tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-39189240497494837042024-03-17T12:19:20.827-04:00Pryor Thoughtspryorthoughtshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18077521279953292684noreply@blogger.comBlogger150915tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3918924049749483704.post-66964732275327705002024-03-11T12:30:00.005-04:002024-03-12T05:13:11.955-04:00The Virtue of Moderation. Or, An Update on Compromise<div class="separator"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Over a a decade ago I published </span><a href="https://pryorthoughts.blogspot.com/2013/02/a-theology-of-compromise.html" style="font-family: arial;" target="_blank"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">A Theology of Compromise?</span></a><span style="font-family: arial;"> A year later I posted a brief follow-up </span><a href="https://pryorthoughts.blogspot.com/2014/03/compromise-james-ka-smith-nails-it-again.html" style="font-family: arial;" target="_blank"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">here</span></a><span style="font-family: arial;">. As I observed in my initial piece,</span></div></div><p><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="background-color: #fffefc;">[Clay] Cooke [to whom I was responding] at best provides a "negative" theological argument in favor of compromise. He combines the theological categories of human finitude and human sinfulness. We don't know everything, especially the follow-along of choices, and most especially legislative choices. This counsels wariness when pressing a law-making advantage to the hilt or voting against the good because it's not perfect. Be careful of what you wish for, as the saying goes. (Prohibition, anyone?) Combine our lack of knowledge, particularly about the future, with </span><i style="background-color: #fffefc;">our </i><span style="background-color: #fffefc;">sinfulness--our propensity to take advantage of opportunities to gain at another's loss--and an attitude opposed to compromise can lead to bad results.</span></span></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: arial;">But as I also noted, this argument lacks a postive basis for compromise. An argument in favor of the lesser of two evils is fine but shouldn't there be an affirmative moral warrant for something like compromise in public life? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">My follow-up post got a bit closer to a moral warrant where I quoted James K.A. Smith riffing Oliver O'Donovan:</span></p><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: #fffefc; margin: 1em 20px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Rooted in our uncompromising [primary] commitment to Christ, we nonetheless have to act, and we act always and only in [particular] situations. ... "It is an old and damaging confusion," O'Donovan points out, "to suppose that compromise in this secondary [situational] sense implies compromise in the primary sense." Thus "every moral decision will be a decision between faithfulness and compromise."</span></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Nonetheless, even drawing from O'Donovan, there seems more pragmatism than virtue. What classical (and Christian) virtues supply a robust warrant for the evident necessity of compromise? Or is necessity all there is?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Enter the virtue of moderation. Given the nature of a virtue, moderation is something more than mere pragmatics. On its own account moderation is a habit that, combined with other virtues, leads to a flourishing life.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">But what <i>is</i> the virtue of moderation? Or, to put the question another way: moderation in respect of what? Moderation as the restraint of appetites? Or as the tool to triangulate between two opposing vices? Is moderation another name for the mean, e.g., courage (between foolhardiness and cowardice)? Or is moderation a tool of <i>phronesis</i>, a form of practical wisdom? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Enter a book recently (re)published by The Davenant Institute, Joseph Hall's <i>A Treatise on Christian Moderation </i>(2024) (with an introduction and scholarly annotation by Andre Gazal). Hall (1575-1656) was a bishop in the Church of England in the run-up to the English Civil War. In his treatise, </span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Hall called for personal and public moderation, a call that was ignored as England plunged into a war that took more lives (per capita) then did WW I. In our own increasingly immoderate age, this work may find a hearing. Perhaps cultural partisans will find warrant to moderate their political wills.</span></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm6nffLOdXT2lxTuE0RzL2pG7Ir_Jln5iOr1tEFE0ctBb_ZCEI18NdpWqMC_snuTU2ce9jP7J9tzZhCvzbjr7N86nyHgj4LzfVVBWb2e-LMspvB7srrB2lhvOgE9K9eF3YcxqQN889n6s_914KxBS7Hlnp-qCgviPX5fku2aFVbeYXlxUWo8H2gO9Ppzk/s1280/Moderation.webp" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="853" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm6nffLOdXT2lxTuE0RzL2pG7Ir_Jln5iOr1tEFE0ctBb_ZCEI18NdpWqMC_snuTU2ce9jP7J9tzZhCvzbjr7N86nyHgj4LzfVVBWb2e-LMspvB7srrB2lhvOgE9K9eF3YcxqQN889n6s_914KxBS7Hlnp-qCgviPX5fku2aFVbeYXlxUWo8H2gO9Ppzk/w133-h200/Moderation.webp" width="133" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">If you wan't to know more before taking the plunge, listen to </span><a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/ee/podcast/the-ad-fontes-podcast/id1557560666" style="font-family: arial;" target="_blank"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">this podcast</span></a><span style="font-family: arial;"> where Colin Redemer, Rhys Laverty, and Jonathan McKenzie discuss the Hall's book and work to distinguish the virtue of moderation from the vice of cowardice.