Kudos for Calvinists, Particularists
September 29, 2004
I do not think highly of John Calvin and many of his later followers who wreaked such political havoc on Europe, or the Calvinistic sects that, to this day, maintain a theocratic bent or a world-withdrawal that has historically infected most conservative Protestantisms, whether they adhere to Calvinistic theologies or not. However, I do appreciate much that has come from modern Netherlandish Calvinists, one of the main sources of renewal for Protestant Evangelicals cited by Mark Noll in his Scandal of the Evangelical Mind and again in his ten-year retrospective on that book in the current issue of First Things.
Unique among all the other varieties of Protestantism in Europe and especially North America, the Dutch Calvinist traditions share fundamental concerns and insights with the Catholic Church, and their members have at times cooperated with Catholics, well before Roe v. Wade made such cooperation necessary and common.
The main area of overlapping concerns and projects is political philosophy and matters of social justice facing orthodox Christians in the particularly vexed context of the modern liberal, pluralistic state. For readers not already familiar with the following Calvinist projects, I wish to put forth my personal endorsement for them as intellectual and spiritual sources of substantial (and often cost-free) edification; they are also worthy causes to support financially:
1) The Work Research Foundation and Comment magazine, edited by Pantagruelist and veteran blogger, Gideon Strauss, who is Senior Fellow at the WRF and Research and Education Director for the Christian Labour Association of Canada.
Comment attracted some praise from Richard John Neuhaus in the latest First Things, although Father Neuhaus opines–in response to a fine Comment feature–that the New York Intellectuals and such magazines as the Partisan Review were an unrepeatable phenomenon and could not have had “heirs.” But perhaps one might find today similar discourses emerging from different quarters.
2) The Institute for Christian Studies.
3) The Center for Public Justice, its Report, Capitol Commentary, Citizen e-link, and Civitas program in Faith and Public Affairs.
4) Citizens for Public Justice and The Catalyst.
5) Pro Rege, a quarterly publication of the faculty of Dordt College. The contents of Pro Rege–typically articles and book reviews–are eventually posted online, but the printed version “is made available free of charge as a service to the Christian community.” (Send inquiries to prorege@dordt.edu.) Each year one issue is dedicated to creative writing and visual art, including student contributions. The latest issue contains a symposium centered on an excellent paper presented in January at Dordt by Dr. Charles L. Glenn of Boston University: “Historical Background to Conflicts over Religion in Public Schools.”
While it can be a hazardous pitfall into parochial myopia, it is the historical confessional particularity of the “community of tradition” behind Pro Rege (and much else named above) that I admire. Here is one of Pro Rege’s frequent examples of a healthy particularity in a review by the college president, Dr. Carl Zylstra, of Douglas J. Schuurman’s Vocation: Discerning Our Callings in Life (Eerdmans, 2004):
“…the strength of this volume is its unrelenting attack on both the liberal protestant abandonment of the whole concept of divine calling and the evangelical spiritualizing of a sense of calling into little more than a divine warrant for internal aspirations and desires. …a biblical sense of calling never can become a validation for individualistic self-assertion. Quite the contrary, calling occurs in community and can never be regarded as valid unless the called one carries out that calling within the parameters of the divinely established authority structures.”
Zylstra goes on to appreciate Schuurman’s consideration of both Luther and Calvin, while offering a more nuanced distinction between each reformer in their notion of calling. Zylstra notes that Calvin’s “cosmic accent”–”(what command has been given me by the exalted Christ)” contrasts with Luther’s “incarnational view of calling” “(what would Jesus have me do)” and perhaps explains the ways in which many Calvinists have justified R. H. Tawney’s version of the Weber thesis by yielding to “a triumphalistic aggressiveness in asserting their own call and authority.”
Here is a man reflecting on his tradition in light of others, and there is a catholic depth and strength in this that I am inclined to say is absent in most “mere Christian” Evangelical circles–those sort that are prone to confuse “calling” with modernistic, liberal notions of individual autonomy and “personal choice.”
And here I must circle back to Noll, for in his continued praise of the confessional traditions that have nourished a rather parasitic Evangelicalism, he rightly exhorts Evangelicals to become “rooted” themselves. Yet Noll also cites one key project that he believes will be part of this rooting. Baylor University’s controversial 2012 plan is, according to Noll, “the most important institutional attempt in many decades to do the proper thing for the life of the evangelical [not Baptist] mind.” Not to make things too black and white, Noll avers that “A predictable alliance of theological liberals and nervous naysayers has protested”–clearly a pack of Neanderthals, untermenschen who fear and loathe true greatness.
Even without knowing anything about the situation, I would judge these remarks from Noll not to be those of a careful, critical historian but of a dogmatic partisan engaged in supporting what may well be a deformed sense of “calling” for Baylor–truly a case of individualistic self-assertion that is destructive to the particularity of real communities which alone may sustain, as Christian communities, a truly catholic mind. Indeed, in light of Baylor alum Andy Black’s essay in The New Pantagruel, I question whether Noll really understands what a community of tradition is, or if he thinks one can be destroyed to build another, better one, by institutionally-based, top-down reconstruction.
The “loyal opposition” [to the 2012 plan at Baylor] fears that all that was good and unique about Baylor is being destroyed by zealous ideologues unqualified to wield such enormous power over the destiny of a major university. They charge the Sloan administration with doing violence to a venerable institution and its traditions by imposing a trajectory neither shared nor wanted nor fully understood by major swathes of Baylor’s constituencies. …
Baylor 2012 supporters’ primary reaction has been to define the protest as simply the typical anxiousness provoked by institutional change and to shift focus onto the rightness and boldness of Baylor’s ambitions. …
To oversimplify: Baylor’s current controversy pits long-time faculty (often with deep Baylor, Baptist and Texas ties) against the faculty and administrative newcomers (essentially seen as carpetbaggers) who are attracted to Baylor because of the “vision.” The controversy aligns the moderate Texas Baptist gentry protective of Baylor’s fragile status quo against grassroots believers, academics and others energized by this proposed attempt to rescue Christian higher education from secularism and/or irrelevance. …
Given all of this, I sympathize with those who would choose to preserve a somewhat provincial Baylor that provides a meaningful community with healthy traditions rather than a Baylor that reaches out to a far-flung constituency drawn to Baylor because of abstract ideals like the “integration of faith and learning.” I wonder, though, how much longer Baylor can remain that kind of community. The distinctive culture and traditions (both Baptist and Texan) that historically grounded it are rapidly losing ground to generic American consumerist culture and generic American evangelical Christianity. …
In a 2002 Christianity Today article, Columbia professor Randall Ballmer identified what may ultimately be the fatal weakness of Baylor 2012. Ballmer observed that “such an enterprise [as Baylor 2012] places a great deal of confidence in institutions as the guardians and the guarantors of faith.”
This seems to me a fair characterization of the motives and tactics of the supporters and leaders of Baylor’s ambitions. Baylor may yet become a notable center for serious intellectual inquiry within an academic community shaped by basic Christian convictions. But it needs a relationship with a healthy, well-defined Christian community to ground and sustain its character–giving Baylor’s leadership the space to act in a much less authoritarian matter. If that community no longer primarily consists of southern or Texas Baptists: who will it be? Who can it be?
This is Kudos for Calvinists, Particularists in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Life & Death | Next: Obscenity | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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