Christianity in Britain

In the latest issue of Anvil (vol. 16, no. 2), David Bebbington (a leading historian of evangelicalism) writes the lead article “Evangelical Trends, 1959-2009” (pp. 93–106), focusing on Britain, where over the years he sees a “decline in anti-Catholicism, Keswick teaching, premillennial eschatology, traditional missionary-mindedness and internal unity.” On the other hand, evangelicals grew as a proportion of their denominations, broadened their views, acquired ecumenical interest, and witnessed growth in the Reformed, charismatic, and black church sectors. Divisive gender and socio-political issues arose.

Open Evangelicals were generally much happier with contemporary approaches to biblical hermeneutics than members of Reform; charismatic churches were more likely to run Alpha courses while Reform favored Christianity Explored; there was normally a much more structured liturgy in an open than in a charismatic congregation; and so on. Underlying the differences […] was a more fundamental cultural orientation. Reform [I’m construing this as I would “Reformed”] promoted a logo-centric modernity, stressing accurate teaching, efficient ecclesiastical structures and resistance to contemporary fashions for the sake of the gospel. Charismatics embraced a postmodern delight in variety, authenticity and relevance to felt needs. The open grouping welcomed insights from the modern and the postmodern, being deliberately eclectic. Attitudes to cultural change fostered markedly contrasting stances. The former unity of Evangelicalism had been broken. (pp. 104–105)

In the same issue, “Britain Today: How we came to be here and what we can do about it” (pp. 107–122) by Michael Nazir-Ali looks especially at “the state of the family, the rise of homemade spiritualities and the phenomenon of scientific reductionism” (p. 107).

[The author then] sets out a vision for how the church can serve the nation by reversing our amnesia about our Christian heritage (especially in education), bringing Christian values and virtues into the public sphere and the marketplace, making our worship visible, and renewing our commitment to mission and evangelism rooted in friendship and witness. (p. 107)

Other articles deal with vibrant Anglicanism in Africa and with an analysis of the Church of England and ways to turn around its decline. Both articles have broader application. Abstracts for all the articles can be found on Anvil’s website.

Book Notes

Aquinas the Augustinian, edited by Michael Dauphinais, Barry David, and Matthew Levering (Catholic University of America Press, 2007)

Dauphinais and Levering are co-editors of Reading John with St. Thomas Aquinas from this same press (2005) and of Knowing the Love of Christ: An Introduction to the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame, 2002). In this new book, we have eleven essays by as many contributors, who represent five nationalities (of the 3 editors only Levering contributes an essay). The influence of St. Augustine’s thought on Aquinas is “well known. With the exception of particular philosophical controversies, however, relatively little research has been done in this area.” This book brings to our understanding of Aquinas “a renewed awareness of his extraordinary indebtedness to his fifth-century teacher.” Summaries of medieval theology that see Aquinas “as a follower of Aristotle over the traditional” Augustinians of his day are simply misleading.

Calvinus sacrarum literarum interpers: Papers of the International Congress on Calvin Research, edited by Herman J. Selderhuis, Reformed Historical Theology series, volume 5 (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008)

Eighteen essays fall under four headings:

“Exegesis” has two essays, one on Calvin as a translator as shown in his 1557 Psalms commentary, and the other titled “John Calvin’s Nonliteral Exegesis” which focuses on his allegorical interpretation—but mentions the literal as well as four additional nonliteral modes:  a) replacement of problematic texts with meanings from other biblical texts; b) inferring of the author’s or character’s thoughts; c) discernment of rhetorical devices; and d) typological.