</span></p><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span><p></p><p></p>pryorthoughtshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18077521279953292684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3918924049749483704.post-43715406189063850542024-02-27T11:30:00.003-05:002024-02-27T20:54:40.117-05:00Abraham Kuyper's Doctrine of the Church Part 2: Or, AI Reads My Posts!<p><span style="font-family: arial;">Only this past Friday I published <a href="https://pryorthoughts.blogspot.com/2024/02/abraham-kuypers-doctrine-of-church.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">a short piece</span></a> in which I looked at Abraham Kuyper's distinction between the church-as-institute and church-as-organism. A book chapter updated by Ruben Alvaro had occasioned my thoughts. I suspected that Alvarado might be right--Kuyper's doctrinal innovation may have unintentionally accelerated the secularization of Dutch society--but I withheld full concurrence. After all, I mused, there was much more Kuyper to canvass than Alvarado's chapter considered.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">The next day the algorithm powering academia.com emailed a suggestion that I should read "</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: arial;">The Kuyperian-Schilderian Option: A Synthesis of Abraham Kuyper and Klaas Schilder That is Better than Saint Benedict</span><span style="font-family: arial;">" by Dennis Greeson (</span><a href="https://www.academia.edu/34514583/The_Kuyperian_Schilderian_Option_A_Synthesis_of_Abraham_Kuyper_And_Klaas_Schilder_That_Is_Better_Than_Saint_Benedict" style="font-family: arial;" target="_blank">here</a><span style="font-family: arial;">). Quite a mouthful.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">In brief (because I lack sufficient interest to pursue the issue further), Greeson anticipated my hope that someone would take up a fuller <i>oeuvre </i>of Kuyper's work and provide a definitive resolution to the contention Alvarado raised. Only in pages 19-21 does Greeson explicitly address institute vs. organism; his burden focuses on Kuyper parallel innovation of the doctrine of common grace. Still, there's enough in the paper to give me greater confidence that both innovations contained enough ambiguity to permit some of Kuyper's heirs to take them in wrongheaded directions. The evolution of Kuyper's thoughts about common grace and his unsystematic, occasional form of writing opened the door both for active acquiescence in the Nazi regime of 1940-1945 and cooperation in progressive governments (and secularizing the university he founded) thereafter.</span></p>pryorthoughtshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18077521279953292684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3918924049749483704.post-80561240268650292692024-02-23T11:30:00.033-05:002024-02-23T11:30:00.155-05:00Abraham Kuyper's Doctrine of the Church: A Timely Adjustment or a Poison Pill?<p><span style="font-family: arial;">Eight years ago my friend Ruben Alvarado published a chapter titled "The Kuyper Option: Kuyper's Concept of the Church in the Context of Strategic Christian Action."* Alvarado updated his chapter in 2021 (<a href="https://www.academia.edu/63727504/The_Kuyper_Option_Kuypers_Concept_of_the_Church_in_the_Context_of_Strategic_Christian_Action?uc-g-sw=110020867" target="_blank"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">here</span></a>). </span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Alvarado identifies two innovations in Kuyper's doctrine that warrant scrutiny: his doctrine of common grace and his distinction between the church as an institute from the church as an organism. Alvarado concludes that, whatever were Kuyper's intentions, both innovations led to deprecation of the preeminence of the Church in the Netherlands and thus acceleration of the secularization of that society. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Alvarado</span><span style="font-family: arial;"> focuses on the institute vs. organism distinction and I will limit my remarks to it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Kuyper retained the traditional Protestant distinction between the visible and the invisible Church. Not all persons baptized into the church are in fact ultimately joined to Christ, the head of the Church. Baptized hypocrites and apostates have always existed. Kuyper's additional institute/organism distinction makes a different point: (i) the life of Christians <i>as Christians</i> extends beyond the institutional boundaries of the church-as-institute, (ii) extra-institutional living necessarily assumes associational forms (business entities, labor unions, universities, political parties, social clubs, etc.), and (iii) the expression "church-as-organism" identifies and reifies this latter state of affairs.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">As </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Alvarado</span><span style="font-family: arial;"> observes, few Christians deny propositions (i) or (ii). Alvarado, however, following a later Dutch theologian Klass Schilder, identifies the associational life of Christians simply as service while living in a society and at the same time as a member of the church-as-institute: "The two aspects of institute and organism cannot be separated from each other in the way that Kuyper does. They are correlative and concurrent, two sides of the same coin."