Lecture at Greenfield Hill Congregational Church: “Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening”

As part of the 300th anniversary celebrations of Greenfield Hill Congregational Church (where Timothy Dwight once ministered), I lectured on Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening.

Reply to Nathaniel Peters on Jacques Maritain

Not Special: Down Syndrome in Will Arbery’s “Corsicana”

The Redemption of Naomi

The Trees of the Field Went Out to Seek for Themselves a Philosopher-King

Interview on “The Lucky Few” podcast

Living and Dying in the Time of COVID

In Feb. 2021, I moderated = a discussion between Shelly Kagan (Yale University) and Lydia Dugdale (Columbia University) on the topic of living and dying in the time of COVID. View the whole recording here.

To Save the World from the Church Basement: On Christian Humanism

But if the goods of Fortune do not perfectly follow upon the cultivation of virtue, then Christian educators mislead our students when we hide the real price of moral formation. The acquisition of virtue and the cultivation of the liberal arts may, in fact, bring an unintended estrangement from family and friends—as it frequently does when formation in the classical tradition places one into a different social class than one’s friends and family. If one is in a society that is sufficiently hostile to the Good, that form of training may even bring martyrdom, as it did for Socrates. A society in which some enclaves are humanistic while others are not may contribute to the historic polarization underway now in America. In all these ways, humanistic learning comes to bring not peace, but a sword.

Read the whole piece at Fare Forward.

Dignity Beyond Accomplishment

On Christmas Day 1999, when she was six years old, my little sister Jenna swallowed a whole jar of diuretic pills. Or rather, she chewed them. She always chews pills like they’re candy. And that is probably what she thought they were, lying there on the piano side table at our grandparents’ definitely un-childproof house in a leafy Pennsylvania suburb. This was no suicide attempt. Jenna has Down Syndrome, but her cognitive slowness did not ever imply that she was any less adept than other children at briefly escaping the watchful eye of even the most conscientious parents, which mine were and continue to be, and causing plenty of havoc in those brief few unsupervised seconds.

Read the whole piece at Mere Orthodoxy.

“The Anger of Marilynne Robinson,” published in Fare Forward

I'm pleased to have a new piece on Marilynne Robinson's first nonfiction book, Mother Country, in the newly-revived Fare Forward journal. It is behind a paywall and requires a subscription, but you should consider subscribing to support its vision of publishing excellent Christian thinking by emerging and established writers.

The Americans for whom Robinson wrote Mother Country have likely never heard of Sellafield. But they have heard of Chernobyl. When I visited the Ukraine at the age of fifteen, the 1986 accident at Chernobyl was sufficiently distant to be a punch line among the Ukrainians: “How do you know the directions to Chernobyl? Just drive north until your skin starts to glow.” “I can count on my fingers the number of times I have visited Chernobyl: thirteen.” But a punchline for the Ukrainians was a boon for Sellafield, because the meltdown at Chernobyl drew attention away from earlier, less catastrophic, nuclear power plant accidents. When Chernobyl became the worst nuclear accident in history, it took that title away from the 1957 fire at the Windscale nuclear plant in Great Britain. Windscale has since been renamed Sellafield. But nobody’s skin glowed at Windscale.

You can read the rest here.

Review of David VanDrunen, "Politics After Christendom"

Mere Orthodoxy recently published my long review of David VanDrunen's Politics after Christendom: Political Theology in a Fractured World (Zondervan, 2020). I used this review as an opportunity to say something about my own current thinking on the field of Christian ethics:

This point is delicate, and therefore must be made carefully. It is a non sequitur to lay blame for complicity in social ills immediately at the feet of Two Kingdoms proponents. Kathryn Tanner has demonstrated that Christian doctrines do not automatically produce social programs in that way. Moreover, given the continuing wisdom of that old maxim that abuse does not invalidate proper use, not every advocate of a given theological paradigm is necessarily responsible for the most heinous deployment of it. However, careful attention to the history of theology demonstrates endlessly the manifold ways in which doctrines are corrupted toward the propagation of injustice. Learning from those errors demands articulating a doctrine and a social program with as few opportunities for abuse and misinterpretation as possible.

It is this that VanDrunen’s theory fails to do when, for example, it emphasizes retributive justice to a society addicted to mass incarceration. It is this that VanDrunen’s theory fails to do when its endorsement of “enterprise institutions” has no critical bite against an institution like Amazon, whose CEO is currently the richest man in the world and may be on track to become the richest person in history, on the backs of exploited and vulnerable workers. And it is this that VanDrunen’s theory fails to do when it removes from the armories of justice so many of the Biblical and theological categories, sources, and rhetoric that have marked the American political tradition.

You can read the entire thing here.

