Puritan Sacramentalism (Calvin's Institutes, Battles edition: p. 1319, vol. 2)

Many defectors from Protestantism, particularly of the reformed and presbyterian variety, to Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy cite a desire for a more serious and ceremonial liturgy. In "Puritan Sacramentalism," Peter Leithart argues that a simpler liturgy, stripped of unnecessary ceremony, takes the Spirit's work in and through the sacraments more seriously.

ADDENDUM: John Calvin echoes this sentiment, with just a wee bit more polemicism, in 4.15.19 of his Institutes of the Christian Religion. A couple choice lines:

By these experiences let us learn that there is nothing holier or better or safer than to be content with the authority of Christ alone.

How much better it would be to omit from baptism all theatrical pomp, which dazzles the eyes of the simple and deadens their minds...

Let Us Consider: a homily from Hebrews 10:23-25

(This homily was delivered at the opening of the April 3, 2012 stated meeting of the Presbytery of the Dakotas [OPC].)

Given the age in which we live, whether you’ve ever preached our text, you’ve almost certainly turned to it as you’ve exhorted a Church member to more faithful attendance at Sunday services. And well you should! Particularly when we understand the connection between the eschatological Day of Hebrews 10:25 and the Sabbath day of Hebrews 4, this text calls us to see the Church’s Lord’s Day services as the primary place to discharge our Christian duties of mutual edification and encouragement. Nonetheless, because the Apostle directs us to love and good deeds, a category broader than liturgical action, we are also called to dedicate ourselves to assembling together for encouragement, on the basis of our shared hope, on other occasions as well. If all our people understood and lived out these few verses, our congregations could all be more vital and uplifting places. A great many of our congregations’ problems would disappear if all our members considered how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds.

In most sermons there comes what I like to think of as the “Nathan moment,” when the preacher turns the sermon back on the congregation and announces, as the prophet Nathan did to King David, “you are the man” (2 Samuel 12:7).

Brothers, you are the man.

We have neglected to stimulate one another to love and good deeds and have forsaken mutual encouragement. While we all get along quite nicely when forced together by our bylaws and Form of Government twice a year, only a crazy man would suggest the other 359 days of the year are filled with edification and comfort. Indeed, we are often blithely unaware of the most momentous events in one another’s lives and congregations until the spiritual reports are delivered on Tuesday morning. [Stated meetings of the Presbytery of the Dakotas are preceded by reports on the spiritual progress of the congregations, with prayer for each.] We sit together in council, but we are not as faithful as our Lord in our brotherly duties to one another. We worship together twice a year, but do not seek out other occasions to assemble together.

This being so, what are the works fitting to our corporate repentance?

While institutional reforms might do us some good, and I intend to make several suggestions along those lines, we must first acknowledge no reform will do us any good unless we first make a heart commitment to recognize one another as brethren to whom we not only are accountable, but to whom we each need to be accountable. A number of years ago this body considered charging its Sessional Oversight Committee to regularly visit the congregations of our Regional Church. During those debates, a brother confided to me that he feared such visitations not only would not be a help, but would become a hindrance due to unwise committee members. To this day, I rather suspect his sentiment is shared by others.

That, of course, is why we must commit ourselves to considering how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds. We would be fools to think ourselves immune to the American diseases of individualism, congregationalism, and confident exceptionalism. We will each, I am sure, continue to believe that we are right and, on certain occasions, the body wrong; precisely because we believe that, we must begin seeking out each other’s counsel and offering prayer for one another. We must act as though we need mutual edification if we are ever to learn the true depths of that need.

To begin, then, ask not how the Presbytery of the Dakotas can encourage you, but how you can encourage the presbyters of the Regional Church of the Dakotas. What can you do to build relationships with the men in the congregations geographically closest to yours? How can you come to know the sister Churches throughout our region well enough to pray for them intelligently when the last presbytery meeting was five months ago? What can you do to bring together the members of our various congregations throughout the year?

