Responding to Secularism

From Seed & Harvest 32, no. 5 (Oct–Dec 2009)—the magazine of Trinity School for Ministry, which is the strongly evangelical seminary of the Episcopal Church:

“Responding to Secularism” is by Justyn Terry and offers four things he learned in the UK while at the New Wine renewal conference near Bristol. These conferences drew 32,000 people this year,

plus thousands of teenagers at their Soul Survivor camps. These numbers grow each year, partly as a result of church planting. It is one of many signs of the Spirit’s work to renew and mobilized the church there. The church in England was slow to respond to secularism and has paid a high price for it. As secularism becomes ever more prominent in the US, what can we learn from mistakes made in England about how best to respond to it? I would say there are four main things:

Terry’s four things essentially are these:

1. “Seek to bring less committed churchgoers to a deep commitment to Christ.” As secularism grows they are more vulnerable to dropping away and also harder to reclaim.
2. “Be intentional about forming the children and young people in the church. They need to be taught the Christian faith at age-appropriate levels so that they come to understand its depth and power. That kind of serious catechesis was largely lost in England.”
3. “Maintain Christian colleges that offer undergraduate and post-graduate education from a Gospel perspective. English universities all became secular in the 19th century and increasingly so in the 20^th.”
4. “Take adult education seriously. As secular ideas become increasingly common currency, Christians need to be able to give good reasons for the faith that is in them.”

Book Notes

Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I, by Stephen Hampton (Oxford, 2008)

The author says:

This book grew out of a doctoral thesis on the thought of five post-Reformation divines: Thomas Barlow, William Beveridge, John Edwards, John Pearson, and Thomas Tully. That research opened my eyes to the strength of the conforming Reformed tradition within the later Stuart Church, a tradition which has, for various reasons, been overlooked by most of those who have written on the period. This book is intended as a corrective to that neglect.

And he also says:

I am especially grateful to the staff of the British Library, the Bodleian Library, Durham Cathedral Library, Durham University Library [Dr. Brad Matthews, note these two from your Durham life], and the libraries of Exeter College and the Queen’s College, Oxford.

Some chapter titles are: 1) “The Anglican Reformed Tradition after the Restoration”; 4) “The Reformed Defence of Trinitarian Orthodoxy”; 5) “The Slide into Subordinationism”; 7) “The Reformed Defence of Thomist Theism.” The final, eighth chapter is “Conclusions.” The bibliography is divided into manuscript sources, primary sources, and secondary sources.

Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries, by Everett Ferguson (Eerdmans, 2009)

This 953-page work (plus 20 pp. of preliminaries) has 55 chapters, all but the last—titled “Conclusions”—fall under seven Parts: 1) Antecedents to Christian Baptism; 2) Baptism in the New Testament; 3) The Second Century; 4) The Third Century to Nicaea (325); 5) The Fourth Century; 6) The Fifth Century; and 7) Baptisteries. There are six Indexes: Biblical passages; Greek & Roman authors and writings; Jewish authors and writings; Non-canonical Christian authors and writings; Modern authors; and Subjects.

Here are both some quotes and my own distillations from chapter 55, “Conclusions”:

Both Jesus’ command in Mt. 28:19 and example (Mt. 3:13-17 and parallels) commonly were the basis for Christian baptism, which

had its precedent in the baptism administered by John the Baptizer, which seemingly was engaged in also by Jesus and his disciples (John 3:26; 4:1-2). Christian baptism was distinguished from John’s in its call for faith in Jesus, its being administered in Jesus’ name, and its connection with the Holy Spirit. John’s baptism, in its turn, had its background in Jewish religious washings but differed from them in its eschatological call for repentance, its one-time exercise, and its being administered […] and not self-administered.

Christians adopted βάπτισμα rather than using “the word for pagan and Jewish dippings”—βαπτισμός.

François Bovon identifies these common elements in early baptismal theology: baptism is a work of God and of humans and a sign of the covenant; baptism is a sign of the work of Christ, an actualization of the redemptive work of Christ; and it was an efficacious sign.

Among early Christian authors

there is remarkable agreement on the benefits received in baptism. And these are present already in the New Testament texts. Two […] are often repeated: the person baptized received forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38). The two fundamental doctrinal interpretations of baptism are sharing in the death and resurrection of Christ, with the attendant benefits and responsibilities (Rom. 6:3-4), and regeneration from above (John 3:5), with its related ideas.

