RSSBlame it on Constantine D.G. Hart First, let me a…
Blame it on Constantine
D.G. Hart
First, let me admit a measure of delight in seeing Covenanters disagree with each other. But I’ll also concede that this does not disprove the mediatorial kingship of Christ. It only makes it fun to watch.
Second, I find Caleb’s intervention particularly helpful regarding the historical moment of both Augustine’s City of God and Luther’s two kingdoms. Protestantism did let a genie out of the bottle and my sense is that the Covenanters, Kuyperians, the religious right, and political theologians as different as Oliver O’Donovan and Stanley Hauerwas — pardon me for grouping all together; I recognize differences — are trying to put it back.
I want to highlight two things that Caleb wrote. The first concerns Augustine’s vision of society, “a decentralized system of small states organized around communal loved things held in common, a community of communities, just as a community is a gathering of families existing under the ’sacred canopy’ provided by the church.” This sounds appealing, but I wonder if this is what the church is supposed to do, as if Christ and the apostles died so that we could have healthy communities or a Christian civilization. That doesn’t mean that I think they wanted us to live in unhealthy communities or like barbarians. But one of the benefits of the Reformation, in my view, was to challenge the inherent utilitarian understanding of Christianity implicit in the sacred-canopy construction. God’s ways are not man’s. Earthly cities come and go and God’s designs remain. Yes, Protestantism yields a disenchanted universe. But it is also a universe shorn of utopia, one fundamentally at odds with immanentizing the eschaton.
This relates directly to my second point, namely, the quotation of Tillich in Caleb’s post: “the Middle Ages were dominated by one problem, namely, to have a society which is guided by a present reality of a transcendent divine character. This was the problem of the Middle Ages:
‘to have the holy present.’” What if the point of Christianity is not to have the holy present? Or to put it more carefully, what if the point is to have a spiritual glimpse of it when we enter the holy of holies on the Lord’s day with all the assembled saints and angels? And then the rest of the week we are strangers and aliens, the sort of folk that Calvin had in mind back in my original post on kingship.
The more I reflect on the significance of the Reformation I do recognize how much it destroyed that sacred canopy. But I also tend to think that for the sake of the gospel this is a good thing. It restores to Christianity what is truly profound about redemption. It also leaves the task of community building in a state of turmoil with lots of contested claims and certainly plenty of attempts nonetheless to immanentize the eschaton.
If it’s not too crass, and this brings in Bill’s post (and I wish he’d refer to me by my first name even if he can’t spell it), it seems that the assertion of Christ’s kingship over the nations is an effort to restore the sacred canopy. I still wonder what that looks like. But I’m more concerned with what that will do to Christianity, that it may invite people to think that things go better with God, which is not exactly what our Lord promised.
Kurt
June 9th, 2006 at 11:09 pm
D Hart,
Since coming into the reformed faith recently (although having been a Christian for 20+ years), I’ve noticed not a small number of RP’ers, including too many preaching elders who appear to confuse salvation with sanctification.
You question whether “Christ and the apostles died so that we could have healthy communities or a Christian civilization.” First of all, there needs to be a distinction made between Christ’s death and the apostles’ deaths. The main purpose of Christ’s death was for our salvation. The apostles’ deaths came about under trying political and religious circumstances while standing up for the Gospel, conditions which few Western Christians even coming close to living under.
The question is how are Christians supposed to be living today under the freedom perpetuated through the Godly obedience of our Pilgrim, Puritan, and Scottish Covenanter forefathers in this country? Are we not to build on their vision of “A City on a Hill?” What is our society supposed to look like with faithful Christians taking every thought captive to Christ and living in faith in every area of our lives - dare I say a reflection of the sanctification process?
This is where the rubber meets the road and where RP’ers are struggling as much as their Arminian brothers (from whence I came)- once you are “saved” what then? Our preaching elders frankly seem to have too little to offer in this area. What does/should the sanctification process look like in our day to day living?
D Hart
June 10th, 2006 at 4:59 pm
Sanctification is supposed to look like dying to sin and living unto righteousness (a paraphrase of the Shorter Catechism). Most Reformed Christians think they know what that means personally, though I have reservations since pietistic forms of Christianity have stressed visible manifestations of sanctification (e.g. quiet times, witnessing, listening to Christian music) while I think the Reformed tradition has stressed the invisible at least during the work-week (e.g. the fruit of the spirit and loving God and neighbor in one’s work or vocation).
But I suspect Kurt’s comment has more to do with corporate forms of sanctification and here I get really squeamish because I have this history of American Protestantism in my head which has the social gospel drowning word and sacrament as the chief task of the church. Perhaps someone on this blog can decipher what corporate sanctification might mean. In the case of the corporate church we used to call that ‘reformation,’ as in a church being reformed in its preaching, sacraments, and discipline. Is that sanctification? Well, maybe but we also call it reform. But if we can’t speak of the sanctification of the corporate church without creating bemusement, how much more confusing would it be to talk about the sanctification of corporate society or the state?
One more comment concerning the “city on a hill” heritage of the United States: I for one believe that the founding of the United States in 1776 was a long way from John Winthrop’s vision of Massachusett’s Bay Colony back in 1629. Lots of historians and political theorists have debated how far 1776 departed from 1629. But it’s pretty clear that Jefferson and Winthrop were not on the same page. It would be good for Christians in America to recognize this because then they would not try to call us back to our Christian roots, at least as the U.S.’s constitutional roots took shape in 1776 or 1789.
An even bigger question is whether the society the less than orthodox founders of the United States created is more conducive to genuine Christianity than was Winthrop’s godly commonwealth. Don’t get me wrong. There is much to admire in the Puritans and their courage and insight could be great. But if you want an example of communism finding a place in the free world, Massachusetts Bay Colony may be one of your best examples. (Look at the kind of sharing of personal property Winthrop outlines in his “Model of Christian Charity.”) I personally enjoy my liberties even if I also recognize their down side, having to witness and endure the popularity of both Michael Moore and Rick Warren. That said, Christians today enjoy way more liberties for worship than they would have in Winthrop’s colony, unless of course, they were Congregationalists.
Daniel
June 19th, 2006 at 9:34 pm
A quick response …
O’Donovan’s take on the American Social Gospel (in which the RPCNA almost completely lost itself prior to WWI) is intriguing: he faults the late 19th century social activism and eschatological optimism of Protestantism for “failing to identify the false horizon”. In other words, there was no clear understanding that the empire could never become identical with the kingdom, and that attempts to do so would result in a devilish and not an angelic society. But were the activities of most mainline churches, which included widespread missions and poor relief, devilish?
Tim Chester in “Good News to the Poor” points out that most Western Christians *have already* bought into a Social Gospel - the gospel of Western capitalist materialism.