Secondly, honesty should characterize our meetings: without any institutional changes at all, honesty and transparency would enable us to minister to one another, and care for the Churches under our supervision, much more effectively. An anecdote: a number of years ago, I e-mailed another pastor asking how our congregation could pray for his. This was one of those providentially orchestrated moments when he needed someone to talk to: as e-mails led to phone calls, I learned of divisions within the congregation and session, and serious questions as to his future in that call. At the next presbytery meeting, I listened with interest and surprise to the spiritual report from that congregation. Not only was there no mention of trouble, one got the impression of an active and Spiritually vital place. Of course, he wasn’t lying: even the most troubled Church is still a Church, and one can usually find enough good things to bring to presbytery that none need suspect some bad news is being omitted. Ever since, I’ve taken our Tuesday morning reports with a grain of salt.

This congregation’s problems could not be kept under wraps indefinitely, and eventually the pastor left and the presbytery got involved. By that point, it was too late for us to offer much help, and this Church went into a period of severe decline. Here we come to the really depressing part of my story: those of you who’ve been in the Regional Church of the Dakotas for the past 12 years, as I have, will have some trouble figuring out which congregation I’m talking about. Depending on how one judges these things, we’ve had about a half-dozen de facto Church splits or sudden pastoral resignations during my tenure here, and a large portion of those have come to a head shortly after a stated meeting of presbytery at which no mention was made of the brewing crisis. We cannot help sessions, congregations, or pastors who refuse to give an honest accounting of their congregational lives. Brothers, give us the opportunity to encourage you and counsel you toward more perfect love and a greater plenitude of good deeds. You owe it to this presbytery and to your congregations by virtue of your ordination vows, not to mention by virtue of our duty to Jesus Christ, the Lord and head of his Church.

Thirdly, let us consider our institutional life. Our bylaws were not delivered atop Pike’s Peak on tablets of stone, and could be much improved. Other presbyteries have found ways to address some of the problems which chronically plague our Regional Church, and we would do well to learn from the brethren. 

Less formal mechanisms are also open to us. I have used my time as moderator to promote gatherings before our stated meetings convene which create opportunity for discussion of issues of interest to our Regional Church and to the broader Church as well. (Such gatherings are held regularly by the Presbytery of Northern California and Nevada.) By design, we debate rather than discuss during presbytery meetings. Since this is how presbyteries are supposed to function, that is a good thing. However, those debates would be much improved if we had other occasions to engage in dialogue: the nuances of a man’s position can rarely be fully communicated in a floor speech. Thankfully, we are presbyterians, and when such a thing has been done three times, it has become an inviolate tradition.

Some further suggestions: perhaps our ministers and elders could gather together in geographically convenient groups for prayer and discussion every couple months. Perhaps similarly grouped meetings of deacons could gather to coordinate on local needs. Perhaps the  stated clerk could distribute communications a month before the presbytery convenes so those documents could be studied and men could meet to gain a better understanding of the issues we will be called upon to judge when we sit in formal assembly.

All this will take time and energy, commodities precious to each one of us. But brethren, what choice do we have? We have been called into the service of the Great High Priest, who offered himself as the once and for all sacrifice for our sins. Let us draw near to him with sincere hearts. Let us confess our hope by discharging our presbyterial office according to the cruciform standard of his own work on our behalf. Let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, and all the more as we see the day drawing near. He is faithful; let us be found, by his grace and the power of his Spirit, faithful to our calling as well.

Jupiter Ascending, Downton Abbey, & Leviticus

The reviews of Jupiter Ascending have not been kind, and I suppose I can see why. I am second to none in gape-jawed amazement at The Matrix, with which the Wachowskis exploded onto the film scene, not only revolutionizing the way action sequences ever after would be filmed, but creating one of the most potent allegories of Christ’s redemptive work in recent memory. Though vast in interstellar scope, Jupiter Ascending shares none of The Matrix’s metaphysical or genre-shaping ambitions. Instead, it puts me in mind most of The Fifth Element, and if that silly science-fiction romp is the standard, then Jupiter Ascending is good (and notably clean) fun.

