Yet Another Calvinist Blog
June 07, 2006
Mr. Stegall has popped up on another new blog with a bevy of other Calvinists, including D. G. Hart and Peter Leithart who have both contributed to TNP. This blog, De Regno Christi, aims at nothing less than “advanc[ing] discussion and awareness of Christ’s reign over the nations.”
I am not sure what this is all about, but one of the early entries refers to the “Distinctive Yet Catholic Principles” of these at least twice reformed Reformed Presbyterians. What delightful irony that the people who once liked the idea of “no bishop, no king” now resort to a blog to spread “awareness” of the reign of Christ. The keyboard over the claymore, eh? Good luck with that guys.
(Wikipedia for the unlearned: “King James I, reacting against the perceived contumacy of his Presbyterian Scottish subjects, adopted “No Bishop, no King” as a slogan; he tied the hierarchical authority of the bishop to the absolute authority he sought as king, and viewed attacks on the authority of the bishops as attacks on his own authority.”)
I do like to encourage serious Protestant confessionalists over against weak-kneed evangelicals backing their way into outright liberalism, but these schismatic sectarian claims of “catholicity” always stick in my craw, and not just because they have no regard for the episcopate and apostolic succession. Even in the hands of its best apologetic spin doctors, Calvinist soteriology implies or as good as implies that Christ did not die for all men, and in the Calvinist ecclesiological realm, the Church is never universal (i.e., catholic) in the proper sense of being coextensive with all humanity. The true Church is comprised of only the elect. So when conservative Protestants claim to be “catholic,” what they really mean is that they have delusions of grandeur and Rome-envy. Sometimes this is seen among the liberals as well when they try to use “catholic” as a synonym for “all-inclusive” or “open and affirming,” meaning a church that is not only coextensive with humanity but a church that “understands” and “accepts” sinners by abolishing the idea of sin and associated practices.
At least the old-school Calvinists have not taken that path, yet their church is indeed too small, too narrowly defined, and yes, too exclusive to be truly catholic. This is roughly a general Protestant trait, and it has led Calvinists and other Protestants in every age (during the short span of their existence) into a number of political problems (it has also spawned the liberalizing guilt-free “inclusivist” reactions) which at least Mr. Stegall seems to understand. See his discussion of “Our [i.e., Calvinists’] Historical Impasse,” a followup to another essay on Augustine.
From the former post:
The great unsolved catastrophe of the Reformation as a political event, however, was that the largely successful attack on the medieval locus of transcendence did not obviate the need within society to have some point of contact with the holy and divine; or with what Voegelin called the “ground of being.” Historically the Protestant church has tried to relocate the ground of existence in one of two places: either in a secularized institutional form, usually the state, or in the radically atomized heart of every individual. As a result, the history of the Protestant church is in part one of being manipulated by and put in the service of either state or individual. This has repeatedly led, in simplified terms, to either some form of collectivism or some form of liberalism, each tending towards more radical expression over the course of time.
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