I’ll say what I said Monday again: These beliefs and practices can be examined by psychologists and, while such scholars know the difference between correlation and causation, the recent study of Kristen Hydinger and Stephen J. Sandage (Boston U), Peter Jankowski (Bethel U),and Shelly Rambo (Boston U), called “Penal Substitionary Theory and Concern for Suffering: An Empirical Study,” Journal of Psychology and Theology 45 (2017): 33-45, examines if there is a correlation between those who believe in penal substitution (PSA [this theory as it is defended today focuses on the cross as propitiating the wrath of God) are more or less empathic and concerned for those who suffer.

Their abstract, reformatted for ease of reading:

The present study tested a hypothesized model of the degree of belief in PSA predicting a negative association with a sense of responsibility for reducing pain and suffering in the world.

Gender complementarian beliefs were hypothesized as a mediator of this association based on theological frameworks within the “New Calvinism” movement connecting PSA, gender views, and the positive spiritual significance of pain and suffering.

The sample (N=225) was comprised of masters-level students at an Evangelical seminary in the Midwestern United States.

Results supported a mediating role for complementarianism in the negative association between PSA and responsibility for reducing pain and suffering in the world. [SMcK: see the conclusion below that states those who believe in PSA and complementarianism are less likely to see the need to reduce suffering.]

Implications of the findings are discussed in terms of theologies of suffering in connection with social ethics. This study highlights the potential interdisciplinary value of empirical research on specific theological views.

Hydinger and Sandage et al have a solid and nuanced understanding of atonement and PSA in particular, quoting some (like Denny Burk) who say both PSA and gender complementarianism are watershed or central theological beliefs. Thus, many connect PSA and a father’s discipline of children (eg Piper).

To read on the theological debate, I recommend:

Roger Olson, Against Calvinism

Michael Horton, For Calvinism

The measures included the Calvinist-Arminian Beliefs Scale (CABS; Sorenson, 1981), Colaner and Warner’s complementarian gender role beliefs scale, and the Faith Maturity Scale – Short Form (FMS-SF; Benson, Donahue and Erikson, 1993; Hui, Wai Ng, Ying Mok, Ying Lau and Cheung, 2011; Piedmont and Nelson, 2001). They also examined the data through univariate skewness and kurrosis etc.

Conclusion, reformatted:

We support for a model of belief in PSA predicting a negative association with responsibility for reducing pain and suffering in the world. Gender complementarianism mediated the association.

Results therefore support ideological points of convergence involving the value of physical punishment, relational hierarchy, and the redemptive spiritual benefits of accepting pain and suffering.

The primary implication seems to be on advancing an empirical theology, and specifically, the first empirical study to focus on the specific belief in PSA (i.e., professed theology) and the descriptive associating with “lived or operative theology.”

We recommend further interdisciplinary research on differing views of the atonement, relational images of God, and social ethics.

Again, the research is not claiming PSA and complementarianism cause less concern for suffering but there is a higher correlation between the two than with other theological beliefs. I have said for years that a person something like this: a person with less empathy for suffering would be attracted to PSA and complementarianism.

The challenges have been heard. Matthew Bates, in Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King, contends that salvation by faith alone is better translated and understood as by allegiance alone.

Does this — to use the language of some critics — “smuggle” works into the meaning of faith? If salvation is by faith (pistis), then how can it be anything but the single act of turning from the Self to Christ in a surrendering faith?

In addition, how can it be “by grace alone” if grace alone means pure gift? That is, if one can do nothing because it is purely a gift, then how can one contend that the word “faith” combined with “grace” means “allegiance”? Bates knows this discussion well because he was both nurtured into faith in that view and has examined it carefully in his own biblical studies.

Bates takes on what is at work in the above two basic questions and responds to each.

Question: If salvation is by grace (a gift), then how can it depend on our allegiance to Jesus?

One cannot question grace without running directly into the bold and broad language of the Bible: God is the actor in our redemption; we cannot and do not save ourselves.

Thus, it is certain that if we are to be saved, it must come from outside ourselves, as an undeserved gift from God (Eph. 2:5). God graciously takes the saving initiative in both corporate (Rom. 5:6; Titus 3:4-7) and personal salvation (Acts 13:48).

In the recent Apocalyptic model where Grace (upper case) conquers all Sin and Sinners and Flesh, and anything else in the way, God acts for our redemption. There is more than a hint of universalism in much of the Apocalyptic school, but at some point someone has to come in to explain why there is such a demand to repent and believe in the New Testament gospel texts.

For this topic, read D. Bonhoeffer, Discipleship

Which means, both the older form of Calvinism, the newer form of Apocalyptic theology, the Arminian and the less than Arminian or anabaptist … in the end we all talk about the necessity of faith, and this lands us in the classroom of Matthew Bates listening to his explanation of what “faith” means. To reduce “faith” to “trust” in that existential surrender of the Self to God in Christ runs into not just Jesus’ demand of discipleship or Jame 2:14-26 but into what faith means in Paul. To Bates:

Yet not even traditional understandings of faith as belief or trust in Jesus’s saving work claim that humans have no active role to play in salvation. On the contrary, most everyone would affirm that God requires us to perform at least one concrete action in response to God’s grace, to respond “in faith,” however we define it, to God’s offer of salvation in Jesus. In fact, Jesus himself states as much in the Gospel of John. When the crowds ask Jesus, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” Jesus responds quite simply, “This is the work of God, that you pisteuete eis the one whom he has sent” (John 6:28-29). Regardless of how we translate pisteuete eis, whether “believe in” or “trust in,” or as I am tempted to translate it, “give allegiance to,” there is no doubt that pistis, to whatever degree it constitutes a “work,” is required—and this is not felt to preclude grace under the traditional understandings of faith.