What the Coronavirus Reveals

I recently issued a challenge in Mere Orthodoxy to evangelicals to place healthcare reform as a central plank of their political advocacy:

I want nothing less than for Christians to put into practice what we were taught from our youth; that religion undefiled is care for widows and for orphans (James 1:27). I want Evangelicals to be at the forefront of the structural improvement and amelioration of a broken healthcare system. Evangelical Christians have something to say about these issues, yet hitherto their political attention and energies have been directed elsewhere. Christians thinking together about how to create a society that can endure enormous exogenous shocks like these and, insofar as is possible, avoid the tragic moral dilemmas that they commonly introduce, will only grow more and more important over the next several decades. If even the most moderate projections by climate change experts are correct, these kinds of natural disasters and cultural shocks will continue to be central and traumatic parts of our lives. There will be no return to normal.

Read the whole essay here.

New Letter-to-the-Editor in First Things journal

The August 2019 issue of First Things includes a letter to the editor from me, in which I briefly attempt to convince Matthew Schmitz, senior editor over at First Things, that his recent "Immigration Idealism" presents a sub-Christian argument which he should reconsider:

"Will [Schmitz] also signal his disagreement with Augustine, who said, “This world is to all the faithful who are seeking their homeland what the desert was to the people of Israel”? Will he disagree with Aquinas who, in his Commentary on Hebrews, claims that we who are children of Abraham “are given to understand that we should live in the world as foreigners and strangers”? Might he beg to differ even with the apostolic writer of Hebrews who reminds his Christian readers that “here we have no lasting city, but we seek a city that is to come” (Heb. 13:14)? Are we to believe that Augustine, Aquinas, and the Apostle are sentimentalists? If not, it seems Schmitz finds himself in disagreement over the pilgrim status of the Christian not merely with Cavanaugh, but with the mainstream of Christian theological reflection."

You can read the whole letter here.

Rene Girard on Why Christians Should Not be Populists

I am late to discovering Rene Girard. The first conscious notice I took of him was in multiple obituaries published upon his death in November 2015. So I began reading him with interest just as the 2016 Presidential campaign was heading up and the GOP began making clear that they intended to initiate some significant decrease in Muslim immigrants and refugees into the country. I found his analysis of scapegoating to have powerful explanatory force for these developments.

At his worst, Girard is a theorist of one idea (mimetic rivalry/scapegoating), and attempts to explain the entire world with that one idea. So many of his analyses seem to me to be a stretch. But if the Crisis of Liberalism has caused Christians to become more interested in robustly Christian political ideas, then Girard ought to be a more central part of that conversation. Here I try to bring Rene Girard to bear on contemporary movements toward populism, and I argue that Christians should not be populists:

For Girard, then, populism of the kind discussed previously and which so tempts many of America’s Christians today – which makes ample use of the logic of scapegoating – is a political ideology that has not been submitted to the logic of Christianity. It is, instead, a rival to Christianity. Both cannot be simultaneously true.

You can read the full piece over at Mere Orthodoxy.

Whither the Niebuhrians? Why Reinhold Niebuhr has Fallen upon Hard Times

I discovered my fellow Yale Divinity School graduate, Reinhold Niebuhr, during my senior year of college, during which time I sometimes wrote glowingly about him. Since then, and partially because of the withering treatment he receives at the hands of Stanley Hauerwas's With the Grain of the Universe, I have come to hold a more sober estimation of him. My most recent piece in Providence Magazine, is an attempt to articulate why he might have fallen out of favor among other Christians of my generation:

Niebuhr is the son of the marriage between Christianity and liberalism, but as that marriage has entered into divorce proceedings, neither parent seems keen to claim custody of their son. Perhaps Niebuhr has fallen out of favor because the easy alliance he is commonly tempted to see between Christianity and democracy (endorsed only pessimistically, of course) is increasingly called into question. On the other hand, in the circles in which belief in this fusion still exists, Niebuhr’s lifelong socialism makes him unpalatable to the right, and his insistence upon Christianity as crucial to making sense of that fusion is unpalatable to much of the left. Stated more precisely, Niebuhr’s endorsement of democracy is too theologically-inflected for the palette of Rawls’ post-Christian children, and his theology is too infected with democracy for post-liberal Christians who have begun to recognize that the presuppositions of democracy may not be as at home in the history of Christianity as we may once have suspected.

The whole piece, including a lovely picture of Niebuhr in a derby hat (alas, how few living ethicists can pull it off!) can be found here.

An Evangelical Response to the ‘Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel’

Malcolm Foley and Justin Hawkins

We dream neither of a faith devoid of good works nor of a justification that stands without them...Do you wish, then, to attain righteousness in Christ? You must first possess Christ; but you cannot possess him without being made partaker in his sanctification, because he cannot be divided into pieces.

