Ten Formative Books

By William B. Evans

Here are ten books (actually more than ten are mentioned) that I regard as theologically formative.  By “theologically formative” I don’t mean the most important or the most influential. Rather, I’m speaking of books that have been particularly significant, for a variety of reasons, for me personally. In some cases, they are widely regarded as theological classics; others are more niche, but all have stood the test of time.

St. Irenaeus, Against All Heresies—This early patristic work is much more than a catalog of Christian Gnostic heresies; it articulates a redemptive-historical view of salvation as participation in Christ, the Second Adam, who fixes what the first Adam did wrong and so “recapitulates,” or sums up under a new head, human history. I have found that the later theologians with whom I particularly resonate tend to have Irenaean overtones (e.g., Calvin, Nevin, Torrance). Here I think, for example, of Julie Canlis’s wonderful Calvin’s Ladder: A Spiritual Theology of Ascent and Ascension (Eerdmans, 2010), with its unpacking of the Irenaean, participatory dimension in John Calvin’ theology.

St. Augustine, Confessions—This classic of Christian religious autobiography serves as a fitting introduction to the greatest of the Western church fathers. Augustine’s Christian Platonism, with its themes of “faith seeking understanding” and participation in God, was dominant in the West until the high Middle Ages, and it continues to be retrieved in the Nouvelle Theologie and Radical Orthodoxy even today. Here I had to choose between Augustine and Athanasius’s On the Incarnation.  Athanasius is attractive in that he reminds us that the purpose of Christ’s saving work was much more than an abstract forensic exercise; it is to reconnect us with God, who is the source of light and life.  Alas, the nod went to Augustine because I am, after all, a Western Christian.  

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion—Reading though the Institutes carefully reminds us that the Reformed tradition is broader and deeper than the later federal theology codified in Hodge and Berkhof. Calvin’s theocentric piety and focus on union with Christ continue to be as relevant today as they were in the sixteenth century.  And that opening paragraph of Book III of the Institutes is pure gold: “How do we receive those benefits which the Father bestowed on his only begotten Son—not for Christ’s own private use, but that he might enrich poor and needy men? First, we must understand that as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us.”  I can think of more than a few theologians today who should strive to emulate Calvin’s “lucid brevity.”

Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith—Although 20^th-century scholarship dubbed him the “father of modern liberal theology,” in the 19^th century Schleiermacher was often viewed as a bridge back to orthodoxy (both interpretations have value). He had the good sense to realize that, over against Kant’s view of Jesus as helpful but ultimately dispensable, if one wishes to be a Christian then Christ must be central.  Thus, “Christianity is a monotheistic faith, belonging to the teleological type of religion, and is essentially distinguished from other such faiths by the fact that in it everything is related to the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth.”  Schleiermacher also emphasized the Pauline and Irenaean theme of Christ as the “second Adam,” and this then became common in European theology through the Mediating Theologians, and was eventually foregrounded in conservative Reformed biblical theology by Geerhardus Vos. One 19^th-century American theologian aptly described Schleiermacher as “the Origen of his age,” and Charles Hodge, who sat under Schleiermacher’s preaching in Berlin, wrote that he expected to see the great German in heaven!  Of course, Schleiermacher was Karl Barth’s bête noire, but I’m convinced that Barth’s response to Schleiermacher was ultimately less than adequate. Fortunately, we now have a new English translation/critical edition of The Christian Faith, and Schleiermacher scholarship is on an upswing.

John W. Nevin, The Mystical Presence—Published in 1846, this volume provides both a defense of Calvin’s eucharistic doctrine and a wonderful introduction to the soteriology of the Mercersburg Theology movement we associate with John Williamson Nevin and Philip Schaff. In it, Nevin called out much of the American Reformed community for its rationalistic Zwinglianism and lack of sacramental sensibility. It also provoked a heated debate between Nevin and Charles Hodge over the nature of the Reformed tradition. In the opinion of most historians who have studied the matter, Nevin won the debate on points!  More accessible is Nevin’s The Anxious Bench, a surgical dissection—both theological and psychological—of Charles Finney’s revivalism.

Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century—Having grown up in a religious context where the Puritans were lauded for their “warmth of piety” (remember all those Banner of Truth Trust reprints?), and having grown really tired of the religious subjectivity on steroids of evangelicalism, I was pretty much done with the Puritans. But reading the Harvard atheist English professor Perry Miller on the New England Puritans finally helped me to make sense of them as people.  It’s now fashionable in historical circles to sneer at Miller, but a good deal of what he wrote has stood the test of time and he’s fun to read.

H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture—This volume has helped generations of Christians begin to navigate the conflicting claims of Christ and culture.  While the work is somewhat dated in that the question is now also Christ and cultures (plural), I (and my students) continue to find Niebuhr’s five-fold typology—Christ against culture (Anabaptism), Christ and culture in paradox (Lutheranism), Christ transforming culture (Calvinism), Christ above culture (Thomism), and the Christ of culture (liberalism)—illuminating.

Thomas F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ—Anyone interested in Torrance should start with this beautiful, elegant little book.  It provides a wonderful primer in Torrance’s notion of the “vicarious humanity of Christ.”

Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., Resurrection and Redemption—This book rocked my world when I was a seminary student. Gaffin’s development of Geerhardus Vos’s second-Adam Christology, with particular focus on the resurrection as the climax of Christ’s redemptive work, helped me to move beyond the conventional evangelical transactional view of salvation to a more participatory understanding of salvation as union with Christ.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue—This volume almost singlehandedly stimulated a popular revival of interest in virtue ethics. MacIntyre’s argument—that, having lost sight of the teleology of human existence, people today have also lost any sense of the virtues that contribute to human flourishing, and ethical reflection has been largely reduced to “emotivism” (how we feel about it)—remains a compelling description of our situation. Also important is the sequel volume, Whose Justice, Which Rationality?  Reading these volumes helped me to deepen my understanding of ethical reflection.

What Happened to the Protestant Mainline? A Review of Peter Schmiechen, Tradition in Crisis: The Case for Centric Protestants.

By William B. Evans

[Editor’s Note: This is the first EcclesialCalvinist post in quite some time. I’m hopeful that this will mark a return to more regular posting.]

My friend Peter Schmiechen, prominent United Church of Christ theologian and former President of Lancaster Theological Seminary, has written a stimulating book on the decline of the Protestant Mainline (or what Martin Marty of the University of Chicago called the “Sideline” and Edward Farley of Vanderbilt termed the “Oldline,” both terms, of course, signaling an eclipse). As the subtitle indicates, Schmiechen’s Tradition in Crisis: The Case for Centric Protestants (Wipf and Stock, 2022) does not just diagnose problems but offers suggestions for a way forward. I’ll add that Peter and I have discussed some of these issues at length.  Those conversations have been frank and spirited, and I appreciate his willingness to dialogue.

NB: The volume reviewed here will be the focus of the 2023 Mercersburg Convocation, held at Lancaster Theological Seminary on May 22-23, 2023.  I will be attending and look forward to the discussion.

The subject matter of this volume is serious and pressing. At this point, there can be little doubt that the Protestant mainline is in dire straits numerically. The Presbyterian Church (USA), the mainline denomination with which I am most familiar by virtue of family history and personal involvement, recently recorded an annual membership loss of 53,105 (a decline from 1,193,770 in 2021 to 1,140,665 in 2022). Moreover, the denomination is predominantly older (58.2% are age 56 and older), female (61.48%), and white (89.08%). Schmiechen’s own United Church of Christ has experienced similar decline. The takeaway from these patterns is that the Protestant mainline has failed to hold on to the younger generations and to males, and that, demographically speaking, the future is bleak—there is not much of a younger generation coming up to replace the losses. Of course, as Schmiechen rightly notes, things are not exactly rosy on the right either. More conservative denominations, which grew during the latter part of the twentieth century (see, e.g., Dean M. Kelley, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing: A Study in Sociology of Religion [1972]), have now started to plateau or decline in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

Schmiechen’s discussion is textured and complex. He argues that while mainline Protestants read the Bible differently from conservative Protestants, they did not do a good job of justifying their hermeneutical approach. In addition, the impulse for evangelism collapsed (not terribly surprising, I would add, given the loss of the notion of eternal punishment), and, finally, mainline worship practices have sent mixed signals in that they have largely borrowed from other traditions rather than giving expression to their own (pp. 12-14). I think this analysis is basically correct.

Central to Schmiechen’s proposal is the notion of “centric Protestants,” which he defines, first of all, over against “liberals” with their anthropological optimism. By “liberal” he seems to have in mind the position H. Richard Niebuhr famously pilloried in the following terms: “A God without wrath brought men without sin in to a kingdom without judgment by the ministrations of a Christ without a cross” (Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America, p. 193).  But he also defines these “centric Protestants” over against Christians on the right—Confessional Protestants of the Lutheran or Reformed sort with their focus on “absolute” doctrine and Scripture, Anabaptists, Pentecostals and Charismatics, and Fundamentalists with their inerrant Bibles (p. 17).

Here, of course, an obvious question presents itself: Does Schmiechen’s notion of “centric Protestants” represent a coherent and sustainable theological position with a significant constituency, or is it an exercise in nostalgia, shaped by Schmiechen’s own formation in a mid-twentieth-century context dominated by Barth, Brunner, and the Niebuhrs, for a time that is long past and gone? Or, to phrase it differently, if conservative historian D. G. Hart can define “evangelicals” as “conservative Protestants who like Billy Graham,” could not Schmiechen’s centric Protestants perhaps be defined as “a few mainline Protestants who still like the Niebuhr brothers”? That the answer to this question is not immediately obvious is a potential problem for Schmiechen’s proposal.

So who are these “centric Protestants”?  According to Schmiechen, they are shaped by three historical moments. First, they “celebrate the essential message of the sixteenth-century Reformation, namely the word of promise in Jesus Christ, understood as grace.” Second, they “are open to the issues raised by the enlightenment,” and they reconstructed Protestant theology on a christological rather than bibliological foundation. And finally, they have responded to the twentieth-century struggles regarding warfare, genocide, and social justice, and the stark realism regarding human condition that entailed (pp. 15-16). That historical schema strikes me as useful and illuminating.

The remaining chapters of the book focus on Schmiechen’s positive proposal for reenergizing centric Protestantism. Chapter 2 is on restoring “community.” Schmiechen rightly notes that the turn to Augustine and the Reformers that characterized the twentieth-century revitalization of Protestant theology involved the recognition that union with Christ (a theme crucial to both Luther and Calvin) involves a horizontal dimension—union together in the church as community (p. 44).  Furthermore, this emphasis on community was powerfully shaped by twentieth-century debates about the relationship between “sacrificial love” and “coercive power,” debates that issued in the praxis focus of the Civil Rights Movement and Liberation Theology (pp. 46-47). The upshot of all this has been a decentering of church, doctrine, and theology by a notion of christological presence in community. As Schmiechen puts it, centric Protestants “are unable to endorse the absolute claims of churches regarding Bible doctrine or episcopal authority, or the attempts to preserve and protect the social status quo which wishes to perpetuate divisions by race, class, and gender. At the same time, they reject the attempts to reduce Jesus to moral teachings or separate religion or Jesus from the community of faith.  They are open to radical criticism of institutional life, but refuse to give up on the church as the community of Christ” (p. 48). Schmiechen then provides a useful typology of different conceptions of how Christ is present in community (pp. 50-51). But this understanding of community is threatened, Schmiechen contends, by a variety of factors, most of them related to individualism, in which the church is construed as a voluntary association of like-minded individuals, salvation is viewed in terms of individual needs and desires, and the Eucharist is viewed as an exercise in individual penance (pp. 54-60).