Grace, too, comes in: and grace as God’s gift of redemption to us creates a bond and an obligation of response.

In other words, Barclay has convincingly demonstrated that it is a misunderstanding of grace (gift) in antiquity and in Paul’s Letters to suggest that grace could not truly be grace if it requires obedience as an obligatory return. We are undeserving of God’s gift of the Messiah—shockingly so!—in ancient contexts as well as contemporary. Yet the modern notion of the “pure gift” (a gift that requires no reciprocation) seeks to perfect grace along the wrong axis and does not align with the ancient evidence pertaining to grace.

That’s the point: most today seem to think the word grace means “pure gift” in the sense of You can do nothing to get it and you can do nothing after receiving it that has any significance. Where did this idea come from? Some will say it is a phenomenology of the meaning of the term (grace, gift) but Barclay proves that is not what gift meant.

It is inappropriate, then, to suggest that God’s gift of the Messiah, if the gift is accepted and subsequently held, would be ineffective in bringing about God’s transformative aims. So we should not set grace at odds with the required behavioral changes (good deeds) associated with allegiant union to Jesus the king.

In short, we cannot say in an unqualified fashion that final salvation is by grace and by faith apart from embodied obedience, for this misunderstands the nature of both charis (“grace”) and pistis (“faith”) in antiquity and in Paul’s Letters.

Question: If we are saved by allegiance alone, and allegiance involves concrete acts of obedience to Jesus the king, then does this not violate the principle that we are saved by faith, not by works? 

Regarding the role of works in salvation, although many systematic treatments attempt to skate around this issue in a variety of ingenious ways, Paul himself states that we will be judged on the basis of our deeds [Romans 2:5-8].

As a PhD student I attended a Tyndale House conference with the theme: justified by faith but judged by works. I recall a brilliant paper by Howard Marshall marshalling the evidence of how often the NT texts about judgment say rather explicitly that we will be judged by works. Not only that, no judgment text says “All I have to ask is if you accepted me into your heart one time.”

So, what happens is… here’s one:

Some of those who are particularly eager to rescue the idea of “faith alone, not works” seek, in squeamish alarm, to propose two judgments (or separate stages within the one judgment)—one on the basis of deeds that is for the purpose of determining rewards only, and another on the basis of “faith alone” that determines eternal destiny.

The fact of the Bible is simple:

Concrete actions and their results (works) are the basis of the judgment—doing or not doing certain things and the specific results obtained (albeit the list of approved and disapproved actions and deeds remains somewhat general).

If so, we are wise then to incorporate faith into the sense of allegiance:

Might it not be better to affirm that when Paul speaks of salvation by pistis in Jesus the Christ, not by works, that he speaks of allegiance to Jesus as the sovereign king? That is to say, we really are eternally judged, just as Paul indicates, in part on the basis of our works, but these works are part of pistis as embodied allegiance or enacted loyalty. Pistis is not the polar opposite of works; rather pistis as ongoing allegiance is the fundamental framework into which works must fit as part of our salvation.

The relationship between pistis and works is not one of cause to effect but rather of overlapping nested categories.

2 Cor 5:10; Rev 20:12-15; Eph 5:5; Gal 5:19-21; 6:8

Many of us were introduced to the Christ and Culture issue by reading H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture and it has stood the test of time as it is now still routinely purchased and read in its sixth decade. In his influentialism approach to Christ and Culture I saw the essential typology for American Christians — both liberal and conservative, evangelical and otherwise. So I read more of H. Richard Niebuhr’s books (though I confess I don’t think I’ve read an entire book of his more famous brother, Reinhold).

This led me to read Kuyper. My colleague, David Fitch, often says something about “Kuyperianism” and in reading Yoder and Hauerwas over the years I’ve encountered Kuyper so I wanted a firmer handle. I had dabbled in James Bratt’s Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader but then James Bratt’s full biography of Kuyper appeared, and I read it. It is called Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat. Bratt gave me categories and perspective to read the former volume that collected his essays. I also dipped into a devotional study by Kuyper, and read into some of the newer collections of Kuyper’s works.

This was all done to sketch a Kuyperian theory of Christian involvement in culture and the state, and for me it had to do with how Kuyper and his sort understood the kingdom of God. I had an outline with way too many quotations and it got a bit unwieldy for the project I was working on when I discovered my favorite Kuyperian: Rich Mouw.

Rich Mouw wrote Abraham Kuyper: A Short and Personal Introduction. What Mouw did for me was to give bigger handles to comprehend Kuyper and he had a hermeneutic of Kuyperianism that gave me firmer footing for reading Kuyper. So I let Mouw be my guide in Kingdom Conspiracy and I’m glad I did, though quoting Kuyper himself would have made the section thicker and longer (and the book got long enough as it was).

One should not, I suspect, equate “influentialism” with Kuyperianism for Niebuhrianism would also be influentialism. But one of the big themes for Kuyper was how best does the Christian engage culture and society and state. Kingdom is not infrequently connected to the vision and the influences. That’s another topic for the Kuyperians.

Rich Mouw is my favorite Kuyperian. Tim Keller would be my second. (I like Keller’s focus on the church, but more of that below.) I don’t know Kuyperianism intimately enough to say who is the best Kuyperian, but I suspect not many (if any) outrank Mouw.

