Monthly Archives: September 2009

Another note prepping for some Sunday School lessons I’ll be teaching on the Reformation

The history of the Reformation is a secular history by the definitions that we use (to the extent that “secular” can have a coherent definition, anyway). It is about the world that was changed dramatically in the 1500s, roughly.

If you teach it as the time when someone important to your tradition taught a doctrine your group agrees with, and transmitted it to you, you are really not teaching much of the Reformation.

The Reformation is when God broke down the medieval order so completely that it had to be replaced with a new order. Remaining Roman Catholic or being an atheist would not mean you were outside the Reformation, any more than being a Frenchmen living in Washington DC from 1860 to 1865 would put you outside the Civil War (That analogy probably works more closely with the atheist. Sorry. I’m in a hurry.)

I didn’t start this post intending to mention this, but it would be interesting to interview secular (including atheist) and Christian historians and ask if there is a difference between “church history” and “cultural history.” I think the secular historians would think you must be silly to even ask such an impossible question. But there may be one or two Christian historians who insist that they are entirely separate.

Thomas Jefferson would laugh at such a wall.

PS.  Why I wrote “another note”

There is always a higher court

One of the great things about Presbyterian government is that it was the polity used to condemn Jesus to death and get him crucified. It wasn’t the last time. Proper government can be used by Satan as well as by God.

But the good news is that God vindicated Jesus and so he vindicates all his servants. “I know your tribulation and your poverty (but you are rich) and the slander of those who say that they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan” (Rev 2.9). “Behold, I will make those of the synagogue of Satan who say that they are Jews and are not, but lie—behold, I will make them come and bow down before your feet and they will learn that I have loved you” (Rev 3.9). During the Reformation many a martyr was not only killed, but declared an outcast from the Kingdom of God by those who were sure they were in God’s inner circle.

Weren’t they surprised.

WTS?

YouTube – Tremper Longman III – Is There A Historical Adam – Part 12.

This guy has been teaching at Westminster Theological Seminary for eighteen years?  Please tell me he left because of this.

There is no way this is remotely “Reformed.”  It isn’t responsible with the text at all.  It basically assumes that the Bible is about concepts and ideas when it is actually a history book.  Yes.  It is.  It says so.  That’s why it has genealogies and counts years.

I would rather read Voltaire or Mencken than hear this garbage.  Actually, I do read Voltaire and Mencken out of admiration and for fun.  I suppose I may have suffered through some parts of a Longman commentary when I was forced to do so.

Honestly, does Longman sound like the description of Machen or his enemies in Mencken’s obituary?

And no, when I first wrote this blog after seeing the video, there was no S in my title for it.  I caught myself in time.

Someone else wants to bring trouble on themselves for loving the Reformation in the PCA

“We confess and teach that holy baptism, when given and received according to the Lord’s command, is in the case of adults and of children truly a baptism of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit, whereby those who are baptized have all their sins washed away, are buried into the death of our Lord Jesus Christ, are incorporated into him and put him on for the death of their sins, for a new and godly life and the blessed resurrection, and through him become children and heirs of God.”

-Martin Bucer

Read more at Notable Quotables On Baptism « Sacramental Piety.

Anabaptists as the impatient ones: a speculative thought

We Reformed all know the anabaptists were wrong, but maybe it is time to consider the ways they were right. All Europe was in the grip of a social order that for 90 percent of the people, if we saw them through a time-portal window, we would identify them as slaves. The issues of the Reformation were settled by the leaders and the rising middle class, which was still microscopic. Everyone else had his life managed by others and got to find out from others whether he would be Protestant or Catholic on Tuesday next week.

The anabaptists were not really new. Peasants had been revolting (yeah, funny pun. haha) for centuries before Luther. It isn’t hard to see that these were essentially slave revolts.

And freedom was coming. We now, even the most covenantal among us Reformed believers, or even the most devout Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodoxy believer in North America, probably has far more of the independent heritage and mentality of the anabaptists than he does of the magisterial Reformers.

Perhaps I am exaggerating, but I doubt it. Focusing on the error of adult-only baptism is, in my opinion, probably a mistake. They were pioneers and prophets of a new social psychology. They just got impatient. In reality, the Protestants fighting against them continued the historical processes that brought about a world more to their liking.