—John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.16.1

I. A History of Errors

Jesus began his ministry by standing up in a synagogue one Saturday morning, and saying that he came to bring justice to bear on the earth, and particularly so on behalf of the poor, oppressed, weak, and vulnerable: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18-19). John MacArthur and the other signers of the recent Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel, insist that none of these stated ambitions of Jesus ought to be understood literally as having anything to do with social justice. They say instead that the social justice concerns that Jesus articulates here are not the Gospel, but are the Law, and that any attempt to weave social justice concerns into the heart of the Gospel diminishes and undermines the Christian gospel. We -- a theological ethicist in training and church historian in training, as evangelicals who are both committed to historic Christian orthodoxy and also convinced of the legitimacy of the concerns of much of the social justice movement, beg to disagree. We believe that in so doing, we, and not the authors of the Statement on Social Justice, are the heirs of the best parts of the evangelical tradition in America. At the end of the Statement, the authors say: “We have spoken on these issues with no disrespect or loss of love for our brothers and sisters who disagree with what we have written. Rather, our hope is that this statement might actually provoke the kind of brotherly dialogue that can promote unity in the gospel of our Lord Jesus whom we all love and trust.” It is in this spirit of brotherly dialogue that we write this response.

The confusions about the intent and meaning of the social justice movement in the Statement reflect longstanding debates in American religious history. In the history of lynching in America, one of the more common arguments in its wake was this: when black men stop assaulting white women, lynching will stop. That is to say, the personal responsibility of blacks -- and not any structures of systemic racism -- is fundamentally to blame for the fact that Southern whites could arise on Sunday, attend church in the morning, and summarily execute a black man by hanging him from a tree in the afternoon. Racism, they said, had little to do with it. Ida B. Wells, a journalist and civil rights advocate, got most upset when she heard this argument coming from a Methodist minister because she wondered how someone purporting to be a Christian leader could say such a thing. She wrote in her autobiography: “American Christians are too busy saving the souls of White Christians from burning in hell-fire to save the lives of black ones from present burning in fires kindled by White Christians.” Her outrage was founded in two fundamental realities: first, that this minister clearly did not know the facts on the ground and second, that the comment placed the blame for the barbarity of the crowd on the back of the accused, under the guise of attributing personal agency and responsibility to the lynched man. The reality was that many of those Black people were deemed criminal by the Jim Crow legal system, and had themselves done nothing wrong.  Under this regime, bumping a white person on the street made you a criminal. Not doffing your hat to a white man made you a criminal. It was factually untrue that most people were lynched for rape. In fact, fewer than 40% of the victims were even accused of rape. But it was a much better narrative that hit people in the gut and justified brutality. By thus suggesting that the weight of lynching rested on the backs of Black people alone, this pastor obscured the fact that lynching was much more often the brutal enforcement of Jim Crow rather than “vigilante justice.” Such a response rang hollow at best and vicious at worst.

We do not even wish to hint at the idea that the authors of this Statement might support lynching. But we see these same analytical and theological mistakes that prolonged that injustice continuing in modern conversation about race and justice among evangelical Christians in America. The errors of the past ought to induce us to be exceedingly careful in the ways that we discuss matters of social justice in the present and future, and we do not see that care being manifest in the Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel. That statement instead assumes that “social justice” is some kind of abstraction, ignoring the fact that the idea is rooted in seeking concrete ways to love our neighbors (the abstraction can be seen in the fact that while it vilifies the Social Justice movement, the statement never mentions a single author or practice against which they are arguing). A response like the Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel comes across to many as hollow at best and vicious at worst.

It is with these concerns in mind that we, a theological ethicist in training and a church historian in training -- both of whom grew up in American Evangelicalism and who still desire to hold to historic evangelicalism -- respond to this statement. The difficulty with online statements and summaries of any kind is that they obscure the reasoning that leads to such statements. We see this in Christian history, where creeds and confessions are abstracted from their context and so their worth and content are misinterpreted as a result. Nevertheless, we think this document worth responding to for two reasons. First, because it is put forward by figures with a high profile in evangelicalism, who have behind them lifetimes of faithful ministry work, but whose signature attached to a document like this will dismay many who desire faithfulness to that same gospel that they have learned from MacArthur and others. Second, because we think this statement is grievously erroneous. We think that the statement is theologically deficient in two important ways: First, it misunderstands the relationship between Law and Gospel, and second, it proceeds from an incorrect doctrine of sin. Both of these are, in the confusing but common phrase, “gospel issues,” because the first articulates how we are to embody the fruits by which our faith is known (Matt. 7:20), and the latter articulates what it is of which we must repent in order to be saved.

II. Theological Error #1 inThe Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel: The Relation of Law and Gospel

What is crucially important for those who interact with the Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel to realize is that the concerns articulated in much of the Social Justice movement do not need liberal theology to undergird them; almost all of those concerns can be articulated as flowing naturally out of the historic Christian orthodoxy which is articulated in American Evangelicalism. The first theological error of the statement is too strong a division between Law and Gospel. One of the articles in the Resources section of the website is an article entitled A Gospel Issue?, and it recounts one pastor’s conversation with a well-intentioned parishioner who insisted that social justice was a gospel issue. In response, the pastor responds:

“Gospel and law aren’t the same thing. The law is a prelude to the gospel, not really part of the gospel. The law tells us what God requires of us. But then it condemns us, because it requires perfect obedience and curses anyone who doesn’t obey its every jot and tittle. But none of us obeys so thoroughly. And ‘whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.’ That’s James 2:10. Jesus said in Matthew 5:48 that the standard the law sets for us is God’s own absolute perfection. We can’t live up to that. The law therefore brings wrath (Romans 4:15), not salvation. The law can only condemn us, because we are guilty. All of us.”