I want in this post to discuss Rich Mouw’s splendid new Kuyperian book called Adventures in Evangelical Civility: A Lifelong Quest for Common Ground. Not all Calvinists or all Kuyperian are on the quest for common ground and not all of them are close to Mouw’s admirable ability to conduct conversations with civility. In this book, which is a memoir like narrative through his intellectual life — a meandering through scholars who have made an impact on him (and the names and breadth of his reading illustrate why he has become so civil), Mouw makes some self claims, and they are these:

I am a Christian
I am a Calvinist
I am a Kuyperian
I am a pietist
I am a professor, philosopher and theologian
I am a seminary provost and president
I am retired

Of the 2d, 3d, and 4th, with ten total points, I’d say he is 4 parts Calvinst, 4 parts Kuyperian and 2 parts pietist. But this kind of scoring may create mis-impressions. He’s always both Calvinist and Kuyperian and his pietism seems to me have created the man who is both civil and always seeking common ground, not least in his deeper-than-most appreciation for variants like Mormonism or even world religions. Perhaps it is Mouw’s pietism that makes him the kind of civil Kuyperian Calvinist that he is.

An early thinker’s transitional moment:

As I reported earlier, I started off as a college student endorsing Van Til’s refusal to concede to Edward John Carnell the legitimacy of looking for areas of agreement with nonChristians in our apologetic efforts. My attraction to Van Til’s perspective would soon give way to much sympathy for Carnell’s side of the argument. And it wasn’t just because I came to see the attractiveness of Carnell’s approach as a plausible apologetic methodology—although it certainly was that. More importantly, his way of viewing things gripped me experientially. I kept sensing, in various encounters with people beyond the boundaries of evangelical Calvinism, that my theological feet were actually finding real patches of common ground (16-17).

In a quote from Rousseau I couldn’t help but think of the zeal at work in the progressive evangelical crowd who have at times fallen for the idea that the gospel is social justice activism:

“The transition from the state of nature to the civil state,” he remarks, “produces a quite remarkable transformation within—i.e., it substitutes justice for instinct as the controlling factor in [one’s] behavior, and confers upon [one’s] actions a moral significance that they have hitherto lacked” (56).

Mouw’s core in this book is the search for and discovery of common patches where people of difference may stand together for a common cause or belief. When Evangelicals for Social Action began to fragment, Mouw’s Kuyperianism kept him grounded but still capable of finding common places for civil discussion and action, even when he did disagree with Yoder — here’s how he expresses Yoder’s theory of atonement:

It is important to pay attention to various theories of the atonement, including the moral example theory, of which Yoder’s is a very sophisticated version. But none of this should ever detract from a central emphasis on the once-for-all transaction that has traditionally been associated with the motifs of substitution, payment, and sacrifice (68).

Furthermore, the present-day Anabaptists and their fellow pilgrims are right to call us to account for the ways we often identify Christian discipleship with specific political programs and ideologies. The church’s record in aligning itself with political power, and in freely giving its blessing to various military campaigns, is not a noble one. For all of that, though, I am not ready to concede that the solution for Christian disciples is to abandon all efforts to employ the political means available to us as citizens to pursue Christian goals. Nor am I convinced that a thoroughgoing pacifism is mandated for Christian disciples (74).

When it comes to finding common ground and compromise for the sake of justice, Mouw:

I would be happy to accept this statement of public policy as an accomplishment made possible by a careful exploration by persons who, in spite of serious worldview differences, possess a shared sense of justice grounded in a common createdness (79).

This brings into play an earlier discussion in the book on the image of God and createdness. Our common createdness provides the platform for common ground, civility, conversation, and compromise for the common good. Including language that jumps from the Christian box into common discourse:

[Jimmy] Carter related “thick” to “thin” by showing how a public address on policy matters can employ the language of a broad-ranging public discourse while being able to link each key point to concrete biblical teaching. It illustrates for me a workable principle: think “thick” within the Christian community and then speak “thin” in the public arena (80).

For Mouw activism isn’t simply the aim and, in fact, there’s very little indication of the kind of social activism Mouw engages in his life. Rather, the mode, namely, civility, is emphatic.

I have experienced a shift in my own focus, as an evangelical who cares about public involvement, from urging evangelicals simply to get involved in public life to encouraging them to work at exercising that involvement in the right spirit. This led, for me, to a sustained emphasis on the concept of civility in public life (82).

… the importance of drawing on Calvin’s overall perspective for seeing the church as a place in which we learn how to cultivate the kind of virtue that is appropriate and necessary for public life (85).

He found the Barth vs. Brunner to be dichotomies that were resolved by Kuyper in the idea of “common grace”:

Common grace, in contrast, is typically set forth by the neo-Calvinists as a divine strategy for bringing the cultural designs of God to completion (104).

There is a lot about law in common grace and natural law, all mentioned at some level in Mouw’s book. Instead of moving toward grace and love, Mouw moves more readily toward the I-Thou in the covenant concept.

He turns at one point to a younger Nicholas Wolterstorff who typologized three kinds of Calvinsts: doctrinalists, pietists, and Kuyperian. How is the Kuyperian depicted by Wolterstorff? “the Bible is meant to give us our cultural marching o; orders, , instructing us in the ways of discipleship in the collective patterns of life in the larger human community (120) … it is about being aligned with God’s culture-transforming purposes in the world” (120). Ah, that’s a very common way of understanding Kuyperianism but Mouw surprises: he sees himself as a pietist. Well, OK, I say to myself, and I see that pietism especially pervading his work in common ground and in civility. But his focus in this book over and over has to do with culture and culture-influencing and the public square.

Our intellectual lives, our cultural engagements, our relationships with others in the body of Christ—all of these must be guided by a personal and communal godliness, by hearts that desire the kind of holiness without which none shall see the Lord (124).

Mouw makes some strong critiques of identity politics today and the fragmentation of people into identities that end up in clusters rather that common ground arising from our common image of God. Hence, “If we take the Pentecostal alternative to Babel seriously, we cannot allow multiculturalism simply to be defined in terms of the Babel experience” (137).

Like Michael Horton, he believes in the village green (common ground) but knows it is insufficient for ecclesiology. Hence, evangelicalism is the common ground but the narrower expression for him is Calvinism and Reformed churches.

