Announcing The Calvinist International

It is with immense pleasure that I can announce the launch of The Calvinist International, "A Forum for Reformed Irenicism."  Created and piloted by my friends Steven Wedgeworth and Peter Escalante promises to provide a much-needed bridge between the world of academic theology and the ordinary educated Reformed Christian, while avoiding the chaotic and ill-informed polemics that so often characterize Reformed blogdom.  It aims to be robustly Reformed, academically rigorous, and authentically irenic, a job description for which I can think of few people better suited than Steven and Peter.  

Their vision is ambitious and exciting:

Consistent with the original wisdom of the Reformers and their best heirs, the irenic way we follow here is wholeheartedly biblical and evangelical in theology, rigorously perennial in philosophy, catholic in scope, and pacific in spirit.

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Relics of the Amorites?

When (if) we read about the controversies over vestments that inaugurated the English Puritan movement, we're probably tempted to wonder how people got quite so worked up about this.  Were a mere robe, surplice, and cap really the "relics of the Amorites"? "filthy rags culled from the popish dunghill"?  Was it really worth abandoning the ministry rather than agreeing to wear such vestments, vestments that after all were simply the uniform that the clergy had always worn?  So what if the papists wore them--hadn't the papists worshipped in the same church buildings too?  And no one was saying that these should be simply abandoned and torn down.

But on second thought, this mania, bizarre as it seems to be, appears relatively explicable when one considers the fact that there are apparently still a great many Protestants who recoil in horror and revulsion from the the idea of distinctive clerical garb.  It's one of those things I grew up around so much that I never stopped to reflect just how bizarre it was.  Just what is the objection?

In his magisterial The Elizabethan Puritan Movement, Patrick Collinson offers some hint as to why the vestments proved so polarizing, which puts the Puritan protest in a more sympathetic light (but renders modern objections all the more inexplicable).  

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A Tale of Two Protestantisms

In our supervisory meeting yesterday, Oliver O’Donovan went off on another of his delightful and delightfully illuminating tangents, a tangent that helped make remarkable sense of my own conflicted experience in the Reformed tradition--first in a quite narrow and parochial Southern Presbyterian context, then in a “Federal Vision” context that aspired to a more “catholic” perspective, but seemed unable or unwilling to follow through, retreating always to the comforting black-and-white dualities of the Reformed tradition they knew and loved, and finally in an Anglican context that, though historically rooted in the Reformed tradition, is despised by most who wear that badge today, and seems more than content to distance itself from it.   

The problem is, suggests O’Donovan, that there were actually two quite distinct Reformed traditions from quite early on, and the difference can be seen, as plain as day, in the contrast between the Scots Confession and the Thirty-Nine Articles.  The Scots Confession holds as an article of faith the existence of an anti-Church, alongside the true Church, an anti-Church presided over by an anti-Christ, the Pope--this notion later became enshrined in the Westminster Confession of Faith, to the considerable embarrassment of 19th- and 20th- century adherents of it.  Ch. 18 of the Scots Confession opens this way: 

“Since Satan has labored from the beginning to adorn his pestilent synagogue with the title of the kirk of God, and has incited cruel murderers to persecute, trouble, and molest the true kirk and its members, as Cain did to Abel, Ishmael to Isaac, Esau to Jacob, and the whole priesthood of the Jews to Christ Jesus himself and his apostles after him. So it is essential that the true kirk be distinguished from the filthy synagogues by clear and perfect notes lest we, being deceived, receive and embrace, to our own condemnation, the one for the other.”  

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Puritan Hypocrisies

Where I grew up, the Puritans were always the good guys in the story.  New England Puritans, English Civil War Puritans, Elizabethan Puritans, you name it.  They were always good guys.  Unlike the wicked corrupt Anglicans who would put them in prison and used their wealth and power to try to trample on them.  The Puritans wanted to purge the Church of its papist abuses, and that must be a good thing.  They wanted toleration for religious minorities, and that must be a good thing.  They opposed the idea of a state church, and wanted the Church to be free to rule itself, and that must be a good thing. 

I first sensed that something was amiss with this narrative when I realized (I wouldn’t say “learned” because in all probability I already knew it, it had just never hit home) that the Puritans (loosely defined) had beheaded their Archbishop in 1647.  That couldn’t be a good thing.  And then when I encountered someone in our circles who wanted to lionize Martin Marprelate, and I started looking at the kind of filthy slander Marprelate had written against his pastors, I knew that something was amiss.  And more recently, the truth has been laid bare in all its ugliness--the Elizabethan Puritans, at any rate, were characteristically petty, self-righteous, slanderous, vindictive, theologically naive, and unprincipled, to an extent that almost justifies the authoritarian response of Elizabeth, Whitgift, and Bancroft (which was, in any case, not all that authoritarian by the standards of the day).   

But, they were at least in favor of the freedom of the Church from the State, right?  For religious freedom, rather than authoritarian conformity?  And that’s gotta be a good thing, right?

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Hooker's Doctrine of Law I: Basic Schema

For Richard Hooker, the father of Anglican theology and one of most powerful reflective and synthetic minds of his century, the basic structure of Christian theology, because the basic structure of the whole world, was law.  Thus did Protestantism come full-circle by the end of the century, from Luther’s repudiation of law in favor of the grace and the “freedom of a Christian” at the outset, through a reclamation of law, both natural and civil, in the late Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin, finally to a kind of Reformed Thomism, hailing law as the reflection of God’s nature and the foundation of all that is, in Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.  This was certainly not a return to legalism, as we might at first imagine; indeed, Hooker’s project was to rescue law from the legalistic mold into which the Presbyterians had forced it, to recover a broader, fuller, freer concept of law that served as the very form and foundation of freedom, rather than its antithesis.  Hooker’s treatment of law is a watershed in Protestant thought, and is critical for my dissertation research, so I hope to undertake a few posts offering an outline of the essential features (although no doubt these first forays will have to be revisited and corrected in light of future research).

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