Yes, Rush Limbaugh should apologize for calling the young lady who defended Obama's cotraceptive policy a "slut". It was rude, crude, and ungentlemanly.
However, he should wait until Bill Maher publicly apologizes for the various things he called Sarah Palin--although Palin is probably tougher, more thick-skinned, and more mature about being in the public eye than the tender young liberal Georgetown law student.
What gives the political Left the idea that it's verbal mud-slinging, ad hominem attacks, vicious rumor-mongering, borderline slanders, shouting down of opponents, and similar routine disregard for the free speech of opponents is acceptable and normal? Well, maybe such "normalcy" is one reason why the Left needs to be kicked off the public stage and why its media needs to go into bankruptcy as soon as possible.
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
The Obama Administration, Islam, and Other Things
Earlier, Uncle Cephas went on record against deliberate Qur'an burnings (http://unclecephas.blogspot.com/2010/09/lost-teaching-opportunity.html) as well as against Islamic triumphalism. He has not changed his opinion. But now that there have been riots in Afghanistan over inadvertent burnings of defaced Qur'ans by American military personnel and that the perpetrators of the burning may be put on trial, it's time to re-examine the question of Obama's relationship to the Islamic faith, his commitment to American valaues, and general qualifications to be president.
No, Barak Obama is not a Muslim, save in the eyes of Sharia, which holds any child of a Muslim father is a born Muslim. Nor is Obama a non-citizen by birth. Even if, as his senile grandmother affirmed, he was born in Mombassa Kenya, there is no evidence that his mother, Stanley Anne Dunham, was anything other than an American citizen with the legal qualifications to transmit citizenship to offspring born abroad. This is one reason why Obama's Indonesian-born half-sister entered the USA on an American passport rather than on an immigrant visa. But, for the record, Uncle Cephas accepst that our current President was born in Hawaii rather than Kenya.
The big problem is that Barack Obama and the administration he leads are sacrificing the protection of their own country and its values to gain the good opinion of people who will never have a good opinion of the USA.
No administration spokesman seems to have made a point of observing that the burnt Qur'ans originally had been used by incarcerated terrorists to pass messages concerning escape plots, and probably the killings of Afghans as well as NATO forces. In Sunni Islam, the marking or writing in the Qur'an is an act of blasphemy. Yet none of the ire of the Afghan street seems to fall on the original defacers. Nor has anyone bothered to note that the Afghan riots have killed far more Afghans than foreigners. Rather, all is focused on retraining and possibly disciplining Americans who were going about their legally mandated military duties.
This is similar to the administration's failure to take a teaching moment to explain the First Amendment in the wake of Terry Jones' ill-advised public burning of the Qur'an. The uppermost concern is to placate the volatile opinion of enemies rather than speak up for the values and Constitution which administration members are sworn to uphold.
As for religious affiliation, Obama's religion seems to be political expediency. He was a devout member of the United Church of Christ for as long as it could help him in the world of South Chicago politics. But, before the Organization of Islamic Countries in Cairo, he repeats the "Peace Be Upon Him" mantra at the mention of Jesus, as if Jesus is just a dead man, rather than the Risen One of whom we must ask peace.
Obama does not "get" the importance of theological doctrine in either Christian or Muslim discourse. It is among the large lacunae in his and his administration's intellectual furniture, and matched only by the firmness of his and his minions' belief in their belonging to the true cognoscenti.
So far, the Obama administration's attempt to win the goodwill of the Islamic world has borne no fruit. Iraq is in the process of sliding towards either sectarian civil war or becoming a new satrapy of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The USA has made no headway in winning Afghan hearts and minds, and in that conflict, remains heavily dependent on that miasma of Islamic bigotry, injustice, corruption, and treachery called Pakistan. The "Arab Spring" towards which the Obama showed so much goodwill is showing itself a fountain of greater Islamic bigotry, the brunt of which is being borne by the Coptic Christians of Egypt and the small, dwindling Jewish community of Tunisia. Even the OIC's chair Isahnoglu (who as a Turk should know a lot better) has gone on record as saying that the Qur'an burning is an act of deliberate malice by the American government. Perhaps a moment of lucidity in this administration is appearing in Secretary Clinton's cautioning against arming the Syrian opposition. But this is a late awakening after interventions in Libya and connivance in Mubarak's fall.
