Eastern Orthodoxy

(This is the eleventh and last in a series of posts critiquing Dr. Peter Leithart's recent call for the "End of Protestantism." Here are links to the prior posts: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten.)

'Peace' is certainly a pleasing word; but cursed is the peace that is obtained at so great a cost that there is lost to us the doctrine of Christ, by which alone we grow together into a godly and holy unity.  - Calvin on Acts 14:2

The Presbyterian Church in America's Dr. Peter Leithart is calling for an "ecumenical" peace with Rome and Constantinople and he labels his movement the "End of Protestantism" project, promoting it through his journalistic residence at the Roman Catholic journal, First Things.  Dr. Leithart has laid claim to be the new fresh face of the "ecumenical" movement and tells us his project seeks nothing more than the unity of the Church that Jesus asked of His Father during His Great High Priestly Prayer:

The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me. (John 17:22, 23)

No man who loves Jesus Christ can be a stoic concerning the unity of the Church. Nevertheless, across the centuries, calls for unity have often been used to cloak attacks upon the Gospel. Surely the Judaizers in Galatia attacked the Apostle Paul for divisiveness when his epistle to the Galatians was read to their congregation. And during the Reformation, the Roman Catholics never stopped accusing the Reformers of dividing the Church.

Yet what is the Church—this is the question Dr. Leithart avoids, crafting his appeals for unity as if there were no true and false Gospel, no true and false church.

When the Roman Catholic church charged the Protestant Reformers with schism, the Reformers faced the charge directly and this response found in the Scots Confession (1560) is typical. Here the Scots Confession begins by teaching that false churches have always existed and that those false churches have done their best to destroy the souls of men and persecute the godly. Therefore it is imperative the godly learn to distinguish between true and false churches ("kirk" means "church")...

Paragraph Six, "The Future-End of Protestantism":

As we reflect on the future of Protestantism it will not do to say that history is change, that the world is always coming to an end in the straightforward sense that today will become tomorrow. History is not a seamless garment. It has gaps and tears, some quite rough. We know that from our own history. The Reformers reached deep into the Scriptures and the catholic tradition, but they were revolutionary innovators for all that. A world came to an end five hundred years ago, and the Western Church was re- born in an unprecedented form—as Catholic-and- Protestant. New kinds of Christians began to appear for the first time, with new names like "Lutheran" and "Reformed" and "Anglican."

Here we turn to the sixth paragraph of the article in which Dr. Leithart calls us to reflection. But keep in mind that Dr. Leithart's original title for this project was "The End of Protestantism," so the future Dr. Leithart is calling us to reflect on is death. He is calling Protestants to die to our "old habits and ideals," our "old ruts" and our "dead selves." He's not defining those old habits and ideals yet; he's not telling us which ruts we're stuck in. Is it our confession of faith alone and Scripture alone? Is it our faith in "Christ alone" and our clinging to "grace alone" we must forsake? If these are not the ruts Dr. Leithart is calling us to forsake, what are those ruts? What are the old habits and ideals he is calling us to repent of? These are the "alones" or "solas" that have always defined Protestantism over against Roman Catholicism. Surely these are not the "habits," "Ideals," and "ruts" Dr. Leithart is prophesying against?

Then again, maybe I'm wrong? Perhaps it is justification by grace alone, through faith alone that Dr. Leithart wants us to turn away from? Since Dr. Leithart wants Protestantism to end, we must admit there's no better path to take than getting Protestants to abandon the righteousness of Jesus Christ for the Roman Catholic church's good works and sacraments. If the fall of the Church is what's being proposed, there's no better way...

Paragraphs One Through Four, "The Future-End of Protestantism":

Protestants often act as if the Reformation were the end of history, the moment when the Church reached its final condition. For these sorts of Protestants, the future of Protestantism can only be more of the same. This cannot be. God is the living Creator, still at work in his world, and that means that the Protestantism of the future will be something new, and, given the pattern of God's creativity, something better. (emphasis in original)

In the beginning, God created the world in six days, and each day improved on the previous one. He spoke light, separated light and darkness, and said it was good. Come the next day, and first-day good was not good enough, so he separated the waters below from the waters above and inserted a firmament between. After he tore the waters and called earth to fruitfulness, he said that was good too. Another evening and morning, and again good was not good enough, so he spent the fourth day hanging lights in the firmament, the fifth calling swarming things to swarm in the sea and birds to hover on the face of the sky, the sixth filling the earth with animals and creating man male and female in his image. Each day was good, but each was followed by darkness and dawn that made good better. When he finished, Yahweh God pronounced it very good and rested in what he had made.