Chapter 3, entitled “Sin and Grace,” is basically a Niebuhr-approved rendition of Christian Realism. Here the claim is that Genesis 1—3, read as neither ancient myth to be dispensed with (per liberalism) or literal history (per fundamentalism), provides a [regulative?] foundation for affirming the goodness of creation, the reality and tragedy of sin, the appropriate limits of our natures, and the breakdown of relationships (pp. 65-66). Schmiechen clearly regards this recovery of the doctrine of sin, and its corollary the goodness of creation, to be vital and even essential to the centric Protestant position: “In an unexpected way, the doctrine of sin is the keystone holding its counterparts together. If you remove it, the others collapse. The reason for this is quite simple. Realism affirms the realty of sin and evil, but also that they constitute a fall from the original goodness of creation. . . . The doctrine of sin holds creation and redemption together: something has gone seriously wrong, corrupting the individual and society, but it arises within the world” (p. 69). It is precisely here that Schmiechen locates the discomfort that centric Protestants sense over against both liberals, who deny that sin is individual, and many conservatives, who deny that sin can be corporate (pp. 74-78).

Here I should note, however, that Schmiechen’s presentation of the “goodness of creation” seems underdeveloped. For example, does this “good” creation order include the gender binary, as Genesis 1:26-28 would seem to suggest? This strikes me as a significant point, in that the goodness of creation is now one of the most controverted points in theology, and pessimism on this point helps to account for the rise of Gnostic ways of thinking in contemporary culture.

The fourth chapter (“Authority”) addresses an issue raised earlier in the book—that centric Protestants have often failed to provide a coherent account of their interpretation of Scripture and their approach to religious authority. Here the point of departure is Mercersburg theologian Philip Schaff’s The Principle of Protestantism (1845), which speaks of a twofold principle—sola gratia (justification by grace through faith) and sola scriptura. Schmiechen argues that of these two, the material principle (grace) has priority over the formal (Scripture), and that Scripture is to be read in light of God’s grace in Jesus Christ (pp. 81-82). Schmiechen also recognizes, in Niebuhrian fashion (cf. H. R. Niebuhr, Christ and Culture), that Christians must acknowledge many authorities and that grace/Christ must function for centric Protestants as the center of a matrix of authorities. Thus, centric Protestants approach Scripture seriously, but also with considerably more flexibility than their more conservative counterparts.

The last chapter, “Worship and the Vital Center,” recognizes that the renewal of worship will be vital to the future of centric Protestantism.  Here Schmiechen argues, first of all, that worship must be an “encounter with the God who has redeemed us in Christ” and that themes of grace and community must be central (pp. 107-110). Second, he contends that worship must invite people to inhabit the biblical story of grace and salvation in Christ: “Christian worship is the place where our self-stories are told, judged, revised, and rewritten in light of the story of Jesus Christ. . . . Put in another way, we are not talking about enhancing or completing our stories, but deconstructing our stories and being re-formed by the story of Jesus” (p. 114). And finally, in contrast to the somber tone of much worship today, worship must involve “the response of faith, joy, and gratitude” (p. 116).

There is much to commend in this volume; it presents a deeply informed take on the trials and tribulations of mainline Protestantism by a seasoned mainline-church veteran and theological educator. I sense that Schmiechen’s understanding of the historical elements that have shaped what he terms “centric Protestants” is pretty compelling on the descriptive level, and that his theological programme may well be attractive to those who find other alternatives lacking.

Moreover, I would not want to diminish the importance of what Schmiechen is seeking to achieve—nothing less than the theological renewal of the mainline. There seems to be an emerging consensus that the collapse of the Protestant mainline in this country has left a void that neither Roman Catholicism nor evangelicalism has been able to fill. This argument has been made in various ways by, for example, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in his book Bad Religion: How We Became and Nation of Heretics (2012), and by Jody Bottum in his An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America (2014). Like it or not, the Protestant mainline once provided the nation with a vocabulary and conceptual apparatus for speaking and thinking about national character, duty, obligation, and civic virtue. Now that voice is largely gone, and the nation is not the better for it.

I realize that the audience for this blog consists largely of readers who are right-of-center theologically, and that such people will likely have significant differences with Schmiechen over issues pertaining to the authority of Scripture and the dogmatic tradition. While not minimizing the significance of those concerns, I want to focus on some other areas of friendly criticism.

First, I’m just not sure that there are many “centric Protestants” left in the world. The mainline churches of today are quite different from the mainline churches of, say, the 1950s. Something significant happened in the 1960s (and Schmiechen at various points seems to concede that the 1960s were a watershed in this story).  The Protestant mainline entered the 1960s at the height of prominence and cultural influence; it left the 1960s increasingly marginalized and frantically accommodating itself to a culture that had changed drastically. No longer influential, the mainline was increasingly influenced. The question is, what happened and why. 

Second, a significant part of the answer to that question is that the Protestant mainline accommodated itself wholesale to what sociologists call “expressive individualism,” and, furthermore, that mainline-church theology was to a considerable degree reconfigured in an expressive-individualist idiom. Here the individual is defined in terms of self-expression and self-actualization over against the constraints of society and even nature itself. As Robert Bellah and his colleagues noted in Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1985), the “expressive culture . . . reveals its difference from earlier patterns by its readiness to treat normative commitments as so many alternative strategies of self-fulfillment. What has dropped out are the old normative expectations of what makes life worth living.  With the freedom to define oneself anew in a plethora of identities has also come an attenuation of those common understandings that enable us to recognize the virtue of the other” (p. 48). In other words, expressive individualism has robbed us of a common moral conceptuality beyond the formal concept of freedom without much in the way of limits, and this explains how the Protestant mainline went from being a key consensus voice for virtue, obligation, and duty to a divisive bully pulpit for what African-American theologian Carl Ellis has termed “do-your-own-thingism.” How many sermons on personal duty, fidelity, and obligation have you heard in mainline church circles recently?

While Schmiechen’s discussion of individualism is less than satisfying, he occasionally seems to sense a problem, but sees it as a “liberal” problem rather than a problem for the mainline more generally: “Much of this goes back to the tendency of liberals to define freedom in terms of self-actualization and self-expression . . . When dealing with oppressive practices on a social scale toward woman or minorities, liberals join in protesting for justice. But they also tend to carve our exemptions from critical analysis in the realm of personal relations such as love, marriage or family, even though such practices might be harmful to women and children” (p. 75).

From this embrace of expressive individualism by the Protestant mainline beginning in the 1960s, it is a relatively small step to the defense by many in the mainline of the contemporary sexual chaos with 57 genders and drag-queen Sunday School. This also helps to explain the demographic problem of the mainline, and why there are so few children and younger couples in many mainline churches.  I sometimes attend PCUSA congregations, and the consistent pattern there is small and old.  By contrast, the ACNA parishes that my two children attend in Chapel Hill, NC and Washington, DC are bursting with young couples and children. My clear sense is that Christian couples who are trying to carve out a stable home life and nurture children in the context of a culture seemingly gone crazy are highly unlikely to attend mainline churches where sexual chaos is not only tolerated but celebrated. It is also worth noting that this has created severe tension with the Christian tradition, which foregrounds self-denial and self-discipline and is manifestly NOT about sexual libertinism. From what I can see, most mainline theologians today either theoretically embrace this libertinism or they ignore it. In fact, the only mainline theologian I am aware of engaging these issues in a constructive way is the British feminist Sarah Coakley, who is seeking a middle path between libertinism and repression in books like The New Asceticism (2015).

But how was mainline theology accommodated to expressive individualism?  This is a story I’ve only begun to ponder in recent months, but here’s a tentative outline. In addition to classical Protestant influences, there were significant Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment factors.   Mainline Protestantism, particularly in its classical liberal and Social Gospel forms, was heavily influenced by Kant’s deontological approach to ethics with its emphasis on duty and obligation. Schleiermacher’s christocentrism and view of theology as funded by experience were also significant, and here it is particularly intriguing to note that Schleiermacher viewed the human being as characterized, religiously at least, by radical dependence (religion consists, according to Schleiermacher, in a “feeling of utter dependence” upon the Whence). Then there was Hegel’s dialectical approach to history and the historicism that it generated, but even more significant for subsequent history was Hegel’s framing of the human condition in terms of radical freedom.  This was, in fact, a point where these two stars at the University of Berlin differed strenuously.  As Hegel famously quipped, if Schleiermacher is right and the essence of religion is the feeling of utter dependence, then “a dog is the best Christian”! In the mid-nineteenth century Hegel’s stress on freedom was picked up by Karl Marx and applied to economics; then in the twentieth century Marx’s Hegelian view of freedom was expanded far beyond economics and social class by the Frankfurt School and French post-structuralism to include nearly everything, and the theoretical basis for justifying expressive individualism in the broader culture was in place. With their culturalist orientation, many mainline Protestants simply went with the flow, and the results have been disastrous for the Protestant mainline.  

Note, however, that one implication of the narrative in the paragraph above is that there are yet resources within the mainline Protestant tradition that can be drawn upon in order to address the problems of expressive individualism.  For example, what if the human condition is better framed in terms of dependence (Schleiermacher) rather than autonomy and freedom (Hegel)?  The argument can be made in a host of ways that as humans we are radically dependent beings. We start out completely dependent on our parents and we often end our lives in states of radical dependence upon others. And in between we are in fact dependent on others and upon God in a host of ways that we don’t fully understand.  Moreover, we certainly don’t create ourselves! Once we recognize those realities we are freed up to recognize the costs of the current ways of thinking—for example, the ways that expressive individualism is corrosive of genuine community, from the family on up, that is necessary for human flourishing. Moreover, drawing on these other resources could well enable the mainline to recover a language of personal virtue, obligation, and duty that is so needful today.

All in all, this book is a significant contribution, though not the last word on what has happened to the Protestant mainline.

What’s with the Evangelical Acolytes for Joe Biden?

It’s with considerable interest that I’ve been watching some people I know in the conservative Reformed community getting in line to endorse Democrat Joe Biden’s campaign for the Presidency. Evangelical Old Testament scholar Tremper “you need to read my book” Longman told us on Facebook that he was voting for Biden some weeks back, and more recently Sam Logan, the Associate International Director at the World Reformed Fellowship, posted this on Facebook: “Three of the MANY reasons why I, as an evangelical Christian who opposes abortion, will vote for Mr. Biden are: 1) the implicit warnings about our current POTUS presented in Eric Alterman’s book, WHEN PRESIDENTS LIE: A HISTORY OF OFFICIAL DECEPTION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES, 2) the INCREDIBLE list of life-long Republicans, many of whom worked closely with Mr. Trump, who publicly oppose his re-election, and 3) the public statements about Mr. Trump by close members of his own family.”

