the-christians-voters-guide-september-october-2004

NEW SECULARISM ❘ GAY MARRIAGE: HIGH STAKES ❘ IT’S ALL POLITICS

MODERN REFORMATION

THE CHRISTIAN VOTER’S GUIDE VOLUME

13, NUMBER 5, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2004, $5.00

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THE CHRISTIAN VOTER’S GUIDE

17 Ministers of God for Our Good: God’s Gift of Civil Government In an election year, the last word many citizens would use to describe politicians is “good.”

Yet, from the unrighteous kings in the Bible to the imperfect presidents of this age, earthly magistrates have been ordained by God to benefit those in the land. How should Christian citizens view civil authorities?

by David VanDrunen Plus: Does Character Count?

23 “One Cheer” for Civil Religion?

America is called a “Christian nation.” But just how Christian is our country?

We explore the history of America’s public religiosity and expose the dangers of confusing civil religion with biblical Christianity.

by William Inboden Plus: Have You Received Your Biblical Scorecard? and Can a Christian Be a Yankee’s Fan?

30 Who’s Afraid of Secular Politics?

Why Christians Don’t Have to Be In their efforts to protect the sacred, many American Christians oppose anything that is secular.

It is important, however, that secularism be rightly understood when Christians participate in politics.

Might Christians protect what is sacred by recovering what is secular?

by D. G. Hart Plus: Christianity and Politics: The Difference Between Christians and the Church

COVER PHOTO BY

In This Issue page 2 | Dear Reader page 3 | Letters page 4 | Council Counsel page 6 | Between the Times page 7 Speaking of page 11 | Preaching from the Choir page 12 | Ex Auditu page 14 We Confess page 35 | FreeSpace page 36 | Reviews page 40 | On My Mind page 44 S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 4 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 1

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MODERN REFORMATION Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton Managing Editor Eric Landry

Faith-based Voting

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he woman on the radio explained that she wouldn’t mind living in a Christian nation if those who agitated for such a thing lived more Christlike lives themselves. Her commentary on the local public radio station was an interesting

example of how people outside our circles think of politics and religion. Her vote wouldn’t be decided by the photo ops at a local house of worship nor the number of times a candidate made reference to Jesus in his speeches. Those were the things that made her think less of a candidate. This woman, who wavered between agnosticism and atheism, wanted to know if the candidate would do unto others what he would have them do to him, turn the other check, and refrain from throwing the first stone. Those values helped define for her a rightly constituted “Christian America.”

Will those values be listed in the voter’s guide that you are sure to receive as we near the election season? Or will you be asked to judge a candidate based on other moral and political criteria? Are there particular issues which help determine how a Christian should vote in an election? Of course, even these considerations beg the question: how exactly should a Christian think through secular political issues? This issue of Modern Reformation steps back from the most pressing ideological questions to address foundational theological principles. And, in an effort to make these theological principles relevant to our contemporary context, we’ve asked our authors to address certain hot-button topics that arise from the theological principle they defend.

David VanDrunen, associate professor of systematic theology and Christian ethics at Westminster Seminary California, asks us to think of civil government as a gift from God

Next Issue: November/December 2004: Peace on Earth The Christmas season is a season of peace, hope, and love. But the world’s vision of peace often differs from that of Scripture.

How can we speak of peace when the babe lying in a manger was born to die?

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for our own good. Dr. VanDrunen follows up his piece with a sidebar addressing the question of character in our choice of civil leaders. Regular contributor William Inboden warns against a lowest common denominator civil religion that often passes for Christianity in the United States. Editor in chief Michael Horton follows Dr. Inboden’s piece with some suggestions on thinking biblically at election time. Democratic senate staffer Neil MacBride encourages Christians to think carefully about their party affiliation in his sidebar to Dr. Inboden’s piece. D. G. Hart, scholar in residence at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, examines the relationship between secularism and the Lordship of Christ in a pluralistic society. In his accompanying sidebar, Dr. Hart helps us understand the proper differences between a Christian’s individual involvement in politics and the corporate church’s role. On the Web this month, regular contributor Rachel Stahle examines the politics of religious freedom.

This is a voter’s guide unlike any other you’ll receive this season, but we hope it helps you think through these issues in a way that challenges some of your preconceived ideas about God and politics. We won’t pretend to tell you how or whom to vote for come November 4, but we will be satisfied if you walk into your polling place confident of your role as a fully participating citizen of this kingdom, which like all kingdoms of this world is ordained and preserved by the Creator-King.

Eric Landry Managing Editor

Department Editors Brian Lee, Ex Auditu, Reviews Shane Rosenthal, Between the Times William Edgar, Preaching From the Choir Staff ❘ Editors Ann Henderson Hart, Staff Writer Alyson S. Platt, Copy Editor Lori A. Cook, Layout and Design Celeste McGhee, Proofreader Brenda Choo, Production Assistant Contributing Scholars David Anderson Charles P. Arand Gerald Bray S. M. Baugh Jerry Bridges D. A. Carson R. Scott Clark Marva Dawn Mark Dever J. Ligon Duncan Richard Gaffin T. David Gordon W. Robert Godfrey Donald A. Hagner Gillis Harp D. G. Hart John D. Hannah Paul Helm C. E. Hill Hywel R. Jones Peter Jones Ken Jones Richard Lints Korey Maas Donald G. Matzat Mickey L. Mattox John Muether John Nunes John Piper J. A. O Preus Paul Raabe Kim Riddlebarger Rod Rosenbladt Philip G. Ryken R. C. Sproul Rachel Stahle A. Craig Troxel David VanDrunen Gene E. Veith William Willimon Paul F. M. Zahl Modern Reformation © 2004 All rights reserved.

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WHITE HORSE INN

September 1, 2004

Dear Reader, Over the last several months you’ve been hearing about the move the White Horse Inn and Modern Reformation were making to the west coast.

That move is now official! I’m happy to announce that both programs have taken up residence at Westminster Seminary California, where I have the privilege of teaching theology and apologetics to a new generation of pastors and teachers in Christ’s church.

This is the best possible outcome since my efforts can now be focused in one place. Your donations will also be more focused as both White Horse Inn and Modern Reformation pursue a united mission and vision for the future. Among other things, that means that we are getting ready for significant growth right now. More and more people are responding to the Reformation message, and that encourages us to make every effort to extend our reach.

And you have a part to play in that. Modern Reformation exists to help you answer your important questions about God, this world, and your life in it. Please consider sending a gift to help cover the costs of publishing the magazine to the thousands of people nationwide who are benefiting from it just as you are.

One of the most convenient ways for you to support the cause is to sign up for one of our auto-deduct options. You can authorize Modern Reformation to withdraw funds electronically from your checking account or to make regular charges to your credit card. If this seems like an option that works for your busy schedule, simply go to our website and follow the link to our online form.

Thank you for your faithful support of both programs. We know that our thirteen-year existence is a testimony to your faithfulness and shared vision for reformation in American Christianity. Please continue to stand with us.

In Christ,

Michael S. Horton Editor-in-Chief

1725 Bear Valley Parkway · Escondido, California 92027 · 760·480·8474 phone · 730·480·0252 fax www.modernreformation.org · www.whitehorseinn.org

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I appreciate the ruminations about Passion of the Christ in your “Between the Times” section of the May/June 2004 issue (“A Good Church Is Hard to Find”), as well as the spirit in which they were shared. While warning MR readers about the dangers of elevating a movie to a status it should never have, and while taking the Second Commandment seriously, the interviewees rightly preserved individual conscience. We Reformed ministers should take note. It is true that Christians are not free to commit idolatry or to replace God’s assigned means of grace with our own.

Furthermore, every Christian should be challenged to think through the theological implications of such a cultural phenomenon. It does not follow, however, that our consciences are bound by God’s law to avoid the movie just because it has been made and promoted for unbiblical reasons.

Unfortunately, while alerting us to the problems and dangers associated with this movie (and there are many), some ministers have equated viewing Passion—for any reason—with idolatry. In other words, anyone who sees this movie is de facto committing that sin. This kind of Pharisaism puts these pastors more in league with evangelicals than they would like to admit. We’ve all heard how evangelical leaders promoted the film so as to destroy Christian liberty in another way: by 4 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

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suggesting it’s unchristian not to see the movie.

Similarly, if we tell our congregations that they are (not could be but are) committing idolatry if they see it, we are illegitimately binding their consciences.

Do we not have the freedom to view this movie— provided we’re not seeing it to enhance our worship, usurp the means of grace, “bring us closer to Jesus,” etc.? If we say no, then we had better be prepared to label a whole list of activities equally verboten—such as touring the Sistine chapel or taking a course in art history that includes religious paintings. While it’s true that American Evangelicalism’s infatuation with this film is for the most part wrong-headed and void of sound theological analysis, let’s not swing the pendulum too far the other direction. There are Christian (even Reformed) art and film enthusiasts who have seen Passion for reasons that have nothing to do with enhancing worship or theological education.

And, as some of your interviewees noted, others chose to see it to engage unbelievers in discussion.

That doesn’t mean pastors have to see it in order to engage the culture; as one fellow pastor pointed out to me, not seeing the film could also be a springboard for dialogue. But a regenerate, theologically informed conscience should be free to decide. Let us not forget that Christian liberty is every bit as much a hallmark of the Reformation as is the regulative principle of worship.

Rev. Gary Matlack Christ Reformed Church Anaheim, CA

For many years I have enjoyed reading Modern Reformation. The content has done much to challenge me and increase the faith God has given me. The May/June 2004 issue (“A Good Church Is Hard to Find”) was no different in the challenging part. What I found most fascinating (and incredibly disappointing) in this issue were two comments. The first was on page seven in the “Say What!” comment box: Mel Gibson’s quote about “why he believes Protestants will probably not be

saved.” This is a perfectly outrageous statement and made me shake my head is disbelief. How can one person determine the salvation of another?

How can one person stand in judgment of another’s eternity? The last time I checked, that was up to God and not determined until said person found themselves standing before the throne of grace. The second comment was made

by Michael Horton in the article “What Should I Expect from Church?”. How can he say that the “Roman Catholic Church officially anathematizes the gospel” and further say that someone who aligns themselves with the Roman Catholic Church is “giving [their] children to an institution that denies the gospel.” He is no better than Mr. Gibson in making an outrageous statement! I was raised Roman Catholic and I can assure you the gospel was taught and preached. I know many Catholic people who attend regular weekly Bible studies in their church, have a deep and abiding faith in Jesus Christ, and are more faithful and less judgmental than many of the Protestants I know.

What is occurring in our Protestant churches today is awful. What saddens me more than the loss of focus, is the increased judgmental nature of the people who claim to be Christians. If those magic words of “accepted Jesus into my heart” aren’t heard, the swift condemnation comes that the person “must not be saved.” How untrue. When did we get a secret magnifying glass to look inside another’s heart and determine their relationship to Christ? What saddens me is that Mr. Horton seems to have fallen into the same trap Mr. Gibson did, that of judging his brethren in Christ. For shame Mr. Horton. I expected better from you.

Trudy Ellmore Via Email

Michael Horton responds: It’s crucial to bear in mind a distinction I made in that article between individuals and the institution. It’s one thing to say that I know for certain that a professing Christian is not “saved.” At least the churches of the Reformation would have trouble with that all too common tendency in evangelical circles to judge hearts. According to our understanding, the power of the keys (opening and shutting the gate of heaven) is entrusted to the church through its ministers and elders. As a private person, I cannot—even as a minister, decide whether someone is “in” or “out.” If a church has examined and confirmed someone’s profession of faith, my own personal judgment carries no weight. This does not mean that the church cannot err, but it does mean that it is not my place to stand in judgment on anyone’s profession of faith. However, all of our confessional Reformed/Presbyterian, Baptist, Lutheran and even Anglican bodies once upon a time held that

the Church of Rome lacked the most essential mark of a true church: the clear proclamation of the gospel. Once the Council of Trent anathematized all who believe “that the sinner is justified by faith alone” (Decree 7, Canon 9) and who deny that we truly merit our justification (Canons 12, 24, 30, 32), the official position of this branch of Christendom became a settled and binding denial of the gospel. I do not doubt that many Roman Catholics are true brothers and sisters and I read with great profit certain priests and theologians in that tradition who, at least in some cases, have a better understanding of the gospel than Trent here represents. But just as it’s not my place to figure out who is “in” or “out” on the individual level, so too on the institutional one. As a Reformed minister, I subscribe the Belgic Confession’s 29th Article: “The true church can be recognized if it has the following marks: the church engages in the pure preaching of the gospel; it makes use of the pure administration of the sacraments as Christ instituted them; it practices church discipline for correcting faults...By these marks one can be assured of recognizing the true church—and one ought not to be separated from it.”

“These two churches”—the true and the false—”are easy to recognize and thus to distinguish from each other.” Rome has been conciliatory over the last half-century, but in every instance official unity with Protestants has been achieved at the price of their no longer affirming the substance and significance of the gospel as understood by their confessions, while Rome has never had to withdraw a single canon from Trent. So my own hope is that we can continue to have dialogue leading to genuine ecumenical reconciliation, not begin with the latter as if churches can be said to exist where the gospel remains officially condemned.

I find it very inappropriate that the article entitled “In the Church: Finding Common Ground Across Denominations” by Ann Henderson Hart (May/June 2002, “A Good Church Is Hard to Find”) contained a quote in the opening paragraph which used God’s name in vain.

Glenn Britt Camden, South Carolina

Ann Henderson Hart responds: No writer wants to offend an interested reader in the first paragraph of an article. And I am certainly in agreement with you that taking the Lord’s name in vain is breaking one of the Ten Commandments. However, I chose to include Eugene O’Neil’s heartfelt statement because it was an expression of his dissatisfaction. If I had sanitized O’Neil’s remarks, words chosen carefully by a gifted writer, if would have been doing a disservice to him. Certainly, we can be offended by his words.

But I don’t think that means deleting them.

Since I chose to frame the article by opening and closing it with illusions to O’Neil’s statement, I think it was essential for [ C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 3 9 ]

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Hywel R. Jones

Judgment Day “Will individual believers have their works and lives evaluated at the judgment seat of Christ (2 Cor. 5:10)? Should I be afraid of this judgment? What happened to salvation by grace?”

“For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ that each one may receive what is due to him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad” 2 Corinthians 5:10 (NIV) We consider each of these questions on the basis that every Christian will appear at the judgment seat of Christ. This is clear from Paul’s expression ‘we all’ in this verse. But what will happen to them there?

HYWEL R. JONES

Professor of Practical Theology Westminster Seminary California Escondido, CA

Council Counsel is a column featuring questions from our readers and answers from the Advisory Council of Modern Reformation.

If you have a question you would like answered in this space, please send it to CC@modern reformation.org

Will individual believers have their works and lives evaluated?

It is significant that Paul does not use the verb ‘judge’ to describe what happens at Christ’s ‘judgment seat’. Instead he chooses the words ‘manifest’ and ‘receive’. We ought therefore to think more in terms of display and recompense than investigation and verdict.

So what will be displayed?

Paul speaks of ‘things done in the body’ and that is plural. It includes all the data of one’s earthly life, thoughts, desires words and deeds. But he also speaks of them as a unit by using the singular ‘whether it be good or bad’. (The NIV obscures this aspect in its translation). The disclosure will be of the parts in the light of the whole that is of works in the light of a life, positively and negatively.

And how will the life be recompensed?

By ‘receiving what is due’ to the tenor of the character expressed in conduct. Worth is the test.

By mentioning what is good as well as what is bad Paul cannot be speaking of penalty but of reward – a reward of all that is good and the loss of reward for all that is bad or worthless as in 1 Corinthians

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3:11-15. Not only will secret sins be uncovered but half-conscious and unnoticed good deeds too for example those ‘cups of cold water’ given in his name (Matt.25: 34-41)

Should I be afraid of this judgment?

Paul has just used the expression ‘we all’ to refer to Christians’ expectation of glory (3:17-18).

Consequently, appearing before the judgment seat of Christ should not cause believers to be afraid that they might not be admitted to heaven. That is entirely dependent on Christ’s righteousness imputed to the believer There is no reason for such fear that has terror in it (1 Jn.4: 17-18) for it is the Christ who died and rose again who is on the judgment seat! But a reverent and earnest desire to do all we can to live to his glory, so as to please him on earth and be welcomed home by him (see 2 Cor.5: 8-9) is necessary so that we are not ashamed when we stand before him (1 Jn.3:28).