This is not the position of historic Calvinism, to which John MacArthur is himself a subscriber. One of the dividing lines between Calvinists and Lutherans at the Reformation was about the proper use of the Law. Lutherans argued typically that there were two uses: (1) to act as a mirror to reflect our own sin back to us, and thereby show us our need for grace; and (2) to act as a restraint upon evildoers, which is why the Lutherans were not anarchists. In addition to these two uses of the Law, the Calvinists added another one: the Law exists to guide the believer in holiness. This became known as the Third Use of the Law, which Calvin himself called “the principal use, and more closely connected with its proper end” (Institutes 2.7.12). It is this Third Use of the Law that moves the Christian toward holiness, and in this way, the justification which is effected by grace alone is inextricable from the sanctification into which the Christian is guided by God’s moral precepts. The reason justification and sanctification are so tied together for Calvin is that they both flow out of union with Christ. Union with Christ is that effect of grace and that real relationship by which, through the Spirit, believers receive not only justification, but also sanctification, breathing life into our love of neighbor. Thus, fighting for justice cannot be relegated to an “extra”, an implication, or an appendix to the Gospel. It is, rather, integral to the salvation of the individual, otherwise when justification and sanctification are detached from each other, Christ is “divided into pieces” (Institutes 3.16.1). Calvin, therefore, would disagree vehemently with the Statement’s claim that “implications and applications of the gospel, such as the obligation to live justly in the world, though legitimate and important in their own right, are not definitional components of the gospel” (Denial #4)

With this theological framework in mind, we can return to our consideration of Phil Johnson’s interaction with his parishioner. Seeing that this parishioner herself actually stands on the side of Calvin, Paul, and even MacArthur himself (on those days when he is fighting against the antinomians rather than against social justice), it is simply a caricature to describe her, as the author of this article does, as “a self-styled full-time evangelical social justice advocate who is incorrigibly convinced that the gospel of Jesus Christ alone doesn’t sufficiently address the problem of injustice.” At best, such a description describes a simple failure to listen to this woman and a forgetfulness of the tradition in which the author, Phil Johnson, stands. At worst it is a failure of charity, perhaps birthed from the recognition that one’s own position is too weak to describe in straightforward terms, and therefore which must be discussed in innuendo.

Given that MacArthur is so indebted to Calvin in his theology, it is no surprise that elsewhere, John MacArthur himself rejects this strong dichotomy between Law and Gospel. In an interview on the website of Grace to You, John MacArthur’s ministry home, he and Phil Johnson, another of the original signers of the statement, are discussing their rejection of antinomianism -- that is, those who deny that the Law has any governing effect on behavior in the life of the Christian, which is a misunderstanding which MacArthur has rightly spent much of his time attempting to refute:

PHIL: Yeah. In fact, the sort of knee-jerk response you’ll get to that sort of thing these days is, “Well, that’s legalistic. You’re moving away from the gospel back into law. And it’s inherently legalistic then to preach the imperatives you find in Scripture; rather, you should just preach the indicatives.” And that’s the idea behind always going back to the cross; it’s about what Christ did for us rather than what we are to do. And there’s a germ of truth in that. The gospel is about what Christ did for us rather than what we are to do, but that’s not the road to sanctification is it? JOHN: Yeah, well, the New Testament, I agree, is full of indicatives: that is, statements of fact. But it’s also full of imperatives. PHIL: Yeah. JOHN: So, you always ask the question to these people, “Well, what are all the commands there for? What is he trying to tell us in the 3rd chapter of Colossians or the book of Ephesians with all the commands? What is all this about? I mean these are commands.” And Paul says to Timothy, “The things that you’ve heard you’re to teach others.” And then later in that same book he says “These things command and teach.” Command and teach. We live under mandates; we live under commands. The difference between legalism and freedom is (sic) Christ is that in Christ we love to obey, we long to obey, and our hearts are broken when we disobey. That’s not legalism. That’s love working in obedience.

This interview as a whole is definitely worth reading, given that it seems designed almost step for step to refute the way that the current statement draws a sharp distinction between Law/Gospel, and that it was published online only a year and a half ago. Almost as if to respond to their own insistence that Law and Gospel be kept hermetically apart, Johnson and MacArthur argue:

JOHN: The grace of God teaches us to deny certain things and behave in certain ways.

PHIL: Right. And that’s grace, not law, teaching us. So, that goes back to my earlier comment, grace and law are different, but they’re not in disagreement. They’re not hostile to one another; they agree.