I’m a bit mystified by Logan’s logic.  Perhaps he can name one or two politicians who do not lie, but I’m not going to hold my breath.  And while there’s no doubt that a raft of establishment Republicans hate Trump’s guts, I’m guessing that may actually reflect favorably on Trump.  Finally, while I’ve gathered that the Trump family has been somewhat dysfunctional, the fact that some members of the larger Trump clan don’t like its best-known member just may be neither here nor there.  Perhaps Logan has the inside scoop on the Trump family dynamics, but I doubt it.  Color me unconvinced.

What is clear is that a fair number of evangelical elite types are registering their support for Biden, the candidate of the Democratic Party. Now such people won’t come right out and say that they support the policies of the Democratic Party platform—pretty much unrestricted access to abortion, the transgender agenda, and so forth—but a Biden victory in November will clearly advance those causes.  We can speculate as to whether such people have “softened” on some of these moral issues (I suspect that the answer to that question will vary from person to person), but what is clear is that THE ISSUE is antipathy to Trump and what he represents.

I’ll grant that, on the personal level, the choice between Trump and Biden is unhappy.  Neither man is a paragon of virtue.  But despite recent polls suggesting that voters view Joe Biden as more honest than Trump, in fact Biden has a well-earned reputation for telling whoppers.  More pressing seems to be the conviction by these evangelical types that Trump is just too randy to occupy the White House.  Once again, the argument runs into problems, not least the fact that we’ve had quite a run of legendary libidos in the Oval Office (JFK, LBJ, and WJC come to mind and all of them were Democrats, so I guess the Republicans were due). Then there’s the fact that Joe Biden apparently has quite a history of inappropriate behavior toward women.  In any event, the argument that Trump is manifestly morally unfit to occupy the White House while Joe Biden is the picture of rectitude doesn’t wash.

It’s also worth noting that the evangelical Never Trumpers are in the awkward position of making a dubious moral fitness argument to counter concerns about what will almost certainly be the profoundly negative cultural impact of a Biden presidency. If he is reelected, Trump will still be gone in four years, and at least we know that he is not hostile to people of faith.  The fallout of a Biden presidency will likely be with us for generations.  If Joe Biden wins, the Little Sisters of Charity and anybody else who affirms traditional morality had better lawyer up.

So, if these evangelical acolytes for Biden are not keen on the details of the Democratic Party platform, and  their moral fitness argument is weak, what is going on? The short version is that this is class warfare.  Almost without exception, as far as I can tell, the evangelical Never Trumpers come from the ranks of the elites, and the simple fact is that such progressive evangelicals have a really big problem with classism. They don’t like “the deplorables” any more than Hillary and Barack and Joe do, and they will go way out of their way to differentiate themselves from the hoi polloi they view as their intellectual and cultural inferiors. To use the language of sociology, the “boundary posturing mechanism” du jour is opposition to Trump.

Moreover, they care more about being acceptable to the movers and shakers of elite culture than they do about working for justice and mercy on the biggest issue facing our day.  To be sure, they may sometimes endorse the abstractions of identity politics and critical theory, but the greatest single moral issue today is the way that entrenched elites have been screwing the lower classes—the elites stick it to the black underclass through the politics of dependency and they stick it to the white underclass through the politics of contempt and marginalization.

In a previous blog post, I noted that the gulf between traditional white evangelicals and woke/SJW white evangelicals is now unbridgeable, and that that fact bodes ill for the future of the evangelical movement.  The movement of evangelical elites into the Biden camp further underscores the unbearable lightness of the evangelical movement as it now exists.  We are now at a point where professed evangelicals are questioning not just the political judgment but the very Christianity of other professed evangelicals.  I just can’t see people on both sides of these divides continuing to worship together—the disagreements are now so elemental—and that is probably the end of the road for evangelicalism as we know it.

Put a Fork in It

Well, let’s put a fork in it . . . it’s done! Evangelicalism, that is. The social pressures of the current situation have revealed a truth many have suspected for quite a while. The simple truth, with apologies in advance for using Gertrude Stein’s overworked phrase, is that “there is no there there.” At least not anymore.

Two weeks ago on Facebook I commented, “One of the results of the recent waves of violence is that the gap between progressive/woke white people who view absolutely everything through the lens of (perfectly abstract) critical race theory and other white people (who recognize the cultural complexity and ambiguity of social relationships) is now unbridgeable. The implications of this split for the evangelical church are not good at all.” Unfortunately, I was right.

I’ve watched the representatives of “Big Eva” (i.e., the evangelical institutional establishment) falling over themselves to endorse the now conventional systemic-racism/white-privilege/white-guilt/white-fragility narrative. Christianity Today has called for white churches to pay reparation to blacks (and let’s not forget the former editor of that magazine, Mark Galli, excoriating evangelical Trump voters as something less than Christian). I’ve read posts by evangelical scholars calling for reparation and endorsing the erasing of history on university campuses by renaming buildings named for nineteenth-century southern white figures.  Apparently, much of the evangelical elite is now embracing Kulturprotestantismus with great enthusiasm.

Parenthetically, I find all this both amusing and sad. It’s been said that wokeness is the single best indicator of white privilege, and close examination suggests that the recent flurries of virtue signaling probably have more to do with not-so-subtle class warfare against “deplorable” WPWDPLs (“white people we don’t particularly like”) and efforts to join with the secular elites than a genuine desire to help black people (for an insightful and rhetorically powerful treatment of the class issues in play right now, see this piece by Victor Davis Hanson).

Then there’s the awkward biblicism in service to whatever the current cultural fad is.  As David Bebbington famously observed, evangelicals are “biblicists”–they love the Bible.  But evangelical use of the Bible is often pretty wooden.  I’ve studied this stuff for years and for the life of me I can’t find a biblical case for what passes for “antiracism” in the current, trendy, cultural-Marxist sense of the term. The biblical writers were certainly aware of racial differences (on balance, “ethnic differences” is probably a more precise term here; see Rodney Sadler, Can a Cushite Change His Skin?: An Examination of Race, Ethnicity, and Othering in the Hebrew Bible [2009]). For the OT writers, not only could the Cushite not change his dark skin, but no “Moabite or any of their descendants may enter the assembly of the LORD, not even in the tenth generation” (Deuteronomy 23:3). And the fact that Ruth the Moabite made it in the back door doesn’t change the text of Deuteronomy!  By cultural-Marxist standards the Bible doesn’t come off too well.

And with regard to slavery, I’ve finally (and reluctantly) come to the conclusion that Harvard Professor Jon Levenson was correct when he wrote that “neither the Hebrew Bible nor the New Testament is opposed to slavery” (Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil [1994], 142). Furthermore, to the extent that the current structural-racism/white-guilt/white-privilege narrative depends on conceptions of corporate, multi-generational moral responsibility and complicity, it probably runs afoul of Ezekiel’s individualism. Recall that the exilic Jews realized that earlier notions of corporate guilt were no longer particularly helpful and so Ezekiel repudiates them with a vigor that caused some rabbis to think he was overturning the teaching of the Pentateuch (see Ezekiel 18:1-20; see also Jeremiah 31:29-30; cf. Exodus 20:5).

In short, the biblical ethical/legal materials, particularly in the OT, are highly contextual and dynamic, and a coherent proof-text argument for wokeness in my judgment can’t be made. Of course, that’s not to say that there is not a Christian case to be made against racism, slavery, and the profoundly invidious hierarchies that are sometimes manifested in human societies. But such arguments must, in my judgment, be made Christologically rather than on the basis of wooden proof texts. The outlines of such an argument were, in fact, suggested by the great Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America: “All the great writers of antiquity were a part of the aristocracy of masters, or at least they saw that aristocracy as established without dispute before their eyes; their minds, after expanding in several directions, were therefore found limited in that one, and it was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America [Mansfield trans.], 413).

But things are not much better on the other side of the argument. While sensing that things are going off the rails and fast, many more conservative evangelicals have difficulty articulating a coherent case to the contrary. Some try to counter the racialism (really a form of “soft racism”) of the Left only to fall off the other side of the horse into racism themselves. It’s also telling that those who want to make substantive arguments against the progressive liberal race narrative must almost of necessity draw on the work of seminal African-American scholars such as Tom Sowell, Shelby Steele, and John McWorter, or on secular white thinkers such as Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson.

The sad fact is that evangelicalism, with its historic and reflexively individualistic focus on saving souls, simply doesn’t have much of anything distinctive to offer in response to the pressing social questions of the day, and to the race question in particular.  And seventy or so years of evangelical preoccupation with “Christian worldview” apparently hasn’t gotten us very far either.

For decades now evangelicalism has been suffering from a howling identity crisis, and my sense is that soon the anathemas will start to fly and the movement will further disintegrate. What will happen is that both sides will increasingly view their position on the race issue as a matter of status confessionis (a technical theological term meaning “state of confession,” in which a truth not directly addressed by formal confessions is effectively elevated to confessional status because of its saliency in a particular historical context). On the evangelical left, in the patois of pietism (to which evangelicals seemingly are addicted) the wokeness/identity-politics package is now being increasingly touted as a “gospel issue.” On the evangelical right, there is an increasing suspicion that the structural-racism/white-privilege/white-guilt narrative is not only unhelpful but also corrosive of a genuinely Christian ecclesiology and Christology, and that what is really going on is a redefinition of the church along lines suggested by liberation-theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez—the church as the oppressed and those in solidarity with them. In other words, a head-on collision is coming.

So, let’s put a fork in it.  It’s done. I frankly don’t see how a religious movement with such scant theological resources and depth can survive.

Democans and Republicrats

Scientists tell us that the sun’s magnetic poles flip their orientation about every eleven years or so.  North becomes south and south becomes north, and then it flips back, completing the 22-year Solar Cycle.  Analogous flips occur in American politics, though not nearly as often and they take a lot longer to play out.  We seem to be in the midst of such a shift today—in important ways, the Democrats have become the Republicans and the Republicans have become the Democrats.

Take the Democrats.  From Franklin Delano Roosevelt (really from the “Prairie Populist” William Jennings Bryan at the turn of the twentieth century) until Bill Clinton they were the party of the working class, as a potent alliance of urban workers and rural agriculture was able to dominate American politics for many decades in the wake of the Great Depression.  The impoverished and socially stratified South was solidly Democrat (there was, of course, a racial component to this in that the Republicans were still seen as the “party of Lincoln”).  Reflecting this base, the Democratic party tended by and large to be economically liberal and socially conservative.  Many were overt populists.