Royalty is a major theme in Jupiter Ascending: it turns out that the earthling Jupiter, the titular character, by pure accident is a genetic duplicate of a now-deceased intergalactic matriarch and vicious capitalist empire-builder. As such, she is by nature “Entitled,” i.e., royal. There’s a rather lovely scene (although, admittedly, somewhat preposterous) in which bees engage in a bit of synchronized swarming in recognition of her majestic status. (It appears bees have something of a sense for this sort of thing.) While this scene has been widely mocked on the interwebs, I thought it hit on what most people, around the world today and throughout time, have intuitively accepted as true: there are some people who are, to borrow from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, more equal than others. Take, for example, the popularity of Downton Abbey: hordes and hordes of Americans, reared on the self-evident truth that all men are created equal, adore a story built on the odd conceit that some people are born to rule, and others to serve them. 

In God’s providence, I saw Jupiter Ascending the day before I preached Mark 1:40-45, in which Jesus heals the unclean leper. The leper’s problem was not so much that he was diseased, but that he was ceremonially unclean, and thus unable to worship in the Temple (Leviticus 13-14) and prone to being shunned by those who wished to worship in the Temple (Leviticus 5:3). Under the Old Covenant system of worship, cleanliness and uncleanliness were a symptom of man’s alienation from God: all you had to do was interact with a person with a skin disease, and your inherent sinfulness would, as it were, bubble to the surface and make you unfit to enter the presence of the LORD God to offer up a sacrifice in worship.

It seems to me that (what seems to be) the native human instinct for respecting persons of royal birth is, in some way, a reflection of the Old Testament laws of purity and cleanliness. There are some people who are more holy, more clean, closer to God than others, and such persons must be respected: even if their personal character is not respectable, their status demands our reverence and awe. 

In light of this, Mark 1:41 is shocking: “Moved with pity, [Jesus] stretched out his hand and touched him….” Leviticus 5:3, if not the rest of the Old Testament Law, is extraordinarily clear: to simply touch the unclean is to become unclean oneself. To push the double negative past the breaking point, Jesus not only is unafraid of becoming unclean, but bears a holiness so intrinsic and so powerful that he obliterates the category of uncleanness: he makes all things clean. He cannot be made unclean; instead, the power of sin is so conquered by his person that the unclean has no option but to become clean. “And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean” (Mark 1:42). Herein lies the immensity of Christ’s work on the Cross: because in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, even the ways in which human societies have intuitively ordered themselves since time immemorial are shown to be mere shadows and types, overturned and abolished in the person and work of our Savior.

(Here, then, lies the peculiarly Christocentric genius of the American experiment in republican self-government: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” No royalist, enmeshed as she or he must be in the Old Covenant perspective on the world, could say such a thing.)

We respect royalty because we respect God: that is how we were made. Nonetheless, Christ’s work on the Cross destroys the royal conceit: there is no more clean or unclean, but in Christ all things have become new. “[T]hat is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.” (2 Corinthians 5:19)

So many heroes, so little heroism

In an admirably caustic post at the First Things website, Owen Strachan calls out "evangelical" pastors who congratulate themselves on their "brave" choice to ignore the Bible and affirm homosexual desire, practice, and marriage. His conclusion says it all:

This is the endgame of the affirming movement. It is a project that removes the scandal of the faith. Once you’ve whitewashed your house’s doorposts of their bloody stain, you find that your neighbors stop looking at you funny, and your house looks just like every other abode in Egypt.

Slouching toward abominable neologisms

I was appalled to see the so-called word "ganjapreneur" in an above-the-fold headline in yesterday's Denver Post, the paper of record of the Gateway to the Great Plains. However, the Urban Dictionary has found a usage from The Atlantic Monthly in 2009, which means it's not quite as new as yesterday morning, but still abominable.

I foretold much doom and gloom when marijuana was legalized in the great state of Colorado, but the death of English has caught me by surprise.

Scripture speaks to politics: a response to Cale Horne

I think I like Cale Horne. I certainly like what I take to be his point in “How Scripture Speaks to Politics” in the May 2014 edition of Ordained Servant: namely, that Christians must beware a tendency, found on both the right and left, to read justifications for public policy positions into the Bible. Unfortunately, the exegetical argument he uses to buttress this wise advice demonstrates both poor logic and (perhaps unwitting?) ignorance of our confessional standards.

