The Statement on Social Justice & the Gospel, introduction

Earlier this month, a group of church ministers and leaders of parachurch organizations published a Statement on Social Justice & the Gospel. It appears to have been spearheaded by the Rev. Mr. John MacArthur, pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, and radio preacher on Grace to You. According to MacArthur's wikipedia profile, he "is considered a Calvinist and a strong proponent of expository preaching. He has been acknowledged by Christianity Today as one of the most influential preachers of his time and was a frequent guest on Larry King Live as a representative of an evangelical Christian perspective."

Throughout the history of the church, occasions have arisen calling for creedal statements setting forth the substance of the faith. The Nicene Creed, for example, came out of the christological controversies of the early centuries of our era. In the sixteenth century, the Reformation produced a number of confessional documents such as the Augsburg Confession, the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism and the two Helvetic Confessions. These were often, if not always, generated during the heat of conflict and were intended to draw boundaries around orthodoxy.

If this new statement is not exactly an ecclesial confession in the classic mould, it does represent an effort to steer Christians away from certain dangers its drafters believe have infected the larger evangelical church. Accordingly each of the sixteen articles takes the form of a series of affirmations and denials. In the coming weeks I will be devoting space to each of these, pointing to their respective strengths and weaknesses while bearing in mind the overall framework within which the statement is set. My intention is not to give readers a series of idiosyncratic likes and dislikes, but to evaluate the statement in light of the larger Christian tradition, and particularly its Reformed expression. As I have been strongly influenced by Abraham Kuyper and his heirs, my analysis will reflect this.

My first post in this series will be published at 9 am EDT next Monday, 1st October, and will cover the first set of affirmations and denials on Scripture. Thereafter I will post every Monday and Thursday until we have completed the statement. My final post will be a general evaluation of the whole.

Here is the link to the section on Scripture.

Canada’s established religion

Since the adoption of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, the accepted narrative tells us that Canadians are better protected than they were under the statutory Bill of Rights (1960) and the centuries-old Common Law tradition. But are we really? In the wake of the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent decision in the Trinity Western case we have reason for doubt.

Section 2 of the Charter claims to guarantee the fundamental freedoms of all Canadians, including “freedom of conscience and religion.” However, section 1 also tells us that the Charter “guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” Because this limiting clause is expressed in such vague language, it is up to the courts to decide which limits are reasonable and which not. However, the courts are under no obligation to admit that their criteria for doing so are rooted in an unstated religious worldview placing the individual at the centre of life.

Trinity Western University, an evangelical Christian post-secondary institution in British Columbia, attempted to establish a Christian law school but ran into difficulty when the law societies of Ontario and BC declined to accredit the institution. Why? Because its community covenant prohibits students from engaging in sexual activity outside of a biblical understanding of marriage. There once was a time when such a requirement would scarcely cause controversy, because the larger society understood the distinctive character of marriage as a unique and lifelong covenant between a man and a woman, capable in principle of bringing forth and nurturing the next generation. As such, marriage deserved protection as a matter of simple justice, because, without it, society as a whole would suffer.

Interview published in Brazil

I was recently interviewed by Guilherme Piton of Santo Antônio de Jesus, Bahia, Brazil, and he has posted the interview here: Fé Cristã e Política: uma pequena entrevista com David T. Koyzis. Here is the same interview in English. Piton's questions are in italics.


First, a brief presentation. Who is David T. Koyzis and how did he get involved with Christian faith, philosophy and politics?

I was born near Chicago and grew up in a Christian family that was politically aware. One of my earliest memories was of the assassination of President John Kennedy and of the huge impact that had on the American polity. As a young man I was fascinated by the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon. At virtually the same time, my paternal relatives in Cyprus became refugees after Turkey invaded the island state in 1974. All of these influenced me to study politics in a more focused way. When I was about nineteen I began reading Abraham Kuyper and his intellectual and spiritual heirs on Christianity and politics, and I was deeply impressed with their conviction that our faith has implications for public life. This conviction has animated my own work over the decades, including graduate studies and university teaching.

The Glorious Revolution, American royalists and the War for Independence

One of the more fascinating books I've read recently is Eric Nelson's The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding. On this Independence Day it is worth recounting Nelson's argument, which differs somewhat from the conventional histories Americans are taught in their schools. The standard account has it that Americans disliked King George III and fought to free themselves from his tyranny. A surface reading of the Declaration of Independence supports this interpretation, as it charges the King with a list of offences, to wit: "repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States." In this reading, Americans are Whigs—heirs of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which unseated King James II and established parliamentary government in the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland.

But what if the Glorious Revolution inadvertently prepared the ground for revolt in the colonies nearly a century later? What if Americans were actually Tories and supporters of the king?

Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem

For my first 12 years, the map with which I was familiar showed a small Israel, some of whose territory was precariously thin, caught between its hostile neighbours and the sea. This all changed in June 1967, when Israel, attacked by those neighbours, pushed them back and occupied the territories west of the Jordan River. For the first time in nearly 20 years, Jerusalem was no longer a divided city bisected by a tense no-man’s-land. Israel had restored the unity of its capital city.

Yet to this day few countries recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, maintaining their embassies in the coastal city of Tel Aviv. But wait. Doesn’t a country have the right to name its own capital city? Shouldn’t other countries with which it enjoys diplomatic relations honour this right without question? Ordinarily this would be the case.

Yet few things are normal in the Middle East, especially where Israel and Palestine are concerned. My visit there in 1995 confirmed this for me. Tension hung constantly in the air, and military personnel armed with machine guns were ubiquitous. Moreover, that was at a time of optimism in the wake of the Oslo Accords.

Humour vs mockery

Political life has always had its humorous side. Policy-making is, of course, serious business, and it has a huge impact on large numbers of people. But in the midst of so many grave matters of war and peace, crime and punishment, we have always found ways to make light of difficult circumstances. After all, laughter is an all too human means of coping with our troubles. Some of this humour amounts to gentle ribbing of otherwise hard-working people whose offices we respect. But some humour is destructive, effectively coarsening the larger conversation and contributing to a culture contemptuous of duly constituted authority.

The German-born Thomas Nast (1840-1902) was the first of a long line of political cartoonists in the United States, famously originating the Republican Party’s elephant and popularizing the Democratic Party’s donkey. An ardent abolitionist and supporter of the Union during the American Civil War, Nast’s cartoons mercilessly lampooned the racism of the secessionists. He hated white supremacy and turned his pen against those who sought to exclude Chinese immigration into the U.S. Nast was succeeded by other political cartoonists, whose caricatures of prominent political leaders simultaneously amused the public and irritated the powerful.

European integration and political ideologies

Bad Liebenzell

Last month I was privileged to spend time in Germany at the Internationale Hochschule Liebenzell (IHL) in Bad Liebenzell, a beautiful village nestled in the Black Forest. The IHL is a ministry of the Liebenzell Mission, which was founded in 1899 and has its roots in a late nineteenth-century revival in Germany. It has branches in Canada, the Northern Mariana Islands, and six other countries around the world. The Mission is active in church-planting, Bible translation, education, evangelism, children and youth ministry, medical care, air service, substance addiction therapies, ministry to immigrants and community development in twenty-five countries. Remarkably, it also has monastic-like brotherhoods and sisterhoods, a fellowship of deaconesses, a retreat centre and a literature distribution ministry. It appears to be independent of any denomination, yet it does plant church congregations.

Political Visions and Illusions, second edition

The second edition of Political Visions and Illusions is due out early next year. In the meantime, the new cover can be seen at right.

The new edition will include a reworking of the chapters in the first, with the addition of discussion questions after each chapter. A key difference from the first edition is that the redemptive narratives underpinning the ideological visions will be brought more explicitly into the foreground. This theme was present in the first, but it will be more visible in the second, enhanced by a series of illustrations highlighting these stories.

Finally, recognizing that this book has been used profitably in theological seminaries, I have added "A Concluding Ecclesiological Postscript," in which I take up the question of the role of the institutional church—as opposed to the larger corpus Christi, or body of Christ—in addressing political life, with references to the Barmen Declaration (1934), Mit Brennender Sorge (1937) and the Belhar Confession (1986). A new foreword will be written by Richard J. Mouw, former president of Fuller Theological Seminary and author of many books, including He Shines in All That's Fair and Abraham Kuyper: A Short and Personal Introduction.

I will let everyone know when the book is published. Stay tuned.

Check the box and take the cash: Trudeau and Canada's summer jobs program

Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government is well over halfway through its statutory four-year mandate, and the prime minister continues to cause controversy by imposing his contestable interpretation of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The provocations began with his parliamentary caucus before the 2015 federal election, when he proclaimed that he would no longer permit pro-life candidates to stand for a seat under the Liberal label. This action produced a dilemma for pro-life Liberals, such as the Honourable John McKay, who had previously served under the convention that controversial moral issues, if raised in the House of Commons, would be settled by a free vote so as not to coerce members into violating their consciences. Trudeau, in effect, unilaterally changed this convention, making “reproductive freedom” for the first time a nonnegotiable element of the federal Liberal program.

In January of this year, the government announced that federal funding for the Canada Summer Jobs program—which subsidizes wages for small business, government entities, and nonprofits that employ young people who are full-time students—would be available only to groups that accept its reading of the Charter. At issue was the expectation that organizations applying for funding sign the attestation at the end of the application form, including these sentences:

Both the job and my organization’s core mandate respect individual human rights in Canada, including the values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as other rights. These include reproductive rights and the right to be free from discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, race, national or ethnic origin, colour, mental or physical disability or sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression.