The Republicans, on the other hand, were the party of business and the upper-middle and upper-class establishment.  As such, it tended to be economically conservative and socially progressive.  For many, fiscal conservatism and social progressivism went hand in hand.  It’s no accident, for example, that a key impulse toward socially progressive Supreme Court decisions has tended to come from Republican appointees (e.g., Earl Warren, Harry Blackmun, and more recently Anthony Kennedy).

Now, however, the Democrats have repudiated the working class (especially those “deplorables” who “cling to guns or religion”) and have hitched their wagon to globalized big business and to the woke New Class of university-educated and ideologically driven manipulators of symbolic knowledge.  They are socially progressive and they cater to the interests of really big money (that’s not exactly economic conservatism in the traditional sense, but it will do for the purposes of this comparison).  Some of the older rhetoric about “care for the poor” continues, but it is vestigial and rings increasingly hollow.

The Republicans, on the other hand, have in recent decades become the vehicle for a visceral populist reaction against globalism and social progressivism and, of course, against the corrosion of local community and religious values that inevitably accompanies such globalist progressivism.  The spendthrift economic policies of recent Republican administrations suggest that fiscal conservatism has been left far behind, even as many in the party have embraced social conservatism.  This shift in focus from economic conservation to values conservation suggests that a decisive change is taking place in what it means to be a “conservative.”

This shift in Republican sensibilities began under the former Democrat Ronald Reagan, stalled to some degree during the “Olde-Republican” Bush One and Bush Two administrations, and has achieved hurricane-force intensity with Trump.  It’s also worth noting that the “flip” among the Democrats is more complete than the shift in the Republican context, and at this point the Democrats may well be more ideologically coherent than the Republicans (which certainly didn’t use to be the case).  Where all this will go is hard to predict, though the patterns we are seeing with Trump are also playing out elsewhere in the world as the economic limitations and cultural barrenness of liberal progressivism become increasingly obvious.

Also worth noting is how these shifts have been facilitated by the enormous economic expansion of the post-World War II era and the technological sophistication that has accompanied it.  For example, it takes a lot of money and technology to facilitate the Democrats’ embrace of expressive individualism with its quest for sexual autonomy and freedom from the onerous constraints of nature itself.  And while many Republicans rightly sense that expressive individualism is culturally rotten and distorts the fundamental contours of human existence, they seem to think that the checkbook for government spending, particularly on middle-class entitlement programs, is bottomless.  All this suggests that neither party’s path is ultimately sustainable.

New Work on the Mercersburg Theology Published

[Editor’s Note: For some reason I neglected to blog about the publication of this volume when it came out in May of this year.  Better late than never (and just in time for Christmas)!]

A Companion to the Mercersburg Theology: Evangelical Catholicism in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.  By William B. Evans

This volume tells the story of a mid-nineteenth-century theological movement emanating from the small German Reformed Seminary in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, where John Williamson Nevin and Philip Schaff taught. There they explored themes—such as the centrality of the incarnation for theology, the importance of the church as the body of Christ and the sphere of salvation, liturgical and sacramental worship, and the organic historical development of the church and its doctrines—that continue to resonate today with many who seek a deeper and more historically informed expression of the Christian faith that is both evangelical and catholic.

William B. Evans is the Eunice Witherspoon Bell Younts and Willie Camp Younts Professor of Bible and Religion at Erskine College in Due West, South Carolina. He received his Ph.D. in History of Christian Thought from Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Imputation and Impartation (Wipf & Stock, 2009), and What Is the Incarnation? (2013).

 

An Interview with the Author

1. What initially drew you to the Mercersburg Theology?

I first encountered the writings of John W. Nevin and Phillip Schaff while I was in seminary. Especially important for me were John W. Nevin’s treatises The Anxious Bench and The Mystical Presence. I was intrigued initially because of the Mercersburg emphasis on religious objectivity as expressed in liturgy and the sacraments—something that stood in pretty stark contrast to the relentless emphasis on religious subjectivity and conversionism I had encountered as a child.

2. How do you account for the rise of interest in the Mercersburg Theology since the 1950s?

The conventional answer to this is that Mercersburg anticipated the ecumenical and liturgical-renewal movements. That’s true as far as it goes, but it’s sort of a “mainline Protestant” answer, and the reality is more complicated. Nevin and Schaff were formidable theologians in their context, and they are still a lot of fun to read. And unlike some theologians influenced by German antecedents, they are quite accessible! Mercersburg also provides an alternative take on the Reformed theological tradition—one that draws heavily on Calvin and Schleiermacher rather than on the Puritans and Reformed scholasticism. And finally, Mercersburg represents a decidedly non-Barthian approach that wrestles with the challenges of history in a rather different manner than Barth. For these reasons, I think, Mercersburg has had a rather unique capacity to draw together Christians from a wide variety of backgrounds.

3. Nevin or Schaff?

That’s a tough question! I’ve discovered over the years that while the similarities of perspective were profound, they sometimes came to different conclusions on some pretty significant matters. I resonate with a good many of Nevin’s theological formulations and with Schaff’s historical methodology and sensibility. In some ways, perhaps, Schaff’s work may be even more relevant and useful in charting the significance of Mercersburg for our contemporary social context because of the way he came to terms with the American experience.

4. Where can we locate Mercersburg on the spectrum of Reformed theology?

In their own context, the Mercersburgers framed their approach over against the predestinarian Calvinism of Old Princeton and the moralistic evangelicalism of New England Calvinism. Now, of course, the lines of demarcation are somewhat different, and Reformed Theology today seems to reflect two basic impulses. On the conservative side there are those who draw on the tradition of Reformed scholasticism, often combined with a heavy dose of Puritan piety. Moving leftward we find the powerful influence of Karl Barth. Mercersburg, with its corporate and liturgical sensibility, deep sacramentology and ecclesiology, and historical consciousness, again presents a third option.

5. What contributions can Mercersburg make to current theological discussion?

While no theological movement can be brought over in toto from the past into the present, I think there are a number of areas where the influence of Mercersburg should figure in present-day theological discussion. For example, in the current context there is a wave of interest in the theme of “participation.” I argue in the book that today we have theological options that are participationist but not Christocentric (e.g., Radical Orthodoxy) and options that are Christocentric but not participationist (e.g., Karl Barth), and that both issue in undeveloped ecclesiologies. Mercersburg succeeded in being both participationist and Christocentric, and that resulted in a pretty robust ecclesiology that just might have something to teach us today.

6. Where do you see the field of Mercersburg studies headed in coming years?

A lot of historical-theological spadework has been done at this point. That work will continue, and will be facilitated by the fact that many key texts are now available in critical editions through Wipf and Stock’s Mercersburg Theology Study Series (it’s worth noting that in this Companion to the Mecersburg Theology every effort has been made to key the quotations not only to the original sources but also to these recent critical editions).  But there is also the need to critically apply Mercersburg insights to our contemporary theological context. This volume is, in part, an effort to prime that pump.

 

Praise for A Companion to the Mercersburg Theology: Evangelical Catholicism in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

“In their own day, the theologians at Mercersburg received scant attention. Over the last fifty years, with the assistance of insightful works like this Companion, that situation has been reversed—which has meant both better history and deeper theology. This particular volume is an ideal introduction to Nevin, Schaff, and company, even as it should also stimulate wider appropriation of these important voices from the past.”

—Mark Noll, University of Notre Dame, author, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln

 

“Evans’s Companion is a gem of exposition, carefully balancing biography, intellectual history, and theological evaluation. I enthusiastically recommend it and regard it as now the standard introduction to the Mercersburg Theology. Students get a clear sense of Mercersburg’s location in the Reformed theological world, and experienced scholars can benefit from its references to the latest scholarship (particularly the texts in Wipf & Stock’s Mercersburg Theology Study Series).”

—David Layman, York College of Pennsylvania

 

“This masterful introduction is a most welcome addition to the growing body of literature on Mercersburg Theology. Evans presents its key figures and themes with a perceptive eye to their relevance to both historical and contemporary theological concerns. Both beginners and specialists will find much to appreciate here.

—Anne T. Thayer, Lancaster Theological Seminary

 

“The Reformed Catholicism of the nineteenth century Mercersburg Theology has found in William B. Evans an outstanding exegete. He provides deft commentary and careful exposition as he commends its ongoing importance for the life of the church. If you want a single short introduction to this important and influential group of American and German theologians, look no further. Evans has done the job with panache.”

—Oliver D. Crisp, Fuller Theological Seminary, and Professorial Fellow, University of St Andrews

 

 

 

Edward’s Quarrel with God

By Robert Winslow

Editor’s Note: This short story by my friend Robert Winslow is both beautifully written and deeply theological in its reflections on theodicy and the Reformed tradition.  Enjoy!

He came into the church and sat down in a pew, pausing a moment before he recited the prayer by heart: “Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy Name; through Christ our Lord.  Amen.”

When he had finished, he looked around the sanctuary and then at the altar.  Speaking to himself, but not to himself, he said: “I want to raise again my claim pertaining to the loss of three family members.  I do this in spite of certain misgivings about filing the suit in the first place. It occurred to me that perhaps it should be a class action suit, but I decided I would be able to control the discussions much more if it were just me making the claim. For me it still is a clear case of breach of contract and damage claims.

“You have to realize that you brought this on yourself.  First you introduced the idea of a covenant with mutually binding obligations.  Then you let the Calvinists interpret it by means of all sorts of decrees and laws.  Whatever you intended got translated into legal stuff and it is binding.  You said we would be a community of life and love and I accepted that as the basis for my life.  So when my son was killed in the war, my wife died of cancer and my daughter was killed in an auto accident, those were violations of the contract.

“Since the original claim was filed I have received a ruling from the lower court, which I appealed several times, since more information seemed to be relevant than at first seemed to be the case.  The issues are mounting up and I want to discuss them with you before it all gets lost in the mysterious workings of the layers of courts.  I must say, you really do have a large organization.

“Now the first ruling which came down from the lower courts simply said the claim was frivolous, since lots of people lose loved ones, and unlike Job, I have not been struck by diseases or lost all my possessions. All of that is simply legal subterfuge, refusing to take my claim seriously.  The deal was that we would have life, were supposed to be fruitful and multiply, and enjoy the gifts of the earth and life together.  That clearly has not happened.  So I have filed an appeal, which I hope would make it up to the highest court of the Almighty Judge.

“I know some in your organization want to argue that you also lost a Son.  They even go so far as to argue that since it was your Son, that one life has infinite value and therefore would exceed the value of my three loved ones.  But that is claiming that one life is of more value than others, or that the pain of losing one is less than if you lose six or a hundred.  These are all claims based on false premises.  The value of loved ones cannot be quantified, but if they could be, I have you three to one—if you will pardon me for using the numbers 3 and 1 in a slightly different way.”

“You will have to excuse me for a few moments since the service is about to begin.  I will return to this matter when I am home this afternoon.”

After Ed had a light lunch and read the paper, he went out on the deck with a cup of coffee and said a brief prayer.  Then he resumed the conversation:  “Before I return to the case itself, I have to interject into our discussion a comment.  During the service the choir sang the familiar words from Romans as part of our prayers: ‘If God be for us, who can be against us… Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect?  It is God that justifies; who is to condemn?  Is it Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us?’

