>> I’m curious to know what those who are not with the FV crowd think about this.
Since Peter asked, I’d have to say that this is one of the things, on the surface at least, that seems really positive about the FV. I say this not as a veteran of the “old wars†in Reformed circles, but a reader and student of Augustine and political philosophy. I have been convinced for some time of the importance of Eric Voegelin’s suggestion that Luther misappropriated the Augustinian language of the two cities and thereby perverted the order and function of the visible church as a historically situated community. The Augustinian City of God is represented by the visible church, but the church is not coextensive with it. The greater part of the church likely belongs to the earthly city, which preserves the prerogative of salvation for God alone in a certain shroud of mystery; there is no sure way for man to decide who is saved and who is not saved. For Voegelin, this preserved the Augustinian orders from the vexing political problems which cropped up under Luther where the visible church declared itself coextensive with the Kingdom of God. Voegelin lays the blame on Luther’s shift from the older fides caritate formata to sola fide, which tends to rob man of friendship with God and leave Christianity paradoxically reduced to buying a book and following the man with the “right†interpretation.
These are obviously fighting words in the Reformed communion, and tend to give weight to those who suggest that the issues at stake are not mere quibbles.
Doug Wilson’s gnostic charge seems richly ironic in a cyberspace discussion, though who the real Gnostic culprit is I’m not sure. The move to disembodied discourse of the sort we’re now engaged in, is part of the reason many of us yearn for more embodied ecclesiologies these days. There is an inevitable attraction to community in an age of overhyped individualism, and objectivity in an age of subjectivity. But that doesn’t get us very far in the discussion. De jure discussions of ecclesiology (and covenant) are lost on most evangelicals, and we among the reformed traditions ought to thank Bill Chellis and others for these sorts of forums to hear each other out on these matters. Theology matters and not simply as an antidote to our cultural disorders.
I’m inclined to agree with Darryl and John that gnosticism is probably not the most problematic of “tendencies†in the evangelical movement. The commodification of religious habits comes much closer to the heart of the problem. And might we say commodification is a strangely embodied form of behavior. Evangelical churches are often expressions of this supreme cultural disorder rather than prophetic voices against the disorder. The deeply embedded pietism of the evangelical movements (as Darryl and John have relentlessly pointed out) gives too much away to liberals and in due course, merely subjective piety of either the conservative or liberal persuasion will finally wither away and die – or get swallowed up by the markets! This should push us toward a more objective ecclesiology, but the question still is: how objective?
It is surprising that this FV discussion has oriented toward ecclesiology. Covenant was the original animating topic of FV (I think) and “church†was one of the consequences of seeing “covenant†in more objective terms. Many of us non-FVers are a wary about the blurring of the lines between redemption objectively construed (Christ’s death on the cross) and redemption applied (Spirit’s regenerating work in us). That line gets blurrier (!?!) the more “objective†everything else in the ordo salutis becomes. I take the FVers to sound alarm bells because everything has been “subjective†in the revivalistic traditions of evangelicalism. High church Calvinism has persistently sounded the same danger bells, and FV has no corner on this kind of dissent. However, we high church Calvinists are wary of over-objectifying everything as well. The reason is simple enough. The regenerating work of the Spirit evidences itself in a living faith, and not solely by external behaviors. Must there not be a middle ground between purely subjective notions of piety and purely objective notions of religious observance? And doesn’t Westminster and/or Heidelberg sound like that middle ground?
Since Voegelin has come up, it may be worth mentioning his charge that Calvin’s *Institutes* is a Gnostic Koran. I don’t think that’s accurate, since the heart of Calvin’s work is in his sermons and commentaries, and the Institutes is a well ordered collection of Commonplaces. Still, Voegelin has a point. When I was in school, long ago, it was commonly thought that Systematics was the queen of theology. Exegesis led to Biblical Theology and finally climaxed in Systematics. Well, I submit that this is very seriously wrong. For me, this is a form of gnosticism. The true goal is Practical and Liturgical Theology. Systematics gives us boundaries (it’s really Polemical theology), and this helps Biblical Theology, but the goal of all of it is Exegesis, the ability to explain a given pericope to PEOPLE so that PEOPLE are transformed. To do full justice to a given text, not explain it away because it does not seem to fit our tiny systems. Jesus came to save and to glorify people, not to bring an ideology. Way too often Reformed people take our great Confessions as ideologies, ignoring their many fuzzy edges, and forgetting that the men who wrote them were Bible-centered, not Confession-centered. They expected more Confessions to be written in the future, and the Covenanters and Associates were faithful to this notion. The State churches and later American denominations were not. My own study was in Systematics, and I still do plenty of it in my writing and teaching. But the highest form of theology is preaching and liturgics.
[...] the comments on a post on the De Regno Christi blog, James Jordan writes something that’s worth a blog entry of its own: When I was in school, long ago, it was commonly thought [...]