Finally, the Obama administration has probed the cultural and legal fence around the First Amendment by first floating the idea that all physicians should be trained in abortion procedures regardless of conscience, and more recently that religious employers must purchase contraceptive coverage for their employees. Here, the president shows himself part of an anti-Christian secular liberal culture gone to seed. Seeing traditional Christianity of any sort as "the" theocratic danger, it will subvert the First Amendment to weaken it.
So, with obsequiousness towards enemies and cunning plots against friends, Obama's America lurches towards becoming ludicrous, as well as corrupt.
No, Barak Obama is not a Muslim, save in the eyes of Sharia, which holds any child of a Muslim father is a born Muslim. Nor is Obama a non-citizen by birth. Even if, as his senile grandmother affirmed, he was born in Mombassa Kenya, there is no evidence that his mother, Stanley Anne Dunham, was anything other than an American citizen with the legal qualifications to transmit citizenship to offspring born abroad. This is one reason why Obama's Indonesian-born half-sister entered the USA on an American passport rather than on an immigrant visa. But, for the record, Uncle Cephas accepst that our current President was born in Hawaii rather than Kenya.
The big problem is that Barack Obama and the administration he leads are sacrificing the protection of their own country and its values to gain the good opinion of people who will never have a good opinion of the USA.
No administration spokesman seems to have made a point of observing that the burnt Qur'ans originally had been used by incarcerated terrorists to pass messages concerning escape plots, and probably the killings of Afghans as well as NATO forces. In Sunni Islam, the marking or writing in the Qur'an is an act of blasphemy. Yet none of the ire of the Afghan street seems to fall on the original defacers. Nor has anyone bothered to note that the Afghan riots have killed far more Afghans than foreigners. Rather, all is focused on retraining and possibly disciplining Americans who were going about their legally mandated military duties.
This is similar to the administration's failure to take a teaching moment to explain the First Amendment in the wake of Terry Jones' ill-advised public burning of the Qur'an. The uppermost concern is to placate the volatile opinion of enemies rather than speak up for the values and Constitution which administration members are sworn to uphold.
As for religious affiliation, Obama's religion seems to be political expediency. He was a devout member of the United Church of Christ for as long as it could help him in the world of South Chicago politics. But, before the Organization of Islamic Countries in Cairo, he repeats the "Peace Be Upon Him" mantra at the mention of Jesus, as if Jesus is just a dead man, rather than the Risen One of whom we must ask peace.
Obama does not "get" the importance of theological doctrine in either Christian or Muslim discourse. It is among the large lacunae in his and his administration's intellectual furniture, and matched only by the firmness of his and his minions' belief in their belonging to the true cognoscenti.
So far, the Obama administration's attempt to win the goodwill of the Islamic world has borne no fruit. Iraq is in the process of sliding towards either sectarian civil war or becoming a new satrapy of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The USA has made no headway in winning Afghan hearts and minds, and in that conflict, remains heavily dependent on that miasma of Islamic bigotry, injustice, corruption, and treachery called Pakistan. The "Arab Spring" towards which the Obama showed so much goodwill is showing itself a fountain of greater Islamic bigotry, the brunt of which is being borne by the Coptic Christians of Egypt and the small, dwindling Jewish community of Tunisia. Even the OIC's chair Isahnoglu (who as a Turk should know a lot better) has gone on record as saying that the Qur'an burning is an act of deliberate malice by the American government. Perhaps a moment of lucidity in this administration is appearing in Secretary Clinton's cautioning against arming the Syrian opposition. But this is a late awakening after interventions in Libya and connivance in Mubarak's fall.