JOHN: Well, of course they agree. The same God who has given the law, has authored the law, is the source of grace. And God isn’t contradicting himself. You know, the law of grace – the faithful preachers, the Reformers, the Puritans, and even to this day faithful preachers understand how they go together. You would agree that in today’s sort of – I don’t know – public evangelical movement, there’s far too little preaching of the law. So, people who don’t understand the law and what the law demands and how far they fall short and the deadly and everlasting consequences of the law on the life of an impenitent, unbelieving person, people who don’t understand that don’t understand the gospel. They don’t understand the magnanimous grace of God: They don’t understand the love the God, the compassion, the mercy, the kindness of God if they don’t understand the law. The Reformers understood that; they were fierce preachers of the law to bring sinners under condemnation, and that’s exactly the work of the Holy Spirit who convicts the world of sin and righteousness and judgment. Where’s that preaching today? There’s none of that.”

Of course, this earlier interview is likely correct: Bonhoeffer’s diagnosis that our Christianity without repentance is “the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner” is undoubtedly an apt description of much of conservative evangelicalism today, which is itself in great need of repenting and reforming. It is worth noting that even within historic Conservative Evangelicalism in America, there is a plurality of opinions about the need to preach the condemnation of the Law before the recourse of the Gospel; Jonathan Edwards, one of the grandfathers of American Evangelicalism, recounts some self-consciousness over the fact that his own conversation did not follow the order set down by the Puritan Divines -- that is, it did not involve first a terror at the demands of the Law before a sense of the sweetness of the Gospel. But the paragraphs that MacArthur and Johnson spoke in the quotations above simply do not accord with the theology of Law/Gospel laid down in their own Statement. If they believe their statement, they must retract their earlier assertions, and thereby take one step closer to Antinomianism. But if they are unwilling to do that, then they have at least to entertain the possibility that one way in which the repentance of modern evangelicalism must play out is in its complicity in the racism expressed in social structures and institutions today.

III. Theological Error #2 in The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel: A Non-Evangelical Doctrine of Sin

The second theological error of the Statement is a non-evangelical doctrine of Sin. Here the Statement seems to us inconsistent. It claims

“Although families, groups, and nations can sin collectively, and cultures can be predisposed to particular sins, subsequent generations share the collective guilt of their ancestors only if they approve and embrace (or attempt to justify) those sins. Before God each person must repent and confess his or her own sins in order to receive forgiveness. We further deny that one’s ethnicity establishes any necessary connection to any particular sin” (Denial #5).

It is worth noting first here that the logic of this claim is that the collective cultural sin which plagued America is a past issue, and that we who are alive today are in the category of “subsequent generations” who stand ready either to condemn or approve the errors of our fathers, which are, nevertheless, a matter of history and not ongoing. If this is the case, we might ask, when did it become the case that structural and social  racism was abolished?

Here as before, this error can be articulated entirely using the resources of historic Christian orthodoxy. Protestants -- especially Calvinists -- famously believe in Total Depravity. This doctrine means not that human beings are incapable of doing anything other than evil, but rather that the effects of sin on us are total. Ostensibly the authors of the Statement believe the same thing when they assert that “All are depraved in all their faculties” (Affirmation #5)  Sin affects every aspect of our humanity. In Calvin’s original context, he meant this to entail that sin touches human rationality and thereby blinds us to the truths of God and to the fact of our own sin. On this account, the great secret weapon of sin is that it blinds us to itself; it encourages us to act as if we have the ‘God’s eye view’ of the world, as if we do not bring an interpretive lens to scripture or the world. But the category of Total Depravity can be expanded out to include the fallenness not only of human reason, but also of gender and sexuality.

We therefore need eyes to see the particular ways in which our sin plays itself out in all of our faculties. Often those eyes are the eyes of our brothers and sisters, and often those brothers and sisters have used the tools of critical theory in order to help us see. The Statement proceeds as if its authors are not themselves culturally-conditioned, as if they have no need of others to point out their sins -- in short, as if Total Depravity is untrue. This is, as we have said, an un-evangelical and unbiblical doctrine of sin.

The second orthodox Christian resource for understanding sin is Luther’s famous claim from his Lectures on Romans that sin is “man turned in upon himself.” Luther means by this that the individual becomes self-obsessed. This again helps us to specify how sin operates in particular, rather than in general, categories. If I am a man, and my gender is ‘curved in upon itself,’ the result of this will be misogyny. If I am white, and my whiteness is ‘curved in upon itself,’ the result will be racism. And the doctrine of Total Depravity will blind us to every operation of sin like this.

To the humble and teachable, this body of literature represented by critical theory -- which, it must be said, is certainly not a monolithic entity -- need be no more an ‘attack on the sufficiency of scripture’ than are the rebukes of a friend or counselor who can see not just that we have sinned, but also the particular ways in which we have sinned. This literature might help us to see the way that Total Depravity plays itself out through hundreds of years of policies and their attendant ideologies that have caused these false ideas about neutrality to permeate our society from housing to schools to incarceration to hiring practices.  (For those evangelicals who are suspicious of the idea that racism can show up in institutions and structures that disproportionately target one demographic over another, we commend the research discussed in Ta-nehisi Coates’ long article The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.)