A great quote from Bavinck:

‘We must remind ourselves that the Catholic righteousness by good works is vastly preferable to a protestant righteousness by good doctrine. At least righteousness by good works benefits one’s neighbor, whereas righteousness by good doctrine only produces lovelessness and pride. Furthermore, we must not blind ourselves to the tremendous faith, genuine repentance, complete surrender and the fervent love for God and neighbor evident in the lives and work of many Catholic Christians.” (199)

Here is my favorite set of lines from this entire book, one that I resonate deeply with:

Many of us have had to move beyond a harsh acceptance of strong convictions to a gentler spirit of civility. But many of the younger evangelicals today need to move in the opposite direction. They don’t have to work as hard at being civil people, but they do need to be guided in the direction of strong convictions. They aren’t very literate biblically. Nor do they have the theological memories of those past struggles that gave birth to the strong convictions in the evangelical community (220).

It is hard to know how to critique a memoir like this but I do want to register a pervasive concern I had with the book. Rich Mouw is a statesman, a theologian, and a church man, but this book is about his public life. I would like to have seen more about the church: his church, the role of the church as church in society, and how the church can embody ways of life that the culture and the state will not because their “worldview” is otherwise. The absence of the church, I’m confident, is not because Mouw is not in the church; it is because this book is about seeking common ground with outsiders and insiders who differ.

Another way of engaging culture and the state is for the church to be the church and as a church witness to an alternative kingdom at work in this world. The distinctive difference I see between the Kuyperian framing of topics and the Anabaptist has to do with the aim, the end, the primary focus of one’s energies: is it the church or culture? is it the church as a means of influencing and transforming culture? is it the church as comprised of citizens for the sake of culture?

Too many today think the primary aim of the Christian is to make the world a better place. Whether a person gets juiced from liberation theology, social gospel, conservative evangelical social activism, or Kuyperianism, the issue is real-er than real today.  Many today are convinced of these forms of activism and are completely unsure how important the church is.

YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW JOHN

By David George Moore

Dave’s videos can be found at www.mooreengaging and his blog is www.twocities.org.

Jane Dawson’s new biography of John Knox is being hailed as the definitive treatment we now have. Diarmaid MacCulloch says Dawson’s work “renders all his [Knox’s] previous biographies obsolete.” [The book is called John Knox (Yale, 2016).]

Dawson teaches at the University of Edinburgh and is a noted authority on sixteenth-century Scotland and Calvinism. She had access to new sources, not the least of which are the papers of Knox’s confidant, Christopher Goodman.

There is much helpful background in Dawson’s fine account on what the culture and church were like in Knox’s day. Some authors can get a bit tedious in trotting out various details about the milieu in which their subject lived. The reader can easily lose sight of the subject under consideration. In Dawson’s case, the historical context is used judiciously so we are continually drawn to the life and impact of John Knox.

The Knox we get in Dawson’s account is full-throated. We see Knox doing heroic things, yet dogged with depression and doubts. We also learn that Knox had a keen awareness of his penchant to pride. So Dawson certainly doesn’t traffic in hagiography, yet it is clear she finds much to commend about Knox.

Dawson makes it clear that Knox was no Calvin. Of course, Calvin was no Knox. Like Calvin, Knox had great respect for the power of language, such as “adding a ‘double translation’ incorporating alternative meanings for some of the single Latin words to convey the complexity or nuances within the original text.” But Knox’s strongest suit was the spoken word. And the spoken word was powerful in a “non-literate” culture (notice that Professor Dawson does not say “illiterate”). As Dawson makes clear, Knox’s speaking gifts meshed well with the oral and aural culture he lived in.

The year 1543 was a critical one for John Knox. This was when Knox began to embrace some Protestant beliefs. As Dawson tells the story, we do not know whether Knox’s change of mind occurred incrementally or was more dramatic. Either way, Knox’s thinking was clearly moving away from the Catholic understanding he long took for granted.

If one were to choose which book of the Bible had the most impact on “famous” conversions, Romans would surely be at the top of the list. One thinks of Augustine, Luther, Wesley hearing Luther’s Preface to Romans, and Karl Barth’s commentary on Romans, which “fell like a bombshell on the theologians’ playground.”

Remarkably, it was not Romans that convinced Knox of the Protestant understanding of salvation by grace through faith. Rather, it was the gospel of John and most notably, the seventeenth chapter. Dawson writes that John 17 was the chapter that gave Knox the ability to understand “how justification, sanctification and predestination were linked.” Calvin’s teaching further enhanced Knox’s understanding of this seminal text. Dawson’s account of the massive influence John 17 played in moving Knox to a Protestant understanding of the Christian faith is as poignant as it is provocative.

Knox’s reverence for the Bible ran deep. Like his mentor, George Wishart, Knox believed that true ministers studied the Bible well and desired to impart what they learned. Though not directly involved like others, the new Geneva Bible translation thrilled Knox. The Geneva Bible would have incalculable influence on noted wordsmiths such as Shakespeare, Donne, and Bunyan.

Along with Scripture, God uses people, and this certainly was the case with Knox. Dawson’s handling of George Wishart’s influence on Knox provides fascinating detail and a model of sorts for spiritual formation. Wishart was unafraid to proclaim the gospel with clarity. His open denunciations of the false church of the Pope were matched by his sincerity. Knox was much impressed. Knox even mimicked his mentor’s approach to preaching. Issuing strong calls for people to repent was the fruit of George Wishart’s indelible imprint on Knox. Wishart’s martyrdom sealed his honorable reputation with Knox.

