Piper on Kuyper

I do not know John Piper's works at all well, though I had some contact with him personally during his stint teaching at my undergraduate alma mater, Bethel College (now University), some 35 years ago. I do know any number of people who have benefited from reading his many books. Up to now, however, I have not usually associated cultural critique with Piper and his followers. This could be changing, if the following is any indication: America's debt to John Calvin. Where he might go from here I don't know, but it is encouraging to see him recommend Abraham Kuyper's Lectures on Calvinism. Might this form the basis for a fruitful dialogue between Kuyperians and Piperians?

Bon anniversaire, M. Calvin

Still looking good after five centuries

The new Calvinism

A number of my blogging friends have picked up on this surprising TIME Magazine story. Under the general heading of "10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now," number 3 is titled, The New Calvinism. Cardus's Ray Pennings has twice commented on this story: Time Magazine thinks Calvinism is Changing the World?, and Time's Ten Ideas Through the Lens of Number Three. Pennings believes that within a Calvinist framework christian faith can never be merely private but has public significance:

When Calvinism takes hold, it is not just something that impacts Calvinists. It has comprehensive implications for a society when it is consistently lived out. Last week, I was trying to explain to someone why what I believed mattered to my neighbours, and was not simply a private matter that they could live with out of respect for my religious freedom and because "I'm happy it works for you -- I'll find truth in my own corner." I used an ecological metaphor. When we live together, we share the air and water -- they don't respect the boundaries of private and public we set between us. So it is that personal religious beliefs, when taken seriously, end up not being all that personal. That is not just true for Calvinism -- it is as true for secularist belief, Islamic adherence, or new age philosophy. Our beliefs impact the social ecosystem in which we live and ultimately, the purity and health (or lack thereof) of the prevailing belief systems that shape our politics, economics, culture and every other aspect of society are impacted.

Not all professed Calvinists are necessarily keen on what they see as this "worldly" vision of transformation. The Acton Institute's Jordan J. Ballor cites a recent article by Calvin Van Reken analyzing the changes in hymns sung in the Christian Reformed Church over the decades: ‘Calvinism’ Transforming and Transformed.

[Van Reken] gives Rev. George Croly’s “Spirit of God, Who Dwells within My Heart,” which dates from 1867, as an example. When Croly wrote the song, it began, “Spirit of God, who dwells within my heart, / wean it from earth.” In its current form, the song begins, “Spirit of God, who dwells within my heart, / wean it from sin, through all its pulses move” (emphasis added).

Van Reken concludes that “Rev. Croly was praying in particular for grace that would help him be weaned from attachments to this world. In Reformed churches today, this is rarely sung or spoken. After all, because our world belongs to God, should we not feel at home here?”

As Van Reken also notes in the article, in his book The Jesus I Never Knew Philip Yancey passes along the words of his former minister Bill Leslie, who “told him that as churches grow wealthier and wealthier, their preferences for hymns changes from ‘this world is not my home, I’m just a-passin’ through,’ to ‘This is my Father’s world.’”

It’s worth considering as “The New Calvinism” becomes a force for changing the world the extent to which “Calvinism,” or better “Reformed theology,” is also changed, and not always for the better. Van Reken’s critique and engagement with the “new” view is an important one that ought to be thoughtfully considered by all proponents of “The New Calvinism.”

There are some real positives in the new vision, and some correctives to the old vision that need to be taken seriously. But as Van Reken summarizes, “The new vision can also generate a real problem: It focuses all our attention on this world and the good we can do. In so doing, the hope of heaven can be diminished, with the result that some come to love the world and the things in it. In a word, it helps us become worldly.”

There is, of course, a genuine danger that, as Christians undertake to transform the world for the cause of Christ, they will themselves be transformed by the world. We are always in danger of loving the creation more than the Creator. Yet the way to combat this is not to reject God's good creation but to love it ordinately as the gift of God's grace, and to do the hard work of grappling with the very spirits that would deform our affections and obstruct the culmination of God's kingdom and the redemption of that creation. With due respect to Croly, it is precisely from sin that we seek freedom in Christ, not from our created corporeality and its attendant responsibilities, which will be transformed and redeemed in the promised resurrection of the righteous.

I will take up this issue again in a review article forthcoming in Comment on Donald A. Carson's Christ and Culture Revisited. Stay tuned.

Hungarian Reformed Church

I have posted in my sidebar a blog, Magyar Református Egyház, maintained by my cyberspace friend, the Rev. Chuck Huckaby (aka Hukabyi Károly Pál), devoted to the Hungarian Reformed Church in the US and diaspora.


Coat of Arms
Hungarian Reformed Church
Calvin Synod

Today's challenge

English-speaking Calvinists are generally familiar with TULIP:

Total depravity
Unconditional election
Limited atonement
Irresistible grace
Perseverance of the saints

However, given that some might see TULIP as old hat, today's challenge is to come up with another floral acronym that expresses the truths of Reformed Christianity. For example:

Perseverance of the saints
Authority of scripture
Noetic effects of the fall
Salvation in Jesus Christ
Yes to God’s grace

Entries may be left in the Comments below.