“What in the world are your people talking about? Who cares whether anyone can bring charges against me?  You have already taken everything I valued.  I already made this point to some of your representatives, and they replied that it is most important that we hear the good news of your grace.  Without forgiveness we suffer the condemnation of hell.  My answer is: Where do you think I am now? Could anything get worse?  What astounds me is that there is this obsession about sin and condemnation when the world is suffering from all manner of disasters and people are dying by the thousands.  Something is amiss here.

“Let me now return to my brief.  You have to realize that I was raised in old school Presbyterian traditions.  As a child I had memorized large sections of the Heidelberg Catechism and was quite adept at finding answers in the Westminster Confession to every conceivable question.  I was a juvenile lawyer for Reformed legalism long before I went to law school and learned the ways of arguing the law.  You may have been the one to introduce the covenants, but the people readily agreed to it.  It was sort of a religious version of the Magna Carta: the people accepted the idea that you would govern the universe in a certain way. But that only got you into trouble because you promised too much. You should have insisted that the Romans Catholics were right—it all has to do with authority and who has the power.  You should be able to do whatever you want.  But when you agreed to all that stuff about covenants and decrees, then you are required to give an answer.  And that is the point of my brief: What is your answer to my losses?

“Now I have received further rulings from the lower courts which try to squelch my complaint by traditional arguments.  One is that I don’t understand: since I am only a wretched human, there is no way I can comprehend the secret mysteries of the divine plan, so I should respectfully withdraw the complaint.  A second is to shame me into silence: I ought to realize that I am a miserable sinner and that my sufferings are not nearly as bad as those of millions of other people.  Well, I reject both arguments because they do not speak to the basic issue: my loss.  It is not speaking to my loss if you tell me that it is inconsequential, or that it would be acceptable if I saw it from your perspective.  I see it from my perspective and it is a grievous loss.

“Going over all these arguments wears me out, so I think I must ask for a recess until tomorrow.  Thank you for your attention to these matters.”  As he sat in the soft chair, pondering what he had said, his thoughts ranged from the specific arguments to memories of Margaret, his wife.  Soon the efforts of the day caused his eyes to blink and he was lost in his usual afternoon nap.

On Monday morning Ed was off to his weekly gathering of men for coffee at Al’s diner.  Al was kind enough to let them occupy a large table in the far corner for over an hour every week. If they only ordered coffee and a donut or sweet roll, they usually came back during the week for a full breakfast or lunch.  This group had been together for over five years, half from the Presbyterian Church, the others related by neighborhood or family connections.  They talked family news, sports and the weather, but were close enough to argue politics, economics and even religion.  But what everyone enjoyed the most was the spontaneous good humor and friendly insults shot every which way.

After the usual topics had been dealt with, Ralph reminded the group that First Church was thinking of buying a handy-man’s special small house for a refugee family, which meant that they needed a work crew to do whatever needed to be done.  Most of the guys, including Ed, were adept at some aspect of home repairs.  So they talked it over, with several indicating a willingness to help.  When Ed remained silent, they looked at him.  Finally he said: “Let me think about it.  I am reluctant to get involved in too much stuff right now.  But I will let you know.”

When Ed’s daughter, Anne, was killed in an auto crash two years ago, Ed had been overcome by grief.  It took him several months before he could even return to the Monday Coffee Club.  His daughter was divorced, and upon her death her son had gone to live with her ex-husband, who had remarried. It is hard to say which loss affected Ed the most—his son, wife or daughter.  At this point the cumulative effect of the three seemed to be the growing problem. When his son was killed in the First Iraq War, it was a terrible blow.  Ed remembers everything about opening the front door and seeing two officers of the Marines standing there.  Their purpose was of course well known, and Ed could hardly bear to call his wife to come into the living room.  When she entered the room, she too immediately knew what the message was and almost collapsed in Ed’s arms.  But through all the grieving they had one another. Then years later, Anne had been the one to be with him during Margaret’s illness and then her death and the weeks afterward.  Now she was gone and he had no one.  With his grandson living with his estranged son-in-law, his day had no order except for the few appointments he might make.  The only sure things were the Monday Coffee Club and Sunday worship.  Now, however, his claim before God had become his major concern.

It was for good reason that the guys worried about Ed.  He always had been in good health and loved to argue issues, which he was trained to do.  But in the last two years, his interest in that seemed to wane and he was preoccupied with his losses. No one knew how to help Ed except for trying to get him to be with people or getting involved in some project or activity.  All of these overtures were resisted by Ed, with vague excuses.  What he never said was that he knew what they were thinking: if he could find some purpose or be with people, perhaps he could move on.  Ah, that awful phrase “Move on.”  As if grief and the pain of loss were confined to a geographical place, and all one had to do was vacate that place and go to another place and grief would be left behind.  He hated these pop-psychology remedies.  At this point in his life, his purpose was to confront God with the devastation visited upon him. Yes, he did have a purpose, but he was not telling them about it.  His purpose was to present his claim to the Almighty in hope for some relief—though he could not imagine what that might be.

The next week proved to be uneventful.  The simple routine was basically repeated each day: some shopping, preparing meals, doing a few things around the house, a nap in the afternoon, then relaxing after supper, with a final drink before bed.  Each day he worked on his notes in preparation for filing another appeal.  Sunday morning he went to church, but did not open the case before the service started.  As best he could, he entered into the worship.  His claim would have to wait until later.

After his lunch he went out to his deck with coffee and said:  “I want to return to the lower court rulings, which also referred me to some recent perspectives on losses in general, which argue that the answer lies in the fact that your Son suffers with us.  Actually this is a well-known theme but it strikes me that it is now being used to replace the older approach which dominated my childhood and younger years.  Whether you agree with this shift in thinking is something you may wish to reflect on and advise me as we proceed.

“To be specific, in my childhood, when a terrible thing happened, or someone died, the minister said that our beloved friend and relative has died and we mourn his loss. Even though we cannot comprehend why this happened, we must recognize by faith that this happens according to the mysterious plan of God and we should take heart that in the end all will become clear to us and we shall be reunited with him in heaven.

“But the newer approach, so common among the younger generation of preachers, makes no mention of the secret decrees or wisdom which you have used to order things.  It jumps forward to Jesus suffering on the cross.  This is laid before us in the midst of our grief to help us see that Jesus suffers with us in our suffering.  I am struck by the seriousness of this shift in emphasis—that preachers would totally skip over the decrees and secret wisdom is amazing.  Don’t they realize that we are trying to understand what is going on in this terrible world?  Instead, they simply ask us to remember that Jesus is suffering with us.

“While I recognize some value in this new approach, with its reliance on key passages of Scripture, there are also some problems which I take rather seriously:

“First, I don’t understand how one can simply drop all reference to the decrees and the infinite wisdom of God.   Are they conceding that the current state of things cannot be explained now or ever?  If that is the case, then one is acknowledging that the world really is fallen, or as Hobbes is supposed to have said: Life is ‘nasty, brutish and short.’  That is hard for a Calvinist to accept.  Are we conceding that the world has gone mad or that you are totally powerless in changing the sufferings of this world?

“Second, while it may be a powerful rhetorical device to focus attention on the Son of God suffering on our behalf—thereby shifting our focus from our suffering to his–that still does not speak to the issue of my complaint, i.e., my loss. As I have said before, I refuse to allow this to be moved from center stage, or to be made to feel guilty for wanting to speak of my loss rather than yours or anyone else’s.  That just gets us back into a contest as to whose loss is greater, which does not solve the problem. Once we decided whether my loss or someone else’s is greater,  that would still leave that person with legal standing to file the greater complaint.

“I must say, there are times when the intricate nature of these arguments causes my head to spin.  They also wear me out.  Why can’t we talk in simple terms?  But I am repeatedly drawn into these elaborate arguments because of the rulings of the lower courts.  I am not sure they have any interest in my situation, but only in denying my right to present this claim.  With that I shall leave the matter for today.”

The coffee gang met as usual the next day Al’s Diner.  This time everyone was there.  Ed was greeted by six other men, all retired, with ages ranging from 67 to 85.  After the usual greetings, bad jokes, comments on the headlines, the weather and sports, there was actually a pause in the conversation.  Ralph, who also went to First Presbyterian, saved the group from an extended silence by asking Ed to come to the Seniors’ monthly supper.  Ed shook his head and said: “I don’t like casseroles.  They look good but when you take a bite, they never are as good as they look.”

John immediately replied, “Are you talking about food or women?”  This evoked laughter and more encouragement for Ed to join the group.

“It will do you good to get out of the house and meet some people—men and women.  You never know what will happen.  Just look at Ron here.  He came away with the best looking single gal from the group and look at him now.  Happy as can be.  Tell him, Ron.”

Ron’s story was actually well known and something of a legend.  Whether it had been embellished was unknown, but Ron enjoyed the telling and everyone seemed to enjoy hearing it. Ron held up his hands for silence.  “Yes, I am happy to testify on a stack of Bibles before our learned barrister here that it is a great group.  Jean and I met at the supper, and then would see one another at the coffee hour on Sunday morning.  We would talk about the cookies and the weather.  After nearly exhausting these subjects for about three weeks, I finally asked her to have lunch and talk about something other than the weather, coffee and cookies.”  This of course prompted the first round of laughter and comments.  “So we went out to lunch and had a very nice conversation.  When I took her home she asked me if I would like to come in and have a piece of chocolate cake.”

This brought a loud response, which included: “If he crosses that threshold, it’s all over.”  Another chimed in: “Does he have any idea what is happening?”

But Ron continued: “We were having cake and coffee, and she says: ‘Ron, you were married for a long time and I knew Mary very well.  I was married for years and you knew George.  Now they are both gone and we are sitting here having chocolate cake and coffee.  I would like to propose…no, that is not the best choice of words for this…I would suggest that we go out for three months without any entanglements of any kind, if you get my meaning.  At the end of that time, we will sit down and see what is the temperature of the water, but we will not keep asking before then.’”

Now the comments flowed freely, directed at how he was being led down the path, or his inability to see what was happening.  Someone said, “Can you imagine this, she has him hooked and is going to reel him in quicker than you can imagine.”  Everyone laughed until Ron insisted on finishing the story.

“Well, I said, ‘Jean, that sounds like a great plan.’  So we would have breakfast on Tuesday, lunch on Thursday and brunch after church on Sunday.”  Again, the guys could not resist commenting on how he was in deep trouble, with lots of laughter.  But Ron continued: “Finally after two months, I said to her: ‘Jean, I can’t stand this anymore.”  She said, ‘Oh, I am so sorry.  Do you want to end this?’   I said:  ‘Of course not, I want to kiss you now.’ Well, she looks at me and says: ‘Actually, the plan has a clause that allows the three month period to be terminated at any time if both parties agree. It would appear that both parties are ready to do that.’  More laughter occurred, with pounding on the table so that they were in danger of spilling coffee.  “So when we got to her place she kissed me on the cheek.  I looked at her and kissed her on the lips, and the rest is history.”