Something of the same rhythm continues after the Fall, with God's judgment a critical addition, with God tearing down in order to build up. After the scattering at Babel, he tears Abram from among the nations and sends him wandering through a land not his own, offering sacrifices at oaks and oases. The Lord mid-wives his son Israel through the travail of Egypt and carries him to Sinai, where he teaches him to worship in his tent and live in the land of promise. Solomon reorganizes tribes into districts and builds a temple, a well-watered Eden on Mount Moriah, with the king's palace hard by Yahweh's. Divided, the people of God take a new name, Israel-and-Judah, until Yahweh tears them from the land of promise and melds them together in exile into one new man, now all Jews, now all "Judahites," incorporated into the royal tribe. Through the cross and Resurrection, we are all separated from our native tribes and nations and grafted into the people of God, taking the name Christian.

God creates Israel as tribes, then as a kingdom, then scatters them among the nations, then sends them to the nations, each good, each followed by the darkness of the tomb, each bringing good brighter than the good that preceded it. At each juncture, God calls his people to shed old ways and old names, to die to old routines and ways of life, including ways of life God himself has established.

"Each good?" I don't want to be a naysayer, but what does Dr. Leithart mean by "each good?" Sure the phrase is cheerful, but to what does "each good" refer?

"Each good" is simply to say that everything God does is good.

But isn't this a kinda "duh" statement?" Who would argue? Is Dr. Leithart simply saying...

This is the fourth installment of our examination of Dr. Peter Leithart's call for the end of Protestantism. 

Paragraph One; "The Future-End of Protestantism":

Protestants often act as if the Reformation were the end of history, the moment when the Church reached its final condition. For these sorts of Protestants, the future of Protestantism can only be more of the same. This cannot be. God is the living Creator, still at work in his world, and that means that the Protestantism of the future will be something new, and, given the pattern of God's creativity, something better. (Leithart's emphasis)

Here in paragraph one, Dr. Leithart sets up his narrative, prodding readers to stop "acting" foolishly; to put aside their sectarian tribalism and hop on board his train headed into a future guaranteed to be "better" than the past because this is "God's pattern of creativity." With his second and following paragraphs, then, Leithart sets out to build a Biblical foundation for his hermeneutic of better.

Paragraph Two; "The Future-End of Protestantism":

In the beginning, God created the world in six days, and each day improved on the previous one. He spoke light, separated light and darkness, and said it was good. Come the next day, and first-day good was not good enough, so he separated the waters below from the waters above and inserted a firmament between. After he tore the waters and called earth to fruitfulness, he said that was good too. Another evening and morning, and again good was not good enough, so he spent the fourth day hanging lights in the firmament, the fifth calling swarming things to swarm in the sea and birds to hover on the face of the sky, the sixth filling the earth with animals and creating man male and female in his image. Each day was good, but each was followed by darkness and dawn that made good better. When he finished, Yahweh God pronounced it very good and rested in what he had made.

As we said in an earlier post, we can see how someone given to deep insights might want to assume that each of the six days of creation left the created whole better than it was the day before. And yet, for the sake of taking the plenary verbal inspiration of Scripture seriously, it must be pointed out that God's response to the conclusion of each day's work was not "God saw that it was better" but "God saw that it was good."

Most of my life has been spent in academic contexts and more than once I've been told that the worst department in the modern college or university is the English Department. When I ask why, those with lots of experience in and with English departments tell me that the study of English literature is...

You say goodbye and I say hello
Hello hello
I don't know why you say goodbye, I say hello

("Hello, Goodbye" by the Beatles)

In the prior post "Leithart smokes his peace pipe...," we began our examination of the Rev. Dr. Peter Leithart's call for a twenty-first century ecumenism Leithart and his Trinity House friends hope will lead Protestants to reunite with Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox.

Leithart first set about this project in his blog post on the web site of First Things, the journal founded by Lutheran-convert-to-Roman-Catholicism Richard John Neuhaus (I'm a charter subscriber). Note that Leithart titled this first post "The End of Protestantism." This is low-hanging fruit, but let me point out Dr. Leithart did not title his post "The End of Roman Catholicism." Such a title would have been ill-bred among Roman Catholics. And yet "The End of Roman Catholicism" would have been a more fitting title from an officer of the Presbyterian Church in America since Roman Catholicism still holds that the anathemas pronounced against the Biblical doctrine of justification by faith alone by her own Council of Trent are infallible.

After posting his first salvo, Leithart engaged in a few short online exchanges with one or two men who still remember the Reformation, but mostly his post played well in Peoria and a few weeks later he received an invitation to present his proposal to Bible college students at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. Since the speaking engagement was sponsored by a foundation, I assume the trip was all-expenses paid with an honorarium, which is to say Leithart's journey to BIOLA was quite different from Martin Luther's journey to the Diet of Worms.