What happened to salvation by grace?

Nothing! It is “cheap grace” that is more than challenged by this teaching. There is no escape from hell without a changed life. Salvation is by grace alone. Yet Paul says “we all must” because grace is not at the expense of God’s justice, and salvation is not exclusive of good works. The holiness of the triune God must be upheld and the character of heaven as a holy place too. So only saints get there. They get there through Christ’s perfect righteousness and show they belong there through their own that is ever imperfect in this life.

Not be condemned for the least sin and to be rewarded for the least good (imperfectly done) and is grace indeed!

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Teens Buying Totally Cool Bible-zines In late 2003, Thomas Nelson Publishers released Revolve, the New Testament with a significant twist: It looks more like a teenage fashion magazine than a traditional copy of Holy Scripture. Complete with beauty and shopping secrets as well as advice for girls who are “totally boy crazy,” this edition of the New Testament has received a lot of attention since its release last year. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, for example, picked up the story and asked pointedly: “Are you trivializing…the Holy Book?” Kate Etue, senior editor of Transit Books (a division of Thomas Nelson) responded, “No, we wanted to give the teens a point of relevance, a way that they could get into the Scripture and make it apply to their lives. Many of the teens we talked to said they just didn’t know where to start. It was too much black and white, you know, 1,600 pages of Scripture.” Though the Bible is still the number one bestselling book of all time, it is not hip among today’s teens. Transit Books reports that the number one reason teens don’t read the Bible is because it is “too big and freaky looking.” Etue explains, “In this Bible, we tried to find a way to address topics that we knew were important to the teens, like guys and shopping and family relationships, but give them a way to relate that back to the Scripture.”

Modern Reformation couldn’t resist taking a peek inside Revolve for ourselves. Here’s what we found:

• “Beauty secret: As you apply your sunscreen, use that time to talk to God. Tell him how grateful you are for how he made you. Soon, you’ll be so used to talking to him, it might become as regular and familiar as shrinking your pores.”

• Q: “I really, really want to get a tattoo, but what does the Bible say about them. Is it against God?” A: “In the Old Testament law tattoos were forbidden. But when Christ came, he redeemed us from the curse of the law (Galatians 3). This means that now God looks at your heart, your motives, when it comes to what you do.

Check with your parents, and follow their advice.”

• Among the “Top Ten Random ways to Have Fun with your Friends” (sidebar) were: “Give each other makeovers. Go shopping. Keep a prayer journal together.” [But, if they put these ideas into action, won’t they cease to be random?]

According to the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, Revolve was the best-selling Bible of 2003. Due to this success, Transit Books released a boy’s version of the Bible-zine in March 2004 called Refuel, which is, according to promotional copy, “part sports or entertainment magazine, part Bible—totally relevant!” It is being hyped as a “totally cool new way for teen guys to read the Bible,” and “sure to be a hit.”

According to Thomas Nelson’s brand manager, Laura Whaley, Refuel has followed its predecessor, Revolve, as the second bestselling Bible thus far this year.

Thomas Nelson then released Becoming in June 2004, a Bible-zine for women which is being described as “the Bible meets Oprah with a twist of InStyle.” This kicked-up New Testament addresses men, beauty, fitness and food. An advertisement for Becoming says, “It’s chocked full of applicable ways to integrate faith into your daily life…perfect for adult women who are eager to learn more about the ‘faith thing.’”

However, not all adult women agree. An online reader/reviewer named Jennifer writes, “This is like feeding S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 4 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 7

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animal by-products to cows, if you want my early guesstimate of the sort of result this type of literature might potentially have on youth. Its crass employment of popular marketing and the dumbing down of the intricate and intellectually demanding books of the Bible points to a dawning recognition by the Religious Right that time is running short. We are reaching a peak with this trend and none too soon.”

At the time of this article’s drafting, Whaley could not say specifically how well Becoming ranked among other Bibles, however, she was able to say that since its release in June, it has been doing “exceptionally well.”

Christian Retail Experiences Drop in Sales The world of Christian retail is facing stiff competition these days. A survey of Christian bookstore owners at the Christian Booksellers Association International Convention in Atlanta this past June revealed that approximately 60 percent of Christian bookstores showed either no new growth or a downward trend in sales revenue. Reasons for this trend could be due to the recent success of Christian books, such as The Purpose Driven Life and the Left Behind series, in non-Christian retail outlets like Costco and Wal-Mart. In addition, these stores offer the books at discounted prices that cannot be matched by smaller Christian retail chains.

According to one Associated Press story (7/01/04), competition drove some stores to opt for opening on Sundays because, despite it being the Christian day of rest, is a time Christian consumers are out around shopping centers after church services and lunch. Modern Reformation reported on this in the March/April issue, identifying Michigan-based Family Christian Stores as a chain making this kind of move. Berean Christian Stores also made the move to remain open for business on Sundays, but this corporate decision did not sit well with customers of the Canton, Ohio, branch who were apparently offended that a Christian store would conduct business on the Lord’s Day. Customers put so much pressure on the store that this particular branch eventually made the decision to go against the national policy of Berean Christian Stores by remaining closed each Sunday. For store hours at the location nearest you, check out www.berean.com/v2/Stores/ StoreInfo.php?Id=0

Los Angeles County Seal Sports a New “Crossless” Look This past June, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted three to two to remove a tiny cross from 8 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

their county seal after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) threatened a lawsuit.

Representatives of the ACLU argued that the cross communicated that the county was promoting the Christian faith exclusively, and this was a violation of the First Amendment, which states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...”

Defenders of the seal argued that the cross image was neither a “law,” nor an “enactment” of Congress. The tiny image was not intended to promote the Christian religion in L.A. County, they contended, but rather was a way of honoring the history of Christian missions in the region. In fact, they argued, the largest and most central image on the seal was not a Christian symbol at all, but that of Pomona, the pagan goddess of fruit and harvest. Other (undisputed) images on the seal included major industries in Los Angeles County.

Reasons for the vote included the concern that the cross would make non-Christians feel unwelcome, the unwillingness to engage in costly litigation, etc. The Board of Supervisors argued that if it is the history of Christian missions that is being honored, they would make an easy compromise by replacing the cross with an image of a mission. Radio talk show host, Dennis Prager, responded to this idea by saying, “But will the mission have a cross on it, like all missions do?

No! Without the cross,” he added, “the county’s new mission image will look more like a Taco Bell!”

Thousands of people showed up to a rally organized by Prager. Prager, a religious Jew, told the crowd that the ACLU and those who side with them were leftist versions of the Taliban. He said, “They are attempting to erase the Christian history of America just as the Muslim Taliban tried to erase the Buddhist history of Afghanistan when they blew up ancient Buddhist sculptures in their country.”

A few months earlier, the ACLU was successful in removing a cross from the city seal of Redlands, California.

Apparently, the ACLU’s tactic is simple: Write threatening letters and see who caves in.

In God We Trust?

Some have speculated that we are nearing a conflict about our coinage. What do you think? Should the line “In God We Trust” remain or be removed from our coins and bills? Email your answer to us at BTT@modernreformation.org

Denominational News PCUSA: Not as Inclusive as Some Would Think At the 216th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the USA (PCUSA) held on July 2, 2004, the delegates voted by a narrow margin of only 4 votes (259-255) to continue their stand against the ordination of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) members. The heart of the issue was a document still in force known as “the definitive guidance of 1978” that defines homosexual practice as “sinful and not compatible with service in the church.” Without that document, church courts could conceivably apply terms like ‘fidelity’ and ‘chastity’ to gays and lesbians, opening the door for their ordination. The Committee on Church Orders and Ministry asked the delegates at this assembly to strike the 1978 definitive guidance, but by a very slim margin (259-255), delegates dismissed the committee’s recommendation and adopted the minority report as the main motion. Delegates then approved the minority report and maintained the 1978 definitive guidance by a vote of 297-218 (or 58% to 42%).

In a PCUSA news article, Rev. Jane Spahr of Downtown Presbyterian Church in Rochester, NY, was quoted, saying, “This is desperately hurtful...All we want to do is walk beside you, serve beside you. We’ve heard another ‘No.’” According to Michael Adee, who himself is an openly gay elder at First Presbyterian Church, Santa Fe, NM, the 1978 definitive guidance document, “is not constitutional law, but does represent current PCUSA policy.” When asked how then the church could tolerate openly gay elders, like himself, who have been ordained to service, Adee responded that it is currently a church-by-church, presbytery-by-presbytery battle. Many do not approve of the 1978 ruling as the 2004 votes indicated. The long and short of it, according to Adee, is that the PCUSA pretty much goes by a “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” policy, except in regions where homosexuality is widely tolerated in opposition to the denomination’s current policy.

Tim Meredith, pastor of Oak Forest Presbyterian Church in Asheville, NC, and member of the Confessing Church movement in the PCUSA, understands this recent attack on the 1978 definitive guidance as part of a larger strategy. “Our policy against ordaining LGBT persons is being deliberately strained at every level in an all-out push by a very aggressive minority. So far, neither the constitution nor the definitive guidance nor the courts have buckled under more than twenty years of activism.” Meredith disputes Adee’s claim that the definitive guidance of 1978 is not constitutional law. He argues, “The 1993 General Assembly adopted the 1978 definitive guidance as an officially authoritative interpretation of our constitution. Therefore, it’s a crucial part of constitutional law even though it is not in the constitution proper.” With regard to current church practice, Meredith says that it is not exactly as though anything goes. Meredith does admit that a number of presbyteries are indeed trying to

turn a blind eye, but because the 1978 document is still in effect, “many openly gay persons in ordained office are being brought before the courts in a very slow and agonizing process.” Meredith summed up the situation this way: “The aggressive minority is currently waging a war of perception, entrenching the LGBT ordination fight in every possible presbytery to normalize LGBT ordination in our church despite the church’s official position and most of our people’s beliefs. They only need one liberal General Assembly to give them a win and the church will be thrown into flagrant apostasy, driving enough conservatives away to solidify their power across the board.” Though in his view the church is slowly growing more conservative both in the pews and in the pulpits, Meredith sees a very strong possibility of an upcoming assembly striking down the 1978 definitive guidance document.

PCA: Fast-Growing Denomination This past June, delegates from the more conservative Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) met for the 32nd General Assembly in Pittsburg. They reported the total number of PCA churches in North America to be currently 1,565. With a 2.68% growth rate, the PCA is one of the fastest growing denominations in North America.

In addition, the denomination adopted two position papers at the meeting, one on marriage and sexuality, the other on racism.

Both position papers can be found at www.pcanet.org/admin.

SUM + of the = TIME

$4,200,000,000 The 2003 sales revenue of the Christian Publishing / Retail industry. This 4 billion dollar industry is up $200 million from

the previous year, and is over 4 times the annual revenue than that generated back in 1980. This compares with the $10 billion annually generated by Rap Music, $6 billion from Florida Agriculture, and $2 billion from the Dieting / Weight Management Industry.

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RCUS Approves Paper on Justification In May 2004, a position paper on Justification was presented and approved at the 258th Synod of the Reformed Church of the United States (RCUS). The paper deals with the controversy surrounding the views of Norman Shepherd and others, especially with regard to whether or not Christians are justified by faith alone, as Protestants have classically affirmed, or whether good works also contribute to our acceptance before God, as Shepherd and others have argued. Copies of the report are available for download at www.rcus.org/synodreportShep3.htm.

The Lighter Side New Evidence for Bible’s Accuracy In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus told the thief suffering next to him, “Truly, this day you will be with me in Paradise” (23:43). Now, conclusive new evidence has been discovered which vindicates these ancient biblical words. The photo shown (below) is taken from Paradise, Pennsylvania, and clearly indicates that Christ has taken up residence in the place he mentioned in the nearly 2,000-year-old text. According to the evidence, he apparently works out of his home and accepts deliveries.

Unfortunately, he was unavailable for an interview.

STATS Source: Dallas Morning News in association with Gallop (July 3, 2004) Religious Preference of Americans: 48% Protestant 25% Catholic 11% Christian Non-specific 9% Other (Jewish, Muslim, Orthodox, etc) 7% None Women More likely to Attend Church 44% of American women vs. 36% of American men say they have attended church or synagogue in the past seven years (polled in 2003) Born Again?

42% of Americans polled describe themselves as “born again” or “evangelical” Religion Becoming Outdated Is religion largely old-fashioned and out of date? In 1957, 7% said yes. In 2004, 24% say yes.

Increased Belief in the Devil 1955 55% 2004 70% Belief in Hell by American Regions South 83% Midwest 66% Northeast 64% West 61% Belief in the Bible 52% The Bible is the inspired Word of God but not everything should be taken literally 15% The Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man 30% The Bible is the actual Word of God and is to be taken literally 3% No opinion

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Speaking of...

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ometimes I think the environment in which we operate is entirely too secular. The fact that we have freedom of religion does not mean we need to try to have freedom from religion, doesn’t mean that those of us who have faith shouldn’t frankly admit that we are animated by faith, that we try to live by it, and it does affect what we feel, what we think, and what we do.

— Bill Clinton, Morning Edition, Sept. 24, 1994

Rules For Politically Active Christians 1. God does not belong to your party: No country, no political party, no political ideology can own Him. He’s the boss.

2. The ends do not justify the means: Stuffing ballot boxes, shredding public documents, etc. are wrong, and most people would agree to that. Sometimes, though, politically active folks seem to think it’s okay if it’s for a greater good. Not quite.

3. Faith does not lie in support: Too many Christians are turned off by liberalism and prone to conservatism simply because conservatives say nicer things about Christianity. While this phenomenon is generally true, be careful about the dangerous road it could lead you down.

4. Generosity does not mean compassion: Christianity teaches compassion. But cheap generosity, when it’s at someone else’s expense, isn’t compassion. (You know what I mean.) Doing what makes us feel good is sometimes different from what really helps.

— Joshua Claybourn, Weblog, Sept. 18, 2003

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he “naked public square,” where religious values are excluded, is wrong. Likewise, the “sacred public square,” which seeks to impose religious values, is also wrong. What Christians should be arguing for is a “civil public square” that allows an open, civil debate to take place. In such an arena, controversial ideas can be discussed and debated in a civil manner.

— Kerby Anderson, National Director of Probe Ministries International, 1991

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mericans want political leaders to have a moral center, but I do not think that Americans expect the President to also be their national pastor.

— Barry Lynn, Executive Director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Time Magazine, June 21, 2004

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Psalmody: Ancient and Modern

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masterpiece, the Genevan Psalter, using the poetic reports that upon hearing of the effectiveness of Peter and John’s ministry, despite talents of Clément Marot, the favorite poet of opposition from the officials, the people of the congregation “lifted their voices Marguerite de Navarre. The theologian and statesman together to God.” They then praised God with Theodore Beza also contributed several texts. The language from Psalm 146, said the liturgical tunes, composed by musicians such as Louis benediction, “who through the mouth of our father Bourgeois and Claude Goudimel, were drawn David, your servant, said by the Holy Spirit,” either from ancient chant, or from the French followed by the corpus, some lines from Psalm 2. chanson repertoire. A few were newly composed.

In the Geneva liturgical calendar the entire The psalms were regarded by most of the Christian church as the textual foundation for its music. Full Psalter was worked through about twice a year.

Psalters of the church date back at least to the third Calvin wanted the congregation to memorize both century. The psalms are by far the most important words and melodies. He cautioned against the use texts used in Gregorian chant (named for Pope of harmony and forbade musical instruments, Gregory I in the late sixth century, though believing that those were of symbolic value and referring to a more ancient style). The common thus appropriate only to the Old Testament. practice was to sing through the entire Psalter over While he did not oppose hymns, he preferred the a period of time. In the Monestic Daily Office, psalms, because, “one cannot sing anything more entire psalms were sung to one of eight psalm tones worthy of God than that which we have received (recitation melodies based on a particular note from him.” Unlike later practice, the singing was belonging to one of eight modes, or keys). These quite vigorous and rhythmical. The music was rich modes each carried emotional connotations, such and varied, despite using only two values (equivalent to our half note and quarter note). as sorrow, joy, resolve, and so forth.