Finally, the Obama administration has probed the cultural and legal fence around the First Amendment by first floating the idea that all physicians should be trained in abortion procedures regardless of conscience, and more recently that religious employers must purchase contraceptive coverage for their employees. Here, the president shows himself part of an anti-Christian secular liberal culture gone to seed. Seeing traditional Christianity of any sort as "the" theocratic danger, it will subvert the First Amendment to weaken it.
So, with obsequiousness towards enemies and cunning plots against friends, Obama's America lurches towards becoming ludicrous, as well as corrupt.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
The LGBT Agenda
There are those who most loudly insist
That from other men gays can't desist.
But to say small girls like dolls,
Frills, lace, such folderols,
Is sexism which we must resist.
They say that it's all in the genes,
That makes gay and lesbian scenes.
But when small boys like trucks
And Dads who hunt ducks,
Its all from warped cultural memes.
Yes, one more case of the Left's cognitive dissonance and its dependence on short public memories.
The eager young lawyers today
For LGBT join the fray.
But in twenty-five years
They will sure hear the tears
Of young men screwed in "two daddies." play.
Then with righteous zeal suing the hairs
From groups that brought forth such affairs,
Oh won't it be funny
To see how much money
They take to retirement lairs.
That from other men gays can't desist.
But to say small girls like dolls,
Frills, lace, such folderols,
Is sexism which we must resist.
They say that it's all in the genes,
That makes gay and lesbian scenes.
But when small boys like trucks
And Dads who hunt ducks,
Its all from warped cultural memes.
Yes, one more case of the Left's cognitive dissonance and its dependence on short public memories.
The eager young lawyers today
For LGBT join the fray.
But in twenty-five years
They will sure hear the tears
Of young men screwed in "two daddies." play.
Then with righteous zeal suing the hairs
From groups that brought forth such affairs,
Oh won't it be funny
To see how much money
They take to retirement lairs.
Monday, January 2, 2012
Reading Paul the Apostle
One of my New Year's resolutions is to not only go through the Bible, but also to undertake a thorough study of the Apostle Paul, including coming to a fair-minded assessment of what is called the New Perspective on Paul. This New Perspective has gotten a critical reception in my own conservative Reformed circles, and I would like to know whether it is a fair criticism or not.
I gather that some of the "New Perspective" builds on the work of Krister Stendahl, a couple of whose books I've read, and on which I reached a few conclusions, which I here cast in an imagined mini-dialogue form:
Stendahl: Paul is concerned about the integration of Jews and Gentiles in the early church.
Cephas: That's obvious.
Stendahl: Too much of our reading of Paul isogetes the introspective conscience of the West into Paul.
Cephas: Hmmmm. I'm under the impression that Paul, along with the Prophets of Israel, is one of the founding fathers of "the introspective conscience of the West." I won't blame Augustine of Hippo for everything; and, indeed, I think he may well have gotten a lot right.
Stendahl: Much of our Paul scholarship rests on 19th and 20th century German scholarship's imputing Luther's spiritual struggles onto Paul.
Cephas: Well, since my own father was of "Mitteleuropisch" Jewish origins, and we have our own family folklore about life in the Old Countries, I think there are a few non-theologocial dynamics at work in the history of German scholarship. One is a tendency to ignore even the post-1519 Luther's "legalist" elements in reaction against the supposed "anti-vital legalism" of the hated Napoleonic French invader--plus reaction against the forcing of the emancipation of my own ancestors on the unwilling German states at the point of French bayonets. I believe that there are probably aspects of their own Germanic Luther that German scholarship misses.
Stendahl: We need to go to Rabbinic sources to understand Paul's mind. 19th and 20th century German scholarship read the supposed "legalism" and "ceremonialism" of the late medieval Roman Catholicism with which Luther struggled back into first century Judaism, which actually had a variety of views of the place of Gentiles in the "Olam HaBa", and an understanding of a gracious God.
Cephas: Accepted. I see the New Testament as a "Jewish book"; and in many ways Paul is a cross-cultural missionary to the Gentiles. But I also see a different direction taken in the New Testament--the Olam HaBa has come, the walls between Jews and Gentiles are down, while in the Rabbinic literature we see a multiplication of halakhic practicalities to "fence" the Torah and refine Jewish distinctives. And, having heard the Kaddish said over the dead and the Aveinu, I know there's a caricature of Judaism--even Rabbinic Judaism--going on in a fair amount of Christian [especially German] writing.