Other features are based on Gal. 3:27 (clothing with Christ), Col. 1:13 (deliverance), “and enlightenment (Heb. 6:4?).” Also present but less frequent are marriage to Christ (Eph. 5:25-27) “and a contract (more often associated with the renunciations and confession of faith – 1 Pet. 3:21).” Building on 2 Cor. 1:22 and Eph. 1:13, “those who brought spiritual circumcision into relation to baptism made the equation most often not of baptism itself with circumcision but saw baptism as the occasion for the inward circumcision by the Spirit.”

The New Testament and early Christian literature are virtually unanimous in ascribing a saving significance to baptism. [Here Ferguson’s footnote is to TDNT 1:540-43.] If anything, the early church exaggerated this aspect of baptism’s significance. […] Only a few (fringe) heretics of the ancient church tried to dehydrate the new birth. The main variation among mainstream Christian authors was in how strongly different individuals affirmed the necessity of baptism for salvation. The major explicit exception to this requirement was for martyrs who died for a confession of faith prior to receiving baptism. […] Baptism, however, was not seen as a human work but as God’s work, and the salvation in baptism was premised on the saving effect of Christ’s death on the cross and his victorious resurrection.

Ferguson says that, “though not mentioned in the earliest sources,” nudity in baptism likely was fairly common and gives reasons. And, triple immersion was “the nearly universal custom” in the period AD 200s through 400s. “A laying on of hands accompanied baptism from a quite early period.” Before AD 200, anointing with oil as a separate act was added to the baptismal rite. And, from about AD 150 baptisms were followed “by the newly baptized joining in the congregational celebration of the eucharist.” Other early symbolic acts were the taking of milk and honey indicating food for the newborn child in Christ (milk) and for the promised land (honey). By the 200s the baptized were re-clothed with white garments, signifying the purity of being clothed with Christ. “In general we can say that there was a great deal of similarity in the baptismal rites during the patristic period.”

Ferguson observes that infant baptism may well have occurred before the latter part of the second century, but “there is no firm evidence.” “Many replace the historical silence by appeal to theological or sociological considerations.” “The most plausible explanation for the origin of infant baptism is found in the emergency baptism of sick children expected to die soon so that they would be assured of entrance into the kingdom of heaven. There was a slow extension of the practice of baptizing babies as a precautionary measure” and it did not become the usual practice until the fifth century.

In the Augustinian-Pelagian controversy infant baptism was a principal support for the doctrine of original sin, rather than the other way around, since baptism was universally recognized as for forgiveness of sins. With the victory of Augustine’s arguments original sin became the reason for infant baptism in the western church.

The development of the view of baptism as objectively effective paralleled the development of infant baptism. If baptism is defined as consisting of water and the Trinitarian formula, then conscious faith and obedience become less important. In the absence of a personal confession of faith and renunciation of the devil other justifications were offered—the faith of the church; the guarantee by the sponsors that the child would be raised in the church; the child considered a believer by reason of receiving the sacrament of faith (baptism).

Ferguson is Professor of Church History Emeritus at Abilene Christian University and affiliated with the Churches of Christ.

Competent Christian Counseling, edited by Timothy Clinton and George Ohlschlager, Vol. 1: Foundations & Practices of Compassionate Soul Care (Waterbrook Press, 2002)

At the head of the title page is “American Association of Christian Counselors” (which holds the copyright). This first volume is over 800 pages. Larry Crabb says “Christian counseling is facing both dusk and dawn. The era of professionalism with a biblical overlay is over. The season of Biblically defined competence is at hand. It’s a good time! Competent Christian Counseling effectively announces dawn.”

Image and Word in the Theology of John Calvin, by Randall C. Zachman (U. of Notre Dame Press, 2007)

This is a remarkable work. Calvin’s opposition to images is not what many—both within and outside the Reformed community—for so long have made it out to be.

There is no question that the thesis of this book appears to contradict not only commonly received impressions of Calvin but also a good deal of scholarly analysis of Calvin’s thought. There does in fact appear to be abundant evidence in Calvin’s writings that he denied that the invisible God can be seen, and in which he exhorts us to hear the Word of God. [p. 3]  Even scholars who wish to highlight the centrality of the sacraments in Calvin’s theology emphasize the verbal nature of the sacraments for Calvin. […] In spite of the apparent consensus that Calvin privileges hearing over seeing, recent scholarship has begun to notice the importance of visual manifestation for Calvin. [p. 5]  Calvin scholars have also noted the essential interdependence of manifestation and proclamation in Calvin’s theology, though usually only in isolated instances [p. 6].   As I show in the following chapters, the interdependence of the Word and work of God, or proclamation and manifestation, is not present in a few isolated topics of Calvin’s theology but is central to the way he thinks theologically. [p. 7]  Calvin’s thought about self-manifestation continued to develop throughout his career, but it is important to note that he demonstrated an interest in this issue from the beginning of his writing career in 1532. Of particular note is Calvin’s interest in the phenomenon of “beholding an image in a mirror” in his earliest written work, the Commentary on Seneca’s treatise De Clementia. [p. 9]