Unfortunately, plainchant soon became a Sometimes there was tone-painting, whereby the matter exclusively for the highly educated. sense of the words was illustrated in the music. For Rendered by clerics in Latin, and with rather example, Psalm 136, with the words, Louer Dieu tout abstract music, by the late Middle Ages, the hautement (“Praise God in the highest,” modern singing of the psalms had become all but versions render, “Praise God for he is good”), which unintelligible to ordinary believers. When the leaps up a fourth from a D to a G, and then up the Protestant Reformation moved across Europe in scale to a high D. Perhaps the most significant aesthetic feature of the sixteenth century, a strong burden was expressed for music and worship to be accessible to the Geneva psalms was their nonconformity to the the people. During this time, church music was classical ideal of balance and symmetry. Although renewed altogether. The Reformed Psalter Calvin himself was partly influenced by Plato’s developed out of Calvin’s and Bucer’s approaches to view of the power and dangers of music, his Psalter the liturgy. The psalms became the prayers of the was surprisingly irregular and nonclassical. people. Inspired by the Strasbourg Psalter of 1537, Perhaps this reflected God’s unpredictable ways Calvin sought to create a similar set of texts in the with the world. So much was this the case that French language. In 1542 he published a later the psalms were regularized and sung rather he psalms have been sung in Christian worship from the beginning. Acts 4:24

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monotonously. In reaction to that, a number of more recent versions have adopted music and poetry from many sources.

African Americans developed a style of psalm singing known as “Dr. Watts,” named for the great British liturgical poet, with lots of room for improvisation and blue notes. The journey to the modern Psalter has been full of twists and turns. Sadly today, psalm singing is in grave danger of being obscured by

many other forms of worship music, some legitimate, some less palatable.

So, let’s get back to the Psalter!

Dr. William Edgar, professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia, PA) is the author of the recently released Reasons of the Heart (Baker/Hourglass, 2004).

Resources: Psalters The Psalter is by far the most widely published book of worship down through the ages. We can choose from a number of editions in modern English. A classic is the Book of Psalms for Singing (Pittsburgh: Crown and Covenant Publications, RPCNA). Its melodies and words have great integrity, although much depends on the way they are sung.

For another standard edition, also containing ancient and modern melodies, try the Psalter Hymnal (Grand Rapids: Board of Publications, Christian Reformed Church, 1957, 1976). The Trinity Psalter (Crown and Covenant) is also quite solid, although somewhat lacking in imagination (all but four psalm tunes can be found in the larger Trinity Hymnal). Although not exhaustive, the psalms rendered in Songs of Rejoicing (Selah Publishers, edited mostly by Christian Reformed Church people) are superbly modern yet singable. Graham Kendrick’s Psalm Collection Songbook (Worship Music) is justly popular.

On the Roman Catholic side, some good things have emerged. The Psalter Paperback sponsored by Liturgical Training Publications (LTP) is quite impressive, though it is not metrical. The psalms of the Gelineau-Grail team (Psalms for Morning and Evening Prayer) still work well in many settings. Besides these Psalters, many guides to singing and praying through the psalms exist.

Resources: Reformed Worship Most readers of this column will be familiar with the brilliant magazine Reformed Worship. The quarterly publication has been in existence since 1986, and at present counts over seventy issues in print. The mission of the magazine, implied in its title, is “to provide worship leaders and committees with practical assistance in planning, structuring, and conducting congregational worship in the Reformed tradition.” Presented by CRC Publications, much of the credit for its originality and usefulness goes to its extraordinary editor, Emily R. Brink, who also writes regularly for the journal. The presentation is always rich with graphics, musical scores, and displays, and is always user friendly.

Generally one can expect Features, with articles of all kinds on such topics as diverse as theological themes in worship, children’s messages, psalm singing, technology, and more, and Departments, which includes seasonal suggestions, lessons in musical instruments, introductions to new and old hymns, a helpful “Notes from the LOFT” column (edited by associate editor Ron Rienstra), a similar question and answer column (by consultant John Witvliet), and books reviews. One might have thought that after nearly twenty years it would have run out of topics. But no, each issue brings new and important articles on a wide range of subjects, all related to worship.

The refrains found regularly in Reformed Worship include appeals for excellence in music, arguments for planning ahead, liturgy and song presentations, cultural diversity within reasonable bounds, and items for children and young people.

Sometimes issues are themed, at least partially. The March 2002 issue, for example, has a number of pieces on the French community Taizé, including a thoughtful introduction by Emily Brink, and a fascinating interview of Brother Émile, who reflects on the history of the movement and its main composers, from Gelineau to Berthier. Again, the March 2004 issue has a nice series on worship in the urban context, including visits to Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York (by Paul Detterman), and to Spirit and Truth Fellowship in Philadelphia (by Larry Sibley).

As a musician and also an academic, I always gravitate first to the psalms and hymns introduced, and second to the book reviews. In both areas the abundance and variety are astonishing. But then, I always find several of the articles thought-provoking as well. Few people will agree with everything printed. While the magazine is certainly Reformed in basic flavor, it does not speak for the more traditional or historic forms such as exclusive psalmody, which might frustrate some readers. Yet, surely, Reformed Worship purposes to be somewhat broad, and especially to be prescriptive as well as descriptive. As such, it is an invaluable resource.

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Matthew 18:21–35

Seventy Times Seven

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e’realwayskeepingscoreonothers,maintaininganup-to-datetallyonwhatthey’vedonetohurtusor get under our skin. And most of the time, we seem as if these people are on the

verge of receiving no more mercy from us. “I’ve had it ‘up to here’ with your mouth;” “If that happens one more time, I’m gonna blow my stack;” or “I’m sick and tired of stomaching your foolishness.” Time’s up, in other words.

You’ve cussed me out one too many times, gone back to the bottle too often, humiliated and wounded me beyond what I can bear. The well of forgiveness for you has run bone dry.

“Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” (Mt 18:21). That is Peter’s question to Jesus. We might demand more detail, with different limits for different sins: “Lord, how often shall my husband cheat on me and I forgive him? Just once?” or “Lord, how often shall my employee steal from me and I forgive him? Twice?” We want to know when to stop forgiving and when to start holding grudges and seeking revenge.

But Jesus will have none of that: “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven,” (18:22). Jesus might just as well have answered Peter’s question with a question of his own, “Peter, how often shall you sin against Me and I forgive you? Up to seven times? Do unto others, as I do unto you.”

And then along comes the parable. A king is settling accounts with his servants. A certain fellow has a multi-million dollar debt hanging over his head, a debt he’d only be able to pay when hell freezes over. The king demands that the debtor and all that he has be sold and payment made. Falling on his face, the debtor begs, “Master, have patience with me, and I will

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From REV. CHAD L. BIRD

pay you all.” And then, in a shocking reversal, the master compassionately releases him and forgives the debt. No payment plan, no reduced interest, nothing but sheer grace. The multimillion dollar debt is erased from the books, as the king pronounces, “Go, you are free.”

A Shocking Reversal And what does this man then do who has been loved by the king and freed from his debt? He immediately hunts down one of his fellow servants in hatred and enslaves him.

Finding this man who owes him a few thousand dollars, he grabs him by the throat, growling, “Pay me what you owe!” Falling on his face, the debtor begs, “Have patience with me, and I will pay you all.” And, then, in a shocking reversal of what the king had done for him, the man had no compassion, but threw his fellow servant behind bars until he should pay the debt. Augustine rightly says, “The man refused to give what was given to himself.” He who had received mercy, showed no mercy.

And then what happens? Talk spreads quickly. The other servants are shocked and grieved at this man’s ingratitude. When word reaches the king’s ears, he calls the scoundrel on the carpet: “You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you begged me. Should you not also have had compassion on your fellow servant, just as I had pity on you?” And in anger, the master delivered him to the torturers until he Assistant Professor Exegetical Theology Concordia Theology Seminary Fort Wayne, Indiana

should pay all that was due.

Then, just in case we don’t get it, Jesus wraps up the parable with these hard words: “So My heavenly Father also will do to you if each of you, from his heart, does not forgive his brother his trespasses.” Now, if it seems that Jesus is calling you to forgive your neighbor as often as God forgives you; if it seems that our Lord is calling you to be as merciful, compassionate, and loving toward your neighbor as he is toward those who sin against him; if it seems as if Christ is telling you never to hold grudges, never to seek revenge, always to forgive . . . then you’ve understood Jesus perfectly well.

Forgiveness without boundaries, without stipulations, without hesitation, without regret: that’s precisely what Jesus means. That’s his charge to you.

Overflowing with Forgiveness But he is not charging you — as it were — to get blood out of a turnip. He is not calling you to give that which you have not received. On the contrary, you are only to bestow that which has already been bestowed upon you, bestowed (need I remind you?) in abundance. The forgiveness with which the Lord has filled your ears is to overflow from your mouth into the ears of others. And it is not as if your Lord forgives you and then you grant your very own forgiveness to those who have sinned against you. Rather, it is the Lord’s very own forgiveness which flows into you and out of you toward your erring brother. You are but the conduit for divine mercy.

And let us look — or, rather, gape in wonder!

— at this divine mercy. The king in the parable is, of course, the Lord himself. He is the one to whom the multi-million dollar debt is owed.

Now, we cannot see the immensity of our sindebt; for we have mastered the art of selfdelusion, of whittling down the forest of our sins until our eyes behold only a few twigs here and there. But the Lord sees truly and truly his law condemns us for grievances beyond number.

Before God we plead guilty of all sins, even those we are not aware of, as we do in the Lord’s Prayer.

And how does our Lord respond when we plead guilty? He cancels the debt. He is always more eager to forgive than we are to confess. He calls debtors before him not because he expects them to pay up, but because he wants an opportunity to absolve. The debtors tremble as if stepping before a cruel Judge, but discover instead a compassionate Father. For such is the nature of the God who is love, who demonstrates his own love toward us in this, that while we

were yet sinners, Christ died for us. The debt we owe God does not go unpaid; it is paid, paid in full, not with gold or silver, but with the holy, precious blood of Christ. The multi-million dollar debt is reckoned to the account of Christ.

He becomes what we owe, is transformed into the debt itself, and — having paid the price — proclaims, “It is finished. The debt is taken care of. You are forgiven.”

It is this forgiveness which must matter for you when your brother sins against you. In the prayer our Lord taught us to pray, we petition our Father to forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

We pray in this petition that our Father in heaven would not look at our sins, or deny our prayer because of them. We are neither worthy of the things for which we pray nor have we deserved them, but we ask that he would give them all to us by grace, for we daily sin much and surely deserve nothing but punishment. So we too will sincerely forgive and gladly do good to those who sin against us. “So we too will sincerely forgive,” Luther’s Shorter Catechism says, for how can we do otherwise?

In the Introit Psalm (Psalm 130) we chanted, “If You, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with You, that You may be feared.” The marking of iniquities is not the way of our Lord. His is the way of forgiving and forgetting iniquities, the way of mercy, not revenge. He never tires of absolving you for he never tires of creating. And that is what absolution is, an act of creation.

When, through the pastor’s mouth, Christ says, “I forgive you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” he is creating you a new man, a holy, sinless, perfect man, an icon of himself; for he is putting himself into you through his words of absolution. If any man is in Christ, he is a new creation, and every man is in Christ and Christ is in him through the forgiveness by which Christ bestows himself.

We have died and it is no longer we who live but Christ who lives in us; so, it is no longer we who show mercy, we who forgive, but Christ who shows mercy and who forgives in us.

Conclusion In the ancient church, before the communicants received the Sacrament, they exchanged a kiss of peace. The lips which would soon kiss the flesh and blood of Christ first kissed those with whom they were to become one body and one blood. It [ C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 3 9 ]

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THE CHRISTIAN VOTER’S GUIDE

Ministers of God for Our Good: God’s Gift of Civil Government olitical life continually confronts the contemporary Christian.

Newspapers and television newscasts are filled each day with the latest acts and foibles of our government leaders, and in election years the stream of political information becomes a torrent. Bumper stickers, billboards, and lawn signs congest the quietest neighborhoods. Most believers would readily assert that Christianity cannot be identified with the political process, and yet most also believe that their faith cannot simply leave them as disinterested bystanders. Developing a proper perspective on political life has been an ongoing challenge for Christians faced with this tension. Perhaps the clearest teaching of Scripture on civil government is its claim that magistrates are ministers of God for our good, and unpacking this idea is key for an understanding of civil government and the Christian’s attitude toward it.

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The Apparent Evil of Civil Magistrates o one thinking about the present topic can fail to recognize that there are a great many reasons why Christians might take a decidedly negative view of civil government and magistrates. As the early Christian church first developed its approach to civil government, much of the Old Testament that they

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treasured and most of their own practical experience seemed to suggest that civil magistrates are generally the enemies of God’s people.

The pages of the Old Testament are littered with examples of the unrighteousness of kings.

The king of Egypt, Pharaoh, initiated a brutal campaign against the Israelites in which he sought to kill all newborn boys. Later, Pharaoh repeatedly hardened his heart against God, first refusing to let the Israelites leave Egypt and then pursuing them after he did. On their way to the Promised Land, the Israelites again encountered obstinate kings, such as Og and Sihon, who would not even allow Israel to pass harmlessly through their territories, and Balak, who hired the sorcerer Balaam to curse them. Even after arriving in Canaan, God’s covenant people had little rest from wicked foreign kings. Through the age of the Judges, for example, neighboring princes constantly harassed them.

Later, brutal Assyrian kings Tiglath-Pileser and Shalmaneser drove the northern ten tribes of Israel into captivity and the great Nebuchadnezzar deported Judah to Babylon after leveling Jerusalem and its temple. Of course, the theocratic kings of Israel and Judah themselves were often no better.

If their Hebrew Scriptures suggested that civil magistrates generally brought harm rather than good, the early Christians’ personal experience fre-

quently confirmed such a view. Was it not, after all, a representative of the Roman Empire, Pontius Pilate, who had condemned their Messiah to death, in a sham trial in which Pilate himself admitted that there was no just cause for accusation?

The book of Acts records a number of sad instances in which civil authorities lined up against the fledgling church and its leaders. King Herod put the Apostle James to death and then (unsuccessfully) pursued Peter. The Apostle Paul, who had a couple of unpleasant encounters with civil magistrates during his missionary journeys, was handed over to the Roman authorities upon his return to Jerusalem.

Though his Roman citizenship at least secured him a judicial hearing, he remained in prison for several years under Felix and then Festus. Felix, Acts tells us, had been waiting for a bribe. The book of Acts ends with Paul awaiting trial before Caesar in Rome. The outcome of Paul’s appeal remains unknown, but not long afterward a caesar named Nero would instigate a severe persecution against the Christians.

Added to all this was the fact that Christians made a theological confession that threw the very idea of political authority into question: they claimed that Jesus Christ was king—in fact, the King of kings and Lord of lords. In the face of such a confession, the idea that mere human beings could be kings might

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he question of whether the character of our political leaders really matters is frequently asked.

Perhaps it is frequently asked because the answer is not necessarily obvious. On the one hand, many, if not most, people, and certainly most Christians, instinctively believe that character must certainly matter. The idea that those who are entrusted with upholding justice in society would themselves be personally corrupt seems strikingly wrong. On the other hand, thinking theoretically, there seems to be nothing impossible about a person with a lousy personal life making wise and just public policy decisions.

Practical examples of this are readily available, and the fact that our social order has not imploded, despite the well-known vices of our political leaders, is undeniable. A firm but moderate answer to the question, Does character count?, would seem to be in order.

First, surely we must answer that character does count. But why

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is this? The insight of some ethicists may be helpful initially.

Many writers who have looked at ethics through the lens of character or virtue have concluded that virtue is a holistic matter.

That is, one part of a person’s character cannot ultimately be separated from another part of his character—an individual vice or virtue cannot be viewed as an isolated matter, but is in sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious ways connected with the whole of who that person is. The basic truth of this insight would seem to be confirmed by the teaching of Proverbs about wisdom. In Proverbs, wisdom is an all-embracing thing that determines the entire course of a person’s moral life. The attainment of wisdom involves understanding “righteousness and justice and equity, every good path” (Prov. 2:9, ESV). Significantly, it is the same wisdom that is to guide kings in their quest for justice that is also to guide each person in avoiding adultery, laziness, malicious talk, and many other things. The political leader who falls into adul-

seem at best to be a matter of indifference and at worst the height of blasphemy. Undoubtedly, the early Christians had many good reasons to take a negative view toward civil magistrates.

