard Alleyne, and Richard Baxter. But to my knowledge, Newton only commended the complete works of one author: Puritan preacher John Flavel (1628–1691). Flavel’s [collected works](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0851510604) are gold, and I can easily see why Newton loved them so much.

Moore: What is the main thing you would like your readers to take away from your book?

Reinke: I think the main thing that I want readers to take away is that the vision of the Christ-centered life is not idealized, but made *real*, inside the mess and bustle of daily life in this world. Newton is one of the greatest examples I have ever seen of this in all sorts of scenarios—when faced with seasons of heated cultural political debate, in seasons of personal faith-less-ness, in seasons of suffering and loss, and when faced with the internal sins that continue to harass our spiritual growth and comforts. I want to be Christ-centered every day of my life; I want it to be a reality and not merely an aspiration, and that’s why I have given my life to the study of Newton’s writings. Newton shows us how to live a Christ-centered life in the real world.

Image of an Illinois cornfield decorated into Cubs celebration!

My former school, North Park University, will have Robert George speaking on freedom of speech during culture wars. October 20, 7:30pm. His respondent will be Edith Humphrey. The lecture is in the Engaging Orthodoxy series. If you go, eat dinner at Tre Kronor (the best). For info, call Brad Nassif at 773-244-6213. I normally don’t advertise such events on this blog but this is a special event in our area.

Scott Stump on the new Wave at Iowa:

It’s the newest tradition in college football, and it’s already one of the best.

The University of Iowa unveiled a heartwarming scene in its season-opening win on Saturday when fans stood and waved to the children watching from the University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital across the street from the stadium.

The sold-out crowd at Kinnick Stadium got up and did their cool new version of “the wave” at the end of the first quarter of the Hawkeyes’ 24-3 win over Wyoming, and the kids waved back from the top floor of the hospital.

It’s the latest initiative in the history of the partnership between the hospital and the football team at Iowa.

Since 2009, the team has had a “kid captain,” a current or former patient from the hospital who joins the players on the sidelines during each home game and gets a special jersey.

These are a.m.a.z.i.n.g! HT: :mic

Dogs can help:

Every day when I wake up to my sweet pups’ faces I wonder: How do people not have dogs? How do they handle stresses of everyday life without a pair of puppy dog eyes to gaze into as their heart melts?

And that’s not just me being mushy about my guys (even though they are pretty special!). While “dogs have been a part of peoples’ lives for thousands of years,” says Rebecca A. Johnson, Ph.D, director of the Research Center for Human Animal Interaction at University of Missouri, they’ve evolved from working and living outside to living indoors as part of the family.

We didn’t let other working animals move into the house and sleep on our beds — why dogs?

“Over time the relationship has gotten closer and closer,” Johnson says. “Some would relate that to advancements in industrialization and technology. We live in a high-tech, low-touch world and people have a longing for a bond with nature.” Companion animals like dogs can be that bond.

And these bonds “help us to feel good,” she says. “When we see, touch, hear or talk to our companion animals,” beneficial neurohormones “are released and that induces a sense of goodwill, joy, nurturing and happiness.” At the same time, the stress hormone cortisol is suppressed. Heart rate, blood pressure and respiratory rate can all decrease, leaving us more relaxed “and able to manage stress in ways that aren’t harmful to our health,” she explains.

Thinking clearly about “privilege”, by Jeffrey K. Mann:

First of all, “privilege” is a misnomer. Privilege has to do with special treatment. If one group faces discrimination, it does not necessarily mean another receives a particular privilege. If Gingers get picked on, it doesn’t mean the rest of us enjoy non-gingered privilege. What we are talking about are relative advantages, which are indeed real. Overuse of the word “privilege” turns people off; they are then less likely to stop and listen.

Opponents of privilege discussions must recognize, generally speaking, that life is easier in this country if you are born white, male and heterosexual. Denying this is an over-reaction. We must acknowledge that not everyone begins life with the same resources and benefits. Many face unfair hardships along the way – some are linked to race, gender, and religion.

Admitting that certain folks have relative advantages over others, however, does not make you a Lefty. I can admit the realities of my own unearned advantages without self-flagellating, liberal, white guilt.

Liberals who talk the most about “privilege,” however, need to recognize that they do not go far enough. There are numerous potential advantages that affect one’s chances in life. It is not just race and gender identity. Consider the enormous and disparate impact of wealth, attractiveness and intelligence. A man’s height is statistically significant when considering his potential for professional success; a person’s posture and weight also play a role.

And consider one of the most powerful unearned “privileges” that only some children enjoy: a two-parent home. …

When we multiply these variables with the fact that people hold multiple identity markers, we end up with a twisted web of relative advantages and disadvantages that no one can untangle through policy or decree. Who has it easier: an attractive girl brought up by a working-class Puerto Rican family in the Bronx or an autistic boy of Greek heritage raised in an upper-middle class, single-parent home in West Virginia?

Our social reality is a tremendously complex interrelationship of economics, education, religion, ethnicity, national origin, individual psychology, appearance and gender that play different roles in different times and in different places. Recognizing these identity markers – and the relative advantages they may carry – is important in creating a more just society. We may then work toward greater equality of opportunity by minimizing discrimination and favoritism, not adding to them. In the long run, that works to the advantage of us all. [HT: JS]

Tim Suttle’s pastoral approach to the Nashville Statement.

Book burning is about power and the logic of privileging one’s information.

But for Rebecca Knuth, author of Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century and Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction, Qin and religious leaders like him are only a small part of the early book-burning equation. “A lot of ancient book burning was a function of conquest,” Knuth says. Just look at one of the most famous examples of burning, the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. The famed building had its contents and structure burned during multiple periods of political upheaval, including in 48 B.C. when Caesar chased Pompey to Egypt and when Caliph Omar invaded Alexandria in 640 A.D.

What changed everything was the printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440. Not only were there suddenly far more books—there was also more knowledge. “With the printing press you had the huge rise of literacy and modern science and all these things,” Knuth says. “And some people in authoritarian regimes, in a way they want to turn back the effects of the printing press.”

According to Knuth, the motives behind book burning changed after the printing press helped bring about the Enlightenment era—though burning through the collateral damage of war continued to arise (just consider the destruction of the U.S. Library of Congress during the War of 1812 or all the libraries destroyed across Europe during World War II). People saw knowledge as a way to change themselves, and the world, and so it became a far more dangerous commodity, no longer controlled exclusively by the elite. What better way to reshape the balance of power and send a message at the same time than by burning books?

The unifying factor between all types of purposeful book-burners in the 20th century, Knuth says, is that the perpetrators feel like victims, even if they’re the ones in power. Perhaps the most infamous book burnings were those staged by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, who regularly employed language framing themselves as the victims of Jews. Similarly, when Mao Zedong took power in China and implemented the Cultural Revolution, any book that didn’t conform to party propaganda, like those promoting capitalism or other dangerous ideas, were destroyed. More recently, the Jaffna Public Library of Sri Lanka—home to nearly 100,000 rare books of Tamil history and literature—was burned by Sinhalese Buddhists. The Sinhalese felt their Buddhist beliefs were under threat by the Hinduism of Tamils, even though they outnumbered the Tamils.

Even when the knowledge itself isn’t prevented from reaching the public, the symbolic weight of burning books is heavy. “Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them as to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are,” wrote John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, in his 1644 book Areopagitica. “Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature… but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself—” an idea that continues to be espoused in modern culture, like in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. [HT: JS]

Roger Olson asks if it is “evangelical Calvinism” or “classic Arminianism.”