This year marks Nancy’s and my 30th wedding anniversary. On our honeymoon, we travelled through the mid-Atlantic states, visiting sites associated with our respective family histories. In April and May of this year, we returned to some of these places, especially Baltimore, Annapolis, and St. Mary’s City, the first capital of Maryland in the seventeenth century.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the death of one of the great figures in Dutch – and arguably Western – history. Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer was born in 1801 and was raised in a Netherlands undergoing significant change. When revolution broke out in France in 1789, it would unleash such instability as to plunge Europe into a full generation of war and bloodshed.
Much as Edmund Burke, whom we visited last month, foresaw the Revolution’s trajectory, it fell to Groen to assess it in retrospect. With the advantage of hindsight and under the influence of the Réveil, a Christian revival then sweeping Protestant Europe, Groen was persuaded that the Revolution was rooted in a rejection of God and in misplaced faith in political ideologies and their false promises of earthly salvation.
David Koyzis is a unique figure. This Canadian is relatively unknown in the Christian world and receives very little media attention; he doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. He holds a doctorate in political science and adheres to Reformed orthodoxy, which theologically aligns him with evangelicals committed to the Holy Scriptures.
I appreciate Wood’s emphasis on “serious engagement with [Christian Nationalism] before critique.” Indeed we need to discern what is right about someone’s position before we can level a credible critique. I would go further than Wood on this score. There is something right about communal solidarity, full stop. Whether that community is the state, the nation, the family, the workplace community, or something else, we rightly celebrate the bonds that hold people together as they live their lives and pursue their daily vocations. There is in principle much good in the fact that Americans and Canadians love their respective countries and take pride in their achievements.
In 1790, one year after revolution had broken out across the channel, the Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke wrote his now classic Reflections on the Revolution in France. Many of Burke’s compatriots, especially his fellow Whigs, thought that the French were finally rid of their absolutist government and were embracing the constitutional institutions which they themselves had long enjoyed. They thus gave qualified support to the revolution.
Burke would have none of this, sensing that something more destructive was afoot in that country. The revolutionaries were going much further than to replace flawed rulers with better ones. In fact, their efforts would soon lead to a reign of terror, something that Burke foresaw in his Reflections.
Read the rest of the column here. I have now been writing for Christian Courier for 36 years. Next month's column will cover Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, an intellectual and spiritual heir of Burke whose recent biography by Roel Kuiper I have reviewed here.
I am pleased to report that I have just signed a contract for my next book, an in-depth exposition of the Heidelberg Catechism with a focus on its implications for our life in God’s world, especially public life. Although the timeline is admittedly short, the manuscript is basically complete and simply needs to be formatted to conform to the publisher's specifications. This will occupy my time for the next little while.
I see this new book as foundational for my other three published volumes, as it elucidates the faith that underpins them. If the books are to be read in logical order, proceeding from faith basics to application, one would begin with "Belonging to God," then proceed to We Answer to Another: Authority, Office, and the Image of God, then Political Visions and Illusions, and finally Citizenship Without Illusions. I will keep readers informed of the progress of this new project as it moves towards publication.
We talked about our common ground of Scripture and catholicity. We debated the proper relation between the Law and the Gospel. We discussed the fraught history of traditionally Orthodox societies with autocracy, while nevertheless noting many important—and too often overlooked—exceptions. To that end Koyzis even expressed his hope that my book would be translated into Greek, Russian, and other traditionally Orthodox languages.
Justiça Pública is a nonpartisan Christian think tank that develops leadership, conducts research, and proposes a constructive way of doing politics in Brazil.
Brazil is undergoing a profound demographic transformation, with the rapid growth of evangelicals, while at the same time facing a crisis in its political practices—marked by radicalism, polarization, and constructive paralysis [sic]. In this context, God has called us to propose an alternative: a long-term vision built by Christians with genuine commitment to the faith, above and beyond any ideology.
The best that can be said of this book is that the author is preaching to the choir. Phil Christman is a follower of Jesus Christ who has come to see himself as a political leftist and is now evangelizing for the cause. However, given his general approach, he is unlikely to persuade anyone not already onside.
Christman claims that “my Christianity has led me out of conservatism, past liberalism, to the left” (12). What does this leftism consist of? Support for “massive redistribution of wealth (either through alms or taxes), the right of marginalized communities and exploited nations to self-defense, a much-lessened emphasis on punishment-for-its-own-sake and on revenge and a much greater emphasis on harm reduction in our systems of punishment, an abhorrence of war, and an avoidance of the hoarding of wealth and power” (15-16). Christman spends the rest of the book unpacking this collection of priorities.