Another commonality between Wishart and Knox was their consistent stance of “no compromise,” especially when it came to the integrity of the church. Initially, Knox had high hopes with the rule of Edward VI, but the final part of his reign eventuated in a major disappointment. Dawson writes, “The initial elation created when demonstrably Protestant measures had been introduced was dissipated by the harsh realities of being in coalition with a political faction that needed to maintain its power. The political art of the possible was a concept Knox shunned and he treated compromise as another term for lack of zeal.”

With biography, there are always certain things we wish we knew. Biographers know this, and some take greater liberties to speculate or even slip in a detail that is impossible to know. Here Dawson shows scholarly restraint. For example, while describing a period of time early on when Knox may have been lacking in courage, Dawson writes, “In later life Knox possibly felt embarrassed…” Dawson keeps her account moving with the particulars we can be confident of not the ones we wish we had.

Like his mentor Wishart, Knox believed the Roman Catholic Church was hopelessly corrupt. Knox didn’t flinch in saying the Catholic Church “was worse than the Church of the Jews when it condemned Christ to death.” These were dangerous times to be a Protestant minister, which is what Knox was by 1547. To be a Protestant minister meant carrying “a suspended death sentence.”

It is impossible to speak of John Knox without including his famous battles with Mary Tudor, Queen of England (latter dubbed “Bloody Mary”) and Mary, Queen of Scots. Knox declared that Mary Tudor was an “open traitoresse to the Imperiall Crown of England” who cleverly under an “Englyshe name she beareth a Spaniardes herte.” The latter charge was directed at Mary’s marriage to Philip of Spain.

Knox’s disagreements and difficulties with Mary, Queen of Scots were also substantial. As Dawson writes, Knox “told Mary she was ignorant and deluded and failed to recognize the plain word of God.” But Dawson argues that the caricatures of their famous feud do not adequately capture the complexity of their relationship. Though Dawson makes clear that Knox retained his prophetic role, he was not opposed at times to a more conciliatory posture. Consider these surprising words Knox communicated to Mary: “I pray God, Madam, that ye be as blessed within the Commonwealth of Scotland, as ever Deborah was in the Commonwealth of Israel.”   Another time in a most unlikely partnership, Knox and Mary were a tag team to convince the Earl and Countess of Argyll to not get divorced. Dawsom comments that Knox and Mary could get along “provided there was no religious element.”

Knox loved purity and truth. It is no wonder then that he said Calvin’s Geneva was “the most perfect school of Christ.” The diligence Calvin displayed in battling the “Libertine” group’s influence was something Knox admired in the great Reformer. In this, Calvin mirrored what Knox found so noble about George Wishart.

John Knox’s marriage to Marjorie was a happy one. Like Sarah was to Jonathan Edwards, Marjorie was a true partner in ministry. She drew the favorable attention of no less than John Calvin. Marjorie had a mature understanding of Scripture and was well educated. She gave John Knox two sons and three daughters who survived childhood, though she did not live long herself. John Knox was devastated and sunk into depression when his beloved wife of only five years died.

Knox’s relationships outside the home were also critical to his well-being, especially when he struggled with depression. No one played a bigger role as encourager and counselor than Christopher Goodman. Knox was certainly a leader with considerable gifts. However, like the apostle Paul who needed Titus to “comfort him in his depression” (II Cor. 7:6, NASB), Goodman was an indispensable ballast to Knox’s battles with melancholia.

According to Dawson, Knox was best suited to lead during a crisis. Dawson brings up Churchill as a modern day version of this type of leader. However, as is sometimes the case, one’s greatest strength may carry an attendant weakness. Dawson observes that when “peace and diplomacy” were sorely needed Knox would not be the best person to tap as the leader.

It is not surprising to see the enthusiasm for Dawson’s, John Knox. It is engaging, lucid, comprehensive, peppered with fascinating details, and an ennobling account of a major figure of the nascent Protestant movement.

Bob Allen:

A Southern Baptist seminary president said Nov. 29 that Baptists who adopt Calvinistic theology and practice ought to consider joining another denomination.

“I know there are a fair number of you who think you are a Calvinist, but understand there is a denomination which represents that view,” Paige Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, said at the close of Tuesday’s chapel service. “It’s called Presbyterian.”

“I have great respect for them,” Patterson said. “Many of them, the vast majority of them, are brothers in Christ, and I honor their position, but if I held that position I would become a Presbyterian. I would not remain a Baptist, because the Baptist position from the time of the Anabaptists, really from the time of the New Testament, is very different.”

Patterson, co-engineer of the so-called conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention in the final two decades of the 20th century, commented immediately after chapel speaker Rick Patrick finished the morning sermon.

Patrick, executive director of Connect316 — a group formed in the summer of 2013 to counterbalance a number of new organizations promoting the New Calvinist perspective — argued that debate in the Southern Baptist Convention over Calvinism isn’t about just the single issue of how people are saved.

“Because Calvin’s Institutes address a broad spectrum of theological categories, we are actually debating much more than just the single issue of salvation,” said Patrick, senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Sylacauga, Ala. “If we are not careful a myriad of related beliefs and practices will enter our camp, hidden within the Trojan Horse of Calvinism.”

Patrick said the New Calvinism and the “traditionalist” position advocated in the past by former SBC leaders such as Herschel Hobbs and Adrian Rogers are “two competing systematic theologies” with disagreements as basic as whether the heavenly Father is a God of love.

“If God has chosen, actively or passively, before the foundation of the world to place the reprobate unconditionally into a category from which they can never possibly escape, then this is, as even Calvin admitted, a dreadful decree,” Patrick said. “I will never forget the first time a Calvinist looked me straight in the eye and said God does not love everybody. I was speechless, and frankly, that doesn’t happen much.”