Leithart gave the talk at BIOLA April 29, 2014, but his original title "The End of Protestantism" had been changed to "The Future of Protestantism." Afterward, BIOLA uploaded a video of the performance to You Tube where it...

(NOTE: This is the fifth post in a series on Reformed worship. Here are the first first, second, third, fourth, and sixth.)

In the previous post, we saw that formalism in worship is very efficient in leading us and our congregants to play nice with Rome. We may do our best to remain vigilant in our soteriology, rallying round the cry “Faith alone!” even as we repudiate historic Reformed principles and orders of worship. We may continue to desire Presbyterian polity and a Reformed view of the real spiritual presence of our Lord in the elements even as we embrace the method and mechanisms of Anglicans' Book of Common Prayer.

Because of the poverty of worship in prior Evangelical Presbyterian or Baptist churches, many among us feel they must spurn the commitment of our Reformed fathers to Biblical simplicity. But let us know precisely what we are undoing before our deformission of Reformed worship reaches twenty years of age.

Today, we have a choice between the simplicity of reformed worship, regulated by God’s Word, or the ceremony and sarcedotalism inherent in the formulaic worship of the Book of Common Prayer and Covenant Renewal.

So you want to go back to the formulaic liturgy? This begs the question—Why? Can we be self-critical concerning our motivations?

Our motives are the same as the children of Israel. When we are faced with the job of entering the Promised Land and we hear their giants are giant, we have a choice: depend on God, or go back to Egypt. We can have a liturgy that is dependent on the work of the Holy Spirit or we can have control of our worship. This choice seems ridiculous to those who eschew what some might term extemporaneous preaching and worship, choosing instead to depend upon manuscripts they read and prayers they recite. But Reformed worship is not extemporaneous in the normal sense of "unprepared." Reformed pastors who look at the sheep of their flock and preach to them and lead them in prayer have never held the absence of preparation as a principle of Reformed worship...

Reading the likes of R. Scott Clark, Michael Horton, and Matthew Tuininga, one walks away with the impression that all of the problems within Evangelicalism stem from our failure to respect history and toe the line of our Confessions in history (as revised in more recent history); and an infatuation with the new along with the desire for success as measured by the world. And their solution?

Go back.

It's a tempting critique because it rings with a certain amount of truth, but continue reading these men and you'll find that, after wagging the chin about historic Reformed orthodoxy a bit, other cards start slipping into the deck...

(Tim) This is written by a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy. Thinking readers might have some responses, I post it here. I've received it second or third hand, so I don't know the writer or context.

While recognizing that some people have a calling from God to speak out specifically on these sins, I find that the focus among many Evangelicals on the abortion and same-sex marriage issues to the exclusion of all others reflects the extreme individualism of Protestant theology and ethics, both "conservative" and "liberal". Evangelicals care rightly about the killing that goes on within a woman's womb, and about the improper and irreverent use of our God-given sexual organs in our own bodies or in the bodies of others. But there is not always a corresponding concern about the killing and grave threats to human life that are present outside of the womb, and about the improper and irreverent use of the natural world and material possessions given to us by God.

I don't think it's an accident that the same individualistic faith traditions that emphasize and sanctify "my personal choice" (to accept Jesus as "personal Savior" in the case of conservative Protestants, to have an abortion as a "personal matter" in the case of the liberals) but downplay the physical unity and continuity of the Body of Christ across space and time would also be quite uncertain regarding the social obligations that Christians have to their political and military enemies, to the poor and sick among us, and to the rest of God's creation. A faith tradition that fails to connect our moral obligations inside our bodies with our moral obligations outside of our bodies is deficient in both its anthropology and its ecology.

To get things started, it seems to me evangelicals are now close to the heart of the movement for the social justice of cutting carbon emissions, calling for the government to increase funds for AIDS research, and shaming people who litter. Rick Warren, anyone? Brian McLaren? Rob Bell up there in Grand Rapids? Inter-Varsity? Zondervan? Navigators? Willow Creek? Tim Keller and his flock?

And of course, every last prof at Covenant and Taylor and Gordon and Westmont and Wheaton.

Maybe our critic is only speaking of historic evangelicalism--not the classic liberalism that's taken over these past few decades.

But then he has an entirely different problem...

(Tim, w/thanks to Brian) Although it makes me uncomfortable seeing national sovereignty lose to the New One World Order, praise God for this victory for religious freedom in Bulgaria won in the European Court of Human Rights by an attorney allied with the Alliance Defense Fund. If you have never supported the Alliance Defense Fund and you're able, please do so...