Mark O. Hatfield (1922-2011)

As a young Christian trying to sort out the relationship between my faith in Jesus Christ and the political landscape, Senator Mark O. Hatfield was one of my heroes. I was privileged to hear him speak at a church in Minneapolis back in 1975, and I was favourably impressed. Here are two retrospectives on Hatfield's life and witness within the political realm, coming from opposite sides of the political aisle: Cal Thomas: A Conservative Remembers Mark Hatfield; and Wesley Granberg-Michaelson: A Tribute to Mark O. Hatfield. This is from my own Political Visions and Illusions (pp. 148-149):

U.S. Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon enjoyed a long political career extending over nearly half a century, although many of the positions he took on specific issues were quite controversial, especially his early opposition to American involvement in Vietnam. Hatfield explicitly claimed to vote in accordance with his convictions whether or not his constituents always agreed. Nevertheless, Oregon voters continually re-elected him, twice as state Governor and five times as Senator, not because he followed their wishes, but because he acted on principle and in so doing earned their continued respect. Refusing to bow the knee to the god of popular sovereignty is not necessarily a recipe for political failure. On the contrary, many citizens prefer to vote for someone willing to stand on principle.

May Senator Hatfield rest in peace until the resurrection and may the LORD see fit to raise up principled statesmen and stateswomen in his place.

John R W Stott (1921-2011)

Never mind the radio and television preachers we hear so much about. The two most influential figures on English-speaking evangelicalism in the 20th and 21st centuries were, not Baptist or Pentecostal, but members in good standing of the Church of England: C. S. Lewis and John R. W. Stott, the latter of whom we were privileged to host at Redeemer University College several years ago. He will be greatly missed.

Les Paul (1915-2009)

Eunice Kennedy Shriver (1921-2009)

With gratitude, we celebrate the life of a gracious and kindhearted woman, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, whose compassion for the mentally disabled led her to found the Special Olympics. What is less known, and what the media, with some exceptions, are generally neglecting to tell us, is that she was also very much pro-life, thus making her one of a very few prominent Democrats left to hold this position, as reported here: NBC Notes Eunice Kennedy Shriver Was 'Lifelong Opponent of Abortion'.

Canada's own Fr. Raymond J. de Souza puts this stance within the context of her Catholic faith with this piece in the National Post: A tale of two Kennedys.

The Shrivers represented the old Democratic Party -- economically liberal and culturally conservative. . . . Eunice was the ideal of the Catholic in public life -- passionately committed to the poor, defender of the weak, pro-life, morally upright and a woman of faith and family.

May she rest in peace until the resurrection.

Last of Great War survivors

We will not be seeing many more reports like this: Oldest WW1 veteran dies aged 113.

Sir Bernard Crick (1929-2008)

My students and former students will be well acquainted with this British political scientist, whose classic In Defence of Politics is well worth reading nearly 47 years after it was first published. The following is adapted from what I wrote about him more than five years ago in this space:

Remarkably Crick called himself a socialist, but, unlike many socialists, he was at pains to emphasize the distinctiveness of the political enterprise, which cannot simply be reduced to economics or an economically-based class struggle.

Politics is too often regarded as a poor relation, inherently dependent and subsidiary; it is rarely praised as something with a life and character of its own. Politics is not religion, ethics, law, science, history, or economics; it neither solves everything, nor is it present everywhere; and it is not any one political doctrine, such as conservatism, liberalism, socialism, communism, or nationalism, though it can contain elements of most of these things. Politics is politics, to be valued in itself, not because it is 'like' or 'really is' something else more respectable or peculiar. Politics is politics. The person who wishes not to be troubled by politics and to be left alone finds himself the unwitting ally of those to whom politics is a troublesome obstacle to their well-meant intentions to leave nothing alone (pp. 15-16).

One might, of course, quibble with his assumed definitions of religion and ethics, but this is otherwise a pretty good statement.