Image and Word in the Theology of John Calvin has two parts. Part I, titled “The Living Images of God the Creator” comprises three chapters; Part II, “The Living Images of God the Redeemer” comprises chapters four through fourteen. The Introduction precedes all. Here’s more:

The goal of this study is fourfold. First […] to reawaken interest in the self-manifestation of God in creation in Protestant theology, which is especially timely in light of our current ecological crisis, to counter the one-sided emphasis on the proclamation of Christ introduced by twentieth-century theologians such as Karl Barth and Rudolph Bultmann. […] The feelings of awe and reverence that the image of God in creation awakened in Calvin are a far cry from the heartless manipulation of the natural world for our own profit that one sees in modern industrialized societies. Calvin’s countless exhortations […] would be a serious check on the participation of Christians in the denigration of the environment.

Second, by showing the centrality to seeing as well as hearing in Calvin’s theology, this study hopes to create avenues of further research by those interested in theological aesthetics, and to encourage a greater appreciation of visual contemplation in Protestant theology, including efforts of liturgical renewal in the Reformed and Presbyterian traditions. Given Calvin’s awareness that the fountain of every good thing manifests itself in beauty and truth together, it is not surprising to see one of the heirs of Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, making beauty central to his understanding of God. Contrary to the suspicions of Luther and Kierkegaard, Calvin shows that it is in fact possible to combine a radical theology of the cross with an equally radical emphasis on visual manifestation.

Third, the essential conjunction of manifestation and proclamation with regard to the knowledge of God is mirrored by Calvin’s attention to the words, gestures, and actions of others as they communicate with us. […] Calvin’s attention to gestures and actions would be a salutary corrective to an overemphasis on words, and his attention to the communication and strengthening of the pious affections would be a healthy corrective to the neglect of affectivity in modern Protestant theology, which has been deeply influenced by the suspicion of pietism in Ritschl and Hermann, as well as Bultmann and Barth. Calvin’s increasingly positive assessment of gestures, rites, and ceremonies also opens avenues of access to Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Anglican understandings of worship.

Fourth […] by showing the importance of manifestation in both creation and redemption, this study hopes to demonstrate the ecumenical promise of Calvin’s theology. […] This study shows that Calvin thinks in terms of the essential interrelationship of manifestation and proclamation, which may provide interesting bridges between Protestant and [non-Protestant…] Churches, without ignoring the major differences between them. (pp. 19ff)

Book Review: “Losing My Religion”

In the September 8, 2009 issue of The Christian Century (vol. 126, no. 18: pp. 38–39),Valerie Weaver-Zercher writes an insightful review of journalist William Lobdell’s Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America—and Found Unexpected Peace (Collins, 2009). [Full text available for Covenant students & staff.] She says:

It is unfortunate that Lobdell could not arrive at a more imaginative, more nuanced and less binary response to theodicy and a corrupt church than his decision to “stop wrestling with the mysteries of Christianity.” (p. 39)

She also mentions the book’s epilogue in which Lobdell tells of a talk he delivered at a Mormon conference, noting in the talk that DNA evidence calls into question the Mormon belief that American Indians are descendants of Hebrew peoples, after which one of the Mormon speakers, Clifton Jolley, launched into a tirade and said “After we have been defeated and all our stories proven untrue we will perhaps come to know the more important reason and the only question that ever is—not whether the stories are true, but whether we are true to our stories.” Lobdell is incredulous at this and deems it pathetic religious apologetics. But the reviewer says:

If it is possible to set aside the bizarre nature of Jolley’s other remarks, I find Jolley’s point about being true to our stories illuminating. What Lobdell misses in his dismissal of Jolley’s cryptic claim—and of faith in general—is that everyone is true to some story, whether or not it is the story of faith. They may be true to the story that consumption satisfies desire, or that achievement is the measure of a person’s worth, or that war makes peace, or that the material world is all there is. Such stories also command allegiance, regardless of their verifiability or veracity. Fidelity to a farfetched story does not mean that Christians are wishful thinkers, as Lobdell (kindly) suggests and as [Christopher] Hitchens (less kindly) proclaims. It simply means that we acknowledge the story that we have chosen to honor, rather than claiming that we don’t have one. (p. 39)

Testing out the YouTube waters

Tonight the Covenant Library got a YouTube channel. It’s our intention to begin producing screencasts and other videos on how to use some of the databases and library resources. YouTube will likely be used to host these tutorials. For now, we’ve posted a short demo of doing a Scripture Citation search in the ATLA Religion database that we threw together in a couple minutes. Future videos will be edited for brevity and include narration.