Cheers erupted, followed by applause.  Ralph immediately jumped in to make the point: “So you see, Ed, this could be a great opportunity for you to have some company.”

Ed, who had enjoyed the story, tried to regain a serious tone when he said:  “You guys ought to know by now that I have no intention of getting into an entanglement with someone from the Seniors club.  So just drop it and let’s go back to spring training.”  The guys saw that Ed was not in the mood for this, but actually he never was, since they had tried many times before.  The conversation went back to sports.

On the way home Ed was annoyed at how they could make serious relationships a laughing matter.  He knew they meant it all in good fun. On most other subjects he was as ready as any to engage in light hearted banter and even some foolishness. After all, how else could one survive?  But they ought to know by now that something had gone wrong with his ability to find relief in these sorts of things.  He had never really gotten over grieving Margaret’s death.  He had not spoken to them about his claim before the heavenly court, but he just could not think about starting all over with someone else.  He was still trying to figure out why his first marriage had come to an end.  Now, without Anne to at least give him some encouragement or be a buffer against the burden of despair, he was left unprotected.  His grief had continued and he discovered that the only way he could deal with it was to prepare his complaint for the heavenly courts.

Two days later at around noon Ed answered the phone.  It was Mike, his ex-son-in-law.  Mike reported: “Ed, things are not going well at all with Jimmie.  He just can’t get along with Arlene and the two girls.  And he has been acting up in school so much that yesterday they sent him home.  We have to do something to break this cycle of behavior.  Could he come and live with you for a few weeks?”  Jimmie was Anne’s son who had been living with Mike and his new wife Arlene, and her girls.  The report surprised Ed because in general, Jimmie was well behaved and had not seemed adverse to living with his Dad’s new family.   But apparently things had gone bad.  Sizing up the situation Ed realized that there really were not any other options.  He was in fact Jimmie’s grandfather.  And he could not think of any valid reason for saying no.  “Well, that would be fine.  When were you thinking of having him come over?”

“If it is o.k. with you, the sooner the better.  Could I bring him over this afternoon?

Ed was a bit surprised.  In five minutes he was moving from a single old man living alone to a new family of grandpa and grandson in a medium size house.  The good news was that Ed’s house was in the school district Jimmie attended as a 12 year old, so it would not involve a change in schools.  “Sure, bring him over and I assume you will bring enough clothes and things that will make him comfortable here.  I don’t have an extra computer or much stuff that relate to Jimmie’s world.”

“Ed, thank you very much.  Yes, we will bring some of the things he needs for the stay.  We will see you in about two hours.  Take care.”

When Ed had put the phone down he began to think of how this was going to change things.  Not only would he have someone living with him, but it was his grandson—a 12 year old boy.  For months people had been hinting and suggesting that he needed some new project or purpose.  Suddenly here it was.  But this was not like what they had been suggesting. If he went out and found something to do, that by nature would be limited in terms of time and emotional outlay.  Plus, this was not a choice—unless you consider taking in a grandson in need of a safe home a choice.  Ed did not feel he volunteered for this, but amazingly he did not regret the decision.  All he could hear was that his grandson—the only living member of his family—needed his help.  And the help needed was quite unlimited.  There would have to be changes in the house, the food supply and menus, waking up and going to bed—just to name the obvious.  And it would start in two hours!

He thought the best thing to do was run to the store for some things for dinner and breakfast.  Trying to recall what Jimmie liked, he decided on fried chicken and potato salad, with green beans (a question mark), ice cream and cookies, plus peanut butter and jelly, dry cereal and granola for breakfast.  When he had put the food away back at the house, he went upstairs to decide which room to give Jimmie.  Two of the bedrooms had been transformed into guest rooms, while the third had been used as a work room for his wife.  Neither bedroom bore any ties to their son or daughter, except in his memory.  He was not even sure if Jimmie knew which was which, but he decided on giving him the room his son had used.  One advantage was that it had a small desk, looking out on the back yard.  This might be a good place for him to do his school work.  After making up the bed, he thought he was ready for Jimmie’s arrival.

At about 5 o’clock Mike arrived with Jimmie and one large suitcase and several boxes of stuff.  He told them which room was for Jimmie and they took everything up to it.  When they came down Mike again thanked Ed and turned to Jimmie with instructions to listen to Ed and spend time on school work.  He gave Jimmie a hug and said he would call, then left.  Ed looked at Jimmie and asked: “Are you hungry?”

“Yeah, I suppose I am.”

“I usually have some cheese and crackers. Would you like that with a soda before we have dinner?”

Upon an affirmative, Ed laid out the food and drinks on a tray and took it out to the deck.  As they munched on snacks, Ed asked: “Do you want to tell me about what happened at Mike’s?”

“Arlene was always on my case and telling me I was not treating the girls nice.  I told her I did not want to babysit the girls and then things were not going well at school. She blew her lid.  But that was three weeks ago.”  Jimmie said this with a smile, to see what mood Ed was in.  When Ed chuckled, he continued, “So we kept going round on this kind of stuff and then my Dad had to go out of town, and Arlene started saying I was not helping.  So that kept going on—stuff about my radio and TV—and then I had more trouble at school and Dad really got upset.  So yesterday he proposed I come and spend some time with you, because he had to go out of town again.”

Ed saw quickly that the story probably left out some things, but all in all it sounded like a mutually caused chain of events.  He had never been sure that Arlene was happy about Jimmie coming to live with them.  And he knew Jimmie well enough to know that he could be sharp tongued and had a short fuse.  Perhaps he should add to his claim against the Almighty an inquiry why children had to bear the brunt of divorce and the death of parents. But that was for later.  “You are welcome to stay here but I am an old man living alone and I must tell you that you will have to follow certain rules.  I expect you home for supper by 5, unless you call me; you must do your homework before lots of TV or games; you must go to school and behave; and there will be some simple chores around the house that need to be done.  Can you do these things with a smile?”

Jimmie looked at him: “That’s it?  Gee, Grandpa, I thought you would have lots and lots of rules.  Sure, I can do those.”

“Then let me get things ready for supper.  You can relax until it is ready.”

They ate together in the kitchen at the table in front of the window looking out on the yard.  Ed asked about Jimmie’s classes and he reported that his favorites were history and math.  He liked soccer but needed to work at it, but he and some friends usually played after school.  He hoped he would get better so that he could be on a team.  Over ice cream they settled on the schedule: Jimmie usually went to bed around 9:30 to 10:00 and had to get up at 6:30 in the morning.  They calculated that the school was about six blocks from Ed’s house and Jimmie did not want to take the bus, but preferred to walk.  Ed agreed to that and offered to drive him on any day there was bad weather.  He also suggested he drive him in the morning and asked Jimmie to go to the office and tell them about his new address and Ed’s name and phone number.

School days the rest of the week went according to plan.  Ed had picked up some food high on Jimmie’s list of favorites, Jimmie was home between 3 and 4, spent time relaxing or on homework.  The walk to school was not too long and presented no problems.  Ed was a little concerned about the weekend.  On Friday he asked Jimmie what they would do.  Jimmie looked a bit surprised, not realizing he would be spending the weekend with his Grandpa.  Ed caught the surprise and rephrased the issue: “Usually on Saturdays I do a few things to clean up.  I do most of the shopping during the week to avoid crowds.  Sunday we will go to church.  Tell me what you normally do on weekends?”

“I usually sleep in on Saturdays but Dad always got me up for church and drove me there.  Now I can go with you.  Sometimes I would see a couple of friends, maybe do something like a movie or play soccer.  My Dad says he will give me my allowance while I am here, so I will have some money for stuff.  He also said he would take me shopping for clothes if I need something. If I have homework I usually do it Friday or Saturday so most of the weekend is free. Did you know I have a cell phone?  I talk to my friends with it—usually texting.  I’ll write down the address so you can call me.  I have your number.”

When they had finished the planning and Jimmie had left the room, Ed began to realize what was before him.  Shopping for food, meal preparation and cleanup, probably some transportation service, adjusting his schedule to be available, and in general, looking out for Jimmie.  He had observed Anne and Mike raising Jimmie over the years, and he and Margaret had done their share of babysitting.  But grandparents are one step removed from all the responsibilities parenting involves—including the emotional trauma.  He remembered how nervous he was when his son went through all the stages of childhood.  There were concerns for John but also for himself.  It was easier with Anne because she was the second child, not because of the gender difference, though he often wondered if Margaret had a different set of problems than what had occurred with John.  So here he was again in the thick of things with a child, though he was one step removed as grandfather.  Would he react to seeing Jimmie’s report card in the same way he had upon seeing John’s?  Would he be disturbed if Jimmie was late after school?  Welcome to the world of parenting, in the mode of grandfathering.

On Sunday evening he sat with a drink on the deck at about 9:30.  Jimmie was in his room—either on his cell phone or reading or already in bed.  The weekend had gone quite well—at least in his opinion.   Saturday he drove Jimmie and two friends to a movie and then picked them up.  Sunday they went to church and Jimmie went out in the afternoon.  Food selection and preparation had gone well, if eating what was on your plate was any indication.  Now they faced a full week of school.  He had asked Jimmie if there was anything he needed for the week.  All that was in place and he was, not surprisingly, exhausted.

After resting a few moments he recited a prayer and then said: “You will have to excuse the delay in my responding to the latest ruling.  My new family responsibilities prevent me from dealing with the case.  I think it best if I request a delay and I will report to you when I am able to resume.  Peace.”

Ed had been apprehensive about this full week.  Last week only involved three days.  Now he had five.  When a rain storm hit on Tuesday he drove Jimmie to school.  On Thursday he took some boys to a park where they could play.  Another parent would bring him home.  Cell phones were actually great.  From Ed’s perspective, Jimmie was his normal self and seemed to be getting along well at school.  His teacher had even sent a note saying just that and thanking Ed for being such a good grandparent.  Ed concluded that teachers were more aware of family situations and problems than he had expected.

On Saturday Jimmie asked if Ed would pick up some kids and take them to a soccer field.  He also mentioned something he had forgotten to tell him.  Last Sunday at church in the Sunday School, the Syrian family was there.  They have five kids included a boy Jimmie’s age, who was also at his school.  He was going to play soccer with them and his name was Sam. Ed took this in, remembering the reference to the family at the Coffee Club.

At the Coffee Club everyone was in good form and the discussion moved from the great triad of weather, politics and sports.  This reflected this age group, since a younger age would put cars and sex in the triad, omitting the weather and politics.  But the group was not adverse to talking cars whenever someone was shopping for one or curious about a repair matter.  As for sex, that entered the conversations primarily when it came up in the news or politics, the exceptions being some tame jokes, especially about the failings of male organs.  When all the big news had been covered, Ed volunteered that he was back in parenting, with his grandson staying with him.  He was glad to report that things had gone well for almost two weeks, though he confessed he was winging it.  Of course they wanted to know how long Jimmie would be with him, and he did not know.  He also mentioned that Jimmie had met one of the children of the Syrian family.  They were glad to hear the family was getting settled, but that still left the issue of rehabbing that house.