That exegetical argument has to do with the proper interpretation of the Eighth  and Tenth Commandments, but Horne falls into the logical fallacy of the excluded middle earlier when he writes, “If we accept that the Bible in its entirety is an unfolding of the story of redemption, we are unlikely… to go looking in the Bible for policy prescriptions that simply are not there” (emphasis added). He does not explore, and hence by implication excludes, the possibility that we who accept that the Bible in its entirety is an unfolding of the story of redemption may  go looking in said Bible for policy prescriptions and may even, on occasion, find them.

This brings us to his argument that the Eighth and Tenth Commandments do not presuppose the God-ordained existence of private property and a consequent duty of the civil magistrate to protect individuals’ right to hold it. Remarkably, he does not demonstrate that the conclusion with which he disagrees is founded on bad exegesis, but argues it is ruled out because of the previous exclusion of the middle: “Based on our assumptions – that the Bible in all its parts is revealing to us God’s plan of salvation for his people, and that this revelation is organic and unfolding – we must conclude that these uses of Exodus 20… are wide of the mark.” Instead, he posits that Adam in his innocence was called to steward all things as possessions of God, and so “[t]he Eighth and Tenth Commandments are required because, by the entrance of sin, we no longer regard property entrusted to us as articles of our stewardship that are not his own.”

Frankly, I find this, especially in the context of Horne’s exegesis of Acts 4, a helpful redemptive-historical insight. However, said insight fails to rule out the exegetical conclusion that the Eighth and Tenth Commandments presuppose a right to private property. Without further demonstration to that effect, this assertion on Horne’s part is another example of the fallacy of the excluded middle: here, the assumption that one application necessarily excludes all other applications. In this case, both applications could be true.

Further, our Larger Catechism speaks in support only of the application which Horne believes excluded, that the Eighth Commandment (at least) requires a right to private property. Larger Catechism 142 speaks of “what belongs to” our neighbor, and it and 143 assume a civil legal apparatus to enforce property rights (“justice in contracts and commerce…; restitution of goods unlawfully detained from the right owners thereof; … avoiding unnecessary lawsuits…; and an endeavor, by all just and lawful means, to procure, preserve, and further the wealth and outward estate of others, as well as our own”). Horne appears not to have thought through the implications of his argument for our confessional standards.

I respond at this late date (at the time of this writing, in mid-October to an essay which appeared in May) not because I want to employ the Bible to promote a right- or left-wing political agenda (which I consider in poor taste, not to mention a subversion of the Gospel). Rather, I write because Horne falls into errors which are increasingly common in the OPC, including (and perhaps especially) among her ecclesiastical officers. The fallacy of the excluded middle can be found in some of our theological controversies, such as pitting a redemptive-historical hermeneutic against grammatical-historical exegesis or Genesis 1-2 as covenant against chronological history. Some of our other theological controversies, it seems to me, could be forestalled by reflection upon what we have already purported to believe in our doctrinal standards. (I have in mind, for example, a failed overture to the General Assembly some years ago to form a study committee on hermeneutics. The OPC’s hermeneutic is stated plainly in WCF 1.9: “The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself: and therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture [which is not manifold, but one], it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly.”)

As I said earlier, I like Cale Horne, and with him I look askance at efforts on the political right and left to claim the Scriptures support their predetermined positions; still, that does not change the fact our Catechisms teach us that the moral and civil law have implications for public policy. In other words, Scripture speaks to politics, and our duty as Church officers is to think reasonably and confessionally about what the Bible says.

A eulogy

I’m writing this for my children.

Children can’t preserve the memories of their parents because they don’t know their parents as people, but as their parents. What they can do is preserve their own memories of their parents, and what I can do is steward my memory of my father. It’s my memory: my sisters and my mother and his brother and his sister have theirs, but mine is for me and my children. They won’t have any more memories of him for their own, not now, so perhaps by passing on mine I can give them some account of who he was and why, for better or worse, I am the father they will remember.

My dad once told me he was an affable and well-liked child, and that seems about right. It certainly would account for the affable and well-liked man I knew. By whatever accident of heritage and up-bringing, I am neither: I am, rather, angry, and my difficult disposition has led me to reflect rather more on the nature of anger than perhaps the affable and well-liked are wont to do. In his excellent Christianity and Liberalism, J. Gresham Machen wisely observed, “The really important things are the things about which men will fight.” When my dad got angry, it was about something important, whether he articulated it or not.