Overlords and underdogs

No one can read the Bible without recognizing that God is concerned for the plight of the oppressed. The first five books of the Bible tell the story of God delivering his people from oppression in Egypt. So central is this story for both Judaism and Christianity that it has been cited as prototype for God’s deliverance of his people at several stages in the biblical narrative. Nevertheless, we need to be cautious in our use of oppression and liberation as political categories, because they can lead us astray.

Reformed theologians in particular have emphasized that the Bible is not simply a collection of pious ancient writings but a unified story of God’s redemptive acts in history, culminating in our salvation in Jesus Christ.

As we read the Bible through this redemptive-historical lens, we will recognize that, yes, God hates people oppressing others but that the primary form of oppression from which he liberates us is that of our own sinful nature. Indeed, it is sin against God and neighbour that fuels every other form of oppression.

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THE LAST TELEGRAM –(STOP)–

It always marked a turning point in those old movies from the ’30s and ’40s. Someone would receive a telegram, indicating that all was forgiven / someone had died / a couple had married / a ship had been lost at sea. In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 classic, Shadow of a Doubt, Teresa Wright’s family receives a telegram indicating that her Uncle Charlie would be paying them a surprise visit, little knowing the havoc he would unleash in their home and community.

On the last day of 2017, Belgium finally ended telegraph service, which had begun more than a century and a half earlier and was a fixture of daily life for so many people around the world. In so doing, it followed the earlier moves of Great Britain (1982), the United States (2006) and India (2013).

Remembering Expo 67

The past year’s celebration of Canada’s 150th birthday reminded me of another anniversary: that of my first visit to this country, which occurred 50 years ago. I was 12 years old, and my father had promised us that we would be seeing Expo 67, the world’s fair in Montréal. We had been expecting this all summer, but school rolled around and we hadn’t yet made the trip. We children knew that the fair would not last forever, and we feared missing it if we waited too long.

October rolled around and still no fair. As Expo would be wrapping up at the end of the month, we got more nervous. But then, on the fifth day of the month, I came home from school to learn that we would be getting in our family’s Buick Electra and leaving for the fair in only two hours! I can no longer recall whether my mother had already packed for all eight of us, but we soon headed off into the night, as prepared as we were ever going to be.

What’s in a name? Fundamentalism, evangelicalism and the fickleness of labels

A good friend of mine in graduate school was an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA). A confessionally Reformed Christian, he admitted to me that he sometimes liked to call himself a fundamentalist just to see how others would respond. Though we were on the same page in so many ways, I personally didn’t think I could go quite that far.

Nevertheless, I was raised in what might well be regarded as the first fundamentalist denomination, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Established in 1936 by John Gresham Machen and others, it grew out of the controversies of the 1920s and ’30s in the former Presbyterian Church in the United States of America. Confessional liberals, who elevated personal experience and rationalism above both the Bible and the Westminster Standards, gradually moved into the ascendancy, with the more conservative elements increasingly on the defensive. These trends had already begun in the post-Civil War era, gaining speed around the turn of the 20th century and achieving dominance after the end of the Great War.

The Queen's Christmas Message, 2017

Exactly sixty years after the Queen first aired her annual Christmas message on television, the Palace posted this fresh message:


We who have faithfully listened to her broadcasts year after year have noticed that their content is more explicitly christian than in the past, as pointed out in this article from The Guardian: How the Queen – the ‘last Christian monarch’ – has made faith her message. The turn of the millennium appears to have marked the start of this unmistakable trend.

To the royal household, it is known as the QXB – the Queen’s Christmas broadcast. To millions of people, it is still an essential feature of Christmas Day. To the Queen, her annual broadcast is the time when she speaks to the nation without the government scripting it. But in recent years, it has also become something else: a declaration of her Christian faith. As Britain has become more secular, the Queen’s messages have followed the opposite trajectory.

This is how she closed her message two days ago:

We remember the birth of Jesus Christ, whose only sanctuary was a stable in Bethlehem. He knew rejection, hardship and persecution. And, yet, it is Jesus Christ's generous love and example which has inspired me through good times and bad. Whatever your own experience is this year, wherever and however you are watching, I wish you a peaceful and very happy Christmas.

God save the Queen! Let us pray that, when the time arrives, her heirs and successors will see fit to continue this emphasis in their own Christmas messages.