Stendahl: We need to rethink Paul's language on faith and works.
Cephas: If you mean we need to re-think the antinomian strain that I see in the 19th and 20th century advanced German scholars and in dispensational fundamentalism, I think that the classical Protestant theologians (both Lutheran and Reformed) offer an excellent corrective. But, if you mean that our works somehow "justify" us with God, rather than express our gratitude, I balk--and I also think we need to keep foremost the New Testament's insistence that the Messiah is the way to the Father.
The renewed interest in Paul is also due to his importance in my Christian walk. I grew up believing that Paul had turned Christianity from the "simple, humane, loving" teachings of the Sermon on the Mount to something spooky, overly "theological", sacerdotal, inhumane, and misogynistic. Well, in my late 'teens, I actually read the New Testament out of cultural curiosity, and found that most of the biblical passages that seem to offer the most hope for most of the human race are found in the letters of Paul. Yes, I started to understand predestination from reading Paul, too, but Paul's predestination is all premised on that the God who predestines whatsoever cometh to pass (Westminster Shorter Catechism) is the same one who came among us in Christ and offered Himself for our sins, conquered death in His resurrection, and is available to all who believe, whether Jew or Gentile (which, I came to understand, was Paul's way of saying "out of all humanity"). And, for the record, I won't contrast Paul's predestinarianism with that of Calvin, the framers of the Canons of Dordt, or the Westminster divines, for, as I've read something of those men, I think they simply got the jump on me (by a few centuries) in their reading of Paul.
In short, Paul's message was brimming with hope and love. As for the Sermon on the Mount, my reaction to it has always been that if that's the standard that gets people into Heaven, all of us are quite thoroughly damned, unless there's some kind of divine intervention. To this day, while I believe and honor Jesus' Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), it is not a passage of Scripture that I "like", or that gives me emotional goosebumps. Rather, every time I read it it is a bit like standing before Mount Sinai with all its thunderings, and where even if a beast approaches too closely, it must be stoned to death. The Sermon on the Mount is something to make us pause, listen closely, and repent of a multitude of sins. There's nothing light, bright, airy, or especially comforting about it at all. Well, thank God, Jesus spoke of giving His life as a "ransom for many" (Mark 10:45), and Paul elaborates on that aspect of Jesus' ministry all over his writings, so there's hope for us after all.
So, considering the hope laid before us, Uncle Cephas wishes all a happy new year, filled with divine grace.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Thoughts for 2012
Happy New Year's to all who read this post!
新年快乐！
Just a few thoughts before I run off to bed--
I wish I had a green dollar for every time I turned on the TV last year, and saw some show about how the Mayan calendar says that we are entering the last year of the world, or something about Nostradamus (whom I have never read). I'd be a rich man.
Well, Jesus Christ says that no man knows the day nor the hour, so Uncle Cephas confidently predicts that 2012 will NOT, I repeat NOT, mark the end of the world.
May God crown this new year with grace.
新年快乐！
Just a few thoughts before I run off to bed--
I wish I had a green dollar for every time I turned on the TV last year, and saw some show about how the Mayan calendar says that we are entering the last year of the world, or something about Nostradamus (whom I have never read). I'd be a rich man.
Well, Jesus Christ says that no man knows the day nor the hour, so Uncle Cephas confidently predicts that 2012 will NOT, I repeat NOT, mark the end of the world.
May God crown this new year with grace.
Saturday, December 24, 2011
Jolly Old Saint Nicholas
Now that Christmas has come to our land, and Santa Claus is on every child's mind, it might be worthwhile to review a little bit about the original Saint Nicholas--Santa Claus arising from a childish German and Dutch corruption of his name.