Writer’s Reference Center Now Available

After receiving positive feedback from our recent trial, the Covenant Library has begun a subscription to Writer’s Reference Center. This database from Facts On File, provides the following writing aids:

• Writing References: more than 100,000 definitions from over a dozen thematic dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other reference books from Facts On File, including:
  1. the comprehensive Facts On File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, Fourth Edition.
  2. the highly reviewed Dictionary of Literary and Thematic Terms, Second Edition.
• Writing Resources: hundreds of essays covering grammar, style, research, and more, presented in an easy-to-use format, allowing users to both learn new concepts and quickly find answers to specific usage and style questions.
• Special Features: specially selected features highlighting important topics for writers; featured words and phrases helping writers expand their vocabulary and depth of understanding.

This is a great tool to help hone your writing skills. Try it out today, and continue to send us your feedback.

November Acquisitions

The November acquisitions list has been posted to our website. Included are a number of works targeted for the new MARC and MAWM degree programs, as well as additional materials for the MAEM Curriculum Resource Center. Donated items, replacements, and additional copies are also present. Here are a few highlights:

• Religious literacy: what every American needs to know—and doesn’t by Stephen Prothero
• What is economic justice? Biblical and secular perspectives contrasted by Andrew Hartropp
• The day God made it rain: I Kings 17-18 for children written by Loyal Kolbrek and illustrated by Herb Halpern Productions
• Victimology and the apoptosis of Black liberation theology by Anthony Bradley
• By faith alone: answering the challenges to the doctrine of justification by Gary L. W. Johnson and Guy P. Waters
• Palm Sunday and Holy Week services by Robin Knowles Wallace
• The challenge of the eldership: a handbook for the elders of the church by Donald J. MacNair
• Preaching in the small membership church by Lewis A. Parks

Be sure to check out the full list.

Free Writing Resources from Harvard

Perhaps the oldest formal writing center at an American university, Harvard’s Writing Center offers a valuable trove of free instructional handouts for writers young and old on their website. On the “Writing Resources” page, visitors will find over a dozen helpful handouts with titles such as “How to Read an Assignment”, “Essay Structure”, “Developing a Thesis”, “Summary”, and “Revising the Draft”. Each piece is written in clear prose, and the advice offered is sound and practical.

Harvard Writing Resources

Book Notes

Calvin: A Brief Guide to His Life and Thought, by Willem van ’t Spijker (Westminster John Knox, 2009)

The author is “one of today’s leading John Calvin scholars” and author of many books (the vast majority in Dutch and, unlike this one, not translated at least as yet—including one on the Westminster Assembly). He also has taught at the Theological University at Apeldoorn. Professor Thomas Davis of Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis says: “This brief guide is long on insight and information. In a very readable manner it serves as a ready entry into the life of Calvin, fully embedding that life in the currents of sixteenth-century society and culture. The life and work of Calvin is on fully contextualized display here, as is the erudition of the author and the skill of the translator. Highly recommended.”

Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross, by Michael J. Gorman (Eerdmans, 2001)

Asbury’s M. Robert Mulholland says: “Gorman masterfully conjoins knowledge and vital piety [… and] interacts creatively and effectively with past and current scholarship on Paul and Pauline theology, and he provides cogent arguments against some of the special-interest readings of Paul. This book has the potential to challenge both the academy and the church to a reconsideration of Paul that could revolutionize Pauline scholarship and transform the life of the church in the world.”

Genesis, by Bill T. Arnold, New Cambridge Bible Commentary (Cambridge, 2009)

The author teaches at Asbury. He did Who Were the Babylonians? (‘04) and 1 & 2 Sam. in The NIV Application Commentary (’03); he co-authored (with J. Choi) A Guide to Biblical Hebrew Syntax (’03) and co-edited (with H.G.M. Williamson) the Dictionary of the Old Testament: Historical Books (‘05). The series builds on its popular predecessor, the Cambridge Bible Commentary.