“Theology” comprises seven essays. Wim Janse is Professor of Reformation History at the Free University in Amsterdam and his “Calvin’s Eucharistic Theology” caught my eye. He opens by distilling what he will present. Here goes an attempt to convey the gist of the distilling…

[…] My own favourite one-liner is: Calvin’s pneumatological instrumentalism moved between the Scylla of Luther’s sacramental realism and the Charybdis of Zwingli’s spiritualistic symbolism. Decidedly helpful is Brian A. Gerrish’s famous characterization of Calvin’s, Bullinger’s and Zwingli’s Eucharistic views as, respectively, symbolic instrumentalism, symbolic parallelism, and symbolic memorialism. I would say that, as in all of Calvin’s theology, these also center around the bipolarity and simultaneity of God’s being both far removed and very close. […]

However, these types of summaries give rise to misunderstandings. […] In spite of Calvin’s own —polemical—claim of consistency, his Eucharistic theology is neither the sum total nor the common denominator of all his pronouncements between 1536 and 1564.  […]

Protestant Reformed Theological Journal

Here are some highlights from the November 2008 issue of Protestant Reformed Theological Journal (vol. 42, no. 1):

• Angus Stewart writes the third part of his article “John Calvin’s Integrated Covenant Theology.”
• Pastor James A. Laning writes the first part of an article titled “The Hermeneutics of Dispensationalism.”
• PCA Pastor Eugene Case writes the first part of an article titled “Survey of Southern Presbyterian History” (and in this part he takes the history up to the late 18^th century). Case wrote this based on his lectures at the Seminary of the Protestant Reformed Churches in April 2008 but went back to add footnotes.
• “Handopening” is the title of an article by Russell Dykstra. The title is the English rendition of a Dutch term meaning the requests by vacant-pulpit congregations for permission from classis [presbytery] to begin the process of calling a minister. The Protestant Reformed inherited this from the Christian Reformed (which they were part of until 1924), but with greater local church autonomy they eventually abandoned the practice and did so years before the CRC did in 1957. (In some Reformed bodies the classis has considerably less authority over congregations and even clergy and ordinands than presbyteries do in PCA polity, which itself is “grass roots” compared to the more “top-down” PC(USA).)
• Professor Barrett Gritters writes part one of an article titled “Music in Worship: The Reformation’s Neglected Legacy.”

Body, Soul, and Human Life

In the September issue of Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith (vol. 61, no. 3), the book Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible by Joel Green (Baker Academic, 2008) is reviewed by Talbot’s Scott Rae (pp. 191–194). Taking up serious grad study in neuroscience in mid-career as a NT prof, Green calls this book a “progress report” on his interdisciplinary work. Rae says…

[Green’s work is a] biblical defense of monism, or nonreductive physicalism, seeing human persons as unified, embodied wholes consisting of nothing more than their material “stuff.”

Green raises a number of important questions, which include the uniqueness of human beings, the grounding for human worth and morality, decision-making and free will, the focus of salvation, and views of life after death. […] Most chapters, except for the final one, begin with challenges to traditional theological views from the neurosciences, followed by lengthy, detailed, and well-documented explorations of biblical texts, attempting to demonstrate that his Christian monism is consistent with the Bible.  […]

[…Rae observes that] three different Nobel prize winning scientists (John Eccles, a substance dualist; Roger Sperry, a property dualist; and Francis Crick, a physicalist) all are quite aware of the neurosciences, yet that field cannot settle the debate. In fairness to Green, he is not claiming that the sciences settle the question, but it is clear that his exposure to the neurosciences is what is driving his re-reading of the Bible. […] I would challenge Green to point out a single discovery in the neurosciences that the substance dualist cannot accommodate.

Green then responds to Rae’s review (pp. 194–196)! He is glad for interaction with Rae, but says Rae’s claim about rereading the Bible in light of the neurosciences is wrong.  Green says that unlike those who see the NT writers as culturally-determined dualists, he takes seriously “the degree to which even Greek influence in the first-century Roman world was monist in its view of the human person” and that in any case it was Israel’s Scriptures that influenced the NT. And unlike those who see a real problem between the Bible and the neurosciences, he does not, and he cannot figure out why Rae deems him a “nonreductive physicalist” or as someone who views humans as nothing more than material “stuff” (which Green considers an egregious caricature). Green also wonders why Rae and other dualists are attracted to the writings of N. T. Wright and try to find support there, in view of Wright’s anthropological monism. “Over and over in Surprised by Hope, Wright draws a sharp line of demarcation between body-soul dualism and biblical faith.”