There actually was a bishop of the Lycian city of Myra, now in southwestern Turkey, by the name of Nicholas, who died somewhere between 345 and 352 A.D. Apparently, as a young man, he went on a pilgrimage to Egypt and Palestine, and shortly after his return became the Christian bishop of Myra. His association with the city of Bari in Italy stems from the theft of his relics from Asia Minor by a group of Italian merchants in 1087. But, to return to his actual life, he was famous for his generosity towards the poor, including providing dowries for impoverished young women. This, apparently, is the origin of the medieval tradition that associates him with gift-giving. In the medieval Roman Church, his festival was celebrated in December, so it was not difficult for it to be assimilated to Christmas, the remembrance of God's ultimate gift of His Son, Jesus the Messiah.
However, Nicholas' life took interesting turns in the early 4th century. In 302-303 A.D., Diocletian, the Emperor of the East, initiated the last major persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire. Among those arrested and tortured was Nicholas, for as a bishop, he was very prominent among the Christians. However, Diocletian's health failed while the political star of Constantine was rising,so when Constantine became emperor and declared Christianity a legal religion, Nicholas avoided becoming living lion chow and was released to go back to his prior work of winning and nurturing souls for Christ.
But things did not end happily ever after. In Alexandria, a presbyter by the name of Arius anticipated the Jehovah's Witnesses by more than fifteen hundred years by declaring that Christ, as God the Son, was not co-eternal with the Father, but the first created being. Much of the Greek-speaking Eastern Empire accepted Arian teaching, although Nicholas did not. When Constantine called an ecumenical council at Nicaea in 325, Nicholas attended, where he was such an ardent supporter of the formula that Christ is "very God of very God, being of one substance with the Father" that he punched out Arius when the two men met. Things probably did not go all that well for Nicholas in the following years, since despite the pronunciations of the bishops of Nicaea, the heirs of Constantine tended to favor the Arian or Semi-Arian (Christ is of "like substance" with the Father) positions.
However, when all is summed up, Nicholas remained a witness to the deity of Jesus Christ as taught in the Gospel and Epistles of John the Apostle, and stands as an exemplar of Christian charity. As such, he deserves to be remembered fondly by those who know and love New Testament truth.
Uncle Cephas wishes all a Merry Christmas!
There actually was a bishop of the Lycian city of Myra, now in southwestern Turkey, by the name of Nicholas, who died somewhere between 345 and 352 A.D. Apparently, as a young man, he went on a pilgrimage to Egypt and Palestine, and shortly after his return became the Christian bishop of Myra. His association with the city of Bari in Italy stems from the theft of his relics from Asia Minor by a group of Italian merchants in 1087. But, to return to his actual life, he was famous for his generosity towards the poor, including providing dowries for impoverished young women. This, apparently, is the origin of the medieval tradition that associates him with gift-giving. In the medieval Roman Church, his festival was celebrated in December, so it was not difficult for it to be assimilated to Christmas, the remembrance of God's ultimate gift of His Son, Jesus the Messiah.
However, Nicholas' life took interesting turns in the early 4th century. In 302-303 A.D., Diocletian, the Emperor of the East, initiated the last major persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire. Among those arrested and tortured was Nicholas, for as a bishop, he was very prominent among the Christians. However, Diocletian's health failed while the political star of Constantine was rising,so when Constantine became emperor and declared Christianity a legal religion, Nicholas avoided becoming living lion chow and was released to go back to his prior work of winning and nurturing souls for Christ.
But things did not end happily ever after. In Alexandria, a presbyter by the name of Arius anticipated the Jehovah's Witnesses by more than fifteen hundred years by declaring that Christ, as God the Son, was not co-eternal with the Father, but the first created being. Much of the Greek-speaking Eastern Empire accepted Arian teaching, although Nicholas did not. When Constantine called an ecumenical council at Nicaea in 325, Nicholas attended, where he was such an ardent supporter of the formula that Christ is "very God of very God, being of one substance with the Father" that he punched out Arius when the two men met. Things probably did not go all that well for Nicholas in the following years, since despite the pronunciations of the bishops of Nicaea, the heirs of Constantine tended to favor the Arian or Semi-Arian (Christ is of "like substance" with the Father) positions.