Among the antipolitical trends from which Crick defends politics are ideology, democracy and nationalism. (His critique of democracy is largely responsible for my including a chapter in my own book on democracy as ideology, a chapter that might initially puzzle otherwise sympathetic readers.)

Influenced by Aristotle and Hannah Arendt, Crick views politics as an irreplaceable and irreducible activity that peacefully conciliates the diverse interests in society. Politics in this sense is untidy and rarely conforms to every aspiration people would impose on it. It is necessarily limited and cannot solve every problem. Yet we cannot do without it.

Sir Bernard was knighted in 2002 for his service to civic education in the United Kingdom.

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus (1936-2009)

This is sad news indeed, but by God's grace his was a life well lived. May he rest in peace until the resurrection.

Samuel Huntington (1927-2008)

Best known for his Clash of Civilizations thesis, key political scientist dies at 81.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)

Famed Russian novellist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has died at the age of 89. He is widely regarded as the worthy successor to such 19th-century literary greats as Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Together they carried on a long Russian tradition of men of letters serving as loyal opposition in a polity characterized by autocracy and totalitarianism. Tsar Nicholas I is said to have at once admired and feared the poet Aleksandr Pushkin. Similarly, the Soviet-era leaders so feared Solzhenitsyn that they attempted to suppress his output and exiled him for 20 years.

His output was prolific, beginning with his groundbreaking novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which chronicles a single day in the life of an inmate in one of Stalin's forced labour camps. This work alone ranks with the likes of The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment as a significant exemplar of the Russian literary tradition.

I myself have been fascinated by Solzhenitsyn's political tracts, beginning with his 1973 Letter to the Soviet Leaders, through his controversial 1978 Harvard address to his 1990 Rebuilding Russia. In the second work he was sharply critical of western decadence and alienated many in the media who had once lionized him. In the first and third works, he sounded themes that would seem prophetic in retrospect: 1) Russia should discard the discredited Marxist-Leninist ideology that had done so much harm to the country; 2) Russia should cast off the nonslavic republics and allow them to go their own way; 3) it should focus on settling and developing the north and east rather than engaging in overseas adventurism; and 4) it must at all costs avoid a war with China, which cannot be won.

Despite or perhaps because of his experience living under an atheistic régime, Solzhenitsyn became a Christian during his time in the Gulag. Having seen for himself the consequences of pursuing a political illusion on a mass scale, he embraced faith in Jesus Christ as the only hope for Russia's future. Solzhenitsyn returned to his homeland in 1994 and lived there for the remainder of his life. Although he could with some justification be called a Russian nationalist and thus focussed most of his attention on his own country, he was capable of seeing through our own political illusions as well: "The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even to excess, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer." May Solzhenitsyn's words continue to speak to us in a new century.

Theodore Plantinga (1947-2008)

Redeemer has just posted this announcement on its website:

It is with deep sadness that Redeemer University College announces the death of Dr. Theodore Plantinga, Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department. Dr. Plantinga died peacefully at his home in Dundas on the evening of July 4, 2008 . Visitation will be held in St. James Anglican Church from 6:30 – 8:30 Tuesday evening (137 Melville, Dundas), and a memorial service will be held there on Wednesday at 1 pm.

Theo Plantinga was born in 1947 in Ee, Friesland , the Netherlands . His family emigrated to Canada when he was four, settling in Winnipeg , where he attended elementary and secondary schools. He went to university at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan , where he received a B.A. in philosophy in 1969. He subsequently completed a Masters degree, and a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Toronto (1975). His doctoral dissertation, published by the University of Toronto Press in 1980, was "Historical Understanding in the Thought of Wilhelm Dilthey."

During the next two years, Dr. Plantinga held a full-time position as lecturer in philosophy at Bishops University in Lennoxville, Quebec . Subsequently, he was a translator and managing editor for Paideia Press in St. Catharines, Ontario . He was appointed Executive Director of College Development for the Ontario Christian College Association, founded to explore the possibility of starting a Reformed Christian liberal arts and science college in Ontario .