However, at least one stubborn fact stood in the way of such a verdict: the teaching of Jesus and his apostles refused to dismiss civil magistrates as wicked obstructers of God and his people. Jesus himself instructed his followers to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s (Mark 12:17). This implied, at the very least, that the civil magistrate had some claim to people’s obedience.

In more detail, Paul described civil authorities as ministers of God for their good. He explained that whatever authorities existed had been ordained by God and that Christians were therefore to submit to them (Rom. 13:1–7). Clearly, the many bad examples of kings notwithstanding, the early Christians needed to develop a positive—as well as skeptical—perspective on civil government.

The Development of a Christian Approach to Government he early church indeed did just that, though not without struggle and ambiguity. One of the earliest extant Christian documents to set forth a view of civil life that acknowledged both its legitimacy and its limitations is the anonymous

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Epistle to Diognetus, probably written by the mid-second century. The very fact that this letter is addressed to “his excellency, Diognetus,” is significant, for it suggests that the author considers high government officials worthy of honor and worthy recipients of appeal. The author of this letter claims that Christians are in many ways indistinguishable from the rest of the world in terms of external appearances. Christians do not live in their own cities, speak their own language, or follow their own customs. Instead, they obey established laws and acknowledge the constitution of their own commonwealth. Yet, in a rather paradoxical series of statements, the author explains that Christians, though belonging to civil society in many important ways, at the same time do not belong to it.

They are citizens of this world, yet also foreigners, because they are also citizens of heaven. Though they work and live in civil society, the ultimate meaning of their lives far transcends it. Many subsequent Christian writers in the early centuries imitated this basic approach. For example, Justin, the famous second-century martyr, addressed his First Apology to the Roman emperor. He not only paid respect to the emperor in his address itself, but he described Christians as those who worship God alone, and yet in all other things are obedient to the emperor and pray for him.

acter Count? tery is reckoned a fool, and fools are precisely the sort of people who are unfit to govern justly.

Yet, were we to stop here, the picture would probably be oversimplified. Though corruption of character adversely affects one’s ability to rule justly, purity of character does not guarantee that one will rule justly either. In other words, more than good character is necessary for just leadership. Among other necessary ingredients are knowledge of relevant subject matters and experience in political decision making. Who would expect a man who is eminently virtuous, yet with no knowledge of other cultures and international relations to make just decisions on matters of foreign policy?

While political figures with good character have advantages over those who do not, so also political figures with vast knowledge and long experience have advantages over those who lack these things.

Perhaps this complexity of what is required of people who would rule justly helps to explain why character counts and yet

does not determine everything. The sort of people we desire to be our governors—who have wisdom and virtue, experience and expertise—are few and far between. However, few individuals of whatever sort have possessed autocratic power to determine the course of nations by their solitary judgments. By his common grace, God gives rulers their advisors and tempers their power through lower magistrates and governmental systems of checks and balances. Such realities often help to blunt the weaknesses, whether moral or intellectual, of those in power and prevent the worst consequences of their failings from coming to fruition.

Does character count? Of course it does. But other things count, too, and our judgments and evaluations of our political leaders should be nuanced enough to take the many relevant considerations into account.

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These early writings, though composed when Christians were still a persecuted minority, established some basic parameters that guided Christians in later centuries, even after their faith had been officially adopted by the Roman authorities. The eminent fifth-century churchman, Pope Gelasius I, for example, spoke of Christ himself as recognizing two legitimate authorities, the royal and the priestly, each with its own proper sphere of activity. In his vision, emperors were to submit to priests in matters of salvation and eternal life, while priests were to submit to emperors in temporal

a positive approach to civil government for the young Protestant churches. Though the views of Luther and Calvin were not identical, they both approached issues of civil government from the perspective of the “two kingdoms.” Against the Anabaptists who despised civil authority and preferred anarchy to order, Luther and Calvin defended the existence of law and magistrates. For Luther, the same Christian who, according to the kingdom of God’s “right hand,” would follow the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount and foreswear all violence and vengeance in his personal life, must also submit to civil authority according to the kingdom of God’s “left hand,” and might Though the views of Luther and Calvin were not identical, they both approached even himself serve as a government official and thus issues of civil government from the perspective of the “two kingdoms.” bear the sword. For Calvin, though the doctrine of Christian liberty frees believers from all man-made laws affairs. The great theologian, Augustine, in his in religious matters, according to the spiritual kingfamous work, The City of God, addressed those reel- dom of Christ, Christian liberty does not at all ing from the fall of Rome at the hand of barbarians. diminish the believer’s obligation to obey civil Along similar lines, he accorded legitimacy to civil magistrates in all matters that do not directly congovernment—even when governed by pagans— travene God’s law, according to the civil kingdom. but exhorted his readers to set their ultimate hopes Calvin made the remarkable claim that suffering under the worst tyrant was better than living in on something far greater.

However, there can be little doubt that the anarchy. For both of these reformers, and most of adoption of Christianity as the official state reli- their followers, civil government was a blessing gion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century from God, though not of ultimate importance. had a profound impact on how Christians thought about civil government. As time went on, Biblical Teaching on Civil Government espite all of the readily available examples of the Christians became much less prone to doubt the wickedness of rulers, much of the Christian tralegitimacy of civil government—as in the days of dition has affirmed that civil government is a the early church—and much more prone to forget and God-ordained institution. its limitations. The idea of “Christendom”— legitimate But is there a biblical basis for such a view? church and state dwelling harmoniously as a uniA survey of relevant teaching in both the Old and New fied Christian society—held the minds of many Christians through the Middle Ages and produced Testaments affirms that there is much scriptural support for some heated debates that could not have otherwise the idea that civil government is legitimate, though always taken place. Among these debates were those limited.

Many people have seen the origin of civil govbetween “imperialists” and “papalists,” those who believed that ultimately the pope was to submit to ernment already in the story of Cain and Abel in the Christian emperor and those who believed that Genesis 4. When God declared that Cain’s punishment for the murder of his brother was that he the emperor was to submit to the pope.

Throughout church history, however, there would be a restless wanderer on the earth, Cain have been those who, in the light of the radical cried out that this was more than he could bear, claims of Christian discipleship and Christianity’s because anyone who found him would kill him. eschatological expectations, have spurned the The Lord answered that there would be vengeance authority of civil government altogether. One upon anyone who killed Cain. It seems that Cain’s prominent group that tended toward such an great fear was that there would be no system of jusapproach was the so-called Anabaptists of the six- tice to protect him, and God’s answer addressed teenth century. The Anabaptists, however, provid- precisely this problem. Little coincidence it is that ed the reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin immediately after this dialogue Cain goes forth and with the occasion and opportunity for setting forth builds a city, for God provides justice in a sinful

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world through civil society. God did not promise salvation to Cain, but he did assure him that justice would not be absent. Here we find a first glimpse at the role of civil magistrates in this world.

Genesis 9 communicates a similar message.

After the flood, God made a covenant with Noah, which is recorded in this chapter. God makes no mention of salvation from sin as he enters into this covenant. Rather, this covenant is made with all people and all living creatures indiscriminately, and it promises the continuation of somewhat normal life on earth. One of the provisions of this covenant is that no one is to kill another person, and that anyone who does will be subject to capital punishment. Rather than destroying life, human beings are to cultivate life. The command that God gives here, to be fruitful and increase in number, echoes the commands of the original creation mandate in Genesis 1. Despite the fall into sin, man retains the God-given tasks of working, procreating, and caring for creation, tasks which can and will happen only as there is some measure of justice in the world. Here again, Scripture gives us a glimpse of the task of what we now know as civil government.

Some time later, God made a covenant with Abraham, and here he did what he did not do in the covenant with Noah, namely, set apart a special people for himself and promise them eternal salvation. But despite the promises that Abraham and his family received, they did not turn their backs on the world in regard to temporal matters.

Genesis records many stories of Abraham interacting with the kings of the lands where he wandered, and he even consorted with several of them in rectifying a particular injustice that was done to his nephew Lot (Gen. 14). Later, the righteous Joseph took a high position in the royal court of Egypt and used his position to preserve the peoples of that land when faced with a devastating famine. The covenant families of Jacob and his children gladly took refuge under the civil protection of Egypt.

This story of Joseph illustrates not only that God’s redeemed people may serve as civil magistrates, but also that God uses magistrates to do good for his people and for all people generally.

Between the time of Moses and Christ, the situation of God’s people changed in some important ways. In the covenant with Moses, God did something different from what he did in the Abrahamic covenant and from what he would do in the new covenant: he constituted his covenant people as a geopolitical nation, giving them a land of their very own and a system of laws to guide their civil life.

When they arrived in the land of Canaan, God’s covenant people were no longer to cooperate with

kings of other nations but to exterminate them.

There is no space here to consider exhaustively the reasons for God’s administering things in this way, but surely they relate in part to the fact that the Promised Land of Canaan was to be a foreshadowing of the eternal heavenly kingdom in which God’s people were no longer to mingle with pagans, but be decisively separated from them.

This is consistent with the fact that when the people of Israel stepped away from the Promised Land, their attitude toward the rulers of the lands around them was often positive and not necessarily hostile. This is evident in the friendly relations that kings David and Solomon had with foreign rulers, such as Hiram, King of Tyre and the Queen of Sheba (1 Kings 5 and 10). More telling are the instructions in the letter that Jeremiah wrote to the Israelites who had been carried into exile in Babylon. These exiles were not to resist the Babylonian government, but to live humbly under it. Jeremiah instructed them to build houses, get married, and have children. He told them to pray for the peace and prosperity of the city in which they lived. Jeremiah even explained that if that the city had peace, so would they—Babylon’s civil government would be their protection! Outside of the Promised Land, these exiles found themselves again in a situation like that of Abraham and the patriarchs, before the days of Moses. They were to live at peace with their neighbors as far as possible and acknowledge the legitimacy of civil magistrates, reaping the benefits of the social order they provided. Yet, just as Abraham, they knew that they were a people set apart by God for eternal life, and thus they recognized that this life in Babylon was one day going to come to an end when God restored the fortunes of his people (Jer. 29:1–14).

With the death and resurrection of Christ, God brought to an end the old covenant with Israel and inaugurated the new covenant with the church.

The situation of God’s new covenant people with respect to civil government in many ways resembles that of Abraham or the exiles in Babylon. God gave his New Testament people no special land of their own, no system of civil laws, and no instructions about exterminating their enemies. He entered into covenant with a church, not a nation.

The church abides in many nations, not one. It mingles freely with its neighbors, even if not Christian. As Paul explains, though the church is to dissociate from so-called “brothers”—professing Christians—who persist in immorality, this does not mean cutting off relations with immoral people “of this world” (1 Cor. 5:9–11). Similarly, believers are generally to remain in their station in life, freely buying and using the things of this world, though

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without becoming engrossed in them (1 Cor. 7:17, 29–31). As part of this basic attitude, Christians are to submit to civil magistrates and recognize them as a beneficial gift of God. Echoing Jesus’ own command to give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, Paul instructs all believers to submit to the governing authorities. The reason is that God has ordained their authority, so that resisting them is resisting God himself.

Though Christians are often tempted otherwise, we ought not see this as a burden, but as a blessing, for Paul explains that the magistrate is God’s servant for our good. He exists to be an agent of wrath and punish the evildoer (Rom. 13:4)—in other words, to bring about that justice on earth that God promised to provide already in Genesis 4 and 9. Contemporary Christians living in the First World often complain about the cultural degeneracy and political misdeeds of their own societies.

Surely it is sobering to consider that the Roman government that Paul described as a blessing from God and worthy of obedience was filled with far greater injustices than First World Christians today endure. Paul reiterates the thrust of his concerns in 1 Timothy 2:1–2. Here, in telling Christians to pray for all people, he especially exhorts them to pray for kings and those in authority. For what purpose? Paul says that we should pray for them in order that we might live peaceful and quiet lives, in all godliness and holiness. When civil magistrates do their job—even to some extent—we are enabled to pursue our work and worship in ways that would be virtually impossible otherwise.

Conclusion s the Scriptures teach and as the church has acknowledged, civil magistrates are ordained by God and to be received by us as a gift from him. Of course, civil magistrates often fail in the tasks entrusted to them, and thus it is helpful to close this article by remembering that civil authority is legitimate, but always limited.

Though civil authority is a good, it is not an unmitigated or ultimate good. Though it suppresses wickedness in the world to some degree, it can never provide salvation. Thus, even while Christians remain humble and obedient citizens in whatever country they have been placed, they remember that their true citizenship is in heaven.

Like the exiled Israelites who looked forward to being rescued from Babylon and returned to the Promised Land after seventy years, Christians today look forward to the time when Christ returns and establishes that eternal kingdom in which righteousness and peace dwell. Until then, we gratefully receive God’s provision of civil govern-

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ment, with whatever justice, peace, and prosperity accompanies it. ■

David VanDrunen (Ph.D., Loyola University) is associate professor of systematic theology and Christian ethics at Westminster Seminary California (Escondido, California).

He is the author of Law and Custom: The Thought of Thomas Aquinas and the Future of the Common Law (Lang, 2003).

SPEAKING OF

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he

University

of

Chicago's

respected

National

Opinion

Research Center (NORC) has reported that the proportion of adult Americans calling themselves Protestants, a steady 63% for decades, fell suddenly to 52% from 1993 to 2002. Not only that, the study's authors projected that "perhaps as early as this year the country will for the first time no longer have a Protestant majority."

— TIME magazine, August 16, 2004

THE CHRISTIAN VOTER’S GUIDE

“One Cheer” for Civil Religion? he pastor of my local church caused no small stir several years ago when he removed the American flag from its perch just behind the pulpit.

Indeed, he removed it from the sanctuary entirely. As you might imagine, this provoked some consternation among at least a few members, who no doubt wondered if this brash new pastor, late of graduate school and ministry in England, might have acquired some suspect loyalties during his years abroad. It was not anti-Americanism or any other lack of patriotism that animated his decision, however. Reared in a small town in the verdant rolling hills of the Bluegrass State, he is as red-blooded an American as you will find, possessed of a deep and abiding love for his country. He will with gratitude and pride salute the flag when given occasion to do so. So why remove it from the sanctuary? Most simply, he wanted to brook no confusion that the church offers its worship only to Christ—and not to America.

More deeply, he saw the flag’s prominence in the pulpit, even its very presence in the sanctuary, as potentially obscuring the distinction between the

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Kingdom of God and the kingdom of man. He sought to make sure that there was no confusion over his primary calling and our primary identity. As a minister of Christ’s church, he is charged with preaching the Word of God to our congregation, holding our consciences captive to God’s revelation as our ultimate authority and to God’s name as our ultimate loyalty, no matter our earthly citizenship or nationality. The mere presence of an American flag does not necessarily defy this distinction, of course. But it may confuse or undermine it.

This is not to say that the virtually ubiquitous American flags in sanctuaries across the United States necessarily indicate some sort of latter-day “Babylonian captivity of the church”—in this case a “captivity” to jingoistic nationalism. No doubt some, perhaps even many, congregations keep a flag in their church while also keeping a clear understanding of the distinction between the church and the world. Nevertheless, the pervasiveness of pulpit flags should give us pause.

Especially because they serve as just one visible manifestation of a deeper problem: the frequent

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confusion of civil religion with biblical Christianity.

What is civil religion? According to historian (and Christian) Wilfred McClay, civil religion is “that strain of American piety that bestows many of the elements of religious sentiment and faith upon the political and social institutions of the United States.” More problematically, civil religion is the misidentification of the nation of the United States with the covenant people of God. It is the casual assumption that America enjoys a special role in redemptive history. It is the confusion of the office of the political leader with the office of the spiritual leader. It is the frequent presumption of divine blessings without submission to divine judgment.

It is the sublimation of Christian distinctives to a generic amalgam that conflates many faiths into a common national identity. It is as old as America itself. And it is not biblical Christianity.

This is the first and by far most vital distinction to keep in mind. Though civil religion may at times draw on biblical resources, though it may on occasion employ Christian imagery, though it may appeal

to many professing Christians, it differs from biblical Christianity in fundamental ways. Christianity holds that the people of God are all those who, irrespective of tribe or tongue, have repented of their sins, trusted wholly in Christ’s substitutionary death for their forgiveness, been reconciled to God through his redeeming grace, and joined in the life of the church.