Here’s the kicker by Patrick:

“Some New Calvinists, even pastors, very openly smoke pipes and cigars, just as they drink beer, wine,” Patrick said. “They may even home brew the beer themselves, attempting to use it as an outreach to identify with other smokers and drinkers.”

“Sin is not a form of outreach,” Patrick commented.

One of the more interesting books that has ever come my way is Prophesies of Godlessness: Predictions of America’s Imminent Secularization, a book edited by C. Mathewes and C. McKnight Nichols (no relation). If the title doesn’t interest you, perhaps this line will: “In American history, prophesies of godlessness are as American as American godliness itself” (6). Paradoxically, alongside this worrisome fear that the country was about to fall into apocalyptic doom is the liberal vision that America was about to reach its real vision of losing its religion. This book fascinates me.

What do you think of preaching that warns of imminent or national doom? Or, of imminent or national good days to come?


So, we’ve got two groups in this country: Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Walter Lippmann, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, John Dewey, John Judis, and Ruy Teixera — the first group. The second group: Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Hopkins, Edwards Amasa Park, William Jennings Bryan, Hal Lindsey, Jimmy Carter, Jerry Falwell, Christopher Lasch, Robert Putnam and Ann Coulter. Each thought the end was imminent; each thought their prophesies — either of the goal of a liberal country denuded of its religion or the demise of godliness by growing secularization or modernity — were about to come to pass.

These two themes are as American as apple pie. The book has eleven studies of these themes, and the approach is to take snapshots of these themes through specific people.

The study makes one wonder if apocalyptic warnings or the dream of a liberal (secularized) culture might not be “verbal games” people play to persuade others to join them in their own vision. The study makes one wonder if biblical apocalyptic and prophecy deserves renewed consideration in light of such cultural scripts. Why say this? America, according to many historians, is no less religious now than it was during the Puritan era. Anyway, the prophesies have not really come true — either way.

I grew up in a world haunted by these two visions. Sundays could be like experiencing Revelation first hand. Every autumn our church staged a prophecy conference. The potent warnings were vivid and scary — I remember one preacher telling us with near certainty that the Lord would return before 1971 or 1973 since the “fig tree” and the “one generation” predictions would be fulfilled by then. I suppose one can grow numb to preaching like this, but when you’re about 10 or 12 years old it can be fierce and fearsome stuff. It was a good time to get saved so you can be on the right side of that awful demise we were about to face. The cynical distance of these words are borne of experience: the preachers were all wrong, but they were as American as godlessness and godliness.

In 1620 John Winthrop, leader of Massachusetts Bay, transported the covenant God made with Israel to the covenant God was making with the New World. En route to Massachusetts, Winthrop preached a now-famous sermon: “A Model of Christian Charity.” He is our first illustration of how Americans have prophesied godlessness and the judgment of God or apocalyptic doom if they do not repent.

The warning that the country will fall apart if Americans don’t repent and turn to God is an old “script” in American history … and this chp, by Wilson Brissett, examines how a particular form — the “jeremiad” — was used and re-used in American religious and political sermons.

Let’s begin with this: there is a problem here with the “little boy who cried wolf.” Some use the jeremiad for anything and everything. What prompts you to use or to respond to a jeremiad?

The calling — the covenant — God made with those who were setting up life in the New World was that they might become a “city upon a hill.” If they live up to what God has said, blessing; if they do not, God’s wrath. Winthrop, however, was no pietistic or quietist. Instead, he envisioned the covenant’s obligations for the new community to be loving God and loving others, and inherent to this love of others was economic justice.

The “form” these folks used to remind the Puritans of their calling/covenant was the jeremiad, the sermon that evoked the style of Jeremiah: remind them of the covenant, list their sins, warn them of God’s judgment, promise them blessing if they repent, and remind them that God’s wrath can burn against them if they neglect their covenant obligations.

Then Jonathan Edwards expanded this style of declaring doom by urging his contemporaries to embrace the surprising work of God in the Great Awakening or they would be rejecting the work of God and incur God’s wrath. So here the jeremiad was expanded from simple obedience to a specific act of God in the country — the revivals.

A study of Edwards: Samuel Hopkins took the Puritan jeremiad and applied it to the country for slavery and to masters who had slaves. His words: “Can we wonder that Religion is done to decay in our Land, that vice and profaneness have overspread the whole Land, when the Ever glorious God has been blasphemed openly in the practice of Slavery among us for So long a time?” (30-31).

This chp of Brissett, then shifts at the end to show that the jeremiad was re-used by Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau and Abraham Lincoln — with much less covenantal basis and for political liberalism, Romantic individualism, and the plea for national unity. Inherent is the warning of what might happen if Americans do not live up to their calling.

America’s history with prophetic pronouncements includes not only apocalyptic doom. Think Thomas Jefferson. Two of my favorite places in the DC area are the Jefferson Memorial, which perhaps could be called the temple of liberal, enlightened reason, and Monticello, Jefferson’s home. Whenever we are in DC, if we get the chance, I stand in the Memorial and read the great lines of Jefferson — and yet I come away thinking this man represents a vision completely contrary to generous orthodoxy. In Prophesies of Godlessness: Predictions of America’s Imminent Secularization we find a chp on Jefferson’s vision … and it begins with this unfulfilled wish dream:
 Where is our hope? Do we hope in progress? Do we hope in an apocalyptic act of God to render the world, suddenly and finally, put to right? Do we put hope in our efforts? in God? in God who empowers us to work for justice and peace now? Or, like Jefferson, is our hope in reason? (This chp has given me a reason to be intentional about discerning how our politicians and leaders envision the future etc.)