The week proceeded without any problems, making Ed wonder if he was just lucky or if he and Jimmie were just a good match.  To his credit he was approaching this matter with a certain laid back attitude.  He did not watch over Jimmie or insist on knowing everything that happened in his day.  But then on Saturday the first crisis arose.  In the afternoon he got a call that Jimmie had banged heads in the soccer game and was in need of assistance.  Ed drove over to the field and found Jimmie on a bench with two other players, holding a shirt to his head.  Jimmie said: “The guys looked at it and think it needs stiches.”

Ed felt he ought to assess the matter himself, and asked him to slowly remove the shirt.  When he saw the cut, he agreed and told Jimmie to come with him to the ER.  The other boys said they would get home by themselves.  As they walked off the playground, Jimmie said: “That tall guy is Sam.”

To their surprise the ER took Jimmie in rather quickly and the doctor determined that he needed to be sewn up.  Jimmie had never had this happen before.  The cut was on the left side of his forehead, below the hair line.  When the doctor and nurse had assembled everything they needed, they asked Jimmie to sit on the side of the exam table.  Jimmie looked apprehensively at Ed.  Without asking Ed sat down next to him on Jimmie’s right side and held his hand firmly.  He suggested that Jimmie look straight ahead.  The doctor went through the basic steps and in no time Jimmie had five stiches.  They held up a mirror for him to see—his first soccer injury, meaning that he was now an official soccer player.  After giving him something to drink and checking that he did not have a concussion, they said he could go.  Ed kept an eye on him as they walked out to the car, lest he faint or become ill.  But he handled the whole thing well and in 25 minutes Ed had him lying down on his bed.  When Ed went downstairs he called Mike and told him what had happened.  Mike said he would come by Sunday afternoon to see Jimmie.  A few minutes later Ed returned to find Jimmie was sleeping.  At about 7:30 Jimmie came down from his room and Ed suggested some chicken soup.  After the soup and crackers, they watched television for a while and Jimmie said he was ready for bed.

If Ed thought they might be staying home from Church on the next day, he was quite mistaken.  Jimmie was up early asking for something to eat and ready to go to church.  Ed complied, thinking that maybe Jimmie wanted to show everyone his bandaged head.  In the afternoon Mike came over with his two step-daughters to visit with Jimmie.  The girls were actually glad to see him and they enjoyed the ice cream Ed served.  Mike quietly thanked Ed for all that he was doing and said he would talk to him in a week or so.  When they left, Ed thought he should think about supper.

As expected Jimmie went to bed early, indicating that he would go to school on Monday.  Ed found himself with his evening drink on the deck.  Since he had not thought much about his claim, he felt he ought to make sure the heavenly court realized the case was still active.  After a prayer, he then said:  “I am sure you are aware of what has been going on here for the past three weeks.  How could you not know?  Given my responsibilities here, I have not been able to proceed in drafting a fuller response as part of my appeal.  But I will get to it and want to insist that the claim not be placed in some in-active category.

“It has occurred to me that some of your lesser representatives may have thought this development was just what I needed to take my mind off my losses and thereby drop the case.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  But if it is true that this was some kind of ploy to turn my attention to other things, I would be deeply disappointed.  It is too late for me to ask how these things could have happened without your knowledge or participation, so I will let that go.  I have repeatedly resisted attempts by friends to get me involved in some kind of romance or hobby or project, which would take my mind off what has tormented me for so long.  But I guard against that, though I must admit my grandson has needed by attention.  Therefore, given all this, I shall speak with you at a later time to re-open the complaint.”  He realized it may have been a bit brash to speak that way, but it annoyed him to think that he would suddenly have a different outlook on life because he was taking care of Jimmie.  Plus, this was probably not going to last much longer, so he would be right back to where he was before.

The next Wednesday Mike picked up Jimmie for dinner at his home, since he wanted to visit with him in the context of his current family.  This had dangers, but it was something Mike felt he had to try.  If Jimmie was going to return, they all had to develop some workable plan.  Then on Saturday he stopped by to visit with Ed and Jimmie, which extended into lunch.  This pattern was repeated the next week.  At leaving Mike said privately to Ed that they needed to talk about the summer, since it was only a month before school let out.

Ed did not say anything to Jimmie but he started a process of thinking about the entire matter.  That was Ed’s way: when confronted with a serious problem, he allocated blocks of time over several days to consider it.  Unlike his work, there were no cases to study up on or calculate the application of the law.  But he did need to estimate the needs of Jimmie and Mike, as well as Mike’s family.  And did he have any needs relating to this matter?  That would be something to discover.

His first exercise was to lay before himself the facts of the case: His daughter and son-in-law had divorced, leaving Jimmie in the custody of Anne.  Subsequently, Mike had married a woman with two daughters and then Anne had died.  In one sense it was a simple case: the father has full rights and custody of the son.  But that had not worked out, to the frustration of nearly all parties, including the school, where Jimmie had acted out his anger toward his new family.  The matter was not so much a legal issue but a practical matter: what would be needed for the members of this family to live together?  Counselling?  Strict leadership from Mike?  More rules?  Visits to Grandpa as a way of relieving pent up frustrations?  Long visits to Grandpa?  Certainly no one would propose permanent residence with Grandpa—that was out of the question.

What Ed could not understand was why Mike had so little interest in Jimmie.  Yes, he had started the once a week dinner and several hours on Saturday.  But he was not acting like a Father who missed his son, or who wanted to play a determining role in his son’s life.  Had the divorce from Anne so affected his ties to Jimmie that he did not have normal feelings toward the boy?  Or was it Arlene, who married Mike on the assumption that he was coming into her life, with her two girls, to start a family of four.  In that situation, Jimmie represented Mike’s past marriage and family.  He was an intruder, always reminding everyone that the new life they wished to create was built on a former life, broken by divorce and death.  Ed had to admit that the most Arlene had signed up for was occasional visits from Jimmie, not full time membership in her new family.  And Mike probably did not want to be reminded of his past.

When he factored into these thoughts the additional point that Mike had not been over to see Jimmie in the first three weeks, he had to assume that he was in damage control back at Arlene’s, or he really was moving in the direction of very little contact with Jimmie.  What options did that leave:  Very few.  Parents—even single parents—did not usually give 12 year old boys to adoption agencies or foster homes.  With only one relative in the extended family, that left Ed as the likely candidate.  All Ed could think was: “What a bastard.  The son-of-a-bitch is going to ask me to take him.”

As June 1 approached Ed had still not heard from Mike.  He and Jimmie were getting along.  Jimmie was doing more things around the house, including cutting the grass, and earning some money for what they called The Special Fund.  After the rocky period in the middle of the semester, Jimmie had raised his grades and was likely to end the year quite well.  Finally, Mike came over and spent some time with Jimmie.  When they both came out on the deck where Ed was reading the paper, Mike said: “I would like Jimmie to come over and spend a week with us in July.  I am going to take the week off and we will do things together that week.”  There was a pause and Jimmie and Ed waited for what was coming, though both suspected the direction this was going to take.  Mike then said: “I would like Jimmie to come back and live with you, Ed, if that is o.k. When school starts we can do a weekly dinner at our place.  So, Ed, what do you think?”

Ed looked at Jimmie, who seemed stunned.  His father had just told them he did not want Jimmie in his house.  The boy was about to explode or run out of the house.  Before that could happen, Ed moved forward and put his arm around Jimmie.  “I think that will be just fine.  Why don’t you go on home to Arlene, Jimmie and I have some things to talk about.”

Mike was taken back by both comments—Ed’s ready acceptance and his dismissal.  He knew Ed was a tough lawyer and had no interest in tangling with him, especially since he was asking so much of him.  But it did annoy him that he was kicking him out.  Without saying good bye he left.  No sooner was he out the door, Jimmie muttered “Go to hell,” and ran upstairs.

Ed let him go, knowing that there was not much he could say or do right now.  Since it was going on 5, he decided to make supper.  Meatballs and spaghetti would probably be a good choice, since it was one of Jimmie’s favorite.  Around six o’clock Jimmie came down and rather cautiously came into the kitchen.  He saw the table set for two and Ed putting the dry pasta into boiling water.  He went over to the table and sat down.  After a long pause, he asked: “What are you going to do this summer?”

Ed let the question hang there for a moment, noting especially how it had been phrased.  The he said:  “I thought we would take a trip out west.  There are some national parks I have not seen and I doubt if you have either.  I also have a brother in Michigan who still lives on a farm, but his son runs it.  It is near where I grew up.  We could go stay there for a few days, maybe you would decide to be a farmer.  Then the Coffee Club is forming teams to work on Sam’s new house.  I would like you to be on my team.  This would be when school lets out.”

It was obvious that the wheels were spinning in Jimmie’s head, though he did not say anything.  They ate in silence and finished the meatballs, with a little pasta and sauce left for lunch.  When they were having ice cream, Jimmie asked: “Could Sam be on our team working on the house?”  Ed told him he thought that would be a good idea.

Next Sunday evening, after Jimmie had gone to bed, Ed opened discussions regarding his claim.  As usual, he offered a prayer and then said: “Every week seems to be drawing me farther and farther away from the case.  I don’t regret what I am doing but I am concerned that the case will get lost.  May I say again for the record that I have no intention of letting that happen.  The issue is as real and important for me now as it was when I raised it a year ago.

“I do not have any new material to be added to my claim, though I do want to offer several comments in light of the sermon presented today in church.  You will recall that some time back I noted the shift in emphasis regarding the trials of this world.  The older Calvinism resorted to the mysterious workings of your covenants and decrees, which, though we may not understand them, will finally be proven to be wise at a future time.  This we are to accept by faith, trusting in your eternal love.  The newer approach moves quickly to the cross of Christ, reminding us that Christ suffered as we suffer, died as we die, and in that we take comfort.  As your anointed one, so even you share in our sufferings.  I still am not sure I want to abandon the older approach, since I think the new approach appears to concede that the Almighty has lost control of things.

“Now my purpose in returning to this debate is that there would appear to be a variant on the new approach, which I think makes more sense.  It has to do with the Great Commission in Matthew, which I am sure you know.  Now of course, the emphasis in the sermon, and throughout the ages, is that here we have the marching orders for the church: make disciples, baptize and teach.  Nothing could be clearer when it comes to what the church is to be about.  The fact that churches have tended to emphasize only part of the mandate is of interest, but not relevant to the matter at hand.

“What struck me about this morning’s sermon was the complete lack of attention to Jesus’ final words: “…and remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”  That hit me as a most profound affirmation.  Of course it is close to the theme that Christ suffers with us, but the two are not entirely the same.  If the one points to the unity of Christ with us in our sufferings, the other simply affirms an eternal presence.  I confess I had not heard, with my head or heart, this part of the Commission.  Now I mention all this simply to say that perhaps your people might want to give more attention to this powerful theme.  In its simplicity it is so easily missed, as I in fact have done.  When I heard it this morning I found myself deeply moved and did not know what to say, except to receive this, not as a future promise but as a present fact.  For reasons not clear, it affected me greatly.