However, when all is summed up, Nicholas remained a witness to the deity of Jesus Christ as taught in the Gospel and Epistles of John the Apostle, and stands as an exemplar of Christian charity. As such, he deserves to be remembered fondly by those who know and love New Testament truth.
Uncle Cephas wishes all a Merry Christmas!
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Original Sin, Total Depravirty, and Modern Politics
The influence of theology on politics has become a minor cottage industry in academic political science. The late Daniel Elazar wrote a multi-volume work on The Covenant Tradition in Politics, in which he argued that Reformed covenantalism played the key role in shaping the ideals of federalism and political cocmpact. While it is true that federalism and political compact sank deep roots into countries that were historically Reformed,covenantalism per se does not seem to be the most important element in shaping at least the ideal of political compact.
Elazar find most of his support in the Politics of Johannes Althusius, city syndic and Reformed church elder in the northwestern German city of Emden in the early 1600's. Althusius' argument holds that the Holy Roman Empire constitutes a federation of states and cities held together by a kind of compact, hence Emden should be allowed to stand as a Reformed city in the Lutheran Duchy of Oldenburg (East Friesland) within the still heavily Roman Catholic Empire. Elazar (a Sephardic Jew) duly notes the biblicism of early Reformed theology, its adherence to covenantal theology, and then concludes that it was the idea of covenant that gave rise to that of political compact and political federalism.
Elazar is, of course, correct in noting how the idea of covenant informs classical Reformed theology. But Elazar's excursions into the realm of classical Reformed theology are those of an outsider seriously misled by various streams of modern academic theology, which he rightly recognizes as deviations from Reformed Orthodoxy, but from whose guidance he cannot quite escape. For instance, in his volume Covenant and Commonwealth, dealing specifically with the continental Reformed and British Puritan theorists,he follows J. Wayne Baker in seeing "Calvinism" (identified as first, last, and always predestinarianism) and "Covenantaalism" as alternative Reformed "theologies" (in the plural), whose schism was averted by the Consensus Tigurinus of 1549. Unfortunately for Elazar's argument, the Consensus Tigurinus settled no debate between predestinarianism and covenantalism (which was non-existent, save in the minds of 19th century liberal theologians eager to live down their "Calvinist" past), but represents the theologians of German-speaking Switzerland accepting Calvin's doctrine of Christ's spiritual presence in the elements of the Lord's Supper as close enough to their own, and not a capitulation to the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation. Further, Elazar does not see how covenantalism in Reformed theology is the means whereby the eternal decree to save the elect enters into and takes effect in the time-bound world of finite human exisstence. Hence, Elazar's work requires correction.
However, from reading in a range of early Reformed political thinkers from the Huguenots on down to the Puritans, the doctrine of total depravity played a much larger role.
The number of early Reformed writers on politics is large, and virtually all (with the noteworthy exception of Thomas Erastes) oppose the state or civil magistrate impinging on the church's independence within its sphere and criticize the idea that the divine institution of government grants the monarch an unlimited power over his subjects. Rather, public law represents an agreement between rulers and people, and that if this law is broken, the lesser magistrate has both the right and duty to lead the people in rebellion against the monarch. Hence the title "monarchomach" given to the critics of royal absolutism by royalist writers of the 16th and 17th centuries.
One of the most common justifications for limited government was, as Samuel Rutherford said, that unlimited power in one that can sin is an "accursed power". Rutherford, as a devout Calvinist, saw sinfulness as the natural heritage of all descended from Adam by ordinary generation, hence its taint affects all members of the human race save Jesus Christ. However, government is a divine institution to protect mankind. Hence, there had to be compact between people, rulers, and God to prevent the rulers from having a power that might destroy rather than preserve the people.
By the same token, Calvin himself urged the best government as a mix of democracy and aristocracy in the last chapters of his Institutes of the Christian Religion. His reasoning was simply that kings could not always be trusted to do what is right. While Calvin differs from many of his disciples--Knox, Buchanan, Marnix van St. Aldegonde, Hotman, Junius Brutus, and others--in shying away from declaring a right of rebellion against a tyrant, his conclusions about the best constitution are remarkably similar to theirs.