In 1980 (the same year that his Rationale for a Christian College was published) Theo accepted a position in the philosophy department of Calvin College. But the work of the Ontario Christian College Association came to fruition in the founding of Redeemer College just two years later, and Theo returned to Ontario in 1982 to become Redeemer’s first professor of philosophy. He taught in (and chaired) the Department of Philosophy ever since then—an unbroken span of twenty-six years. He has written numerous books, articles addresses and reviews on philosophy, apologetics, memory, the problem of evil, Christian education, and reading the Bible as history. He has also translated into English numerous books by Dutch authors, including the philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd; Dr. Plantinga became managing editor of the Dooyeweerd Centre at Redeemer in 2005.

For more than a quarter century, Theo Plantinga served our Lord faithfully through Redeemer University College in his teaching, scholarship and research. Especially in the early days of the university, he was a force to be reckoned with in our debates on policy, institutional purpose and identity, pedagogy and a host of other topics. He had a lively wit, a vibrant faith, a ready laugh, a listening ear and a particular fondness for the eccentric. He will be greatly missed as a friend, colleague, teacher and mentor. "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints."

Please pray for the Redeemer community as it mourns the loss of one of its founding professors.

Stanley Robertson Hall (1949-2008)

I have recently learnt of the death of a friend whom I knew during our graduate studies at Notre Dame in the 1980s. I no longer recall exactly how Stan Hall (shown at left in his Notre Dame regalia) and I met, but I believe it was through a mutual friend who was studying in the same theology department at the university. Stan was an ordained Presbyterian minister, and we quickly discovered we had a common love of Reformed liturgy, which, while merely an avocation for me, was precisely what he was preparing to teach professionally. We further had similar convictions that contemporary efforts at "dressing up" the liturgy and livening worship missed the point. His convictions are well summed up in the eulogy delivered by David W. Johnson:

He was convinced that worship should honor and express the Godness of God, and that anything called “worship” which allowed the fads of the moment or the clichés of the crowd to obscure the Godness of God was a perverse travesty of what worship ought to be. He was also convinced that a congregation is not an audience but a community, and therefore worship should be a community act and not a performance. His whole outlook on worship and ministry flowed, I think, from these two convictions. . . .

These two convictions do not isolate the church from the world. But they do require that the church be the church in the world, the church that is apt to offend even while it invites, because it tells the truth and exposes the sham. And these convictions insist that the movement of the Spirit, and therefore of the church, starts with the word, the font, and the table, and then goes out into the world equipped with grace, truth, and love. Those who plan worship around marketing surveys and trend analysis found Stan to be a very frustrating person, for he thought that such things did not honor the priority of Spirit, Word, font, and table.

He expressed great interest in my own versifications of the biblical psalms and canticles and used liturgical responses I composed at the congregation he was pastoring in Granger, Indiana. My own versification of the Song of Jonah became the seventh "reading" at an Easter Vigil service he led at that church.

I have been moved to read the reminiscences left by his colleagues and students at the memorial website at Austin Presbyterian Seminary, where he was the Jean Brown Associate Professor of Liturgics and Homiletics. It is rather remarkable to see the positive impact he had on so many people during his not quite twenty years there, especially given that I knew him before any of this had yet occurred. Nevertheless, everything said about him, e.g., his no-nonsense lack of sentimentality and his curmudgeonly manner, was true of him even then.

The most memorable thing Stan told me was that he thought most protestant liturgy could be summed up as "one damn thing after another." I have another memory of sitting with him and other theology grad students in the public cafeteria at Notre Dame. He delighted in telling them he was a "fundamentalist" and watching their discomfort. On yet another occasion in one of the student cafeterias, I saw him crush a bothersome fly with his thumb and then go back to eating as if nothing had happened.