Here the usefulness of critical theory can be understood as an articulation of the principle embedded in Isaiah’s doctrine of sin. Isaiah claims: “all we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way, and the Lord has laid on Him, the iniquity of us all” (Is. 53:6). The passage here demonstrates two things: (1) the universality of sinfulness (“all we like sheep have gone astray”), and (2) the way in which particular expressions of sin diverge from each other (“we have turned every one to his own way”). The authors of the Statement see the universality of sin (“because of original sin everyone is born under the curse of God’s law and all break his commandments through sin. There is no difference in the condition of sinners due to age, ethnicity, or sex” (Denial #5). What the statement lacks is the account of the particular divergent expressions of sin -- it can be the case that all are equally sinners, and that this sin finds different expression among different groups, but on this, the Statement is silent. It is precisely this task with which Critical Theory is most helpful. For example, Scripture informs us that the rich will be tempted to oppress the poor (James 2:6). Yet how in particular this will happen varies from society to society. If it is the job of the Christian thinker to take the principles of scripture and interpret the world through them, then the natural question to ask after reading a text like this from James is: “how does this play out not only in society generally, but in my society in particular?” Here critical theory is eye-opening, and it need not be a resource against the scriptures, but as a specification of the Scriptures. C.S. Lewis anticipated this use of scripture in Mere Christianity:

Christianity has not, and does not profess to have, a detailed political programme for applying "Do as you would be done by" to a particular society at a particular moment. It could not have. It is meant for all men at all times, and the particular programme which suited one place or time would not suit another. And, anyhow, that is not how Christianity works. When it tells you to feed the hungry it does not give you lessons in cookery. When it tells you to read the Scriptures it does not give you lessons in Hebrew and Greek, or even in English grammar. It was never intended to replace or supersede the ordinary human arts and sciences; it is rather a director which will set them all to the right jobs, and a source of energy which will give them all new life, if only they will put themselves at its disposal.

At other times, the authors and signers seem to argue as if yes, these structural issues are, in fact, sinful, but eradicating them should not be an emphasis of Christians because we can never be fully healed of sin. So one supporter of the statement argues in the Resources page:

“The fact that many Christians continue to exclaim that “Racism still exists!” – as if racism, a term I dogmatically disapprove of but will use for the sake of this article, should be treated as if it were the attitudinal equivalent of a carton of milk that has reached its expiration date – is testament to the level of naivety that exists in failing to realize that politics and, by association, politicians, is wholly inadequate in meliorating not only the effects of such a mindset, whether individually or systemically, but also the cause of it.”

This is a difficult argument for which to find evidence. For example, most in America consider human slavery, just to pick one example, to have been a grave evil -- and it is quite obvious that it is a grave evil that has been ameliorated by some strange combination of the Holy Spirit brooding over history and outlawing a particular expression of a particular sin. Those evangelicals who signed this letter who also consider themselves to be compelled to abolish abortion in America operate under the same logic: it is, in fact, possible for human laws to restrain the sinfulness of evildoers. This is, of course, the Second Use of the Law on which Protestants of almost every stripe have historically agreed: "by fear of punishment to restrain certain men who are untouched by any care for what is just and right unless compelled by hearing the dire threats in the law" (Institutes of the Christian Religion 2.7.10). Martin Luther King, Jr. was himself echoing this principle of this in a famous statement in support of legislating morality. He said, in a statement that The Gospel Coalition themselves quoted as an apt response to the claim that the law cannot legislate morality, famously quipped: “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also.”

At other points the authors argue as if to say that critical theory is not diagnosing disunity among people, but causing it. Again on the Resources page, in an article entitled No Division in the Body, John MacArthur argues:

“The New Testament never speaks of our unity in Christ as a far-off goal to be pursued or a provisional experiment to be trifled with. Our union with Christ (and therefore with one another) is an eternal spiritual reality that must be embraced, carefully maintained, and guarded against any possible threat. That’s why I’m deeply troubled by the recent torrent of rhetoric about “social justice” in evangelical circles. The jargon is borrowed from secular culture, and it is being employed purposely, irresponsibly in order to segment the church into competing groups—the oppressed and disenfranchised vs. the powerful and privileged.”

