Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Living in the World
Diggin' Up Bones

Back in 1986 a new Country Music artist burst on the scene. He was and is Randy Travis who just won another Grammy for his album Glory Train. On his debut album Storms of Life he had a tune called "Diggin' Up Bones". The chorus was as follows:

I'm a diggin up bones
Exhuming things that's better left alone
I'm resurrecting memories of a love that's dead and gone
Well tonight I'm sittin alone diggin up bones

When I heard of the Jesus Tomb spectacle by James Cameron of Titanic fame, I could not but help think of that song. Some reports say the documentary producers and writers are not trying to cast aspesrions on Christianity! How absurd. Christians believe Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven where He sits at the right hand of God the Father. He can't be in both places at one time. For a good preliminary response to Cameron and his experts and to continue to monitor this see New Testament scholar Ben Witherington's blog [26 and 28 Feb entries] http://benwitherington.blogspot.com

This is another attack on the Christian faith. It should not surprise us. The media fawns all over this stuff because it is sensational. The production is to air on 4 March with a book just released. Needless to say, much more ink will be spilled on this subject. The protagonists are taking an old subject and appealing to the MBA in all of us with statistics and the CSI mania that has its grip on TV viewers with DNA testing.

Like the Da Vinci Code, there will be $$ to be made. But, in the long run its hokum will be exposed as unbelief...diggin' up bones that are best left alone and showing that the love of God is dead and gone in the skeptics...if it ever existed at all.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

The American Founding
Christian Republicanism

Mark Noll is one of this country’s leading Christian thinkers. Formerly at Wheaton College, last year he succeeded George Marsden at Notre Dame. His vie of the founding of the republic consists of a complex mixture of politics and religion beyond the amalgam of Zuckert. He has outlined his views in an essay entitled “The Contingencies of Christian Republicanism”. In his account, there is a mixture of republicanism and liberalism, neither having hegemony. He acknowledges that the Puritan experiment of a godly commonwealth failed. He does not buy into the theory that the Puritan vision then merged with reason to make all sacred, including politics.

When the collapse of the Puritan government by revelation occurred, he opines that the republican promise of social order through virtuous public service came to the forefront in the colonies. When Puritanism’s experiment of a godly commonwealth expired the republican promise of social order through virtuous public service came to the fore in the colonies. For Noll:

The religious-political discourse of the revolution had joined classical republican themes of disinterested public service to late-Puritan themes of God-oriented public duty.

According to Noll republican themes of liberty were much more prevalent than Lockean themes of natural rights, social contract and individualism.

As the republic grew and expanded, however, it became a commercial juggernaut. It was then Lockean rights theory began to emerge. The Lockean impulse was connected to economics, not political theory. Noll, however, sees no antithesis that would cause revelation and reason to trump one another. Instead, there was a combination of liberalism, republicanism and religion in a complex, hard to explain, manner. Quoting Zuckert, Noll insists:

…both Locke and the ministers tended to treat natural and revealed law as two consistent, complimentary, and interdependent expression of a single divine will.

However, Noll and Zuckert are not on the same page. Where Noll differs from Zuckert is his emphasis on a strong Christian republicanism in the founding along with the Lockean impulse. Also, the arrangement was messier and more nuanced that Zuckert’s amalgam. Although we desire a neat and tidy explanation, the founding defies a clean, logical and analytical answer.

As one sorts through the different explanations, Noll’s analysis seems compelling. A mixture of Protestant faith and religion with secular reason and political freedom appears to be the recipe. Like grandma’s “pinch of this and pinch of that”, the quantity of the mixtures is not certain. Noll is convincing in his designation of the process as messy and contingent no matter how much we yearn for a high school textbook explanation.

And that is just what the conventional wisdom of the founding as solely and “Enlightenment project” is—sophomoric. At the founding, religion and faith were not abandoned. The founders believed religion was best as a matter of personal conscious. But, they also knew that religion and faith were integral to the new country. That is what Tocqueville found sixty years later. Thomas West was wrong to designate Locke as a Protestant theologian, but Lockean thought is not necessarily hostile to Christianity. Zuckert believes that Locke gave fledging Americans political ideas based on reason that

…were better resources for orienting themselves to the kingdom of this world than sectarian interpretations of scripture.

That seems to be good advice to us modern Christians who want to squeeze everything into a Scripture proof text. And, also to the secularist who wants to ban religion from the public square. To the founders, God spoke in two ways…revelation and reason…and both contributed to the birth of a nation.

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

The American Founding
Reason=Revelation in Political Thought

One of the most radical of the theories surrounding religion and the founding of the republic is as follows. Puritan thought adapted to reason…became reason instead of revelation based. Since the founders “expected” the country to be religious, there was no attempt to make revelation a part of the foundation of the new nation. There was no mixing of political and religious thought. They had become one.
The reason for this is the failure of Puritan’s to establish a “city on a hill” by revelation alone. A theocracy, as understood at that time, was impossible. Reason was necessary to have political order. And, eventually religion became comfortable with reason to the point where reason and revelation merged in religion. Furthermore, at the time of the founding, Christianity was increasingly seen as reasonable and based on natural law discovered by reason alone.
Going beyond that position was the twist that this process is really the sacrilization of the profane…what had been seen as lowly and worldly was now part of religious thought. This was an expansion of the original Puritan concept of the sacred. Their limited view was widened to bring in politics. A devotee to this position is Thomas West. West believes that:

…the political theology of the American Revolution was grounded on both revelation and reason. No ‘blending or amalgm of Protestant theology with secular rationalism was needed, because scripture was understood to teach the same political principles as philosophy.