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Well. Okay. Of what significance might be such theological hairsplitting?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Alvarado</span><span style="font-family: arial;"> identifies two problems downstream of Kuyper's originality. First is the "freedom" of the church-as-organism from the doctrines and discipline of the church-as-institute. The members of the amorphous church-as-organism can come together across confessional lines to form associations that take positions that are inconsistent with the doctrines of the church-as-institute. For example, a Kuyperian Christian political party formed by persons who identify as members of the church-as-organism will be drawn inexorably to thin its distinctive claims in favor of increasing its numbers to accomplish what all political parties want: political power.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Second is the practical result that the place of the church-as-institute is depreciated in favor of Christian associations cobbled together by the church-as-organism. Big, powerful, and socially influential associations will attract more attention than the traditional and confessionally-circumscribed church-as-institute. But only the latter has the keys to eternal life. Kuyper's innovation may thus have had the unexpected effect of turning traditional two kingdoms theology on its head.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">In Kuyper's defense, the increasingly pluralistic religious and political landscape called for some reconfiguration of the increasingly complex forms of social life. The complicated relationship among the national church, more powerful forms of business (and labor) associations, and an increasingly democratically-minded citizenry defied the old forms of resolution. The forces of modernity were dissolving traditional forms of Dutch life</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">In any event, Alvarado's concerns are well taken if the foregoing is an accurate account of Kuyper's distinction between between church-as-institute and church-as-organism. And it may well be. It certainly strikes me as plausible given what happened with Kuyper's denomination, university, and political party in the subsequent decades of the twentieth century. But I'm not ready to commit.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">While writing this short chapter, Alvarado did not have access to the complete corpus of Kuyper's political and theological writing in English. Thanks to the Acton Institute and Lexham Press that corpus (all twelve volumes of it!) are now available in English in both print and digital editions. I suspect that there's a dissertation waiting to be written that examines Alvarado's argument in light of all that Kuyper wrote.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;">* Bradford Littlejohn, ed., For Law and for Liberty: Essays on the Transatlantic Legacy of Protestant Political Thought (Davenant Press 2016).</span></p>pryorthoughtshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18077521279953292684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3918924049749483704.post-7159020399199287982024-02-08T13:54:00.001-05:002024-02-08T14:01:54.183-05:00Half a Million and Counting<p><span style="font-family: arial;">Sometime this past week the number of pageviews for my blog crossed the half-million mark. "Pageviews" doesn't mean a great deal in the world of SEO's but it's something. And it's free. <a href="https://pryorthoughts.blogspot.com/2018/04/a-moving-trueman.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">A Moving Trueman</span></a> is my number one post if anyone cares to know.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">Today I want to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ph1XCW9r5w" target="_blank"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">link to the YouTube lecture</span></a> by Oliver O'Donovan titled "Love, Values, and Rights." (O'Donovan's lecture begins at the 9:00 mark.) As some readers may already know, I count O'Donovan as the greatest living Protestant moral theologian. I have posted about his work more times than I care to count or link. This lecture, the bulk of which is devoted to an account of love, is causing me to rethink what I concluded in "<a href="https://pryorthoughts.blogspot.com/2016/12/whats-wrong-with-rights-part-4.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">What's Wrong With Rights? Part 4</span></a>".</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">In short, drawing on nineteenth-century German jurist Friedrich Stahl, I found in the notion of the fear of God a means by which to resolve the conflicting accounts of the foundation of an orderly social life of O'Donovan and American philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff. O'Donovan argues that a right-order has priority over rights while Wolterstorff contends for the reverse.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">But what if, I am now wondering, the higher order principle by which the accounts of these two heavyweights can be harmonized is not in the fear of the Lord but instead is in love? The fear of the Lord certainly entails love of God but does not, standing alone, require love of one's neighbor. Following O'Donovan's lecture it begins to seem that the virtue of love--of God and my neighbor--can bring together without remainder an account of a rightly ordered society together with subjective rights of its individual members.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">I hope to follow up as I continue to work out this matter. Until then, keep those pageviews coming!