Christian Perspectives on the City

The theme of the summer 2009 issue of Christian Scholar’s Review is “Christian Perspectives on the City.” Inside, the introductory essay has 22 footnotes in its five pages, with some notes listing multiple works including a forthcoming one titled Keeping God’s Earth: Creation Care and the Global Environment in Biblical Perspective, edited by Noah J. Toly and Daniel I. Block, from IVP Academic. The three articles on the theme and their abstracts are as follows:

“Subdivided By Faith? An Historical Account of Evangelicals and the City” by Mark T. Mulder and James K. A. Smith (pp. 415-433). [Link for Students, Faculty, & Staff]

In an echo of Michael Emerson and Christian Smith’s study of evangelicals and the racialized society (detailed vividly in Divided by Faith), Mark T. Mulder and James K. A. Smith attempt to trace the history and literature concerning evangelicals and their relationship to the city. While there exists an interesting literature about general urban antipathy in the U.S., the authors contend religion remains a salient and under-examined component within that phenomenon. This paper calls for more theologically-nuanced studies regarding evangelicals, anti-urban bias, and geographical habits.

“Nature and Nature’s God: The Religious Background of the Garden City Movement” by Lee Hardy (pp. 435-456). [Link for Students, Faculty, & Staff]

Is the discipline of urban planning a religiously neutral affair? If the English Garden City movement is to serve as a worthy example of this discipline, certainly not. After noting its considerable influence on American New Urbanism, Lee Hardy explores in this essay the religious motivation of the Garden City movement through the figure of its founder, Ebenezer Howard. The exploration takes place on three levels: the physical design of urban form; the socioeconomics of collective land ownership; and the religious hope of human transformation, which draws upon the cultural strategies typical of separatist Christian communities and the metaphysics of American Spiritualism.

“Ellul on New Urbanism” by David Wang (pp. 457-470). [Link for Students, Faculty, & Staff]

In this paper, Jacques Ellul’s theory of “technique” and his theology of the city are framed into a critique of New Urbanism. Against Modernism’s view of the city as a “machine for living in,” New Urbanism harks back to the ambiance of old New England towns. But far from assuring the sense of community it promotes, Ellul’s thought reveals this new paradigm to be as mechanistic as the one it replaces. The paper concludes by highlighting three Ellulian suggestions towards more authentic expressions of sense of community.

Search Fatigue

Beall, Jeffrey. “Search Fatigue.” American Libraries 38, no. 3 (March 2007): 46-50. [Link for Covenant Students, Faculty, & Staff]

Beall defines “search fatigue” as the phenomenon that results when people “repeatedly get results that do not match their information needs” (p. 47). He proposes that the cause is the increased use of keyword searching instead of “metadata-enabled” searching (p. 50).

Here “metadata-enabled” signifies things like standardized subject headings. As an example, consider a person searching for material on the doctrine of Perseverance. A keyword search for the term “perseverance” would miss a work like Rayburn’s Are the Sheep Secure? if it weren’t for a library cataloger giving it subject headings like “Perseverance (Theology)” and “Assurance (Theology)”. Meanwhile, a keyword search for “perseverance” would turn up diverse irrelevancies including names such as Perseverance Press and the Perseverance mine in AK. Or, to use Beall’s example, consider challenges for someone researching the Atlantic cod—for which there are 60 different names (such as codling, schrod, shoal fish, Newfoundland fish, winter fish) (p. 47–48).

Beall concludes:

If this process [of keyword only] continues, metadata-enabled searching will become a high-priced specialty service, one that is not generally available. Keyword searching, with all its flaws and weaknesses, will dominate and become the only type of search available. … The bad is driving out the good. …

[Keyword searching] does have some uses and can sometimes be an effective tool for information discovery and retrieval, especially in casual information-seeking.

However, search fatigue will certainly become more common as keyword searching becomes the main means of information discovery, as metadata-enabled search engines become fewer and fewer, and as full-text databases start to be measured in terabytes and petabytes rather than megabytes and gigabytes. (p. 50)

The Church Online

The theme of the June 30, 2009 (vol. 126, no. 13) issue of The Christian Century is “The Church Online,” and it presents two articles on the topic.