Harry Blamires, 1916-2017

Harry Blamires (pronounced BLAMers) was not one of the best known of Christian apologists, overshadowed as he was by the likes of his mentor C. S. Lewis and, among Reformed Christians, Cornelius Van Til. Nevertheless, he was a scholar and theologian of the first rank, and he will be remembered for a single book he published in 1963, The Christian Mind. Because there have been so many books published in recent decades on the subject of a Christian worldview, we may forget that there was a time when the need to think in a distinctively christian way was unfamiliar even to regular church-goers, as it was to me when I was growing up. I acquired my copy back in June 1976 (so I wrote inside the front cover), and underscored those passages that leapt out at me. Blamires makes no mention of Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch polymath and statesman with whom I was becoming acquainted and increasingly sympathetic, but, with some exceptions, I saw them as co-belligerents in the effort to alert believers to the comprehensive sovereignty of God in Christ over the whole of life. Here is a wonderful sample of Blamires' writing:

It may be that the dominant evil of our time is neither the threat of nuclear warfare nor the mechanization of society, but the disintegration of human thought and experience into separate unrelated compartments. For a feature of the diseased condition of modern society is the parcelling out of human faculties—physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual—into distinct categories, separately exploited, separately catered for. Man is dismembered. In the high incidence of mental disease you can measure something of the cost of this dismemberment. In so far as the Church nurtures the schizophrenic Christian, the Church herself contributes to the very process of dismemberment which it is her specific business to check and counter. For the Church's function is properly to reconstitute the concept and the reality of the full man, faculties and forces blended and united in the service of God. The Church's mission as the continuing vehicle of divine incarnation is precisely that—to build and rebuild the unified Body made and remade in the image of the Father. The mind of man must be won for God (TCM, p. 81).

Christianity Today carries an obituary of Blamires here: Died: Harry Blamires, the C. S. Lewis Protégé Who Rediscovered ‘The Christian Mind’. May he rest in peace until the resurrection.

A troubled anniversary

Next year we observe – perhaps “celebrate” doesn’t entirely fit – the 370th anniversary of the modern state, which is generally said to have resulted from the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the devastating Thirty Years War and reshaped the map of Europe. According to this agreement, the European powers would henceforth accept the principle of state sovereignty, namely, that the state is sovereign within its own territory and exempt from interference from its neighbours. This new international order would replace the messy patchwork of feudal fiefdoms that had lasted for centuries in the western part of the continent.

Since that time we have come to see the state, not as a domain of a particular ruler, but as a community of citizens led by their government. But settling its territorial boundaries has been the tricky part. Where does France end and Germany begin? And what of the German lands where, say, Polish is the majority language? For as long as the modern state has existed there have been quarrels over its jurisdiction. Attempts to settle these quarrels have not always succeeded, with the two world wars of the last century among the most tragic of the failures.

One Year of Trump

Nobody expected him to win. He was too boorish and crude. He couldn’t hold his own in a debate, even as, by his sheer presence, he seemed to be trying to intimidate his opponent. He thumbed his nose at people he thought weak and made fun of the handicapped. Far from being a polished orator like his predecessor, his rhetoric consisted of monosyllabic words spat out with tremendous ferocity, coupled with monotonously repetitious outbursts of braggadocio. Read more.

The Queen would not be amused: Julie Payette’s ill-considered remarks

As one of the Queen's Canadian subjects, I personally doubt she would approve of the remarks her freshly-minted representative made last week. Some months ago Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had advised Her Majesty to appoint Julie Payette, a former astronaut, to the post of Governor General, an office which she assumed at the beginning of October. In a Westminster parliamentary system, the Queen and her representatives must remain impeccably nonpartisan and avoid even a hint of partiality. The monarch is the guarantor of the constitution and a symbol of unity for the entire nation. In her sixty-five years on the throne, Queen Elizabeth II has discharged her weighty responsibilities admirably, more than living up to the vow she took in South Africa on her twenty-first birthday.

Sadly, not all of her representatives have managed to follow her example. Last week, Payette addressed the Canadian Science Policy Conference in Ottawa, and in the course of her speech appeared to belittle her fellow citizens who have the temerity to believe in a transcendent God:

Commemorating a revolution

Exactly one-hundred years ago, a small cadre of revolutionaries seized power in the then Russian capital city of Petrograd. After the Tsar's abdication earlier in the year, a provisional government had attempted to run the fractious country, unwisely attempting to continue the war against Germany that had brought down the imperial régime. While Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein would immortalize the storming of the Winter Palace in his famous re-enactment three years later, the actions that brought the Bolsheviks to power were much less dramatic. Nevertheless the long-term consequences of the Revolution would reverberate throughout the twentieth century, leading directly or indirectly to the deaths of scores of millions of people in the interest of implementing a political illusion based on a fundamental misreading of human nature.

On this anniversary we do well to acknowledge that human efforts to reshape the world according to the demands of the gods of the age are not without consequences. In particular, when human beings deny the one true God, they don't cease to believe. They simply redirect their beliefs elsewhere. While there is little to celebrate on this solemn occasion, it is appropriate to remember those who lost their lives to the scourge of Marxism-Leninism in the decades following the Revolution. Господи, помилуй! Lord have mercy!