</span></p>pryorthoughtshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18077521279953292684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3918924049749483704.post-59087585497742265482024-01-16T12:30:00.032-05:002024-01-16T12:30:00.143-05:00"Why Do Protestants Convert?"<p><span style="font-family: arial;"><i>Why Do Protestants Convert?</i> is a short (100 pp.) popular-level book published in 2023 and co-authored by Brad Littlejohn of the <a href="https://davenantinstitute.org/" target="_blank">Davenant Institute</a> and pastor-theologian Chris Castaldo. While nodding to Protestant conversions to Orthodox churches, <i>Why Do Protestants Convert?</i> focuses on conversions to the Roman Catholic Church. And even here, the authors opine that more folks baptized into the communion headed by the Bishop of Rome eventually affiliate with a Protestant church than vice versa. Indeed, this book is not fortified by empirical or qualitative research. <i>Why Do Protestants Convert?</i> is the authors's account of the reasons they believe that, over recent decades, a non-trivial number academic and otherwise intellectually-oriented Protestants have converted to Rome. From my limited vantage point, the reasons Littlejohn and Castaldo describe strike me as entirely plausible.</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh_Ic2GKEvszMCUnkZjvhSKnkwmfKIxeOZGpYEH7Yzh-dZiKxGvf6JYKnM9BvYa7lFoU19oYuA83S2giQlrWRznHYLZeMuoQw-jCqXuuPtAzi7MbgOmE3QRNhrHRw49zyr0dQPpnRkBS1i0Jh7tWzpR3tbfvfXSAGuFPiBkt9k1D8lVm5hUkZB4mFwr540" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><img alt="" data-original-height="610" data-original-width="384" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh_Ic2GKEvszMCUnkZjvhSKnkwmfKIxeOZGpYEH7Yzh-dZiKxGvf6JYKnM9BvYa7lFoU19oYuA83S2giQlrWRznHYLZeMuoQw-jCqXuuPtAzi7MbgOmE3QRNhrHRw49zyr0dQPpnRkBS1i0Jh7tWzpR3tbfvfXSAGuFPiBkt9k1D8lVm5hUkZB4mFwr540=w126-h200" width="126" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;">The core of </span><i style="font-family: arial;">Why Do Protestants Convert?</i><span style="font-family: arial;"> is its three middle chapters: The Psychology of Conversion, The Theology of Conversion, and The Sociology of Conversion. Each of these chapters in turn is divided into three parallel subchapters followed by a clear summary conclusion. The book's final chapter is "Why Protestant's Should <i>Not</i> Convert."</span><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">For example, the first section of the chapter The Sociology of Conversion, "Tired of Division" invokes a concern among many (most? all?) Christians that the current divisions of the Church dishonors Jesus' prayer for the unity of his followers recorded in John 17:20-21. Addressing this legitimate concern, the authors contrast the Protestant understanding of the Spiritual unity of the Church (in terms of reconciliation through the work of Christ, the priesthood of believers united to Christ, and the marks of preaching of the Word and administration of the sacraments) with the "sacerdotal vision of ecclesial unity upheld by Rome." The multifarious forms that the Church now takes "may appear deficient" from the perspective of a church whose clergy claim to exert apostolic authority, "but they are simply the outworking of an ecclesiology that defines catholicity by adherence to the kerygma." In short Protestants emphasize the Spirituality of the Church over against claims of hierarchy and apostolic succession.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">The authors acknowledge much of the substance of the second rationale of conversion to Rome ("Tired of Shallowness") but observe that the Evangelical decline into worship characterized by therapy and smoke machines developed long after the Reformation. Still, even if entertainment-as-worship would have left Protestants aghast until the latter half of the twentieth century, it remains a reason for dissatisfaction for many with worship in some Evangelical churches today. Of course, shallowness characterizes contemporary versions of the Mass in most Catholic churches. And many Protestant churches have maintained a serious liturgy of God-directed worship.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">A desire to be counted among the "in" crowd also pulls some Protestants toward Rome. No one can deny that Protestants in America have largely failed to build institutions that carry heft in public life. This failure is not endemic to Protestantism. After all, </span><span style="font-family: arial;">for generations following the Reformation, </span><span style="font-family: arial;">Protestants founded many great institutions. But this is no longer the case today, which calls for a program of institutional reconstruction. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">(On a related note, folks interested in an accounting of the failure of American conservatives generally to build sustainable institutions of higher education should read </span><a href="https://lawliberty.org/the-economy-of-university-prestige/" style="font-family: arial;" target="_blank"><span style="color: #2b00fe;">this post</span></a><span style="font-family: arial;"> by James M. Patterson</span><span style="font-family: arial;">.)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;">There's much more of value in this short book. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in understanding why many of American Evangelicalism's best and brightest are not staying the course.</span></div>pryorthoughtshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18077521279953292684noreply@blogger.com0