Another Byzantine-rite Calvinist?

Judging from her comments on the OrthodoxyToday.org Blog, I think "Nancy L" may have fallen under the influence of the 17th-century Ecumenical Patriarch Cyril Lucaris. Moreover, it seems we are both alumni of the same undergraduate institution.

Communion with Rome

Redeemer alumnus Michael Trolly left a Haloscan comment to my post, Another Catholic Rite?, that I found sufficiently intriguing to warrant reproducing immediately below, with responses:

Yurkus' description of variations within the Latin Church could have added that an Anglican Use within the Latin Rite has been approved in the US; this preserves elements of the Book of Common Prayer within the Latin-rite mass. (There is some hope in the future of an Anglican Rite as a self governing church in communion with the Vatican, on the same basis as the Eastern Catholic Churches.)

One wonders whether the coming reconfiguration of Anglicanism may end up sending a much larger contingent of would-be "Anglican-rite" Christians to Rome or Constantinople than just the few who have been lapping at the banks of the Tiber in recent years. I am struck by how infinitessimally small the various eastern-rite churches are. An Anglican-rite church in communion with Rome could conceivably number in the millions after the coming crack-up.

Also, a group calling itself the "Nordic Catholic Church" has recently been established by Lutherans with help from the Polish National Catholic Church (they also have connections with some traditional Anglican churches.) They might potentially seek some sort of recognition from Rome; the PNCC has had an ongoing dialogue with Rome for a number of years now, and PNCC members are allowed to receive communion in Catholic (i.e. "Roman" Catholic) churches.

Here is an interview in Touchstone with Roald Flemestad about the formation of the Nordic Catholic Church: Out on a Limb in Norway. As institutions, the European Old Catholics are not in communion with Rome, so it's not clear that moving towards the PNCC will bring these dissident Norwegians there either, at least formally speaking. But if the "back door" route Trolly mentions really does exist, then that might provide an avenue for others as well. My understanding is that Orthodox Christians as individuals are also understood by Rome already to be in communion, even if their churches are not.

I mention all of this because it suggests that a "Genevan" rite or use (i.e. permitted variation from another rite) might be a realistic ecumenical hope, if a group of Reformed Christians wanted to go down that route.

I must admit to having made this suggestion mostly tongue in cheek. My sense of the matter is that the establishment of intercommunion between Rome and individual eastern-rite churches was not preceded by intersynodical study committees bent on sorting out myriad doctrinal issues that might stand in the way of reunion. It was effected simply by the eastern-rite churches recognizing the jurisdiction of the Pope, along with acceptance of the filioque clause in the Creed. Was there agreement in all details concerning, say, purgatory and the Marian doctrines? I frankly doubt it.

Yet the Reformed Churches — or at least the more confessional of these — have largely defined themselves over against Rome, for better or worse. Simply establishing intercommunion with the Pope would leave unanswered any number of issues, the least of which would be the extent of the Old Testament canon. (It is striking that some of the eastern-rite Catholic churches accept a larger OT canon than even that established by the Council of Trent. Is Trent normative only within the Latin rite?) It is difficult to imagine a Genevan-rite Catholic church which would not entail an outright repudiation of the very reason for the existence of the Reformed churches, namely, the Reformation itself! Any move towards Rome will be a matter of individual conversions to the Latin rite, and not a Genevan-rite church in communion with Rome.

Your (Dr. Koyzis') adaptation of the CRC eucharistic liturgy does strike a certain chord with me... since the first time I read the text for the "Service of Word and Sacrament" in the CRC hymnal, I've wanted to see a Reformed eucharist celebrated this way. To be "as close as possible" to the universal worship tradition of the church while properly expressing distinctives of a particular tradition or denomination is a tremendous way for protestants to contribute to ecumenical dialogue. I would love to see this idea put into practice.

The CRC used to use a liturgy with 16th-century origins that was excessively didactic and contained little that was recognizable in the larger liturgical tradition of the church catholic. This despite the claim in the fronticepiece of the Genevan church's La Forme des Prieres et chantz ecclesiastiques that its liturgy was "selon la coustume de l'Église ancienne." In 1968 the CRC moved to adopt what in other traditions would be called a eucharistic liturgy more in conformity with this catholic tradition, including the sursum corda, &c. My own adaptation is intended to follow in this path, but with the selected metrical psalms "plugged" into the liturgy in the appropriate places. As to how this looks in practice, it depends on the individual congregation.

Two decades ago I composed settings for part of the "ordinary of the mass", including a Sanctus and Memorial Acclamation. These were sung at South Bend (Indiana) Christian Reformed Church, as well as at two Presbyterian (USA) churches in Indiana and Michigan, for several years. By now I probably have settings for a complete mass, although they still need a lot of work to bring some coherence to the whole.