Stan was unsentimental even about his own impending death, according to his friend, the Rev. Scott Black Johnston:

Knowing that the disease he had would one day claim his life, Stan went online a few years ago and located a group of Trappist monks with whom he was familiar in South Bend, Indiana—monks who support their Abby by selling simple caskets built out of pine and oak. Stan submitted his measurements to the monks, and within a couple of weeks UPS delivered a custom-made, pine box to the seminary. Unwrapping it, my friend set it up in the corner. As you might guess, most people who walked unprepared into his office felt pretty uncomfortable. First year students often left shaking their heads. Why would a person, even a person who is dying, want to spend every day working in the presence of a coffin? Stan, however, seemed genuinely amused by the students’ fretfulness.

Almost exactly a year ago, in a coffee shop in Austin, I asked my friend what the pine coffin was all about. Instead of speaking in maudlin terms about his illness, Stan began to describe for me the tradition (passed down through the centuries) whereby Trappist monks construct their own coffins, their own wooden boxes for burial. They do so, Stan said, as a prayer to God. “What sort of prayer?” I asked. Oh, he said, the monk prays that he not be tempted to live in fear for his mortal life, but that he be given the strength [to] live each day as grace—as if he had been granted a precious gift from God. His words reminded me of a prayer that Presbyterians often say at funerals. “Help us to live as those who are prepared to die. And when our days here are ended, enable us to die as those who go forth to live, so that living or dying, our life may be in Jesus Christ our risen Lord.”

We will miss Stan and look forward to seeing him again at the resurrection. In the meantime something of him will continue to live through the many people he influenced during the time God gave him in this life.

William F. Buckley (1925-2008)

The death of William F. Buckley, the last true conservative, is prompting numerous appraisals of the movement he helped found and of his own legacy for that movement and beyond. Among the tributes is this one by Robert McDougall, which is noteworthy for unintentionally illustrating the ambiguity behind the conservative label. According to McDougall, Buckley promoted "individualism and its democratic benefits," was a free spirit, respecting anyone "who strove to live life on his own terms," and "called for the decriminalization of drugs."

In short, Buckley's conservatism was of the libertarian variety and, in this respect, quintessentially American. As it turns out, "the scourge of American liberalism," as the late Arthur Schlesinger dubbed him, was as much indebted to the broader liberal tradition as his "leftist" compatriots. This explains in large measure why a movement with so little substantive content has had such difficulty defeating an opponent with which it has so much in common.

Good night to knight

Fra Andrew Bertie, Prince and Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta, Most Humble Guardian of the Poor of Jesus Christ, has died at age 78. The Knights of Malta, or Order of Malta, is nearly a thousand years old and is recognized as a sovereign entity in international law. As such, it enjoys diplomatic relations with a number of mostly, but not exclusively, Catholic states.

Although it is a Catholic order, the Order of Malta recognizes four protestant offshoots, encompassing the Brandenburg Bailiwick of the Knights' Order of the Hospital of St John in Jerusalem (Germany), the Johanniter Orde in Nederland, the Johanniterorden i Sverige (Sweden) and the British Order of St. John. Other claimants to the legacy of the Knights of Malta are regarded as illegitimate.

There is a Cyprus connection to the Knights, who once had their commanderie at Kolossi Castle in Limassol, where they produced the oldest named wine still in existence, Commandaria, a dessert wine for which the island is famous.

James-Charles Noonan, Jr., in The Church Visible: The Ceremonial Life and Protocol of the Roman Catholic Church, devotes several pages to the Death and Burial of the Grand Master and to the Conclave and Election, which are now taking place at the Order's headquarters in Rome. Here is a brief report from the Catholic News Agency about Bertie and the Order of Malta:

Thomas Torrance (1913-2007)

Tributes are pouring in for one of the 20th century's great theologians: A tribute to Thomas Torrance, By Gerrit Dawson; Presbyterians Pro-Life honors Thomas F. Torrance. Here is more about his life and work from The Telegraph: The Very Rev Professor Thomas Torrance.