“When time allows I shall return to the claim already before you. In the last few years I have been through a lot and do seek a resolution of the matter.  But for now there is a young person who feels very alone and there are things I must do.”

Copyright © 2019 Robert Winslow

New Book on the Mercersburg Theology Now Available

I’m delighted to announce the publication of A Companion to the Mercersburg Theology: Evangelical Catholicism in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2019), 155 pp.

Click on the link below for more details.

Evans_Presskit

Mike Pence and Religious Liberty

Earlier this week, a person connected with a national news-media organization contacted me and asked what I thought of Vice President Mike Pence’s commencement address at Liberty University.  I responded with the substance you find below.  Of course, it wasn’t used (I’m quite sure it didn’t fit the narrative they wanted to tell), but I thought I would share an expanded version here.

I didn’t watch the Pence speech (we were preoccupied with my daughter’s graduation from medical school), but I did read the transcript of the commencement address that was released by the White House.  I was surprised by how little was actually said about the topic of religious freedom.  Much of it was the usual commencement niceties and Pence establishing his evangelical Christian bona fides by telling his conversion story. My sense was that the Vice President was “preaching to the choir.”

A couple of sentences did, however, stand out to me. In fact, they made me cringe a bit.  Pence said, “The freedom of religion is enshrined in our First Amendment and in the hearts of every American.  And these attacks on Christian education are un-American.” As sociologist James D. Hunter of the University of Virginia has noted in his book Culture Wars, the cultural conflict often takes the form of a “struggle to define America.”  This sort of rhetorical game happens on both the right and the left, as both sides try to depict their opponents as “un-American” and as “opposed to what America stands for,” but this sort of language is often unhelpful; it can further deepen the cultural divide and make it more difficult to find common ground and have civil conversations.

But does Pence have a point in warning the Liberty graduates about discrimination against people of faith?  I think he does.  The progressive left by and large now prefers to speak of “freedom of belief” rather than the “free exercise of religion.”    Such people seem to think that one can hold religious beliefs but one cannot act on them, especially if such actions can be construed as unfavorable to those deemed to be oppressed on the grounds of gender, sexual orientation, etc. Can you lose your job for affirming traditional morality? Sure.  Just as Brendan Eich. Can your business be excluded from economic activity because you affirm traditional Christian morality?  Sure.  Just ask Chick-fil-A.

The rather clear failure of many on the progressive left to speak out against the killing and persecution of Christians elsewhere in the world (and the difficulties that some Christians have faced in seeking asylum in the West from religious persecution elsewhere in the world) at least suggests that secular elites view Christians as a problem.  It’s interesting to ponder why that might be.  I can think of two reasons—one more social/psychological and one implicitly religious.

Shortly before his death, the eminent sociologist Peter Berger penned a number of essays (here and here) in which he basically suggested that there has been in the broader culture a lot of ideological backfilling of the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies.  Berger used the analogy of a candy store. The sexual revolution, he suggested, gave people the key to the candy store, and once people have that key they will respond viscerally and negatively to anyone who is perceived as trying to take the key away from them.  Traditional Christian affirmations of sexual morality will almost inevitably be seen as a matter of trying to take the key to the candy store.

But I think there’s more to it than that, and here we get into matters religious.  The theme of self-creative autonomy is a pretty powerful assumption in much contemporary cultural discourse.  The prevailing conviction is that we create ourselves. We can decide even something as seemingly basic and given as our gender.  And this sensibility has clearly replaced the older conviction that human beings are creatures of a transcendent God who established a creation order involving, for example, the gender binary. From the standpoint of functional religion, the autonomous, sovereign, self-creative human agent has effectively replaced the traditional deity.  To challenge the ultimacy of this self-creative human agent is to blaspheme what is sacred, and from time immemorial blasphemers of the sacred have been excluded and punished.

T. F. Torrance and Michael Polanyi on Moral Inversion

Editor’s Note: I’ve been reflecting on the theological implications of recent societal debates involving matters as disparate as homosexual rights, BLM, and the confirmation hearings of a certain nominee to the US Supreme Court, and the notion of moral inversion has come to mind.  What I did not realize is that the term moral inversion was coined by philosopher Michael Polanyi, whose insights are used to great effect by the Scottish theologian Thomas F. Torrance in this excerpt from an essay in Torrance’s Theology in Reconciliation (1975). It provides a rather remarkable description of the state of our contemporary moral discourse.

2 . The Church must learn again the meaning of justification by grace
A few years ago Fr Jock Dalrymple, sometime Roman Catholic chaplain at St Andrews University, remarked, mainly with Edinburgh in mind, that some of our young men being trained for the ministry seemed unable to distinguish between helping a person therapeutically and leading him to Jesus Christ. Such a shrewd evangelical critique of the Church of Scotland, coming from the Roman Catholic Church, seems to indicate that the tables are being turned on the Reformation! It is certainly the case that Protestant Churches everywhere today appear, and want to appear, highly meritorious, giving themselves out as the great patrons of goodness: that is, precisely what Jesus warned his disciples against at the Last Supper. How has this come about?

Some of the sharpest thinkers in modern times, coming from Eastern Europe, see us in the West in a way that we cannot easily manage ourselves, and have been warning us against the moral inversion of the guilty intellectual. That is, I believe, the insidious infection that has been afflicting western, and particularly Protestant, Churches. Moral inversion (Polanyi’s phrase) is a hybrid of idealism and scepticism, of high moral demands on society and individualistic naturalism. It comes about when moral passion is uprooted from its authoritative ground through rationalistic critique of transcendent moral obligation, and becomes embodied in a tangible realm of socio-moral objectives regarded as less open to destructive philosophical analysis. ‘The morally inverted person,’ Polanyi says, ‘has not merely performed a philosophic substitution of moral aims by material purposes, but is acting with the whole force of his homeless moral passions within a purely materialistic framework of purposes.’ 1 It is distinctive of moral inversion that it carries with it a strong sense of righteousness and moral superiority, evident in passionate moral indignation against prevailing evils, social injustice, racial discrimination, overpopulation, etc. These are all of course very right and highly laudable causes, but the inflamed moral passion for social betterment that lies behind this, appears to go hand in hand with a guilty detachment from an objective and divine source of moral obligation and a replacement of a personal religious ethic with a naturalistic ethic of self-determination in which man assumes absolute responsibility for himself. This is often accompanied by bitter denunciations of explicit expressions of personal religious morality as hypocritical and dishonest, together with an inverted moral fervour in the alleged ‘honesty’ that characterises such denunciations. Moreover, this whole approach finds not a little support in the moral nihilism of modern sociology, that is, its deliberate suspension of value in the explanation of human behaviour, without reference to its rightness or wrongness, and therefore apart altogether from moral motives.

There is another important aspect of moral inversion that must be noted. The uprooting of moral passion from its creative source in Christian faith and therefore its lack of Holy Spirit, makes it quite helpless unless it can secure centres of power, from which it can move and change society. Hence it moves into the political arena where it can develop pressure groups and forge the kind of instruments through which it can exert force upon every area of life until its ends are achieved. But this is to move into an area of operations in the technological society where the achievement of social perfection is committed to a political machine which develops its own ideological rationale and generates its own functional momentum, so that inevitably moral motives are submerged in a struggle for power: self-determination is converted into collective power and moral persuasion is replaced by force. In the nature of the case, change one way or the other can take place only through violence of one kind or another. Thus the high moral demands for society geared into a naturalistic concept of man lead paradoxically into inhumanity: that seems to be the case whatever kind of government is in command.

The vast slide of Church leaders in recent times into something like an obsession with socio-moral concerns reflects (does it not?) a nagging sense of guilt over their own personal Christian convictions, which over-compensates for itself, not merely in public demonstrations and loud protests of ‘involvement’, but in passion- ate moral extravagances and drives which our modern critics have sometimes described as pathological moralistic excess. Whether that kind of language is justified or not, we must certainly be ready to face up to the criticisms they direct at us. But what concerns me here is that moral inversion of this kind has so infected the Churches, especially Anglo-Saxon Churches, that our evangelical convictions are persistently submerged if not replaced by consciously meritorious involvement in socio-political issues, which is associated with a serious degeneration of genuine ethical substance and indeed a widespread moral laxity of the individual in our society. Thus the moralistic externalisation of life in the Churches is concomitant with a fatal loss in spiritual depth. Or perhaps it should be put the other way round: it is an atrophying of the soul, a deep inward emptiness, that forces people outward where they become absorbed in externalities on the surface of existence, but where, as every true pastor knows, the flock of Christ grows weary with the husks of morality and. hungers for the sheer grace of God.

I would not like to be misunderstood, for I am not asking for the slightest curtailment of concern for any genuine human, moral or social need anywhere in the world. But I am more and more staggered at two things: first, the astonishing volte-face that has been taking place in the Churches of the Reformation, in that they reveal a serious lapse from the centrality of the Gospel of Christ, together with a failure to understand that it is justification by grace alone which creates the ethical disturbance that turns the world upside down; and secondly, the growing contradiction that the western Churches exhibit to Jesus’ total rejection of every value-system based on power, and his proclamation of the new order which cannot be brought about by any form of force, together with a failure to remember that Jesus was crucified by contemporaries who bitterly resented his refusal to have anything whatsoever to do with their political theology.

Let us perform a double thought-experiment. First, let us put the Church of today in the place of Jesus in the wilderness where he was tempted of the devil, and ask how it would be able to stand up to those temptations. Would we be able to resist the temptation to turn stones into bread, in face of the vast hunger of mankind? And what of the temptation to have a compelling demonstration of divine, supernatural power in the temple—could we withstand the seduction which religious prestige like that would bring? And the ultimate temptation of political power which would bring into the Church all the kingdoms of the world and their power and glory? Jesus resisted that temptation too and chose instead the way of the servant, with complete renunciation of all power, in order to fulfil his mission in the utter weakness of the man on the Cross.

Then, let us project the Church of today forward to the last judgment where it will meet Jesus face to face, as he divides the sheep on his right hand from the goats on his left, in the way which he anticipated for us in the parable of Matthew 25. The meritorious Church of today could hardly be placed with the sheep on Christ’s right hand, for they did not know that they had cared for the hungry and the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick or the imprisoned. That is after all a parable of justification by grace, for grace always takes us by surprise.

1 See The Logic of Liberty (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1951), p. 106; Personal Knowledge (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1958), pp. 232 ff.; Knowing and Being (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1969), pp. 14, 16 ff., 21 f., 44 f.; and ‘Science and Man’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine (1970), vol. 63, pp. 971 ff.

 

From T. F. Torrance, “The Church in the New Era of Scientific and Cosmological Change,” in Theology in Reconciliation: Essays Towards Evangelical and Catholic Unity in East and West (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 275-78.