The first is “The church on Facebook” by Lenora Rand (pp. 22–25). Rand asserts that life has become a series of long and busy commutes. People commute many hours to and from work and social functions each week. Traveling to and from church each Sunday can seem like one more, long commute added to the mix. Moreover, stepping into church can feel for many like a “cultural commute.” The experience of Sunday morning is to step into a new culture where neither the language nor the customs are well known. As a result, intimacy and openness seem unattainable there. Instead, many people are opting for “ambient intimacy.” “Ambient intimacy,” as defined by Lisa Reichelt, is “being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible” (24–25). Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter provide precisely that. Christians can keep their brothers and sisters aware of their situations through regular status updates, which regularly elicit responses of encouragement and prayer. This sort of virtual community, Rand argues, serves as a valuable companion to (but not replacement for) the real-life community experienced on Sunday morning.

The second article is “Church netiquette” by Lillian Daniel (pp. 26–28). To be more precise, the topic of the article is email etiquette. Clearly, email is a convenient and readily-accessible form of communication, and is a useful resource for pastors. However, it also provides distance from the people involved in the conversation which can breed a reactionary attitude not otherwise present in similar conversations. This lends itself to “send-button remorse,” which can create even larger headaches for pastors and parishioners alike. Daniel suggests that Christians utilize her version of a Paul injunction to guard against internet rudeness: “And let us also understand that what we say in an e-mail from behind a computer we will also do face-to-face.” This principle should help reduce instances of “send-button remorse.”

Book Notes

According to the Scriptures?: The Challenge of Using the Bible in Social, Moral and Political Questions, by J. W. Rogerson (Equinox, 2007)

From the use of the OT in the NT to today’s varied use of the Bible in advocating or opposing certain policies, practices, and lifestyles, the author seems mostly to counter those who think it’s relatively easy to determine what’s to be done or not done based on the Bible. Between the third century and the Reformation, here are the people covered: Clement of Alexandria and Origen; the Apostolic Constitutions; Augustine; Cyril of Alexandria; Abraham Ibn Ezra; Maimonides; and Aquinas. Luther and Calvin are the only ones covered from the Reformation period. Hooker and Baxter are the only two in the chapter on the 16^th & 17^th centuries, and only Michaelis is singled out for individual consideration from the 18^th century, in a chapter also covering the 19^th and its interpretive shifts.

From a modern ethical standpoint the Bible, especially the Old Testament, falls far short of contemporary moral standards. This is not a new [view]. …Augustine…acknowledged that Abraham’s example in fathering a child by his wife’s servant was not an example that Christians could or should follow…

…[Diverse] justifications for moral difficulties had come to be under attack at the end of the seventeenth century…This led to a different approach to the ethical teaching contained in the Bible…which saw it as immature human moral understanding…

What was basically at issue was the understanding of the nature of God…

The upshot of all this is that the Old Testament came to be seen not as a revelation of God but as a record of his revelation…

…[T]he Old Testament was no longer…prophecies and “types” which had their fulfillment in Christ. …But in one regard the link between the testaments was not severed. The New Testament provided the moral touchstone by which the ethical content of the Old Testament was to be judged…

The view that the Old Testament is the record of the progressive self-revelation of God…has lost the attraction that it exercised so powerfully in the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth century….[for that] understanding of the course of ancient Israel’s history…has been superseded. It has become clear, for example, that Joshua did not invade the land of Canaan and utterly destroy its inhabitants, as claimed in the Book of Joshua…

However, if the idea of progressive revelation or progressive education is out of favour, the phenomena that it was meant to account for still remain and have to be faced up to. These phenomena are moral teachings in the New as well as the Old Testament that fall short not only of the standard implied in the teaching of Jesus, but the actual legislation of many modern societies…

…However, abandonment of the belief that biblical injunctions had been revealed by God does not mean that this material in the Bible has lost all theological or ethical significance. On the contrary, abandonment of older “mechanical” theories of the origin of the Bible has made way for new approaches which arguably enable its ethical material to be appreciated to a greater extent than was previously possible.