"Craig Vanderveen is home! boo-yah."

With great shock and sadness I post the following announcement from the President of Redeemer University College, Dr. Justin Cooper:

We are saddened by the tragic news of the death of Craig Vanderveen on Thursday evening, June 28. While visiting his family in Manitoba, he and a friend were killed in a car accident while traveling to Winnipeg to see his grandfather. Further details of the funeral and any contact information will be provided when it becomes available. In the meantime, please pray for the Lord's grace and comfort for family and friends, particularly those in the Redeemer community who knew and worked with Craig.

With resurrection hope,
President Cooper

Craig was a double major in political science and business at Redeemer, and he managed to take every course I teach. He was a bright student with a promising future ahead of him. He had planned to graduate in December and thus had one more semester to go. He was president of Student Senate this past year, past managing editor of the Crown, and was involved in a variety of other activities. He was respected by his peers and his professors, and he would have been a strong contender for next year's Faculty Award.

He was working at Redeemer over the summer months. The last time I saw him was around two weeks ago when we passed in the hall. He recently returned to his home province of Manitoba, where last evening's accident occurred. The heading for this post is taken from the last thing he wrote in his facebook profile on sunday.

We will miss you, Craig. We look forward, by God's grace, to seeing you again at the resurrection.

Addendum: Craig's funeral will be 10 am, Wednesday, July 4, at the Carman Canadian Reformed Church, Carman, Manitoba. No visitation is planned.

Robert E. Webber (1933-2007)


Nearly 30 years ago I read my first book by the prolific Bob Webber. It was called Common Roots, an eloquent plea for free-church evangelicals to reclaim the church of the first centuries as their own and to recognize their origins therein. A few years later I reviewed Webber's The Moral Majority: Right or Wrong? for the old Vanguard magazine, published by the Wedge Publishing Foundation in Toronto. Then on to an edited volume, Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail, containing first-person accounts of evangelicals whose personal pilgrimages had led them to Anglicanism. This book inspired me to commit my own spiritual pilgrimage to writing, which, at the tender age of 31, I had the audacity to send to him. When I met him later, he told me he had actually read it, somewhat to my surprise.

In 1991 Webber was a guest speaker at a worship conference at Redeemer, and I had the opportunity not only to meet him but to spend time talking with him. Five years later he attended Nancy's and my wedding ceremony in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. Nancy had been teaching at Wheaton College up until then, so she and Bob were colleagues in the same department. I thus had more than one connection with the man.

Webber was best known for his writings on liturgy, including the edited multivolume Complete Library of Christian Worship, in which two of my own articles appear. He was less the scholar, along the lines of, say, Gregory Dix or Hughes Old, and more the popularizer, influencing Christians in a number of traditions to think more self-consciously about why and how they worship. He wrote in a way that was accessible to ordinary church-goers, and that's where his impact will be felt for some time to come.

Last autumn he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and, after enjoying a brief remission around Christmas, died last friday. He will be missed.

Later: Here is Christianity Today's article on Webber: Robert E. Webber, Theologian of 'Ancient-Future' Faith, Dies at 73.

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin (1931-2007)

Bruce Metzger, 1914-2007

A giant in the world of biblical scholarship has been gathered to his ancestors: New Testament Scholar Bruce Metzger Dies at 93. Ben Witherington III expresses appreciation for his mentor: Revisiting a Non-Standard Scholar.

Mrs. Methuselah passes on

What would it be like to live to see the 7th generation of one's descendants? This woman knew: Woman listed as world's oldest person dies at 116 in Memphis nursing home. And I'm sure she must have sent every one of them a birthday card each year.

Jaroslav Pelikan: 1923-2006

The prolific church historian is dead at age 82. Oddly enough, a blog search brings up tonnes, while a Google news search brings up nothing as yet.