He retired from the State Department (the second time) in the late 1990s, right about the time the Republican Party officially gave up on any kind of philosophy of government in favor of a naked commitment to win elections by hook or by exploiting the resentments of a frightened populace. Not content with the somewhat dubious claim that government is the problem, they began suggesting government workers are the problem, somehow posing a threat to the American people. Leaving aside the fairly obvious fact that the greatest threat facing the American people is the American people, this widely-spread assertion wounded my father, who had spent his entire adult life to that point in government service. In other words, it got him mad, and when he got mad it showed all of us what was important to my father.

My dad believed, without irony, in duty. He entered the Foreign Service because the work interested him, and because he wanted to serve his country. As did many of his generation, he volunteered for the Army to avoid the draft, and did his service at the Presidio, wearing mufti, driving a sports car, and visiting San Francisco jazz clubs at night. Thus, I have a hard time imagining him as anything other than a diffident soldier, but he was serious about national service, serious enough to take his oath as an officer of the United States government in absolute sincerity. He spent his entire working life in government service because government service is necessary and important. He volunteered, and he did his duty.

So if you want to understand my father, you need to understand that his job, for a man like him, was not simply a job, but really and truly service to his country. I don’t know if that’s how he would have stated the matter, but that’s the way he was, not only with regard to his job, but with regard to everything, including Church and home. My father could never comprehend the notion that people should only do what they feel like doing, no matter how many times his children tried to persuade him of it. For my dad, you do what you’re supposed to do, with only just as much complaining as the situation warrants and no more. Life is defined by duty, and one does one’s duty.

I was a pretty emotional kid, and I think I would have liked a father who could have connected with me emotionally, although I rather doubt anyone could have successfully connected with me back then. God knows my dad tried, and he tried mostly because he had to, and he mostly failed. But what I remember isn’t his failure to be whatever it was I wanted when I was a child. I’ve mellowed with age, and the truth is, I don’t understand any more why I was the way I was. What I remember is that my dad was there. He was always there. It wasn’t the parenting “quality time” which was faddishly in vogue sometime during my teen years, but it was certainly time. He volunteered for my Boy Scout troop when that was an extremely ill-advised proposition. He came to all my school plays. He even slept in my freshman dorm room one time so he could see me as Touchstone in As You Like It. More importantly, he was there every night when I went to bed, and, later, when I came home late at night. When things got hard and my wife was pregnant with our first child and we had to sell our house, I called him and I didn’t ask him to help. I told him I needed him to help me get the house fixed up and he told me when he could come out to Denver, which is what I knew he would do. My dad was there.

My dad was an affable and likable child. “Affable,” which I didn’t think people even know is a word any more, is the adjective which most often appears in the e-mails and cards I received in the weeks after Thanksgiving. It was easy for me to get along with my dad, at least after I went to college and the stakes were lowered in our relationship. I miss him. I can’t be affable, but he never wanted me to be affable. What he wanted, and what he told me explicitly only once, was for me to do what I have to do. He was, I think, glad I ended up a pastor, although he never said so in so many words. He didn’t ask me to do my grandmother’s memorial service: someone had to, and it had to be me because I couldn’t imagine doing otherwise. I read the prayers over his body because that is what his son, who is a pastor, was duty-bound to do. That’s what I learned from my dad: you do what you have to do, your feelings on the matter be damned. 

My father was an affable man, but there was something there I could never reach. I am not an affable man, and I am that much more a difficult husband and father. My children may never reach me, so I hope they never need to. What I hope they remember is that I was there.  I hope they will be there for their children, because that is what Kingsburys do: we are there; we do our duty. What I ultimately hope my children remember is that I was there because my dad was there. He was always there.

William F. Kingsbury was a man and a person much larger than my memory can encompass. I can’t do justice to your memories of him, and now I realize I can’t do justice to mine. All I can say is this: I learned from him all I really need to know, all I really need to do, to be a father and a husband. I am what I am by God’s grace through Christ’s Cross, and I am the man I am because of my father.

I miss him.