The Reformed doctrine of total depravity grates on modern, democratic sensibilities. Yet the seed of the constitutional, limited governments that marked the North Atlantic countries were planted by something quite unlike the sunnier estimate of human nature springing from the French Enlightenment.
Elazar find most of his support in the Politics of Johannes Althusius, city syndic and Reformed church elder in the northwestern German city of Emden in the early 1600's. Althusius' argument holds that the Holy Roman Empire constitutes a federation of states and cities held together by a kind of compact, hence Emden should be allowed to stand as a Reformed city in the Lutheran Duchy of Oldenburg (East Friesland) within the still heavily Roman Catholic Empire. Elazar (a Sephardic Jew) duly notes the biblicism of early Reformed theology, its adherence to covenantal theology, and then concludes that it was the idea of covenant that gave rise to that of political compact and political federalism.
Elazar is, of course, correct in noting how the idea of covenant informs classical Reformed theology. But Elazar's excursions into the realm of classical Reformed theology are those of an outsider seriously misled by various streams of modern academic theology, which he rightly recognizes as deviations from Reformed Orthodoxy, but from whose guidance he cannot quite escape. For instance, in his volume Covenant and Commonwealth, dealing specifically with the continental Reformed and British Puritan theorists,he follows J. Wayne Baker in seeing "Calvinism" (identified as first, last, and always predestinarianism) and "Covenantaalism" as alternative Reformed "theologies" (in the plural), whose schism was averted by the Consensus Tigurinus of 1549. Unfortunately for Elazar's argument, the Consensus Tigurinus settled no debate between predestinarianism and covenantalism (which was non-existent, save in the minds of 19th century liberal theologians eager to live down their "Calvinist" past), but represents the theologians of German-speaking Switzerland accepting Calvin's doctrine of Christ's spiritual presence in the elements of the Lord's Supper as close enough to their own, and not a capitulation to the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation. Further, Elazar does not see how covenantalism in Reformed theology is the means whereby the eternal decree to save the elect enters into and takes effect in the time-bound world of finite human exisstence. Hence, Elazar's work requires correction.
However, from reading in a range of early Reformed political thinkers from the Huguenots on down to the Puritans, the doctrine of total depravity played a much larger role.
The number of early Reformed writers on politics is large, and virtually all (with the noteworthy exception of Thomas Erastes) oppose the state or civil magistrate impinging on the church's independence within its sphere and criticize the idea that the divine institution of government grants the monarch an unlimited power over his subjects. Rather, public law represents an agreement between rulers and people, and that if this law is broken, the lesser magistrate has both the right and duty to lead the people in rebellion against the monarch. Hence the title "monarchomach" given to the critics of royal absolutism by royalist writers of the 16th and 17th centuries.
One of the most common justifications for limited government was, as Samuel Rutherford said, that unlimited power in one that can sin is an "accursed power". Rutherford, as a devout Calvinist, saw sinfulness as the natural heritage of all descended from Adam by ordinary generation, hence its taint affects all members of the human race save Jesus Christ. However, government is a divine institution to protect mankind. Hence, there had to be compact between people, rulers, and God to prevent the rulers from having a power that might destroy rather than preserve the people.
By the same token, Calvin himself urged the best government as a mix of democracy and aristocracy in the last chapters of his Institutes of the Christian Religion. His reasoning was simply that kings could not always be trusted to do what is right. While Calvin differs from many of his disciples--Knox, Buchanan, Marnix van St. Aldegonde, Hotman, Junius Brutus, and others--in shying away from declaring a right of rebellion against a tyrant, his conclusions about the best constitution are remarkably similar to theirs.
The Reformed doctrine of total depravity grates on modern, democratic sensibilities. Yet the seed of the constitutional, limited governments that marked the North Atlantic countries were planted by something quite unlike the sunnier estimate of human nature springing from the French Enlightenment.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)