In 1822 Jefferson wrote: “I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die an Unitarian” (35). He dreamed of the day when religion would be a religion of reason instead of one based on faith. And, at the heart of Jefferson’s radically consistent liberal vision was a theory of historical progress that included the discovery — by the Enlightenment — of the folly of superstition and the goodness of humans. But humans had to protect freedom and work for the separation of church and State (author’s terms). In contrast to others, Jefferson did not believe in the universal, innate, inexorable laws of progress but instead in the need for humans to work at freedom and reason for that progress to occur.

In the USA, the historical Jesus begins with Jefferson who considered himself a true follower of the real Jesus — the human, excellent Jesus. (By the way, the author of this chp — Johann Neem — confuses “Immaculate Conception” [something about Mary’s own conception] and the “virginal conception” [something about Jesus’ conception].) Jefferson believed in the pure morals of Jesus and reason would lead to the elimination of superstitious doctrines. The key was the “wall of separation” (41). His fear: the rising surge of American evangelicals.
Key, too, was empowerment of the people instead of empowering clerics and politicians. Education would empower the people. But it must be a secular university: so the founding of the University of Virginia. It would promote a religion of peace, reason and morality.
”I have sworn on the altar of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man” (41).

But Jefferson was wrong: what followed was the Second Great Awakening and the rise in Boston, at Park Street Church, of Lyman Beecher. His aim: to dismantle Unitarianism. He was a prophet of godlessness. He, too, believed in empowering people and his form of doing so was voluntary (evangelical) action groups.

Thomas Jefferson anchored the entire good of Christianity in the morals of Jesus. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ever striving for the universal to be found in nature, anchored it all in “moral sentiment.” Both Jefferson and Emerson, though, thought the days of Christianity were numbered and soon to expire — so the next chp in Prophesies of Godlessness: Predictions of America’s Imminent Secularization.

How Emersonian is the Christian vision today? Where are you seeing the Emersonian vision in the Church today?
Emerson’s problems were Church institutions, creeds, forms, churches, and buildings. Emerson saw their imminent demise in the anarchy of choices running rampant in his day, and he thought that what would remain would be a religion that was moral science and reasonable, but fashioned in the soul and spirit of each person. The religious work of churches, he thought, was being replaced by the social work of philanthropy.
Here’s a potent statement: “How many people are there in Boston? Two hundred thousand. Then there are so many sects. I go for churches of one.”
Emerson, who was a Unitarian minister for a few years but who became convinced Christian rituals, esp the Lord’s Supper, were things that no longer spoke, was caught between Calvinism and Unitarianism. And his vision of transcendantalism was an “attempt to reenchant Unitarianism while still accepting many of its basic critiques of Christian orthodoxy.”
Emerson distinguished spirituality (good) from religion (church); and he thought sermons were good if they converted life into truth (not truth into life). His contemporaries were Whitman and Thoreau.

I’ve got a big question today, but first let me sketch two items quickly. First, think about it, we’ve seen the following as prophets of doom: the puritans with their weekly jeremiads, Thomas Jefferson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Add someone else to this list: Abraham Lincoln, about whom Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh says: “For better or worse, there has been no more messianic a figure in American history than Abraham Lincoln” (Prophesies of Godlessness: Predictions of America’s Imminent Secularization, 75).

Big question: Is apocalyptic rhetoric, the kind of rhetoric that declares that if we don’t change society and culture will collapse, simply a rhetorical package that is designed to get people to wake up and change? (If folks change, mission accomplished.) Or is it a rhetorical package that also predicts what will happen? You may know where I’m going: are biblical apocalyptic warnings more the first than the second? In other words, is it a way to get folks to change? Or is it a way to get folks to change because of what will surely happen? Is it prediction or it is simply religiously-charged rhetoric?

Nothing brings out the jeremiad and apocalyptic rhetoric like war, so this chp’s focus on the Civil War and the beliefs of Lincoln and Sherman are excellent examples, but their examples resonate with anyone who pays attention to how our nation has talked about war in the last decade.

Back to Lincoln and what the author of this chp calls his “ironic absorption into his age’s American religious culture” (because Lincoln was hardly an evangelical but his obsession with discerning God’s will was noteworthy). In contrast, William Tecumseh Sherman repudiated republican, evangelical and Enlightenment Christianity. Mark Noll observed that despite all the jeremiads tossed into the public by both the North and the South, the beliefs of both sides largely continued on after the Civil War.

The jeremiads unleashed permitted the South to see their defeat as a temporal, providential chastisement and the North to see God purging the nation from sin. Belief in God’s working in history held out hope for redemption, and this powerful jeremiad form was more potent than the rational notion of progress that many adhered to … including Lincoln.

Lincoln was a skeptic as a young man and lawyer in Springfield, Illinois. His own view of the “doctrine of necessity” was not the same as the evangelical belief in Providence. That is, he held to a “gradual, orderly, rational, and … secular conception of progress” (79). Hsieh explains how Lincoln’s view of Providence became more personal and it led him to make a covenant with God, a kind of Gideon’s fleece, that if the North won a particular battle he would take it as a sign and he would issue the Emancipation Proclamation. The Second Inaugural, however, reveals Lincoln’s conviction of the inscrutable providence of God. Lincoln illustrates how difficult it is for many to discern the plan of God. If the jeremiad is found in Lincoln, there is a humility about it that demonstrates his belief that God’s plans are inscrutable.

But Sherman, who is not emphasized in this chp, came at the issues from a different angle. We find in him a warrior-ized vision: God is nearly equated with Union and the Confederacy becomes a rebellion against God.

Where are we today? Do we opt for the inscrutability of God’s providence? to warrior-izing the plan of God? to a confidence that God is on our side?

Follow The Leader, By Michelle Van Loon http://www.MomentsAndDays.org

I am of Paul. I am of Apollos. I am of John Piper or Jim Wallis or Jen Hatmaker or Nancy Leigh DeMoss.