Why T. David Can't Write (for a Popular Audience)

an unusually hostile review of T. David Gordon’s Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns: How Pop Culture Rewrote the Hymnal (Phillipsburg: P&R, 2010), with advice on its appropriate use for pastors and sessions

T. David Gordon has helped me better understand the Christian duty of charity. In “Introductory Considerations,” (endnote 1) he writes “it is also our duty to employ charity in discussing ‘polemical’ theology, or controversial theology” (p. 40). Amen, and after reading Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns, I have developed a corollary to this rule: we shouldn’t make it difficult for others to employ charity toward us. Sadly, Gordon violates my corollary, and I am genuinely saddened because I largely agree with his approach to, and conclusions regarding, the music used in Christian worship.

I have never directly participated in “worship wars,” but at my age (endnote 2) I have had much opportunity to observe controversies over the music used in congregational worship. Since my college years, I’ve not liked to ask, “What kind of music may we sing?” The better question is “What kind of music should we sing?” That is, while the Scriptures do not explicitly prohibit or endorse particular genres of music, some are (vastly) better than others for congregational singing, and should be considered on musical and aesthetic merit. This is the refreshingly novel media-ecological perspective (“Preface,” pp. 9-18) Gordon employs in Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns, and likely why it has been so warmly received by pastors and professors alike. With that in mind, I recommended our session use it in our congregation’s home study groups. This was a mistake.

A mistake not because our members are wedded to the contemporary worship style Gordon decries (we use only the Trinity Hymnal and Psalter in our services) or are suspicious of aesthetic considerations. Instead, his writing style (endnote 3) erects barriers between him and his readers which unnecessarily prejudice them against his conclusions. I led one group discussion, and found about half the time was taken up with complaints about how Gordon presented his arguments before I was able to steer the conversation to their substance, with which most of the participants (grudgingly) agreed. (endnote 4)

Gordon is prone to overstatement, as in his evaluation of the guitar as an accompaniment for congregational singing. “[G]uitar-playing just doesn’t sound serious; it sounds like casual amusement” (p. 61). “The guitar is nearly hopeless for accompanying a chorus…. [T]he choice of a guitar as an accompanying instrument rules out [‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God’] (endnote 5), as it does… ‘For All the Saints’” (p. 100). Then on page 132, in footnote 3 he praises the relatively recent hymns of Stuart Townend, which he notes “employ guitar.” If the guitar is “nearly hopeless” for accompanying Christian worship, how can a hymn which relies on it be commendable? When an author is unable to keep up a rhetorical stance, he invites the suspicion it is not entirely sincere.

Gordon also confuses his deductions with demonstrated conclusions. In his discussion of “commercial forces” (endnote 6) as a contributor to American culture’s present contemporaneity, he asserts that Gillette no longer manufactures the 1906 safety razor (or its replacement blades) which he prefers because the corporation wishes to keep the average consumer ignorant so that said consumer will purchase new models (p. 107). Mind you, he offers no documentation in support of this theory. With little effort, I can construct alternatives which account for the facts equally well: the 1906 model had too small a market share to make its continued production profitable for Gillette’s purposes; or Gillette actually believes its current razors are superior to its previous products. Of course, these theories do not fit Gordon’s predetermined conclusion, nor do they have the added advantage of showing him to be a man of cultivated old-world tastes.

Which in turn brings us to Gordon’s fastidiousness, in which he appears to take a peculiar exhibitionistic pride. As a new pastor, he determined “about 500” of the 700 hymns in his congregation’s hymnal “were not appropriate” “to corporate Christian worship” (p. 22). Denominational hymnal-revision committees are not to be trusted because they sometimes include popular “stinkers” to ensure their hymnals get used (p. 163). Gordon doesn’t “believe recently occurring events are worthy of [his] attention” (p. 113). Few in our congregation are as well-educated as T. David Gordon, but they know when an author is putting on airs.

Allow me to comment on one final example: on page 100, he relates how the congregation he pastored sang without accompaniment for six to nine months not because accompaniment was unavailable, but because what he (or, possibly, the congregation) considered appropriate accompaniment was unavailable. In sharing this anecdote, he offers no concession to the reality faced by many Churches whose members don’t sing very well, and lack musically gifted people who can teach them to sing or facilitate their singing with the best possible accompaniment. That is to say, the average Christian whose congregation is doing its level-but-in-all-honesty-mediocre best, as aesthetically unimpressive as that may be, to sing praises to their Savior each Lord’s Day almost cannot help but be irritated by page 100 of Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns.