Secular Funerals

“More forgo clergy-led funerals for those by secular ‘celebrants’” by Cathy Lynn Grossman (USA Today [online version], 8/19/2009) reports on the phenomenon indicated by the article’s title. Although the opening lines indicate that folks increasingly even want funerals without God, the closing lines quote one of these secular “celebrants” who, with only one exception, has never had anyone say they don’t want Scripture or prayer. Australia and New Zealand have licensed secular funeral practitioners apparently for some time. Anderson-McQueen Centers in the U.S. offer 3-day training seminars at which someone can “learn how to empathetically interview grieving family and friends, construct a ceremony focused on the deceased’s life story, values and interests, [and] then write a eulogy and role-play delivery.” The article notes that 27% of American adults “say that when they die, they don’t expect to have a religious service,” according to the 2008 American Religious Identification survey of 6,000 people by Trinity College’s Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture in Hartford, CT. The president of the National Funeral Directors Association, John Reed, is quoted saying that “50% of Americans today say they don’t belong to a church and don’t see value in a religious funeral.” Reed’s basis for saying this is not given, and his comments are in stark contrast to the 16% not claiming religious affiliation according to the Pew Forum’s study in 2007 (see The Christian Century of July 28, 2009).

Does the Promise Still Hold?: Israel and the Land

In the January 13, 2009 (vol. 126, no. 1) issue of The Christian Century, Notre Dame’s OT professor Gary A. Anderson writes the article “Does the Promise Still Hold?: Israel and the Land” (pp. 22–25), in which he affirms that Israel has a God-given right to the land according to what God told Abraham (Gen. 13:14–15, 17). These 3 people respond (pp. 25–29): Walter Brueggemann [professor emeritus at Columbia Seminary (PCUSA)], Marlin Jeschke [professor emeritus at Goshen College (Mennonite)], and Donald E. Wagner [professor and director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at North Park U. (Evangelical Covenant Church)]. Anderson then responds to them. He is disappointed with Jeschke, who “is so concerned to highlight the universal dimensions of the Abrahamic promise that he neglects the specific promises of God to a single people.” Anderson likes Wagner’s response better, but says he misreads Uriel Simon’s thesis (which Anderson cited—and regrets is only in modern Hebrew). Simon aims “to show how the case of religious Zionism can actually serve the interests of peacemaking” (Simon, though a religious Zionist, is toward the left in Israeli politics today). Anderson appreciates Brueggemann’s response the most, except for “his emphasis on the loss of the land in 587 BC.” [I’m a little surprised both because Brueggemann hardly mentions 587 and because he clearly critiques Anderson for not doing justice to moral and political realities.]

Then, in the March 10, 2009 (vol. 126, no. 5) issue, “Israel and God’s Promises” has ten substantive letters opposing Gary Anderson’s article in the January 13 issue, and Anderson responds. The letters range from disbelief that such “lunacy” (about God promising the land to Israel forever) could appear in any serious publication today, to Newland Smith’s assertions about secular origins of Zionism versus Anderson’s notion of “the miraculous appearance of the Israeli state just after the darkest moment in Jewish history [which] is hard to interpret outside of a theological framework.”  One letter argues that Anderson’s allegation of anti-Semitism against those who fault Israel but not Russia and China is unfair, owing to the fact that we (the U.S.) subsidize Israel’s budget with over $4 billion per year, always go to bat for them at the United Nations, and provide military hardware and other materiel. Other letters even mention, respectively, the absence of archaeological evidence “supporting the narratives that lead to Judaism’s exclusive claims on the land” and the priestly (as in JEDP) material in the OT as late and obviously suited to Anderson’s views. Anderson’s response names 8 of the 10 letter writers and says: two simply disqualify the right of the biblical text to speak to this issue; two mistook him (Anderson) as addressing the public square rather than the person in the pew; Newland Smith rightly points out the problem of Zionism’s secular origin but needs to read Anderson’s longer piece in First Things (April 2005), and both Smith’s and another letter miss the theological force of Uriel Simon’s argument (cited by Anderson) about Israel’s supernatural claim to the land; finally, Anderson compliments two letters for interacting with his theological purpose.