It was a first century problem, and it is a twenty-first century problem. It is perhaps most pronounced in the Protestant world. Our very spiritual DNA contains a desire to divide. As we lack a single hierarchical authority structure on which we can all agree, we are tempted to form our own tribes.

Today, our Bible teachers and Christian communicators are brands™, driven as much by personality and marketability as they are by doctrine. We are far less inclined these days to be discipled by denomination, and more inclined to be fed and formed by the offerings endorsed by a Christian leader who has a platform on the conference circuit.

It wasn’t all that long ago that many young male seminarians in my acquaintance were quoting and emulating Mark Driscoll’s particular style of testosterone-fueled neo-Calvinism. Women of my generation (Boomers, older X-ers) filled arenas for the Women of Faith events; the books and study materials published under their banner offered audiences a positive ‘n encouraging conservative suburban Evangelical approach.

Buying into a communicator’s brand can serve as a filter for the dizzying array of theological choices facing a well-meaning believer who is seeking to grow in his or her faith. Aligning with a particular leader offers adherents more than theology. It can also define the spiritual aspirations of those in the tribe. John MacArthur’s conferences tend to attract a more crew than Andy Stanley’s events do, for example. They’re not just buying books and conference CD’s at these events, but are carrying home with them a picture of how their lives, families, and communities can be based on the image they get at these events of both teacher and fellow adherents. I’ve known women who aspire to be the next Beth Moore or a Christine Caine clone, and try to copy their particular look, content, and style of ministry in their own context.

It rarely goes well. Certainly a word about the greater spiritual responsibility of those who teach is in order here, as well as a reminder that some of those in our congregations are being discipled from afar by high-visibility communicators with whom they have no relationship in real life. Celebrity Christian voices are an idealized mirror of who their followers want to be.

The apostle Paul told the Corinthian Church, “Even if you had ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers, for in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel. Therefore I urge you to imitate me.” (! Corinthians 4:15-16, italics mine) Paul recognized his role as disciple-maker. He also affirmed that there is a place in the spiritual growth process to attempt to copy the leader.

In her seminal 1947 essay The Lost Tools of Learning, Dorothy Sayers called this the Poll-Parrot stage:

The Poll-Parrot stage is the one in which learning by heart is easy and, on the whole, pleasurable; whereas reasoning is difficult and, on the whole, little relished. At this age, one readily memorizes the shapes and appearances of things; one likes to recite the number-plates of cars; one rejoices in the chanting of rhymes and the rumble and thunder of unintelligible polysyllables; one enjoys the mere accumulation of things.

While we assign this kind of imitative learning to young children, there is a correlation in spiritual development, too. As a young believer in the 1970’s, I watched The 700 Club (don’t judge me – it’s been four decades since then!) and saw the way Pat prayed for people on the air. I wanted to be a spiritual giant like Pat, and so I approached prayer like it looked like he did. I aspired to be an exemplar of submissive trust to God, so I tried to be the sotto-voiced, modestly-dressed Elizabeth Elliot I read in books and listened to each day on the radio. Yes, at the same time as I was trying to be Pat. It was as awkward as you might imagine.

There was no one discipling me at the time, so I looked to these far-away icons to show me the way of Jesus. I was a Poll-Parrot, not yet capable of critical analysis and unsure of my own identity, gifting, and place in the Body of Christ. My two-dimensional disciplers may have fed me information about the spiritual life, but their real power was as a reflection of who I wanted to be as a follower of Jesus at the time. Moving past the Poll-Parrot stage took a long time for me, as I think it does for most of us.

If you’re in a church or gathering marked by devotion to this person’s teaching or that particular conference, or conversely, your local assembly is being influenced negatively by pressure from followers of celebrity teachers to be more like whatever model of church or faith these teachers are representing, it might be a helpful exercise to consider what it is that their adherents are looking to reproduce in their own lives. And then consider the question for yourself – what far-off teachers do you most admire, and why? Or what have you parroted in the past, and how have you grown past this stage?

I got this question from a reader the other day:

I’ve been studying a lot lately. Also concerning topics like Calvinism etc.

Last week I spoke to a Calvinist and he said something like this: “God doesn’t have to save anybody, and if He does save anyone, and elects people to be saved, that should fill our hearts with amazement and wonder. We don’t deserve it and still He saves some by election. This in itself makes Him loving, gracious and good.”

How do you react on something like that? I find that really difficult.

From Roger Olson:

Review of New Book about Calvinism and Arminianism: Jerry Walls’s Does God Love Everyone: The Heart of What Is Wrong with Calvinism

Yesterday I was asked by bright, eager, young Christian student of theology to identify “the one major difference between Calvinism and Arminianism.” Without hesitation I identified it the way evangelical Arminian philosopher Jerry Walls does in this book (published this year by Cascade Books, in imprint of Wipf and Stock): the character of God. On page 80 Walls writes that “The deepest issue that divides Arminians and Calvinists is not the sovereignty of God, predestination, or the authority of the Bible. The deepest difference pertains to how we understand the character of God. Is God good in the sense that he deeply and sincerely loves all persons?”…

In Does God Love Everyone? however, Walls does an excellent job of driving home the Achilles Heel of five point Calvinism which is that a believer in it cannot say to any group of people or any individual “God loves you, Christ died for you, and you can be saved.” Of course, John Piper and some other five point Calvinists argue that they cansay that to any group of people or to any individual. However, the “explanation” of that basic evangelistic statement, if made by a five point Calvinist, is so tortuous as to be laughable. As one five point Calvinist explained the first part of it “God loves all people in some ways but only some people in all ways.” And Piper argues that Christ’s death on the cross benefits even the reprobate—those God has predestined to hell—with “temporal blessings.” As I have said many times that amounts to giving them a little bit of heaven to go to hell in.

Go to the link to read the rest.