One-hundred years of Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism

Already a century ago, many Christians were noticing a seemingly subtle shift in the message issuing from Protestant church pulpits—a shift away from the gospel message and towards a focus on the religious experience of the individual person. This prompted one Presbyterian leader, John Gresham Machen (1881-1936), to write a book that remains relevant today. Here are my thoughts on One-hundred years of Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism, posted at Kuyperian Commentary. An excerpt:

During the 19th century, Princeton Seminary, founded in 1812, was a bastion of Reformed orthodoxy and remained so into the first three decades of the 20th. Nevertheless, by the turn of that century, the supporting denomination, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA), was already in the process of changing, and not for the better. Pulpits were increasingly occupied by ministers whose preaching was more influenced by the ideologies of the day than by sound biblical interpretation. The major ideology of the day was scientism, the conviction that the only genuine form of knowledge was that accessible by the scientific method. Other claims to knowledge were to be greeted by a general posture of scepticism. Even Scripture and the doctrines of the Christian faith must be subjected to the canons of science, which in turn were thought to determine what we can and cannot accept of that faith. Claims to miracles, for example, cannot be scientifically vindicated and must thus be relegated to the status of primitive myths. All that remains of Christianity is its supposed ethical core.

Read the entire article here.

Tim Keller's faithful witness

I had intended to write sooner about pastor and author Tim Keller (1950-2023), whose passing was quickly followed two days later by my own mother's death. Now Christian Courier has just posted an article I wrote about him. It takes the form of a tribute and expression of personal gratitude: Tim Keller's faithful witness. An excerpt:

Born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1950, Keller grew up in a Lutheran congregation but came to a fuller knowledge of the Christian faith while studying at Bucknell University through InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. With his life now redirected towards serving God’s kingdom, Keller went on to attend Gordon-Conwell Seminary in Massachusetts and Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. He was ordained a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), a confessional Reformed denomination currently observing its 50^th anniversary.

After serving as pastor of a small congregation in Virginia, the PCA in 1989 asked him to start and lead a church plant in America’s largest city. Of course, New York is not a heavily churched community, and trying to maintain a Christian ministry in the heart of a secular urban centre certainly looked to be an uphill battle. Nevertheless, we know that with God nothing is impossible, and he used Keller to grow a vibrant church community in an unlikely setting. Beginning with only 50 people, by the end of 1989, attendance had grown to 250.

 Read the entire article here.

KLC interview

In April Jason Estopinal and I interviewed Hannah Nation, who edited the book, Faithful Disobedience: Writings on Church and State from a Chinese House Church Movement. The podcast has now been posted at the Kirby Laing Centre website: Learning from the Chinese Church Today with Hannah Nation. Indeed, we have much to learn from our brothers and sisters in a country that may one day become the global centre of Christianity.

June newsletter posted

I have now posted my Global Scholars newsletter for June. Among its contents: my recently completed series on Israel's precarious democracy, a new distance course for Brazil, a complete draft of my Genevan Psalter project, and a panel discussion on Russia sponsored by Global Scholars Canada. As always, thank you for your support for my work.

Israel's precarious democracy

My recent series on Israel's precarious democracy is complete. Here are all four parts:

1. Historical and demographic background
2. Institutional factors
3. Immigration and the Law of Return
4. Options for the future

There are undoubtedly factors that I have neglected to take into account, and I may come back to these at some point. But for now I have tried to set forth the basic contours of one of the most difficult political issues, which thus far has eluded all attempts at settlement, and to point to two necessary preconditions for moving forward.

Israel's precarious democracy, 4: options for the future

In the earlier instalments of this series, we discussed the historical, demographic, and institutional factors that condition the Israeli polity, along with the complicating factors of immigration and the 1950 Law of Return. All of these combine to make for a democratic system that is precarious at best, preventing domestic stability and a coming to terms with Israel's neighbours. In this final instalment, I will survey the options that the country's government could pursue, while recognizing that all of them bring dangers to its status as a Jewish state. I assume that the current status quo is unjust, but correcting this injustice will not come easily in any case, and each option threatens in a different way to worsen Israel's relations with its neighbours and to contribute further to domestic instability.