Civil religion instead often holds that God’s people are those who dwell in a particular nation-state and faithfully uphold their civic duties. Christianity holds that man’s chief end is, in the words of the Westminster Confession, to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Civil religion, at its worst, holds that God’s chief end is to preserve and bless the nationstate. Christianity is worship of the one true God. Civil religion, at its most pernicious, is idolatry.

It must quickly be said, however, that civil religion is not always this problematic, or even this objectionable. When the distinction between civil religion and biblical Christianity is kept clear, the former can at times serve as a helpful and even necessary source of civic virtue. In other words, civil religion at its best functions as a sort of natural theology affirm-

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e’ve all seen the “biblical scorecard” literature that floats about during election seasons, grading candidates based on their voting record. The criteria are usually the same: pro-life, pro-family, promorality. Most of us would hopefully agree that one is safe in concluding that these are indeed biblical objectives. The problem comes when a whole series of specific policies are deduced, as if they were logically required by commitment to those values. In a lot of these scorecards, for example, God has apparently declared himself in favor of a specific tax cut, a particular war, school prayer, and a Constitutional ban on flag burning. A lot of them get more specific even than that. Usually, by the way, they are not very specific about racial discrimination, environmental disaster, or piling up debt for future generations.

On one end are those who think that God doesn’t have anything to say about politics. Can we imagine that the God who created the world, upholds it every moment by his providence, has redeemed it at the cost of his own Son’s death, and will one day make it new, does not really care what we do to it or in it? On the other end are those who think that they can deduce God’s will on every congressional vote: “If x, then y; if y, then z. Can’t you see that if you don’t adopt z,

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you don’t really accept x?” But whenever the church thinks God has told it more than he actually has, it has always reflected poorly on God and his cause in the world. Many who take “biblical scorecard” folks’ word for it that Scripture clearly supports conservative Republican policies simply reject Scripture. To be sure, they probably already had, but now they feel more justified in doing so. They have missed the point that Scripture was not given as a blueprint for a holy government with civil power, but to reveal Christ as the hope of history and the world beyond the stop-gap measures of politics, hospitals, jails, and other means of restraining the damage that sin does.

The biblical scorecard approach has been effective on the left as much as the political right. It is often not differences over whether God is on their side in every jot and tittle of their ideology, but a matter of which ideology is so privileged.

Here are a few suggestions for thinking biblically at election time: 1. Clearly distinguish the role of the church as an institution from the role of Christians as citizens in the world. Especially in a democracy, Christians have every reason to be involved, informed and engaged in the pressing questions of our day.

However, the church itself is not an American institution, but a colony of Christ’s heavenly kingdom in this present age.

ing certain truths that God has revealed in creation.

These might include that God is above governments and ordains their authority, that he has bestowed on man certain rights, freedoms, and responsibilities, that he is the source of all material goods and blessings, and that all people and nations are subject to his judgment, both here and in the hereafter. It is good and right for governments and peoples to acknowledge a sovereign divine lawgiver, provider, and judge.

Civil religion at its best affirms these truths. In doing so, it can help produce good citizens and even a good society. But it cannot save sinners.

Civil Religion in History ivil religion is nothing new. In some ways it is as old as both church and state. What the eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon famously observed about ancient Rome might well be true in some circles today: “The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.” His wry

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observation, which could be said of many other nations and cultures besides ancient Rome, should caution political leaders against manipulating religious faith, and religious leaders against placing their faith in the service of the state. Winston Churchill, for one, took a more humble and more honest perspective. Asked if he considered himself to be, like his devout Anglican colleague Lord Halifax, a “pillar of the church,” Churchill replied that he was not, but rather was a “flying buttress.”

While professing support for the presence of the church in his country, Churchill recognized that he was neither a part of the church nor in control of it.

Civil religion is inseparable from history, particularly because it often bases itself on a distinctive view of the past. Rather than attempt a comprehensive survey of civil religion throughout American history, this essay will focus on just two periods in our nation’s past, the founding and the early Cold War years, to illustrate how civil religion originated and to show how this view of the past informs the present. Indeed, some of today’s most contested political debates often appeal to

Your Biblical Scorecard?

Patriotism, for example, is terrific for the public square and a Christian ought not to have trouble expressing it along with non-Christian neighbors. But it is completely out of place in Christian worship. Further, the church simply does not have the authorization or usually the competence to address complex policy questions about which many of its own members might with good reason disagree. This relates to the next point.

2. Clearly distinguish divine command from questions of wisdom and prudence. When you think about it, God has not commanded very many things. He makes few laws, but enforces them. Further, the churches of the Reformation insist that Scripture alone can command the conscience. We cannot be required to believe or do anything that does not have scriptural warrant. Of course, many brothers and sisters think that they have scriptural warrant for every policy position they take, but they often confuse their own thinking with the Bible. There is nothing wrong with using one’s own mind! God has equipped us with reason and endowed us with a sense of justice, so that even non-Christians can create a reasonably equitable government. Christians who agree on the big questions clearly addressed in Scripture may and do disagree over policy ques-

tions—in other words, how to implement or apply the civil use of the law. We have to allow each other room to disagree without judging them to be somehow unfaithful to Scripture.

3. Try not to read the Bible selectively. God is not a Republican.

He’s not a Democrat either. We have to remember that any political ideology is a reflection of questions raised by the secular culture in a given time and place. The “biblical scorecard” is not actually biblical. There is no official Word from God on whether we should have a tax cut or what kind of cut it should be. Even when we think we’re on solid biblical ground, we often realize that somewhere else in Scripture another biblical value is affirmed as just as important, and we cannot sacrifice it for this other value over here. We have to allow Scripture to give us better questions and a fuller interpretation of reality than we already have by simply listening to the cultural left or right.

Michael Horton (Ph.D., Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, and the University of Coventry) is professor of apologetics and theology at Westminster Seminary California (Escondido, California).

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the question of just how religious—or irreligious— were America’s founders. How often, after all, does one hear calls for the United States to return to its “biblical roots,” its “Christian heritage”? Such theological irredentism is correct in at least one respect.

Many of the early English settlers did come with the goal of building a distinctively Christian community. Many others did not, of course; they came for political liberty or often just to make money.

But even the first Massachusetts Puritans did not see themselves as founding a new nation-state, and certainly not a Christian nation-state. Rather, they only sought to establish a new Christian community, while still retaining their English citizenship.

Out of this context came one of the most famous yet least understood sermons in American history.

John Winthrop, the hardy leader of one of the earliest groups of Puritans, in 1630 preached a message to his companions while they sailed onboard their ship, the Arbella, to America. Winthrop described himself and his people as “a company professing ourselves fellow members of Christ.” And while he believed that “the Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us as His own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways,” Winthrop also invoked divine judgment on himself and his fellow Christians should they break their covenant with God. [W]e shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.

The “city upon a hill,” self-consciously echoing Christ’s words in Matthew, referred not to a new nation-state but to a new church community. It would serve as a gospel model first to their fellow Englishmen and then to the rest of the world.

Note also that Winthrop warned his people that if they were unfaithful to God, he would remove his blessing and cause their errand to fail. The whole world would still be watching the “city upon a hill,” but all the world would see would be the city collapsing miserably under wrathful divine judgment.

Such were the promises and peril that attended the first Puritan settlements in Massachusetts. It was not civil religion, but a distinctive brand of Christianity that animated these Puritans.

The many glories of colonial New England notwithstanding, the Puritans’ original mission ended in abject failure. Not only did the English Church eventually stop paying attention to the efforts of their brethren to establish a model Christian society in the new world, but the American Puritans them-

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selves over time lost much of their Christian devotion and doctrine, until Puritanism as a distinctive religious movement had largely disappeared. Their descendants still had their new land, however, and decided to make it a new nation. As the late Perry Miller famously described the Puritan legacy, “having failed to rivet the eyes of the world upon their city on a hill, they were left alone with America.”

In other words, rather than being founded as a distinctively Christian nation-state, the birth of the United States came as almost an accidental by-product of a failed Christian community. This is not at all to say that Christianity was completely absent from the American founding itself. In the revolutionary era, the Founding Fathers drew on three principal sources in conceiving the ideals and institutions of the United States: classical Greco-Roman thought, Enlightenment rationalism, and Christianity. From this intellectual ferment came the founding principles of the new nation, and not coincidentally, the birth of the American civil religion. In turn, it is not too much of a stretch to say that the American Revolution would not have happened without the support offered by this new civil religion.

Consider the following examples. Most obviously, Thomas Jefferson’s affirmation in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal . . . [and] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” reiterates the conviction that our rights came ultimately from God, not government or man. Less well-known are the resolutions adopted by the Continental Congress throughout the Revolutionary War, setting aside particular days for “Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer.” One such resolution, issued in 1777 and distributed throughout the churches of the land, called on all Americans to “join the penitent confession of their manifold sins … and their humble and earnest supplication that it may please God, through the merits of Jesus Christ, mercifully to forgive and blot them out of remembrance.”

Several themes emerge here: awareness of sin, dependence on God’s providence, the urge to stay faithful, the belief that God had a special relationship with America, and even the explicit invocation of Christ. And the first Congress seems to have practiced what it preached. After convening in 1774, the Continental Congress immediately selected a chaplain to open its sessions in prayer. The Rev. Jacob Duche’, an Anglican priest from Philadelphia, served as the first Congressional chaplain from 1774 until 1777. His term “ended” not because he retired but because he defected to the British—the Benedict Arnold of civil religion, perhaps. Finally, after declaring independence in 1776, Congress solicited ideas for a national seal. Both Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson suggested a depiction of God drowning

Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea and rescuing the nation of Israel from slavery in Egypt—showing what they regarded as the common theme of God’s granting liberty to his chosen people, whether the Old Testament Israelites or the new world Americans.

These examples are just a few of many that well illustrate the emerging civil religion. Here it is crucial to remember that the American founders employed a natural theology rather than a revealed theology to establish the intellectual foundations of their new land. Just look again at the language of the Declaration of Independence: “we hold these truths to be self-evident.” In short, the God that most of the founders believed in epitomized reason, virtue, order, and liberty—though not necessarily perfect holiness, wrath, love, and grace. As Mark Noll has observed, most of the founders (many of whom were not orthodox Christians) found in God what they most admired in humanity. It might also be said that they found in religion what they most admired in their nation.

Civil Religion in the Modern Era n February 1, 1953, at the National Presbyterian Church in Washington D.C., the Rev. Edward Elson baptized the newest member of his congregation. Elson also made history, of a sort. The person baptized was Dwight D. Eisenhower, just inaugurated as president of the United States—and the only president to be baptized while in office. Besides its spiritual significance for Eisenhower’s faith, his baptism also represented a new era of public religiosity in American life. From Eisenhower’s unprecedented offering of his own prayer before his inaugural address, to his decision to have Cabinet meetings open with prayer, to the creation of the National Prayer Breakfast, to adopting “In God We Trust” as the United States’ motto and printing it on the nation’s paper currency, to adding “one nation, under God” to the pledge of allegiance, the Eisenhower administration oversaw the reinvigoration, even the reestablishment, of American civil religion.

It was such a creed that in part prompted Eisenhower’s most infamous, yet revealing, comment on religion. On December 22, 1952, Eisenhower, then president-elect, met in New York with his old counterpart and friend from World War II days, Marshal Grigori Zhukov of the Soviet army.

Describing their discussion at a press conference afterwards, Eisenhower delivered fodder for critics of civil religion—and of his own intellect—for generations since. After quoting the Declaration of Independence’s recognition that “all men are created equal” and “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” Eisenhower offered this interpre-

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tation: “In other words, our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is. With us of course it is the Judeo-Christian concept but it must be a religion that all men are created equal. So what was the use of me talking to Zhukov about that? Religion, he had been taught, was the opiate of the people.”

This quote by Eisenhower illustrates the worst and the best of civil religion. At its worst, doctrine and theological truth-claims are rendered largely irrelevant. Of particular concern to Christians, the redeeming work of Christ is wholly disregarded, replaced by moralism and a crude, nonredemptive natural theology. At its best, it unites a society around a few basic truths, including the distinction between creature and Creator, the supremacy of God over government, and the inherent dignity and equality of all human beings. If Irving Kristol could muster “two cheers for capitalism,” in the same spirit we might say that civil religion merits just one cheer.

A contemporary observer in Eisenhower’s day, the Jewish social scientist Will Herberg considered the nature and paradox of the altogether new faith that he saw emerging in America. Though written in 1955, his description of civil religion in his classic Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology, is no less applicable today. Herberg observed that the American people had become more religious than at any time in the nation’s history. Yet this new level of religiosity was accompanied by a “new secularism,” not defined by unbelief but by the diminished authority of religion over people’s lives. “The religion which actually prevails among Americans today has lost much of its authentic Christian (or Jewish) content.

Even when [Americans] are thinking, feeling, or acting religiously, their thinking, feeling, and acting do not bear an unequivocal relation to the faiths they profess.” Instead, Herberg argued that while Americans at one level affirmed the theological distinctives of their respective faiths, these distinctives gave way to a more transcendent new faith that trumped all else: “The American Way of Life.”

Herberg’s “American Way of Life” was moralistic, idealistic yet pragmatic, fiercely democratic, and fervently anticommunist. This new faith genuinely valued traditional religion and sincerely believed in God. However, in a profound teleological shift, no longer was Jesus Christ (for Christians) or even God (for Christians and Jews) the final object of faith, but rather “religion” and “faith” were taken to be ends in themselves, as objects of devotion, as indispensable for society’s foundations. No doubt this civil-religious “faith” played an indispensable role in bolstering American resolve against the unmitigated evil of Soviet communism during the Cold War. It also helped shape national cohesion and build social cap-

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ital for a well-ordered society. Unfortunately it also further blurred the distinction between creation and redemption, between the world and the church, between the city of man and the City of God. What may have been good for the country was at the same time bad for the church. And in the long term, what is bad for the church is also bad for the country.

Civil Religion in the Balance urveying our present situation, Wilfred McClay describes civil religion’s “inherently problematic relationship to the Christian faith or any other serious religious tradition. At best, it provides a secular grounding for that faith, one that makes political institutions more responsive to calls for self-examination and repentance, as well as exertion and sacrifice for the common good. At worst, it can provide divine warrant to unscrupulous acts, cheapen religious language, turn clergy into robed flunkies of the state and the culture, and bring the simulacrum of religious awe into places where it doesn’t belong.”

The civil religion of the Eisenhower era is essentially the version still with us today. Blandly patriotic, optimistic, therapeutic, more spiritual than confessional, it reinforces much of the pervasive “religiosity” in America that is as resilient as it is amorphous. As Herberg observed, “religion” and

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“faith” are often seen as ends in themselves, and doctrine is regarded as unnecessary and divisive rather than as essential to determining truth.

Moreover, this civil religion too often reassures us of the favor we enjoy from God while eschewing any call to repentance from our sin. Hence Irving Kristol’s acerbic insight that “when Americans sin, we quickly forgive ourselves.”

Do these confusions mean that American Christians shouldn’t be patriotic? Not in the least.

Indeed, an honest assessment of the considerable abundance of common grace goods that the United States enjoys might appropriately inspire a robust love of our country. Not for nothing did Lincoln, recognizing the uniqueness of the American experiment, famously describe Americans as an “almost chosen people.” Yet any biblical Christian will recognize that there is, quite literally, a world of difference between being “almost chosen” and being “chosen.” The former may make good citizens on earth; only the latter will be citizens of heaven.

It is right for all Americans—Christian and nonChristian—to recognize the supremacy of God over the governing institutions that he ordains, the divine source of our rights and freedoms, and that all of us will be held to account for our actions. In this sense, being a “good American” may sometimes not conflict with being a “good Christian.” But

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very four years, I get nervous as election day approaches. Inevitably, well-meaning ministers publicly announce their endorsement of a presidential candidate and call on all “professing Christians” to elect (or re-elect) the nominee. Church leaders on both right and left confidently answer the same question (“What Would Jesus Do?”) with different answers (“re-elect Bush!”, “vote Kerry!”). Yet both camps are guilty of the same mistake — confusion over the “two cities,” collapsing of the “two kingdoms,” and a conflating of the eternal (gospel) with the temporal (state).

While competing political interests have invoked divine blessing on their policy agendas for millennia (Lincoln noted this irony in his second inaugural address), I will address the unshakeable belief of many American evangelicals that God is a Republican and that Jesus would vote for GOP candidates. This myth prompts a correlative question: “can a Christian be a Democrat?” (a question which strikes many of us as odd as, say,

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“can a Christian be a Yankee’s fan?”) As a Reformed, confessional evangelical and a Democrat I often get this question.