But notice the logic of this claim: the Bible says that Christians are truly, now, at every moment since the writing of the Bible, united in Christ. Therefore, anyone who claims otherwise is sowing division. But if this argument holds for 2018, then it holds for 1918 as well -- two years before women were allowed to vote in America, and it holds for 1818 just as equally -- when white Americans bought, sold, and owned their Black brothers and sisters in Christ. Was there ever a moment when there were real failings to live up to the unity of the body? The long history of slavery, colonialism, racism, misogyny in all there forms, demand that we answer yes. But if there was some historical moment where the real divisions within the body of Christ failed to approximate the unity demanded in scripture, then the arguments of the statement writers must be false. The subsequent question becomes: have conditions changed so dramatically as to change that answer? To this we have ample reason to say no. It must also be added as a point of history that Black churches did not come to exist because Black people sought to separate themselves out of some conception of anti-Gospel ethnic solidarity. Many Black Christians in the nineteenth century, of whom Richard Allen is an excellent representative, found their worship to be actively restricted and their well-being actively threatened in white churches and so they sought to build their own communities. White church leaders, instead of repenting of the ways that they restricted the worship of their members, took the easy way out, supporting the exodus of their Black brothers and sisters. If the logic of MacArthur’s argument holds for one of those periods of time, then it holds for all of them. But if we see the argument in this light, then it is clearly mistaken. The unity of the body in Christ is a real spiritual reality, but it is only occasionally recognized socially and politically. It is, then, in the words of Paul to the Ephesians, incumbent upon Christians to “walk worthy of the calling to which you have been called” (Eph. 4:1), which is an imperative that suggests the opposite is possible: we might fail to walk worthy of our calling in various ways, and one of them is failing to recognize socially the unity that we have in Christ spiritually.

Again in the body of the Statement itself, the authors write:

“We reject any teaching that encourages racial groups to view themselves as privileged oppressors or entitled victims of oppression. While we are to weep with those who weep, we deny that a person’s feelings of offense or oppression necessarily prove that someone else is guilty of sinful behaviors, oppression, or prejudice” (Denial #12).

Presumably they make this argument because the categories of ‘privileged oppressors’ and ‘entitled victims’ impose yet more disunity on the body of Christ. But here again the historical argument from above applies: if it is true that there are no true victims or oppressors, it is either true necessarily -- which is to say, it is true of all moments in history equally, or it is true by virtue of some historical development. If it is the former, then this statement has nothing to say to those people who were ever slaves or who are even now slaves, and it must beg to differ with the repeated Biblical claims that “the Lord is a stronghold for the oppressed” (Ps. 9:9); “The Lord works righteousness and justice for all who are oppressed” (Ps. 103:6); The Lord is the one “who executes justice for the oppressed” (Ps. 146:7), and on and on. To be oppressed is to have justice denied to one. Justice is being given one’s due. Therefore, to be oppressed is not to be given one’s due -- in other words, not to be given that to which you are legitimately entitled. How this argument and these scripture passages above give us anything other than the endorsement that some are, in fact, “entitled victims of oppression” is difficult to see.

IV. Conclusion: A Generational Moment in Evangelicalism

A generation of young evangelicals is arising who hold to historic Christian orthodoxy orthodoxy and do not see that orthodoxy as at all incompatible with the recognition that structural, systemic injustices exist. We, the authors, count ourselves as among their number. We have argued that many of the resources of critical theory are, in fact, powerful diagnostic tools for understanding how sin functions in social ways. Many of us came of age in a generation that was rediscovering the historic theological roots of American Evangelicalism -- the “young, restless, and reformed” generation. It is our love for that theology which inclines us away from the liberal Protestant Union Seminary’s response to the Statement. And we are likewise encouraged that many of the leading figures in American evangelicalism -- particularly in the "young, restless, and reformed" movement did not place their signatures on this statement. We consider this a hopeful sign.

But we are have titled this ‘an evangelical response’ because we still intend to fight for the legacy of American evangelicalism, rather than surrendering it to those who would insist that the Christian gospel has nothing to say about improving the lives of those who are oppressed even in this temporal life. The authors of the Statement say: “We submit these affirmations and denials for public consideration, not with any pretense of ecclesiastical authority, but with an urgency that is mixed with deep joy and sincere sorrow.” It is in this spirit of public consideration that we have written this response. Our own plea is that the authors of this statement might consider that those with whom they disagree are also attempting to discern the guiding of the Holy Spirit in these matters, and likely do not deserve such snarky epithets as ‘woker than thou evangelicals,’ and ‘our bright thinkboys,’ If the signers of this statement are truly fearful that their opponents -- especially among the millennial generation of evangelicals -- will slide down the slippery slope of theological liberalism, then it is our hope that they may have the grace to realize also that sometimes people fall down slopes not because they are slippery, but because they are pushed. Would they be willing to entertain for a moment the possibility that they might be complicit in doing precisely this -- at the moment when American evangelicalism is realizing the fact that we have failed to think through the social implications of our gospel, they are content to push millennial evangelicals down this slope by asserting that any recognition of the fact that Christ came to save bodies as well as souls (which the church has always believed) demands that we abandon our evangelicalism and embrace theological liberalism? We refuse to acknowledge this false dichotomy. Evangelicalism has always, at its best, been both a movement of personal holiness (in the style of Jonathan Edwards) and of social transformation (in the style of William Wilberforce). We see no need now to demand that these two strands of our movement diverge. They are united in the gospel, and they can be united in the movement of American evangelicalism.