Israel's precarious democracy, 3: immigration and the Law of Return

Political stability requires a stable population living within a well-defined territory. The population should have long roots in the territory and share a strong enough sense of solidarity to enable people to work together for common purposes. They should share traditions and customs and a love for the land in which their forebears have lived for generations. Blessed with these preconditions, diverse peoples can become a nation, taking pride in their common history, with a determination to bequeath to their children what they have inherited from their ancestors. Once there is a sense of common nationhood, a people can develop political institutions embodying self-government, their durability secured by general agreement on the rules of the game. 

Pittsburgh pilgrimage

My monthly column has been posted at Christian Courier's website: Pittsburgh pilgrimage. Here is an excerpt:

In late February I travelled for work purposes for the first time since the pandemic began three years ago. My travels took me to the Pittsburgh area where I spoke at two Christian institutions of higher education. The first was Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, where a good friend of mine, Bill Witt, teaches. Trinity is an independent Anglican seminary that trains prospective clergy in several jurisdictions, including the largest Anglican provinces in Africa. My first lecture was on ideology and idolatry, in which I drew from my first book.

Read the entire article here.

Democratism: Making Too Much of a Good Thing

Here is the last-but-one instalment of my series with the Politics Network of UCCF: The Christian Unions: Democratism: Making Too Much of a Good Thing. Here's an excerpt:

Our democracies, in other words, are complicated systems in which several institutions counterbalance each other, providing for multiple eyes vetting policy proposals for the sake of the public good.

Nevertheless, for some people this is not enough. They want to see as many offices as possible subject to election and a clear voice of the people unfiltered by mechanisms put in place to check it. Here is where democratism as an ideology enters the picture.

‘Letters from Moscow’: The Opening and Closing of Russia

On saturday, 10 June, I will be participating in an event taking place at Faith Baptist Church in Oakville, Ontario, Canada: ‘Letters from Moscow’: The Opening and Closing of Russia. It is sponsored by Global Scholars Canada, the organization with which I am affiliated. Here's the description:

Global Scholars Canada’s original scholars, Drs. Wendy and Adrian Helleman lead the Symposium with their now available ‘Letters from Moscow’ (Moscow Messages); an account of their time teaching at Moscow State University (pictured) in the mid-1990s. The letters are rich and inquisitive, poignant in their capture of a brief period where new freedoms and openness post-perestroika, seemed possible.

Israel's precarious democracy, 2: institutional factors

In part 1, we covered the historical and demographic elements forming the unique context of Israel's politics. Here I want to discuss some of the institutional factors that play a role in Israel today.

First, Israel has no constitution. Well, not exactly. Like every country, Israel has a constitution in the sense of an empirical arrangement of political institutions relating to each other in customary and predictable ways. In this respect its constitution is similar to those of the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and nine of Canada's provinces. But Israel has no written constitution, that is, a document that establishes in normative fashion the institutions and offices that govern Israel. There is no equivalent to the Constitution of the United States, which describes itself as "the supreme law of the land," taking priority over ordinary statutory laws. This has complicated Israel's domestic politics, including Prime Minister Netanyahu's recent efforts to rein in what he sees as an overreaching judiciary.

Israel's precarious democracy, 1: historical and demographic background

This year Israel celebrates 75 years as an independent state. It was born in the wake of the Holocaust, as large numbers of Jewish refugees from nazi-occupied Europe fled to what was then the British League of Nations Mandate of Palestine. Britain had acquired Palestine in December 1917, when Lieutenant General Sir Edmund Allenby captured Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks during the Great War. By then the nascent Zionist movement was already bringing Jewish immigrants from Europe into the territory. The previous month, the British government had issued the Balfour Declaration, named for Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour, which stated:

His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

During the three decades in which Great Britain controlled Palestine, the government in London discovered that the influx of Jewish settlers from Europe was not popular with its Arab inhabitants and attempted, rather too late, to curtail immigration. However, Jewish immigrants found ways to evade British efforts to stem the tide. After the end of the Second World War, survivors of the Holocaust streamed into Palestine, as Britain was preparing to vacate the territory.