A few initial observations about the question’s presuppositions: first, it’s a sad irony that today’s politically conservative evangelicals commit similar errors (pitching a conservative political gospel) as did the mainline churches (promoting a liberal social gospel) in the 1960s. Both confused the distinct roles of the two cities, and the believer’s dual citizenship in both. Second, equating a political party’s platform with God’s purposes will inevitably cheapen the gospel, inviting an inexorable slide toward civil religion and, ultimately, cultural Christianity. Third, purporting to herald Trinitarian policy preferences is a tad presumptuous. Do politically conservative evangelicals really believe they know what position Jesus would take on policy issues like welfare reform, global warming or Third World debt relief?

Now to the question: while Scripture calls us to be exemplary citizens within society, it neither mandates nor precludes membership

sometimes the two are wholly incommensurate.

What must be guarded against is making our penultimate loyalty—to country—into our ultimate loyalty. Love of God and loyalty to his kingdom must always be ultimate; anything else is idolatry.

If Gibbon identified the cynicism of the Roman Empire toward revealed religion, it fell to Augustine to identify the fragility of the Roman Empire in worshiping itself. As his biographer Peter Brown notes, “committed to the fragile world [the Romans] had created, they were forced to idealize it; they had to deny any evil in its past, and the certainty of death in its future. Even the most ancient of their historians, Sallust, had lied in praising the ancient days of Rome. This was inevitable, ‘for,’ as Augustine said, poignantly, ‘he had no other city to praise.’” ■ William Inboden (Ph.D, Yale University) has worked in the legislative and executive branches of the federal government.

He is currently finishing a book on religion and American foreign policy.

In this article, Dr. Inboden has cited Wilfred McClay, “The Soul of a Nation,” The Public Interest, Spring 2002; and Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 3 vols. (New York: The Modern Library, 1995), vol. 1, p. 22. The quotation from John Winthrop is taken from “A Model of

Christian Charity,” in Mark Noll and Roger Lundin, eds., Voices from the Heart: Four Centuries of American Piety (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987), pp. 4–6. Dr. Inboden’s quotation from Perry Miller is from “Errand into the Wilderness,” in Jon Butler and Harry Stout, eds., Religion in American History (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 41. His citation of the 1977 Continental Congress resolution is quoted in James Hutson, Religion and the Founding of the American Republic (Washington DC: Library of Congress, 1998), p. 54. The observation from Mark Noll is taken from The History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1992), p. 136. The anecdote of Edward Elson’s baptism of President Eisenhower is taken from Wide Was His Parish (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1986), pp. 115–118. Eisenhower’s comment on religion is found in Patrick Henry, “‘And I Don’t Care What It Is’: The Tradition-History of a Civil Religion Proof-Text,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. XLIX, no. 1, pp. 35–49.

The quotations from Will Herberg are from Herberg’s Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1955), pp. 3, 77–84. Finally, the observations of Augustine were taken from Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), p. 307.

Be a Yankee’s Fan? in, or support for, either political party. After all, America is not a theocracy but a constitutional republic, and neither political party “speaks for God.” The public policies they promote may be sound, even just, but that doesn’t make them “Christian.” Because neither party has a corner on the truth, it’s as unwise for Republicans to seek God’s stamp of approval for their pet issues (e.g., abortion, gay marriage, school prayer) as it is for Democrats to do so for theirs (e.g., civil rights, social welfare, economic justice).

That is not to say our faith doesn’t inform our public policy prescriptions. It can and should. But it is not advisable to construct a “political Apostle’s Creed” of core issues. Before labeling a policy as “Christian,” evangelicals must remember that many political debates are not ultimately about ends, but rather the best means to achieve those shared ends. Reasonable Christians will honestly disagree over which policies are the most prudent and sensible. Even if it were possible to identify an issue in which theoretically all Christians should agree, Scripture will rarely, if ever,

answer the question as to which policy prescription temporal authorities should pursue.

Thus, Christians can be Democrats for the same reason they can be Republicans. Christ commanded us to “render under Caesar,” which includes our thoughtful participation in the public square.

Both political parties promote policies which Christians can affirm, and it’s our civic and biblical duty to work out our political involvement with fear and trembling. Though Lincoln’s theology was hardly orthodox, it was biblical on this point: let us all prayfully consider whether our positions are on God’s side, rather than the reverse.

Neil MacBride (J.D., University of Virginia School of Law), currently serves as Minority Staff Director and Chief Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee Crime Subcommittee. He previously served as an Assistant United States Attorney and campaign aide to several presidential and congressional campaigns.

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THE CHRISTIAN VOTER’S GUIDE

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ne sure way to generate Christian opposition to an idea, person, or organization is to attach the adjective secular to the institution, item, or person under scrutiny. Think of how much more harmful humanism sounds merely by adding secular. After all, humanism in the early sixteenth century stood for a literary reawakening that the Protestant reformers supported, thus

prompting some historians to refer to it as Christian humanism. But secular humanism is clearly a different breed of literary study where the adjective modifies an otherwise important activity—the study of texts—and connotes an enterprise without reference to God or revealed truth.

The perils of the word secular are no less apparent in the world of American politics. Many wellintentioned Christians employ the word to refer to a way of pursuing the public good or determining public policy in a manner divorced from religious or moral considerations. For instance, in a column on recent efforts to remove the phrase “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, Chuck Colson argued that if the deletion is made, the change to the Pledge would be “one more step toward the official establishment of secularism as American religion.” For Colson, secularism is the equivalent of man declaring his independence from God. “We declare ourselves free from any moral law or governor higher than the imperial self, and so we become gods,” Colson wrote. “I cannot imagine a more frightening prospect.” Whether or not the

Pledge of Allegiance’s revision signifies such a damaging outcome, Colson’s rendering of secularism conforms to the common usage among most American Christians, if not many Americans.

Yet, this way of looking at secularity or the secular is unfortunate because the word itself has a much more complicated history. The term also stands for some valuable contributions that Protestantism introduced into the history of the West and the political systems that emerged over the past three centuries. So before you run off denouncing the secularism of American politics— or throw this article across the room in disgust— consider how different (and perhaps worse) the world would be without secularity rightly understood.

Lowering the Stakes he word secular comes from the Latin saeculum. If you take out a dollar bill from your purse or wallet and turn it over to the back you will notice on the left a somewhat strange picture for North America—a pyramid—with the

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Latin phrase underneath, Novus Ordo Seclorum (seclorum is the plural of saeculum). The phrase means “new order for the ages,” and it testifies to the millennial optimism that inspired the American founding. The United States was supposed to represent a new political order in human history, one that would redirect the future course of human affairs.

Of course, this may not be the best foot forward for lowering the stakes of secularity. Indeed, the very notion of creating something new and that would last for millennia appears to be indicative of the kind of pride that many associate with secularity’s understanding of human autonomy.

Still, the word saeculum itself need not follow from novus ordo. In Latin the word typically meant merely an age or generation, like the way we might use era or period to speak of a space of time — for example “the era before Christ” or “the antebellum period.” As such saeculum rightly signifies a period of time and especially its provisionalness. In this case, a period or era need not be a permanent one that lasts for all time. Seculum can also refer to a stage in history that is passing or fleeting. This meaning of secular is actually one that Christians should try to appropriate.

In Latin, saeculum could also take on negative connotations, such as in the Vulgate, the authoritative Latin translation of the Bible used by the

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Roman Catholic Church. For instance, in 2 Timothy 4:10 Paul writes of Demas’ desertion of the apostle’s ministry because of his love for “this world,” which in the Latin is rendered hoc saeculum.

Or again in Ephesians 2:2 Paul reminds Christians of their former unregenerate way of life when they “followed the ways of this world,” which the Vulgate again employs saeculum mundi to capture the apostle’s idea of worldliness. Even though the use of saeculum here is negative, it also signifies the provisional character of worldly affairs, in the sense that these things are passing and not of eternal significance. Someone with a strong otherworldly perspective might be tempted to regard the Vulgate’s use of saeculum as signifying wickedness or evil. But just as important is the original idea of temporariness. Here we need to keep in mind that even good things, like marriage, are products of this age, institutions that will not carry over into the age to come. This is even true of human politics or government, which has been instituted as a provisional means for restraining evil in between the Fall and consummation. For this reason, simply because something is of this world, this age, or

saeculum does not inherently make it godless or sinful. In fact, a truly secular politics might actually be a form of governing and policy-making that recognizes what rulers do here and now is temporary and fades like the grass. If that were the case then Christians could legitimately be at the forefront of advocating secular politics.

Secularization and Christendom f course, most American Christians do not use secular with its Latin derivation in mind. In addition to associating the word with antireligious motives and policies, many employ secular to describe the process by which a cultural or political endeavor passes from an explicitly religious sphere over to a neutral or irreligious one. Perhaps the greatest example of this development in modern history comes from the sphere of politics. As opposed to the Middle Ages when the pope and king worked in tandem to govern a Christian society, with the pope asserting his supreme authority as the representative appointed

by Christ to govern on earth, modern politics since the revolutions of the late eighteenth centuries in

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he year was 1926. The issue was Prohibition. J. Gresham Machen, assistant professor of New Testament at Princeton Seminary, had just voted against a motion in his presbytery to support the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act, the federal legislation that made illegal the sale and distribution of alcohol between 1918 and 1933. Machen’s denomination, the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. was vehemently supportive of Prohibition. And yet Machen voted against the motion, not because, as some alleged, his family money came from running bootleg gin. Instead he believed the church’s support for this specific legislation violated the church’s legitimate authority.

Machen’s reasons went as follows: No one has a greater horror of the evils of drunkenness than I or a greater detestation of any corrupt traffic which has sought to make profit out of this terrible sin. It is clearly the duty of the church to combat this evil.

With regard to the exact form, however in which the power of the civil government is to be used in this battle, there may be difference of opinion. Zeal for temperance, for

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example, would hardly justify an order that all drunkards be summarily butchered. The end in that case would not justify the means. Some men hold that the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act are not a wise method of dealing with the problem of intemperance, and that indeed those measures, in the effort to accomplish moral good, are really causing moral harm. I am not expressing any opinion on this question now, and did not do so by my vote in [Presbytery]. But I do maintain that those who hold the view that I have just mentioned have a perfect right to their opinion, so far as the law of our church is concerned, and should not be coerced in any way by ecclesiastical authority. The church has a right to exercise discipline where authority for condemnation of an act can be found in Scripture, but it has no such right in other cases. And certainly Scripture authority cannot be found in the particular matter of the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act. This case and Machen’s justification for his actions represent a good example of the different responsibilities that church members have as citizens and that the church as an institution has to

France and America have segregated religion and politics. This separation has not meant automatically that the magistrate is supreme to rule in the church (though the English monarch is still head of the Church of England). But in countries like France and the United States the division of power has left the church with a very small sphere while the state’s power has increased to regulate more and more arenas of society. And in doing so without reference to religious standards, modern politics have become secular, that is, free from entanglement with the church or independent from religious standards.

As discouraging as these developments may be to believers, Protestants need to remember that the Reformation implicitly endorsed this kind of secularization. On one front the reformers insisted upon the doctrine of vocation, which taught that all legitimate work had religious significance; in other words, one did not have to be employed by or under the authority of the church in one’s work to be performing meaningful labor. (That is, secular employment became as worthwhile as full-time Christian service.) Another variation on this

reduction of church authority over all spheres (and hence a form of secularization) was the notion of the priesthood of all believers. Because all Christians were called upon to render acts of service in their daily lives, and because such work actually sanctified the laborer and even work in socalled secular occupations, the Reformation liberated some spheres of activity from the control of the church, again contributing to a form of secularization.

The secular nature of the Reformation was no less true for the arena of politics. Lutherans embraced the doctrine of the two kingdoms, which teaches that the spiritual affairs of the church and the earthly matters of the state are matters distinct and not to be confused. In turn, the doctrine of the two kingdoms reduced the authority of the church, taking away from it the political or secular sphere.

Calvinists also understood a fundamental difference between the spiritual and heavenly matters administered by the church and the earthly and temporal affairs of the state. Calvin even argued that after the coming of Christ, to confuse the two, to mix religion and politics, was to commit a Jewish

ce between Christians and the Church society. As Machen argued (in good Reformed fashion), the church’s power is limited to what Scripture clearly teaches, that is, salvation in all its aspects. Because the Bible does not establish a specific form of government or prescribe public policies, the church has no authority to speak on political matters. The only exceptions are when the government solicits the opinion of the church or in extraordinary cases where church officials believe laws or policies will prevent church members from carrying out their Christian duties. In other words, the church’s power is spiritual and moral—she has no weapons other than preaching and church discipline (the keys of the kingdom). At the same time, the church’s power is ministerial and declarative—her sole task is to proclaim the salvation available through Jesus Christ.

Individual Christians, as citizens, have a different set of obligations. These involve deciding upon matters about which Scripture is silent, such as the rights of the federal government versus state governments, tax rates, or energy policy. To make these decisions Christians should seek counsel from the general truths of the Bible and from the wisdom that comes through the study of history and society. But because the truths about politics, economics, and international relations are much more ambiguous than the way of

salvation revealed in Scripture, Christians, as Machen admitted, will likely disagree. And if the church corporately tries to require a specific political outcome, she has overstepped her legitimate authority to minister God’s Word.

The political passivism implicit in Machen’s understanding of the church, however, must not be rendered a justification for Christian escapism (something charged against the Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms also). Machen himself was active in politics precisely because he knew the church should not be. Christians who look to the church to engage in political reforms invariably fail to explore other means by which they as citizens, along with believers and nonbelievers, may engage in the political process. In other words, to say the church has no responsibility for politics is very different from describing what duties Christians themselves have as citizens and neighbors. As they are called, Christians have a duty to seek the welfare of the city (Jer. 29:7). What Machen’s example teaches is that Christians have no right to expect the church as a corporate body to seek the city’s welfare other than through the spiritual means of proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ.

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folly. This was Calvin’s clear contention that Israel’s theocratic pattern where religion and politics were mingled under one nation no longer applied for the church whose boundaries knew no national limits and whose power was spiritual and eternal, not physical and temporal.

Protestants who dislike the secular label might like to nuance the interpretation of the Reformation offered here. Unfortunately, the limitations of space do not permit a fuller exploration of Protestantism’s understanding of politics. Still, the point remains.

Protestants broke up Christendom and they did so not necessarily reluctantly because they recognized that the church is not called to regulate or oversee the same set of human affairs Israel did in the Old Testament. In effect, the Reformation was an effort to restore the church to its proper sphere of operation—what Paul called the invisible and eternal things—and this inevitably involved a curtailment of religious restrictions upon public or common life. As such, the Reformation was a preliminary stage in the secularization of the West. Depending on how one thinks of the church’s proper sphere of authority will determine whether one regards secularization in this sense as either a blessing or a curse.

The Lordship of Christ ome may still be wondering whether a favorable view of secularity properly understood is at odds with the Lordship of Christ. In fact, on the surface Christ’s rule and a secular realm appear to be at odds because the former is comprehensive and includes all things whereas a secular sphere is independent of religious authority and implies an arena free from Christ’s lordship.

What may be helpful to remember at this point is that Christ’s Lordship is not a zero-sum game, as if Christ’s rule vanishes if not explicitly evident through a ruler’s overt appeal to Scripture or by means of church authority. After all, when Christ said “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” he was not suggesting that some things belonged to the emperor independent of his own authority as the eternal Son of God. Instead, Christ was implicitly establishing the point that he delegates his authority to different lesser authorities. Reformed Christians have traditionally limited these lesser authorities to three spheres: the church, the state, and the family. Each institution in its own sphere has legitimate authority that comes from Christ’s ultimate authority. Simply because these authorities are not Christian (a notion that ideally does not apply to the church) does not mean their authority is illegitimate. Non-Christian parents are to be respected and submitted to as much as

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Christian parents, just as Paul instructed Roman Christians to submit to governmental authorities who were notoriously anti-Christian (Rom. 13).

Likewise, the Christian identity of one of these authorities does not give a family, a magistrate, or a church official the power to intervene in the affairs of other legitimate authorities. All authority on earth has been given unto Christ and he has delegated it to human authorities whom Christians are to respect no matter what the ruler’s religious identity may be.