And therein lies the tragic irony of an author who understands the relationship between messages and meta-messages (endnote 7) (pp. 65-66), but has written a book whose message is obscured by the average reader’s impulse to kill the messenger. I invoke tragedy seriously: T. David Gordon offers a much-needed reorientation to the now decades-long controversy over worship music which could help further the discussion along productive lines. Every chapter of this book offers insights which should help any Christian better understand how and why he sings to his Lord, but Gordon appears unable to present these in a manner irenic or helpful to a popular audience.

In retrospect, our session probably erred when we distributed Why Johnny Can’t Sing Hymns to our congregation, although I am confident in our members’ Christian maturity and ability to profit even from poorly presented arguments. To others, I recommend you read and study this book in session, perhaps along with your congregation’s musicians, and then determine how best to convey its insights to your members. For example, the pastor could give some lectures which distill this book’s arguments and perspectives. Odds are very good you will do a better job at applying charity to polemical theology than does T. David Gordon.

1) Fully a quarter of this book is taken up by a “Preface,” “Acknowledgements,” an “Introduction,” and “Introductory Considerations.” Seriously?

2) Forty-four but still boyishly handsome, thanks for asking.

3) One is tempted to say “his personality,” but that might not be entirely charitable.

4) The experience of our other church officers who led discussions was similar.

5)  See also p. 99. A factually incorrect assertion, incidentally: I witnessed it done at our presbytery’s Bible camp last summer. The guitar may not be the best accompaniment for this hymn, but it is competent.

6) Gordon invokes “commercial forces” in much the same way your paranoid uncle brings up “the Trilateral Commission.”

7) Speaking of which, I’m obviously fond of using the footnote to insert clever comments. Others, however, find Gordon’s similar practice off-putting. Also, he has a tendency to put some substantive information in his footnotes, which can be missed by those not trained to read them.

Calvin on why you disagree with me (Calvin's Institutes, Battles edition: p. 1285, vol. 2)

If you set out to convince anyone by words to do something, you will think of all the arguments by which he may be drawn to your opinion and more or less constrained to obey your advice. But you have accomplished nothing unless he in turn has a keen and sharp judgment by which to weigh the validity of your arguments; unless also he is of a teachable disposition and ready to listen to teaching; unless, finally, he conceives such an opinion of your faith and prudence as may predispose him to adopt your opinion. For there are very many stubborn heads which you can never bend by reasoning.

The War over Christmas: after action report

It's the day after Epiphany. I took down the Christmas decorations in my study, and so now is a good time for a reflection on the 2014 edition of the War over Christmas. Once again, the Facebook was replete with aggressive posts from otherwise quite pleasant Christians stating their intention to forcefully wish "Merry Christmas," with all vim and vigor, on any who might dare say "Happy Holidays" to them, no matter the circumstances. Despite the evident fears of many that Christmas would be abolished by presidential executive action (which I do not share), Advent and Christmastide progressed unhindered. Thanks to Redbox, the curmudgelings were even able to see A Charlie Brown Christmas for the first time.

Also for the first time that I can remember, all the "War on Christmas" rhetoric actually began getting to me. I began to fear that saying "Merry Christmas" to a store clerk would be taken as a deliberate assault in the culture wars, and so chose to continue with the monosyllabic grunts I use year-round whenever leaving the house. Thus it was Mrs. Curmudgeon who, at the check-out at the local purveyor of bargain-priced organic produce, accidentally let slip a "Merry Christmas" and saw the clerk visibly flinch. Christmas is surviving the War on Christmas just fine, but civility is definitely a casualty.

I'd call it ironic if I weren't fond of irony, so let's call it sad instead. The Church has historically celebrated Christmas so we might have twelve days to focus on the remarkable fact of the Incarnation. At any time of year, we should marvel that the infinite God became a finite man, and the Creator thereby honored and affirmed his own image as it is found in all his human creatures. How sad that Christians choose to dispense with civility, a basic expression of our Fifth Commandment duty to honor our fellow image-bearers (Shorter Catechism #54), at precisely the season when our Lord's model of goodwill should be foremost in our minds and conduct.