Peter Leithart defends Christian Society against Dunn

In the second chapter of his letter to the Galatians, Paul recounts how on a visit to Antioch he publicly rebuked Peter’s “hypocrisy” in withdrawing, under pressure from a delegation of the Jerusalem church, from table fellowship with Gentile believers. The New Testament scholar James D. G. Dunn contends that for Paul this event resulted in a decisive break with the church that had sponsored his original missionary journey. Significantly too, it was in this context—as an answer to the social problem of relations between the circumcised and the uncircumcised in the church and not as a solution to individual guilt and fear of judgment—that Paul first wrote the formula, “justification by faith and not by the works of the law” (Galatians 2:16). Dunn concludes, “The Antioch incident was probably one of the most significant events in the development of earliest Christianity. It shaped the future of Paul’s missionary work, it sparked off a crucial insight which became one of the central emphases in Paul’s subsequent teaching, and consequently it determined the whole character and future of that young movement which we now call Christianity.”

It is a large claim, but Dunn actually underestimates how widely Paul’s stinging rebuke reverberated, for its echoes produced an earthquake that finally left the ancient world in ruins. Toward the end of Economy and Society, Max Weber cites Galatians 2 and Peter’s participation in ritual meals with Gentiles to highlight the differences between the antique and the medieval cities. Ancient cities, Weber notes, were socially structured by a separation between those who made a claim of descent from the founding clans (patricians) and those who could make no such claim (plebeians), a separation often spatially represented by the isolation of plebeians either at the foot of the sacred hill of the polis or in ghettos clustered at the walls.

Continued at The Politics of Baptism | First Things.

Pagan, Christian, and Enlightenment/Christian states of alleged nature

In Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (Galaxy Books), he follows peasant movements from the so- called Middle Ages, to the Reformation.  It has been a long time and I don’t remember if I finished it.  (I think I actually read it from the library in college and then bought it later and have managed to hang onto it ever since.  There is a really depressing story about how many excellent books that I used to own that did not survive my early years in the pastorate, but that must wait for some other time, if ever.)

In any case, because I will be teaching on the anabaptists and the Reformation soon, I thought I should revisit the book.  And I have either re-read (having forgotten it) or read for the first time Chapter 10, “The Egalitarian State of Nature.”

What a bizarre study.

Cohn claims (and has the citations to back him up) that there was, in pagan hellenic thought, the idea that back during the “age of Saturn,” (before Percy Jackson’s parents got in charge–for those who know what I’m talking about) there was an age in which there was no private property or monogamy or government or slavery.  Everything was held in common and everyone was honest and equitable in sharing everything.

Somehow, Christian apologists latched onto this idea in order to defend and/or explain the doctrine of “The Fall,” even though nothing in the Bible actually indicates there was no private property and it is actually the Apostle Paul’s basis for his teaching on monogamy.  Cohn traces this idea, being enmeshed with some scripture passages, such as the description of the early church in Acts, as it is preserved and propagated in Christian literature.  Even the idea of universal “free love”–to use the modern Anglo-American slogan–was kept intact as the theory was advanced through Christendom.  In the middle of the 1200s, a French poet actually wrote about it in a work that was a bestseller (among the literate anyway).  Basically, anyone who could read learned this mythical history as sober history passed on from the authority of antiquity.

This raises several thoughts.

First, it makes me think that Rousseau was actually passing on an ancient idea.  Maybe not.  Maybe he accidentally reconstructed it.  But it is worth further study if I ever have time.

Second, for all the claims that he is secular, it seems to me that John Locke’s theory is a Christian response to this pagan idea infecting the Christian Church.  His claim that property is individual and is acquired through homesteading and then by giving (in exchange or not) looks like a direct common-sense attack on the myth.

Third, Hobbes was doing the same thing to prove that a state was necessary.

Understanding 9/11 blowback

Osama bin Laden repeatedly stressed the major objections: The U.S. had been supporting apostate dictatorships in the Muslim world, given one-sided support to Israel, occupied holy land such as the Arabian Peninsula, and enforced brutal sanctions on the Iraqi people that had left hundreds of thousands of Muslims, mostly children, dead.

Americans are warned not to forget what happened eight years ago, but we must not assume history began on that date. Those in the Muslim world tend to have a much longer memory.

In 1953, the CIA helped to oust the once-democratically elected leader of Iran, a man who had been featured as Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year” just a year before, and replaced him with the corrupt and brutal Shah, a dictator who ushered in a period of torture, terror and mass inflation. Twenty-six years later we saw the “blowback” — a term the CIA uses to describe the unintended reaction from American policy abroad — in the form of the Islamic Revolution. Iran fell under the grip of fundamentalists, but most of the nation would not rally against America for purely cultural reasons. What united them was resentment toward the U.S. meddling in their country.

Read the rest