Malcolm Foley has the last word here:

It must be noted, also, that for many Black evangelicals like myself (Malcolm) who still take the name (Malcolm), to reach out and attempt this cross-conversation is difficult. It has been attempted for centuries. Black Christians spoke out against the evils of African slavery, including Lemuel Haynes, David Walker and others. Black evangelicals spoke out against lynching and Jim Crow in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as outlined in part in Mary Beth Mathews’s Doctrine and Race. But the most frustrating aspect of studying African American religious history is the deafness of the White pastors that are constantly cried out to. It is that deafness that inspires and encourages the continuation of nationalistic options and the shutting down of “conversation”. If I ever choose to disengage from reaching out, it is not because I have acquiesced to some heresy of racial supremacy. It is because I, like many of my Black brothers and sisters, am tired of constantly trying to plead with deaf ears. I am tired of reading about my brothers and sisters during the Civil Rights Movement who were constantly told to wait because there were issues more pressing than their livelihoods. I am tired of reading about my brothers and sisters under the invisible terror regime of lynching who cried out to white pulpits to join them in denunciation of evil and who were met with accusation and diminution. I am tired of hearing my brothers and sisters now crying out about mass incarceration and police brutality and receiving the same responses. This is our national history. And it is tiring. To demand that I engage with you is to demand something that I and many others have already done...and in many cases, you have not listened. We ask that you do. But even if you do not, we will continue to battle the growth of sin and sorrow, both individually and corporately, personally and systemically. Because we affirm with the songwriter that Christ has come to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found. And as those united to Him by the Holy Spirit, we will be messengers of His grace, ministers of His blessings, and servants of His people...as far as the curse is found.

We Die, and God Dies with Us

A relatively new forum of Christian thought published through Dort College, titled In All Things, just published my most recent piece. This piece is a devotional/theological meditation on Cyril of Alexandria and Good Friday. An excerpt:

When Nietzsche’s madman proclaimed that “God is dead and we have killed him,” or when Time magazine ran a cover story asking “Is God Dead?”, neither of these were proclaiming facts alien to the Christian faith. It was the Christian faith that first informed the world that God died and that we killed him. What the Christian faith can say that Nietzsche and Time may not is that God has a curious habit of not staying dead when we kill him. The inexplicable and unexpected rise of Christianity in the majority world during the 20th and 21st centuries, precisely when it was largely assumed that the world was secularizing and God was dead, shows that He has yet maintained his stubborn habit of “rising again on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.”

Read the rest here.

Exodus and Illiberalism

The current June/July 2018 issue of First Things magazine includes my letter-to-the-editor in response to Patrick Deneen's April 2018 essay "The Ignoble Lie." In that letter I briefly draw attention to the fact that while I agree that Deneen is right in arguing that founding myths are of crucial importance in a people's self-understanding, I would propose a different founding myth than he himself does: the Exodus. I intend to extend this argument significantly in an essay for the 2018 issue of Fare Forward magazine, to be published in several months. For now, my letter-to-the-editor is as follows:

Patrick Deneen’s characterization of Plato’s noble lie, in an otherwise excellent essay, nonetheless overlooks one crucial feature of the story: the autochthony myth. Socrates says his citizens should be told that “the earth, which is their mother, sent them up. And now, as though the land they are in were a mother and nurse, they must plan for and defend it, if anyone attacks.” The opposite of this autochthony myth, perhaps, is the Exodus story, in which the inhabitants of the promised land, though they are a chosen people, nevertheless receive the land as a gift. This story also demands an ethical response—but not mobilization against foreigners. Instead, Moses informs the people that they are to “love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 10:19).

The Exodus story explicitly cautions us against the dangers of inherited privilege, of which the contemporary egalitarian invitation to “check your privilege” is merely an imitation. Moses warns:

And it shall be, when the Lord thy God shall have brought thee into the land which he sware unto thy fathers, . . . to give thee great and goodly cities, which thou buildedst not, And houses full of all good things, which thou filledst not, and wells digged, which thou diggedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not; when thou shalt have eaten and be full, Then beware lest thou forget the Lord, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage. (Deut. 6:10–12)

Deuteronomy’s response to the recognition of unearned privilege is not the well-intentioned yet ultimately futile attempt to empty oneself of those privileges (admittedly a practice with roots in Christian kenosis), but rather, the practice of the virtue of gratitude.

If the danger of unbridled meritocracy is that the elite will come to think of the misfortune of the poor as deserved, and likewise their own prosperity, then the danger of Plato’s noble lie—and John Winthrop’s variation on it—is that God has appointed the poor to their station, and they are therefore obliged to stay there. Plato’s story of the admixture of metal with souls is functionally a caste system, and Christianity has a storied history of opposing such systems wherever they may appear.

Christianity teaches both that God appoints us to our stations, and also that there is no prohibition against improving them as we are able. To bondservants, Paul recommends, “If you can gain your freedom, do so” (1 Cor. 7:21). This is the logic of the Exodus narrative applied to social stratification and inequality. Perhaps it affords a point of common ground with those egalitarians so eager to warn against the dangers of unearned privilege today.

Justin Hawkins New Haven, Connecticut