"I Am Committed to Protecting This Constitutional Right."

He's said it before, of course, and in more graphic and explicit terms, this governor of ours who has been "sent by God to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right" (2 Pet 2:14). But on the anniversary of the most horrific decision in all American jurisprudence, he reminded us again of his flagrant commitment to violate this divine trust. No moral stimulation remains to fulfill the first and most basic function of human government: to perpetuate humanity by shedding the blood of those who shed blood (Gen 9:6-7). Even the lingering moral twitches of previous statements (e.g., let abortion be legal and rare) seem to have subsided.

And yet moral outrage seems to diminish year by year. Perhaps this year we are fixated on the recovery of the economy. Perhaps we are pleased with an impressive speech about six Americans who died senselessly in Arizona. Have we forgotten so quickly? Is there not a dark shadow over a speech mourning the death of six "innocents" gunned down in Arizona when during the course of that short speech some 77 children died throughout the country under the committed protection of the speech-maker? Have our sensibilities become so calloused?

We cherish our freedoms in America. We react viciously against those who threaten them. And yet freedom is never absolute. It must always submit to one law or another. The freedom of Americans to collectively select the law to which they submit is simultaneously their greatest boon and their greatest burden. May God help us as dual citizens of heaven and earth to "live as free men, without using our freedom as a cover-up for evil" (1 Pet 2:16).

MAS

Fundamentalism and Cultural Conservatism

Fundamentalists have a reputation for being culturally conservative. I'll let others quibble over whether cultural conservatism is a sine qua non of fundamentalism. It's a worthy discussion, but that's not my point today. What I want to discuss today is the meaning of cultural conservatism. In my experience, when the label "cultural conservatism" is raised, the specter that most often comes to hearers' minds is the absurdity of conserving a peculiar culture, usually American culture from somewhere between the Great Depression and the immediate aftermath of World War II. That this vision of cultural conservatism has thrived in fundamentalist circles is an unfortunate reality: you can still visit the 1940s in many fundamentalist churches today. And that is a tragedy.

This vision of cultural conservatism, however, is not the kind of cultural conservatism that fundamentalism has always practiced. George Marsden makes this point clearly in his Fundamentalism and American Culture and especially his Reforming Fundamentalism. In many cases, he observes, early fundamentalist culture was more folksy and populist than their modernist rivals because, as a grass-roots movement, the fundamentalists had lost much of their high-culture machinery to the modernists (after all, when they lost the church builiding, they also lost the pipe organ--which in some cases was worth more than the building!). Marsden further observes that the early new evangelicals were sometimes more straight-laced and staid than their fundamentalist brothers precisely because they were pursuing acceptance among modernists who had retained a rather "high" culture.

The early fundamentalists did, however, develop a certain reserve about culture based on robust concerns about depravity and true worldliness. Where the new evangelicals had adopted something of a non-critical "Christ of culture" mindset that pragmatically assumed neutrality in culture for the sake of re-engaging it, the fundamentalists began to be more critical of culture. The early fundamentalist response, however, was not (and still is not) monolithic. Some adopted a simplistic "Christ against culture" stance, dug their heels into 1947, and resisted all cultural advance from that point forward. But others adopted something of a "Christ and Culture in Paradox" stance that viewed culture with measured distance, anticipating and abhorring what was evil in culture, but clinging to what was good. Now there were (and still are) practical similarities between the cultures reflected in these two visions of fundamentalist culture, but not identity.

What concerns me about the "conservative evangelical" tent is a tendency to abandon both kinds of cultural conservatism and to embrace a sort of non-critical cultural ambivalence reminiscent of the new evangelical model. In their haste to jettison the simplistic and unhealthy cultural conservatism of "Christ against Culture" fundamentalism, there has also developed among conservative evangelicals a certain repugnance for the critical cultural conservatism of "Christ and Culture in Paradox" fundamentalism. And I fear that the result of this tendency is the loss of some of the practical antithesis that the Gospel anticipates.