Yet, equally important to keep in mind about the lesser authorities of the state, the family, and even the church, is their secular character. That is, these institutions to which Christ has delegated his own rule are passing and temporary. They are secular in the sense that their function is limited to this age or generation. In the new heavens and new earth, a truly novus ordo seclorum, we will have no need for the authority of parents, clergy, or politicians because Christ’s authority will be direct and comprehensive.

The problem, then, with pitting secular against Christian politics is that such a conception misconstrues the nature and contingency of politics.

The state by its very nature is an institution that is secular in the right sense of the word because it is not a permanent arrangement. Conversely, to invest politics with Christian significance, to make them Christian, is in effect to attempt to give permanence (spiritual and eternal truth) to human endeavors inherently temporary, or of this age. For this reason, Christians have a real stake in recovering a truly secular politics, one that avoids identifying the legitimate and proximate ways and rule of Caesar with the necessary and ultimate rule of Christ. If it is possible to recognize the secularity or impermanence of marriage and the family (areas of life that ironically have inspired Christians to oppose secular politics), surely it is also possible to acknowledge similar qualities in the very murky but equally significant sphere of politics and government. ■

D. G. Hart (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University) is director for honors programs and faculty development of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Wilmington, Delaware, and is a contributing scholar to Modern Reformation. He is the author of Deconstructing Evangelicalism: Conservative Protestantism in the Age of Billy Graham (Baker Books, 2004).

We Confess…

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f Civil Affairs they teach that lawful civil ordinances are good works of God, and that it is right for Christians to bear civil office, to sit as judges, to judge matters by the Imperial and other existing laws, to award just punishments, to engage in just wars, to serve as soldiers, to make legal contracts, to hold property, to make oath when required by the magistrates, to marry a wife, to be given in marriage.

They condemn the Anabaptists who forbid these civil offices to Christians.

They condemn also those who do not place evangelical perfection in the fear of God and in faith, but in forsaking civil offices, for the Gospel teaches an eternal righteousness of the heart. Meanwhile, it does not destroy the State or the family, but very much requires that they be preserved as ordinances of God, and that charity be practiced in such ordinances. Therefore, Christians are necessarily bound to obey their own magistrates and laws save only when commanded to sin; for then they ought to obey God rather than men. Acts 5:29.

Article 16, Augsburg Confession (1530), “Of Civil Affairs”

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God, the supreme Lord and King of all the world, hath ordained civil magistrates, to be, under Him, over the people, for His own glory, and the public good: and, to this end, hath armed them with the power of the sword, for the defence and encouragement of them that are good, and for the punishment of evil doers.

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It is lawful for Christians to accept and execute the office of a magistrate, when called thereunto; in the managing whereof, as they ought especially to maintain piety, justice, and peace, according to the wholesome laws of each commonwealth; so for that end, they may lawfully now, under the New Testament, wage war, upon just and necessary occasion.

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The civil magistrate may not assume to himself the administration of the Word and sacraments, or the power of the keys of the kingdom of heaven: yet he hath authority, and it is his duty, to take order, that unity and peace be preserved in the Church, that the truth of God be kept pure and entire; that all blasphemies and heresies be suppressed; all corruptions and abuses in worship and discipline prevented or reformed; and all the ordinances of God duly settled, administrated, and observed. For the better effecting whereof, he hath power to call synods, to be present at them, and to provide that whatsoever is transacted in them be according to the mind of God.

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It is the duty of people to pray for magistrates, to honour their persons, to pay them tribute or other dues, to obey their lawful commands, and to be subject to their authority, for conscience’ sake. Infidelity, or difference in religion, doth not make void the magistrates’ just and legal authority, nor free the people from their due obedience to them: from which ecclesiastical persons are not exempted, much less hath the Pope any power and jurisdiction over them in their dominions, or over any of their people; and, least of all, to deprive them of their dominions, or lives, if he shall judge them to be heretics, or upon any other pretence whatsoever.

Chapter XXIII, The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), “Of the Civil Magistrate”

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An Interview with Michael Cromartie

Christians and Political Action Michael Cromartie has been a leading spokesman for the relationship between Christian ethics and public policy through his work at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he directs the center’s Evangelical Studies Project. You’ll often see him quoted in the leading news magazines around this time of year and we’re happy to have him take some time to talk with us.

MICHAEL CROMARTIE Vice President Ethics and Public Policy Center Washington, DC

MR: First of all, the culture wars. Obviously there is no neutrality when people talk about a naked public square. As Richard John Neuhaus reminded us: It’s a sham. There really is no such thing as a neutral space. Something will always rush to fill the void. People who say there is a secular base are often naïve about just how many assumptions go into culture making. Is there a real culture war going on? How should Christians respond without turning Christianity into a sort of wing of one party or another?

MC: One way to do it is to be sure that when we work in the public arena we make appeals to the common good as opposed to just making appeals to fellow believers.

MR: The common good? But when we talk about politics these days, it’s not just about taxes anymore, it’s about whether we should allow marriage to be defined to include partners of the same sex. We seemed to be engulfed in culture wars, and it looks increasingly like the churches, Roman Catholic and Protestant across the board, are having to take sides. What are we to do?

MC: It is the duty of the pastor to encourage the parishioners to be involved as engaged citizens in the public square. It’s not the duty of the pastor, however, to tell the citizen how to vote. And I think it is very important that the pulpit not become politicized. The role of the pastor is to encourage the laity to do the work of the kingdom, one part of that work is political, but as you know not most of it. Having said that, we are involved in a culture war. Though, as one observer said

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recently, there isn’t a culture war anymore. There was one, but the other side won. And I think what he meant there (especially as it relates to the same sex marriage debate) is that we don’t seem to have a common reference point in the public arena to debate why certain things that are revealed, not only in Scripture but in nature, are true.

MR: Is that why we didn’t seem to have to take sides before?

You could have Christians who were all over the map on policy issues and now there is polarization and people often feel like they have to take sides where before they wanted to be moderate?

MC: That’s a good point—the fact of the matter is that there once was a consensus that one could appeal to and that everybody understood. When we’re involved in the public arena, we go in as citizens concerned for the common good of everyone and not just concerned for the common good of believers. In other words, our appeals may well be based on special revelation, but we also need to make appeals to general revelation and things like natural law, so that our neighbors know that what we’re arguing for and working for is not only good for believers but for the whole community. That’s something we’ve not been very good at. Some leaders are getting better at that, but in the past we’ve had some people come to Washington and say, “Thus sayeth the Lord” and the people on Capitol Hill say, “Thus sayeth who?”

Theologically conservative Christians are learning more and more that we need to develop a public theology to deal in the public arena.

MR: A lot of people are asking how specific can you expect the Bible to be? There’s a biblical view of this or a Christian view of that and some people listening to this program are going to be attending churches this Sunday where they have the Republican voter’s guide in the narthex, or a Democrat

equivalent. On the left and on the right there’s this pressure to have a sort of church sanctioned position on everything from the tax structure to third world debt. At what point do we say, “The Bible just doesn’t pronounce specifically on all of these issues. There’s wisdom here, sanctified common sense, based on biblical principals.” Where exactly do you draw that line?

MC: Scripture doesn’t have much to say about foreign policy and our view of Afghanistan and Iraq, but what we do draw principles from Scripture that should lead to prudential judgments and certain policies. There isn’t such a thing as a “Christian View of Economics.” There are good economics and bad economics, and we need to be debating empirically which economic system works best in the world or in our country. So when Christians start saying there is a Christian view for everything, they are speaking to things that Scripture does not address. We have to learn to become comfortable with “prudential reasoning” and learn how to be prudent in our moral reasoning. That means that we go from scriptural principals to certain policies and we reach conclusions on which honorable people of strong Christian faith may actually disagree.

MR: Do you think our efforts to make Scripture address political principles eventually weakens the power of the church? The church is there to speak for God, not to speak for the Republicans or Democrats. And if it does try to speak for a political party it compromises the church’s primary mission to preach the gospel.

MC: Yes, it compromises the church’s unique identity.

MR: There are those rare occasions when the church does have specific grounding in natural and special revelation to make pronouncements. But we need to be aware of when those are true opportunities to make churchly announcements. For instance, we do want to say, “we believe abortion is wrong.”

But if we also say “we should go to war in Iraq,” the world won’t take us seriously on those issues in which we do have Scriptural grounding.

MC: That’s right. The church just becomes a Christian political action committee and we lose the core of the gospel. People who did this first were on the political left: mainline churches and the National Council of Churches were sending out faxes about Reagan’s Central American policies, or any number of things, during the Reagan years.

The NCC had so politicized the faith that it was more important what you thought about a critique of the Reagan administration foreign policy than what you thought about the Apostle’s Creed. The

temptation, as you know, quickly moved over to the political right. Pastors were standing up in the pulpit telling us what we ought to think about Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. It’s not the duty of the pastor in that teaching office to make those kind of pronouncements. Turning the kingdom of God into a partisan political activity either on the right or the left weakens the witness of the church to the gospel.

MR: How should we think in terms of individual Christians, exercising their earthly citizenship in distinction from the church? For instance, shouldn’t we assert that individual Christians need to be involved in the political process and they could participate in a variety of political parties?

MC: Absolutely, we really need to stop talking about the church this and the church that. We should be talking about individual Christian citizens exercising their rights in the public arena.

All of our churches, no matter how conservative or liberal they are, are full of people with diverse opinions about politics. A pastor should never assume that everybody in the sanctuary is of the same persuasion. And, as one Dutch theologian said, “The dead are not raised by politics.” It is important to remind people that there are some things more important than politics. We need especially to remind people in Washington of that.

MR: Do you think that it is remarkable how quickly the sleeping giant of the Evangelicalism awoke in the wake of Francis Schaeffer’s calls and Jerry Falwell’s moral majority and so forth? It seemed like it happened almost overnight. The evangelicals awoke to politics, political action, culture, and education—areas where conservative Christians weren’t really all that interested or involved before.

MC: That’s right. Some of these cultural things— as in the arts, the state of our moral culture, the state of the American family—must not be neglected, but they have been in many ways. I think, however, that a tangible political result is something you can see pretty quickly. So I don’t want to downplay the importance of politics in the sense that Supreme Court Justice appointments are really very important in shaping our laws and having influence on our culture. When I’m with those who say, “Politics don’t matter, it’s only the culture,” I want to talk about the fact that changing civil rights laws actually changes attitudes among people who are racist. When I’m with people who think only politics matter, I want to argue that if the shape of the culture is such that nothing you pass legislatively will have an effect then we really need to spend about thirty years working on the

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culture. The balance I’m trying to strike here is Shaeffer’s call for the Lordship of Christ in all areas of life, which includes politics, education, the arts, and so forth.

MR: I think of the pastor who told me that he was profoundly moved when he had to serve communion to Vietnam War protestors and Vietnam War veterans kneeling at the same rail and that this was a great picture of the church. We both have friends who are on both sides of the political aisle and would argue vociferously for the same doctrines, the same Christian convictions, (the authority of Scripture, and so forth) but one would be a fierce Democrat, the other a fierce Republican.

MC: That’s a beautiful picture you just painted there.

MR: As one who is both conservative theologically and politically, do you ever get frustrated with the church’s treatment of people who hold more liberal policy perspectives than you?

MC: I do. Look, I can take communion with someone who is a devout Christian and a very liberal politician. I can take communion with him and work hard to vote him out of office. It is hard for people to get a handle on the distinction. We can take communion together and repent of our sins together and then I can go out the next day and leaflet his neighborhood to vote him out of office. He can be a brother or sister in Christ, with whom we disagree, but when it comes to the foot of the cross we are brothers or sisters in the Lamb.

I once had a woman bring a bunch of students by and she said, “Michael, aren’t you concerned that God is being depicted as a Republican these days?”

And I said, “Oh yes, I’m very concerned about that.

There’s only one thing worse - that he’d be depicted as a Democrat!” My point is that we have to be concerned if the Christian faith ever gets tied to any political agenda. If that happens we’re confusing what the faith is. Having said that, however, doesn’t mean that we stop being concerned about talking about what agenda might work for a more orderly and just society. I think people who are concerned about the Christian faith being tied to ideology sometimes back away from the fact there are real issues we need to talk about.

MR: Right, exactly, and a lot of these real issues do have political solutions.

MC: Yes, they do have political solutions, or they at least help bring about “approximate justice” in our very fallen world. They won’t bring in the kingdom of God but they will make a difference.

Indeed, sometimes a very big difference

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MR: It is remarkable when you read the statistics about African Americans and white evangelicals. Both groups not only believe the same things but they also practice their faith in the same ways: daily prayer, Bible reading, the importance of their faith to their lives, and so forth. And yet, their churches are so far apart. The old slogan still rings true, “The most segregated hour is Sunday morning.” It’s remarkable.

MC: It is remarkable. It’s partly culture but it’s also political and legal in the sense that the church has had such a sad legacy when it comes to slavery and racism. It takes generations and generations for African Americans to feel comfortable voting for a party for which they have never voted. There may be a change coming, however, with the whole debate over same sex marriage. Some of the biggest opponents of gay marriage are African American Christians.

MR: Well, Mike, thank you for taking the time to discuss these important issues with us as we get closer to the general election. Know that we are praying for you as you are engaged in very important work on behalf of the common good in Washington, DC. MC: Thank you, it was great to be with you.

Michael Cromartie (M.A., American University) is the vice president of the Washington, DC based Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is an adjunct professor at Reformed Theological Seminary and the host of Radio America’s weekly show, “Faith and Freedom.” He is the editor most recently of A Public Faith: Evangelicals and Civic Engagement (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).

Ex Auditu

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was truly a kiss with the lips of the heart, a heart which was at peace with the neighbor. That is the kind of peace which Christ bestows — a peace which not only makes us children of our Father but brothers and sisters in the family of our holy mother, the church. It is the peace of absolution, of reconciliation, of unity, of the forgiven and the forgiving. It is the peace that passes all understanding and passes over all the offenses of others, not seven times, but seventy times seven.

me to quote his statement accurately. After all, the point of the article was to show how much a gift the church is from birth until death—a stark contract to O’Neil’s experience. You should know that if that statement were not in quotes and was my sentiment I would expect to be disciplined by my church elders. I would also expect the learned editors of MR to refuse to include them. But this was quite different. Thanks for writing.

Rev. Chad Bird (S.T.M., Concordia Theological Seminary, Ft. Wayne, IN) is assistant professor of Exegetical Theology at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

How does your church evanglize and reach out to the community?

Send stories and ideas to editor@modernreformation.org.

After reading the article, “What Should I Expect From Church?” (May/June 2004, “A Good Church Is Hard to Find”) please allow me to answer the two questions you raise. The first question you asked was, “What is a good church?” A good church is any church where God is at work through his Holy Spirit conforming people to Jesus Christ. The second question was, “How can I find a good church?” Instead of laying out pages of criteria, why not simply answer, “Where does God want you to attend, or not attend?” The focus of your article was on the church and what human beings are doing or not doing. As followers of Jesus Christ, our focus should always be on God and what his will is for a particular situation. We do people a disservice by having them evaluate the situation, instead of seeking out the One who can truly guide. As Christians, we walk by faith, not evaluation.

John Kennett Via Email

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Modern Reformation Letters to the Editor 1725 Bear Valley Parkway Escondido CA 92027 760.480.0252 fax Letters@modernreformation.org Letters under 200 words are more likely to be printed than longer letters. Letters may be edited for content and length.

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he question mark in the title of Schultze’s book is not to be overlooked. Despite

believe he concedes too much value to the so-called undoubtedly genuine efforts at fair-mindedness and overt statements directed presentation technologies: “Presentation technologies against technophobes, this volume seriously questions the widespread use of can appropriately highlight sermon points and focus presentation technologies in Christian worship attention on particular liturgical practices. They today. Schultze rightly warns that technology can boost singing, provide worthy liturgical art, tends to develop a life of its own, unrestrained by and offer many other benefits.” wisdom or stewardship (chapters four through six), A good book always raises a few good questions theology of worship (chapter two), patience that may not be answered therein, and this book (chapter four), or proper ecclesiastical authority or satisfies this criterion. Here are a few that interest tradition (chapter seven). Indeed, his initial chapter me, in no particular order: addresses “Our Confusion,” not our achievement.