Highlights from Faith and Philosophy

Faith and Philosophy 26, no. 1 (January 2009)

“As far as I know, this book is the all-time most sophisticated, well developed, and plausible defense of the idea that Christians may rationally believe and know apparently contradictory doctrines.”  So begins a review of James Anderson’s Paradox in Christian Theology: An Analysis of Its Presence, Character, and Epistemic Status (Paternoster, 2007). Although the reviewer sees no future in Anderson’s “mysterian defense of Christian belief” in the Trinity and Incarnation, for example (which Anderson deems paradoxes), “others will take it as presenting an exciting, well-motivated, and genuinely different apologetic option.” Anderson “relentlessly dismisses recent attempts to render these doctrines seemingly consistent, by the likes of Barth, Rahner, Cornelius Plantinga, Swinburne, Brown, Martinich, Rea, Brower, Feenstra, Davis, and Morris.” Anderson believes such efforts to avoid both paradox and heterodoxy can’t help failing on either count or even both.

DePauw U’s Erik Wielenberg writes “In Defense of Non-natural, Non-theistic Moral Realism,” in which he argues “that there are sui generis objective ethical facts that do not reduce to natural or supernatural facts.” And, “objective morality does not require an external foundation of any kind.” He defends this against objections posed by William Wainwright, William Lane Craig, and J. P. Moreland. Other articles deal with Kant’s religious argument for the existence of God, with “The Sense of Deity and Begging the Question with Ontological and Cosmological Arguments,” and one on Kierkegaard and natural reason, and one on inductive evidence.

Faith and Philosophy 26, no. 2 (April 2009)

“The Vice of Pride” by Baylor’s Robert C. Roberts clarifies “pride by distinguishing it from emotions that are symptomatic of it and from virtuous dispositions that go by the same name, [and also] by identifying the disposition (humility) that is its virtue-counterpart, and by distinguishing” the “kinds” of pride.

In “A Leftovian Trinity” William Hasker argues that Brian Leftow’s proposed “Latin” doctrine of the Trinity—according to which “the Father just is God” and so are the Son and Spirit—is unorthodox because it renders the three identical. A “minor modification would enable Leftow to avoid this untoward consequence.” But even then his doctrine would “retain a strongly modalistic flavor” by implying, e.g., that Jesus’ prayers are instances of God-as-Son addressing himself, i.e. God-as-Father.  Hasker’s article begins: “The past half-century has seen a revival and outpouring of theological work on the doctrine of the Trinity that may be unmatched since the early centuries of Christianity.”

“Perhaps the most interesting and fruitful development in recent epistemology has been the renewal of interest in the intellectual virtues.” So begins a review of Intellectual Virtues: an Essay in Regulative Epistemology, by Robert C. Roberts and W. Jay Wood (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007). The reviewer is St. Olaf College’s Anthony Rudd. Because other books have tended to address general issues that this new work treats in Part One (the importance of the intellectual virtues, “their relation to the goods of intellectual inquiry,” etc.), it is Part Two that makes this book distinctive, dealing with the specific virtues themselves: Love of Knowledge, Firmness, Courage and Caution, Humility, Generosity, etc. And what the authors have to say is “fascinating, thought-provoking, and very readable.” The reviewer says that their “critique of traditional epistemology” and “their call for a reorientation of the discipline towards the regulative and the humanly relevant is enormously valuable.”  Other reviewed books deal with Pascal’s wager, immortality, the liberal conscience, John Locke (a new biography), the birth of secular ethics, and The Meaning of Theism.

Please Don’t Reshelve the Books

The library staff have noticed that a lot of books, especially in Reference, are getting put back on the shelves in the wrong place. This is one reason why we ask everyone not to reshelve books. The LC call number system can be a little tricky and can trip up even the sharpest person unless great care is taken. We understand that many of you feel bad about not cleaning up after yourself, but a misshelved book is effectively lost, and that doesn’t help anyone.

Furthermore, even if you are 100% sure that you know exactly where a book belongs, we still ask you not to reshelve it. The reason for this is because the library likes to keep track of which books are getting used on-site. When the library staff reshelve books, we scan each book to indicate in the library system that it has been used. This helps us make decisions about what kinds of books to buy, replace, or remove in the future. Therefore, by leaving books on the designated return carts and shelves, you are providing valuable data that helps the library serve you better.

So the next time you’re in the library, please remember to leave the reshelving to the library staff. We promise we won’t think you’re being lazy. On the contrary, by refraining from reshelving you will have helped both the staff and your fellow students.