It is for this reason that I continue rather stubbornly to plead for cultural conservatism in the church today.
MAS

What About Futons? Revisiting US and THEM

There has been a recent interchange of ideas here and here about the labels fundamentalism and conservative evangelicalism as a basis for separation. Riley has done us a service by explaining, based on a discussion of the one and the many, why we should continue to recognize these two categories despite our difficulty defining the terms. Just as it is difficult to come up with a sine qua non of "chairness," it is difficult to come up with a sine qua non of "fundamentalism" or "conservative evangelicalism." He concludes that, just as we cannot deny the existence of chairs due to our inability to define "chairness," we cannot deny the existence of "fundamentalists" or "conservative evangelicals" on account of our difficulty in defining the ideas represented by these respective labels.

The explanation that Riley offers, though, does not directly address the concern that Doran had raised a few hours earlier, viz., that while the distinguishable ideas of "fundamentalism" and "conservative evangelicalism" do exist, there is an expanding excluded middle that makes it impossible to use these categories as bulwarks for separation.

To answer Doran's concern, it seems that Riley needs to expand his metaphor, establishing not only the idea of "chairness" but also a foil, say, "bedness." We all know that chairs and beds exist as separate ideas, but when it comes down to defining the two ideas, we find that there is a fuzzy middle that exhibits characteristics of both. For instance, due to severe back troubles my dad sleeps in a recliner. Is that a chair or a bed? On the other hand, my younger son sleeps on the lower tier of a bunk bed that is actually a futon. Is that a chair or a bed? In both cases, the cluster of attributes that defines "bedness" and the cluster of attributes that defines "chairness" overlap--they are not mutually exclusive categories. Most of us have little angst over this problem because absolute demarcation of beds and chairs is not necessary. But with fundamentalism and conservative evangelicalism, more is at stake.

To summarize, then, it would seem that Riley is right in concluding that "fundamentalism" and "conservative evangelicalism" exist as separate ideas, just as "chairness" and "bedness" exist as separate ideas. Just as some beds are clearly not chairs and some chairs are clearly not beds, so also some fundamentalists are clearly not conservative evangelicals and vice versa. If this is true, then there is legitimate basis for suggesting some real demarcation between "us" and "them." But this still does not adequately address the observation raised by Doran that the presence of an excluded middle means that the categories of "fundamentalist" and "conservative evangelical" are not mutually exclusive ideas, and as such cannot serve as absolute standards of separation.

So the question, it seems, is this: What about the futons?

MAS

Fruitful Seminar on Ecclesiastical Socio-Political Action

The blog has been quiet here the last week. I spent much of that time in Minneapolis leading a Ph.D. seminar at Central Seminary. In it we covered a historical range of responses of the Protestant church to socio-political concerns. Against the backdrop of the barbs traded between missional and anti-missional models, the readings we discussed proved refreshingly measured and informative. Below is the reading list:

• Wright, William J. Martin Luther’s Understanding of God’s Two Kingdoms (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010).
• VanDrunen, David. Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010).
• Graham, Preston D. A Kingdom Not of This World (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2002).
• Dole, Andrew C. Scheleiermacher on Religion and the Natural Order (Oxford: OUP, 2010).
• Heslam, Peter S. Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham Kuyper’s Lectures on Calvinism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).
• Barth, Karl. Community, Church, and State (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1968).
• Niebuhr, H. Richard. Christ and Culture (reprint, San Francisco: Harper, 2001).
• Moore, Russell D. The Kingdom of Christ: The New Evangelical Perspective (Wheaton: Crossway, 2004).
• Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford: OUP, 1980).
• Guder, Darrel L., ed. Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).

At the risk of being reductionist, I see four basic theological reasons why the historical church in its various expressions has taken on an institutional social mandate:

1. Apologetical: Social action can be an effective means used by the Church to attract and/or awaken the irreligious.
2. Eschatological: Social action is a part of the life of the Kingdom in which the Church is presently participating.
3. Historical: Social action was integral to the mission of Christ and/or OT Israel and by extension is integral to the mission of the Church.
4. Exegetical: The Scriptures instruct the institutional Church to pursue a socio-political agenda.

There are other reasons that are less theological nature (pragmatism, peer pressure, external expectations, general neighborliness, etc.), but these four seem to stand out as the major theological impetus for all major models of ecclesiastical social action. Anyone care to interact on this thesis?

MAS