First, I would like to see Schultze conduct a The amount of wisdom-per-page in this slender theological discussion of “presentation technologies.”

High-Tech volume is unusual, and many readers will perceive What is presented, anyway, in a service of Christian Worship? Using Schultze’s well-nurtured intellectual roots even worship, if not us to God, and God himself to us? Is Presentational when they are not explicitly or pedantically not what we call “worship” in fact a meeting between Technologies paraded.

When Schultze says that “Our God and his people? And does not God Wisely technological practices shape how we perceive the mediate/offer/present his very Self to us in Word and

by Quentin J. world,” we hear the echo of Marshall McLuhan; Sacrament? If he does so by these media that he has Schultze when he describes our culture as image-saturated but selected, can we seriously think that Word and Baker, 2004 not image-savvy, we discern the imprint of Daniel Sacrament rightly administered need the supplement 112 pages (paperback), $10.99 Boorstin and Sven Birkerts; when he warns that of some new technology? Is God merely a authentic Christian worship is no place for market- commodity that can be “presented” in any medium?

Second, I wish Schultze (or someone) would Wired for driven consumerism or entertainment, we cannot Ministry: How but recall the wry warnings of Neil Postman; and distinguish “multi-sensory” from “multimedia,” and when he refers to “the rhetoric of technological not confuse the two. The loaf, for instance, in the the Internet, progress,” “technological cocaine,” or says that Lord’s Supper, is multi-sensory: we see it with our Visual Media, “Fools with tools are still fools,” we wonder if eyes, we feel it in our hands, we smell it and taste and Other New Jacques Ellul might have been the co-author.

Technologies it. But this multi-sensory reality is not multimedia.

Yet Schultze is no technophobe. In the It is one medium, a simple loaf of bread. But Can Serve Your introduction, he candidly refers to his experience Schultze follows others in suggesting a kind of Church of “some wonderful, inspiring, and appropriate equivalence between multi-sensory and

by John P. Jewell Brazos Press, 2004 worship presentations.” His stated thesis is that multimedia, in the (possibly unintended) effort to 189 pages (paperback), $14.99 “liturgical wisdom should direct how we employ suggest that there is some inherent virtue in presentational technologies” (emphasis mine), and multimedia beyond the two instituted by God. he defends the “adaptation” of presentation And finally, I would like to see a distinction technologies, not their abandonment. Personally, I made between the presentation technologies and

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their common content, so we could truly evaluate the technologies themselves. For instance, when Schultze avers that lyrics projected on a wall “can boost singing,” I think he may be mistaken. What “boosts” the singing—in those places where it actually does—is usually the contemporaneity of the music whose lyrics are typically thereon displayed. In a culture that has almost entirely lost any sensibility for art forms that antedate the Second World War, many people will always sing more heartily if they have a peppy, contemporarysounding melody, even if the lyrics are inconsequential, maudlin, or even heterodox. But find a congregation whose sensibilities are not so limited, and they sing “Of the Father’s Love Begotten” (fourth-century lyrics, twelfth century tune) or “O Sacred Head Now Wounded” (early twelfth century lyrics, early-seventeenth century melody) just as heartily as others sing “Shine, Jesus, Shine”—whatever that means.

Schultze has performed a profound service, in urging the users of presentational technologies to do so wisely: Informed by Scripture, a sound theology of worship, and the several branches of the general Christian tradition; modulated by wisdom, patience, and prudence. Those who have not already moved beyond the reach of these six influences will find much insight in this small book.

In contrast, John P. Jewell’s book intends to cover a broader range of both ministerial concern and technology than does that of Schultze. While Schultze restricts his conversation primarily to the relation between presentation technologies and worship, Jewell addresses all of the newer electronic technologies and their relation not only to worship, but to evangelism, discipleship, and— perhaps especially—Christian community. Like Schultze, Jewell says so many helpful things, and says them so well, that the reviewer can only urge that both books be read, because no review can do adequate justice to either volume.

Like Schultze, Jewell is aware of the overstated promises of technology and the church. Indeed, the first four chapters address the pitfalls of technology, and Jewell repeatedly warns that these tools can be used for good or evil, creating chaos or community. Jewell expends substantial effort creating a vision both for what electronic technologies can and cannot accomplish: “There is power in the Internet that can be applied in our Christian mission—it is just not messianic power” (emphases his). Jewell’s theological grounding prevents him from ever suggesting that these technologies can replace prayer, the Word of God, or the Sacraments: “The pervasiveness of the Internet does not even come close to the power of

a faithful pulpit.”

Jewell persistently warns that technology is regressive when it is either intrusive or messianic: “Frankly, the majority of declining churches would do well to forget the Internet and technology and focus their efforts on building community, doing evangelism, and encouraging Bible study.” Jewell also recognizes and declares what our culture rarely observes: that information is neither understanding nor wisdom. Technologies that deliver information should not be expected to cultivate either understanding or wisdom, which must come from other sources, that is, “Information technology is not wisdom technology.” Jewell’s resistance to those who rush headlong into the technological maelstrom is both informed and wry: “Two final items of caution as you develop a plan for implementation: (a) there is no rush, and (b) there is no rush.”

Such comments are all the more credible in a book that contains nine chapters on how to use electronic technologies in the church (chapters five through eight, “Develop Knowledge of the Promise,” and chapters nine through thirteen, “Study the Practice”), written by the director of instructional technology of Dubuque Theological Seminary. Indeed, readers who are tentatively inclined to employ the best of these technologies in the best manner for the best ends will find a mine of useful instruction in Jewell’s book.

I do have one concern, though it hardly mars the value of the book. In Jewell’s discussion of images and imagination, I respectfully think he misunderstands both historic Protestantism and the relation of images to imagination. I think Jewell may confuse contemporary Protestantism (especially with its American distinctives) with historic Protestantism (that, for instance, of Luther and Calvin) when he claims that “Protestants have failed to understand the power of images and metaphors in worship.” A triple confusion is here manifest.

First, I think Jewell fails to appreciate how central the Lord’s Supper was to the liturgical thinking of both Luther and Calvin, who said, “No assembly of the Church should be held without the word being preached, prayers being offered, the Lord’s supper administered, and alms given” (Institutes IV, xvii, 44).

Calvin also said, “It would be desirable that the Holy Supper of Jesus Christ be in use at least once every Sunday when the congregation is assembled, in view of the great comfort which the faithful receive from it as well as the fruit of all sorts which it produces” (Articles presented to the Geneva Council in 1537, cited in Howard Hageman, Pulpit and Table, p. 25).

Calvin’s ardent sacramentalism (albeit not sacerdotalism) displays a profound belief in the power of images; but his writings throughout argue

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that images without the accompanying/interpreting Word of God are mute and uncertain, not unlike Paul’s clanging cymbal.

Second, Jewell says that the “traditional Protestant” approach “breeds an underestimation of the power of images.” It was precisely Calvin’s and Knox’s appreciation for the “power of images” that caused them to exclude them. Neither Calvin nor Knox underestimated the “power of images”; if anything, they overestimated them, and considered them to do a kind of irreparable harm in the minds of those who viewed them, especially if the images had anything to do with the Godhead or the Incarnate Son. A mother who pulls her daughter’s hand away from a hot stove does not underestimate its power, she estimates its power quite rightly. And the early Protestant (“traditional Protestant”?) objection to images was due precisely to their power to cultivate what was considered to be superstition.

Third, Jewell confounds “image” with “metaphor,” when he lumps them together as things that Protestants “have failed to understand.”

In point of fact, the first is visual and the second is, technically, linguistic. Shelley’s Defense of Poetry, for instance, argues throughout that metaphor (linguistic image) is much more powerful, and stimulates the imagination much more deeply, than does visual image. When the hearer or reader transforms words into mental images, quite literally, he must employ “imagination,” which is not necessary in the simple observation of a visual image. Thus, if Shelley (or William Hazlitt, or Charles Lamb, or C. S. Lewis, or Harold Bloom) has understood the matter rightly, the imagination is much more stimulated by verbal “images” than by visual images. One can thus believe profoundly and zealously, as Shelley, in the power of linguistic metaphors, without having the same appreciation for visual images. I would suggest that the true difference in the history of dogma is between Rome’s iconography and Protestantism’s iconoclastic insistence on scriptura sola.

However I might disagree with Jewell’s thoughts on image, metaphor, and imagination, the disagreement in no way diminishes my appreciation for, or commendation of, the volume as a whole.

Jewell’s book might be best for ministers and churches to read to begin their assessment of what technology can (and cannot) do for them, precisely because it raises such a broad range of ministerial and practical questions from the perspective of one who genuinely understands the technology.

Dr. T. David Gordon Grove City College Grove City, PA

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Discerning the Spirits: A Guide to Thinking About Christian Worship Today

by Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. and Sue A. Rozeboom Eerdmans, 2003 186 pages (paperback), $18.00 This volume is a collaborative work produced by the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship at Calvin College.

Although Plantinga and Rozeboom are the primary authors, it includes more than twenty brief articles or sidebars on related topics, mostly penned by the members of a Lilly-funded research team. The book’s “main project . . . is to set a context and recommend a tone in which healthy decisions about worship may be conducted.” Accordingly, the book is neither a sharp polemic against nor an uncritical celebration of contemporary worship forms.

Given the heated character that the so-called “worship wars” have often taken in recent years, such a tack represents a welcome departure.

Discerning the Spirits begins with a valuable history of what has come to be styled “Contemporary Worship” (CW). Among the developments that shaped CW were the church growth, charismatic, and praise and worship movements of the last forty years. Moreover, in Catholic circles and beyond, the major liturgical reforms of Vatican II have also played a crucial role. Many North American churches have adopted CW for evangelistic purposes. Yet even the most keenly CW congregations still have to grapple with hard questions about the interaction of the Christian message with its cultural context. “We’re wrestling with questions of integrity,” the authors note, and they rightly ask, “[A]re we upholding the integrity of the gospel and of Christian worship even as we translate them into fresh cultural idioms?” Some degree of cultural adaptation in worship is both inevitable and desirable, but also undeniably risky.

Although some have stressed the centrality of the Incarnation to a Christian appreciation of culture, such an approach can be misleading in isolation since the Incarnation doesn’t simply validate all of culture indiscriminately. Our understanding of the true nature of the church can be of help here. While we endeavor to be culturally and generationally inclusive, “niche marketing tends to reinforce our differences” and Christians need to be wary of the uncritical adoption of such marketing techniques. The final chapter starts with a stimulating definition of worship as “narrative engagement with the triune God” and then

proceeds to unpack all that this formulation implies.

Ultimately, the narrative of Creation, Fall, and Redemption “frames Christian worship in ways big enough to stretch us all beyond our [particular and often parochial] preferences.”

There is much to commend in this brief volume.

Its approach is balanced, charitable, and filled with practical advice for clergy and thoughtful laypersons.

Unfortunately, it is not always clear whether its treatments of some subjects are prescriptive or purely descriptive. The normative role of Scripture is occasionally lost in the sociological discussion of various competing models. Some congregations, for example, are described as employing drama or dance in their worship, but there is no explicit examination of whether either is in fact sanctioned by the New Testament. Indeed, the question of what Scripture permits and what it actually enjoins are rarely explored directly—a curious omission for scholars within the Calvinist tradition. At one point, the authors note that The good news is that between men and women, slave and free, Jew and Gentile, Jesus Christ has broken down the dividing wall of hostility (Gal. 3:28; Eph. 2:14) The bad news is that his followers keep trying to put that wall back up. Some want women to preach; some do not. Some want the church to take a stand with unborn children; some want the church to stand with women in crisis pregnancies.

The latter differences hardly appear analogous to the apostle’s original categories.

Finally, sometimes there is a therapeutic quality to the discussion that moves one away from the consideration of whether a particular practice is biblical and toward options that are preferred because they are “healthy” or “authentic.” The garment of denominational tradition is worn pretty lightly in these discussions; it is assumed that clergy are free to be their own liturgists, that the options for designing suitable worship are almost limitless, and that conformity to a single mandated order would presumably be archaic or perhaps simply unthinkable. Of course, in this respect, the book mirrors the untidy state of American Evangelicalism.

In short, Discerning the Spirits contains some helpful and insightful analysis of the contemporary worship scene, but it should be used with discernment.

Written in Stone: The Ten Commandments and Today’s Moral Crisis

by Philip Graham Ryken Crossway, 2003 240 pages (paperback), $14.99 Frequent Modern Reformation contributer Philip Ryken’s Written in Stone is a wonderfully accessible treatment of the Ten Commandments. Drawn from sermons first preached at Tenth Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, this book’s great strength is its unoriginality.

In an age where many evangelicals have jettisoned the moral law and some Reformed types have overreacted by making the law part of the grounds for justification, Ryken’s book stands firmly in the broad Reformed consensus, represented by the Westminster Standards, on the abiding validity of the moral law for today, on the three uses of the moral law, and on the exposition of the moral law. Even more, Ryken models how the moral law should point us to Christ. Each chapter concludes with searching application questions that are meant to reveal our abiding sinfulness and our continual need for the gospel of Jesus Christ. Who can read the various chapters on each individual commandment and not come away convicted of moral failure in the face of a holy God? Hence, believers who read this book come to realize that even holiness is by God’s grace. Even though believers have the Spirit, they still have remaining corruption and still need the gospel preached to them. As a result, a healthy view of the relationship of the law and the gospel is the great contribution of this book for a general audience. In addition, with its thirteen chapters and study questions at the end of each chapter, this book would be extremely useful for a Bible study or Sunday school class.

Dr. Sean Michael Lucas Covenant Theological Seminary St. Louis, MO

Gillis Harp Grove City College Grove City, PA

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Choosing Life

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eing an Anglican (or Episcopalian) is never easy, but the past several months have been more trying than most. Our church has been torn apart by the homosexual question, and because of the unique position that Anglicanism has in the English-speaking world, everyone has been affected by it to some degree. I am not in favor of homosexual practice nor am I am homophobe, as the gay lobby likes to brand anyone who disagrees with them. But

GERALD BRAY

Anglican Professor of Divinity Stanford University’s Beeson Divinity School

how can I adopt a positive attitude to the issue without compromising my Christian principles? Is there a loving response that I can credibly offer to those on the other side of this divide?

I have thought a great deal about this recently, and have come to the conclusion that the answer lies in the biblical injunction to choose life over death. Homosexual practice is a denial of life at the most basic level. Human sexuality has many dimensions, but the most important of these must always be human procreation. Even when that is not possible for biological or other reasons, the institution of marriage bears witness to the principle that underlies the reality of human life— everyone of us has come onto this planet because, at some point, a man and a woman engaged in sexual intercourse.

Life is not something we can afford to take lightly, and those who tamper with its source in the name of freedom and self-expression must be challenged to consider what the implications of their demands really are. If all of us went the homosexual way, the human race would cease to exist—that is the basic fact which nobody in the current crisis seems willing or able to mention. As a Christian, I do not condemn people who smoke or who take drugs, but neither do I approve of their conduct or try to promote it. I respect their freedom, but insist that the way in which they are using it is self-destructive. I hope and pray that they will stop, not because I want to imprison them in my outdated bourgeois morality, but because I want them to have life, and to have it more abundantly.

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My approach to homosexuals is fundamentally the same. They are free to do what they want and I respect that freedom.

But at the same time, I believe that they are using it in a way that is selfdestructive and I want them to choose life, not death. Of course, some of them will claim that they are reaching new heights of joyful selfexpression, but cigarette ads claim the same thing for smokers, and there have always been people who have hymned the delights of opium or cannabis. But that does not make them right. On the contrary, the claims such people express makes it all the more urgent for Christians to tell the truth—what they see as positive is, in fact, deeply harmful, and harmful to themselves most of all. In this world, we are given a choice between death and life. The message of the gospel is “choose life” in whatever way life is manifested. However hard it may be, we are called to choose life and the source of life, and to insist that this is the only way that can ever bring true happiness and fulfillment.

I hope that the church will proclaim this message, not in a spirit of homophobic condemnation, but from hearts overflowing with faith, hope, and love—love for life and for sharing life with those who are perishing.

Gerald Bray (D.Litt., University de Paris-Sorbonne) is Anglican Professor of Divinity at Samford University’s Beeson Divinity School. Dr. Bray’s latest book is Personal God (Paternoster, 2001). Dr. Bray is an ordained minister in the Church of England and is a frequent contributor to Modern Reformation.