Revelation includes reason. Holy Scripture is understood to stand for the same principles as the political thought of the day. They were as one. So, West would posit that John Locke was a Protestant theologian because he represents political views not at variance with what Scripture teaches about political thought.
There is much to question about this approach. Since Locke does not proceed from Scripture or on a basis of the Calvinism of the times, the claim that he spoke Christian orthodoxy in his political views is dubious at best. The view that there was no mixing of revelation and reason in the founding is problematic, at best. To further propound that reason and revelation actually stood for the same thing in the political thinking of the time is an even further stretch. Finally, the idea that this process actually turned the profane into the sacred is a view shared only by the “Christian America” crowd.

Friday, February 16, 2007

[Due to technical difficulties, two things have happened. This is the new site of SGM Magazine and our series on the American Founding was interrupted. We are back up and going. NOTE: The first 3 posts in this series are still avaliable on the old blog www.sgmmagazine.blogspot.com]

American Founding
Are there limits to the Puritan/Lockean Synthesis?

We introduced this series with the Zuckert view of synthesis. Yes the Puritans had a vision, but Lockean thought had invaded the view of the city of man. The Puritans had not abandoned Scripture but they came to accept reason as an integral part of the political process. There are those who reject a synthesis because there was no compromise to be forged. The Constitution was a completely godless document. Isaac Kramminck and R. Laurance Moore of Cornell in an essay entitled “The Godless Constitution” assert that God is no where in the Constitution and the founders were overwhelmingly deists. The lack of a religious test clause in Article 6 seems to be the lynch pin for the godless Constitution argument.

Yet, it is difficult to reject the notion that the founders, even if deists, realized the connection between religion and the health of the new republic. Even Kramminck and Moore admit:
Almost everyone who participated in the debates around the constitution shared a common concern about the health of religion. The success of democracy depended upon a moral citizenry; and for most American thinkers of the eighteenth century, morality rested on some sort of religious convictions.
Godless Constitution or not, even critics of the idea of a Puritan influence in the government acknowledge there was some sort of accommodation necessary between religion and government because of the positive influence religion has on the populace governed. This appeared to be accepted orthodoxy among the founding fathers.

Then we find those who admit a synthesis, but with limitations. In other words, one cannot deny Lockean natural rights and their affect on political thought. However, just below the surface bubbled orthodox Christian thinking and belief. One such proponent is Carey McWilliams. McWilliams espouses his position using such language as;
American ideas of what is rational or self-evident—incorporates teachings historically, if not necessarily, rooted in revelation.
And,
Those rights [from the Declaration], and endowment or trust, are explicitly unalienable, and entail on natural rights that must derive from the Creator’s endowing, since it is not evident from the rights themselves.
He offers up Nathanial Niles’s Two Discourses on Liberty as an example contemporary of the times who understood the synthesis but who did not champion natural rights.

There is not doubt that then, as now, there were those who held on to the old Puritan vision, but there was still a partnership with Locke evident and not as a mere sheen over Puritan orthodoxy. Locke and the Puritans were inescapably partners in the founding mixing reason with revelation. And, contrary to McWilliams, revelation may at best have been a junior partner.
Finally, there are those who claim the synthesis as a contemporary over realization of what actually happened at the founding. For them, it is flawed reasoning to assert that the Puritans wanted to transform Christian language to make it compatible with” liberal rationalism”. In that camp is Peter Augustine Lawler. Lawler contends:
…the founders did not aim to do justice to both reason and revelation…they used religion as little as possible in service to reason and liberty.
Using Tocqueville, Lawler argues that religious liberty is necessary for political liberty and that the abstract individual of the Declaration is neither rational nor liberal. There is no continuity or mixing of the concepts of natural rights political thinking with Protestant political thought for Lawler.

Even so, surely Lawler would be hard pressed to deny that even Locke had a deist dimension not visible in other Enlightenment thought. And, although it was far from Puritan political theology, it did coalesce in some way with Christian thought to form the Republic. While it is an error to overemphasize revelation in the founders and their actions, to limit religion to a minor bit part is certainly without justification.

Is there a limitation to the admixture of reason and revelation? Most certainly, but it is difficult to quantify. It is certainly beyond the evidence to eliminate religion as a founding factor. Nor is it justifiable to over or underemphasize the role of religion in this partnership with reason. The USA is neither a pagan nor Christian country. Zuckert’s synthesis is not suspect because of limitations. Limitations most certainly were entailed in the founding. But, it is unlikely that over 225 years later we modern and post-modern folk will be able to discern what they really were.

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

The Jan/Feb 2007 issue of SGM Magazine will be released soon. The Editor's Letter speaks to the death of Anna Nicole Smith from an historical and cultural standpoint. Articles include the first of two parts by Dr. John Carpenter about a Christian's role in the culture; another first of two parts is the testimony of the late Allen Yuan, prominent house church leader in China; a comment on Abortion and Immigration; and a review of a Chesterton jewel, The Flying Inn.

If you failed to renew your subscription, do it now so you don't miss this important issue. And, if you are looking for a gift for someone, SGM Magazine is the gift that gives all year long! Contact us at sgmmagazine@atlanticbbn.net or by mail at PO Box 1425, Clearfield, PA 16830