August

In August I hope to post some remarks on Rob Lister's God is Impassible and Impassioned: Toward a Theology of Divine Emotion (Crossway/Apollos), which is a full length discussion of divine impassibility. This is a topic on which there have been posts at Helm's Deep in the past. The book is valuable in providing a good deal of information on the historic position on divine passibility, and the rise of the stress on divine passibility, which is such a feature of modern theology. Lister also offers some proposals of his own. The post will be on the doctrine of God that Lister proposes, the 'model', one which seems to be attractive to several evangelical theologians at present.

In September it is hoped to return to the theme of rebellion, looking at the early Reformed pamphlet Contra Tyrannos.

If you have an interest in Baptist history, or church history more generally, note that there is a two-day Conference in September at the Andrew Fuller Center, Southern Baptist Seminary, Louisville, 'Andrew Fuller and his Controversies'. Further details can be found at events.sbts.edu/andrewfuller

Calvin on Rebellion

Philippe Du-Plessis Mornay (1549–1623), widely regarded as the author of Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, by 'Junius Brutus',  an early Calvinist defence of civil rebellion, published in Basle in 1579

I’ve heard it said that John  Calvin was not in favour of rebellion against the government, and that it was John Locke to whom would-be rebels looked to justify Christian rebellion, as we might call it. For a recent example of this view see here.  But I think the matter is a bit more complicated than that, and that a case can be made for Calvin leaving open, in fact if not in intention, the legitimacy of rebellion as a last resort against civil injustice.

Government

It is worth remembering that Calvin’s view of government was aristocratic.  The king's power was not to be absolute, but he is to govern together with his nobles. Calvin’s treatment of civil government is in Book IV of the Institutes, the last chapter (20). At the beginning of Book IV Calvin explicitly links to his earlier teaching on the two kingdoms. (Book III.19)

The former [kingdom], in some measure, begins the heavenly kingdom in us, even now upon earth, and in this mortal and evanescent life commences immortal and incorruptible blessedness, while to the latter [kingdom] it is assigned, as long as we live among men to foster and maintain the external worship of God, to defend sound doctrine and the condition of the church, to adapt our conduct to human society, to form our manners to civil justice, to conciliate us to each other, to cherish common peace and tranquility. (IV.2)

You might ask why if Calvin holds to the two-kingdom doctrine, the Institutes should contain any instruction in political matters. The answer is because he believes that the NT teaches that government is warranted and put in place by God. As Paul says, the powers that be are ordained of God. Christians need to be reminded of this, he thinks, just as they need to know what the limits are to the powers of government. 

It is widely believed even amongst Reformed people that Calvin was mistaken in including the part that I have underlined among the duties of the civil magistrate. The state should not try to protect the profession of the faith, (as Calvin thought) but (instead) provide a public square in which any religion and none may or may not peaceably flourish. Calvin was a stranger to freedom of worship and toleration, as he was to a universal electoral franchise. He interpreted Paul’s words to Timothy ‘that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty’ rather more strongly than most Christians today would interpret it.  But nothing (I think) turns on this in what follows.

The forms of government

In Chapter 20 of Book IV Calvin also says something about forms of government in general.

…..and if you compare the different states with each other, without regard to circumstances, it is not easy to determine which of these has the advantage in point of utility, so equal are the terms in which they meet. Monarchy is prone to tyranny. In an aristocracy, again, the tendency us not less to the faction of the few, while in popular ascendency there is the strongest tendency to sedition. When these three forms of government, of which philosophers treat, are considered in themselves, I, for my part, am far from denying that the form which greatly surpasses the others is aristocracy, either pure or modified by popular government, not indeed in itself, but because it very rarely happens that kings so rule themselves as never to dissent from want is just or right, or are possessed of so much acuteness and prudence always to see correctly. Owing therefore to the vices or defects of men, it is safer or more tolerable when several bear rule…..

So, Calvin favours aristocracy because of the need for the operation of what later came to be called checks and balances. To put the point otherwise, the king needed his nobles as they needed him.

Government and equity

In the course of his chapter on Civil Government, Calvin also has things to say about the fact that there are  different ways that  the magistrate may express the natural law of God.

Yet we see that amid this diversity they all tend to the same end. For they all with one mouth declare against those crimes which are condemned by the eternal law of God. – i.e. murder, theft, adultery and false witness; though they agree not as to the mode of punishment. This is not necessary, nor even expedient. (IV 20.17)

This is valuable for  those who see here a  recognition of distinctive elements of the New Testament  in Calvin’s understanding of the relation between the church and society, and not an attempt at a re-production of Mosaic theocracy. In recognizing legitimate differences in the way that the natural law is administered in different nations he recognises the international character of New Testament Christianity. These different modes of administering the law are, Calvin says, to be seen as different ways in which the magistrates' sense of equity may be expressed.

But can Calvin be saying that the natural law, however understood, must be seen as a legitimate recognition of the natural law, God’s ‘eternal law’? This cannot be, for in his commentaries and elsewhere Calvin pays attention to the ‘barbarous’ nations. Barbarous nations are presumably those that do not give appropriate recognition of the natural law. And in any case he cannot think that whatever edicts the magistrate upholds are, simply in virtue of his upholding them, made equitable and so legitimate. (Note what he later says about the 'undue license ' of kings.) That is surely the road to tyranny.

We can at least say this. Calvin’s distinction between the equity of the natural law and the various ways in which is concretely interpreted and applied in different societies opens up a gap or fissure to allow a critic of the status quo to probe the question: This is the law, but is it equitable? And to cite certain arrangements as oppressive and a legitimate target for rebellion.

Civil disobedience

Besides the issue of resistance to tyranny, and of equity, there is also the matter of civil disobedience. Calvin was against the government forcing people to sin, forcing them to attend the Mass, say. No, he said, Christians are to obey God, not men. So they must either publicly dissent by refusing attendance, and take the consequences, or flee. No Nicodemism! But are not such acts (or abstentions) of individuals, acts of civil disobedience?

But in that obedience which we hold to be due to the commands of rulers, we must always make the exception, no, must be particularly careful that it is not incompatible with  obedience to Him to whose will the wishes of all kings should be subject, to whose decrees  their command must yield, to whose majesty their sceptres must bow….

But what has civil disobedience to do with rebellion? Quite a bit, actually. Suppose that the number of Reformed Christians in France had been much greater than it was and these had agreed with Calvin in not adopting Nicodemism, then one can conceive of widespread instances of civil disobedience. And such passive resistance, as we know, can sometimes be brutally suppressed by the authorities. But also as we know, it can be successful in bringing about change. We need think only of Gandhi in colonial India,  and the civil rights movement in the US.

 

Calvin and rebellion

These data - on the scope of government, on aristocracy as the preferred type of government, on government and equity, and on civil disobedience - provide the background to his brief remarks on rebellion in the closing paragraphs of the Institutes. First, vengeance against the tyranny of kings.

Although the Lord takes vengeance on unbridled domination, let us not therefore suppose that that vengeance is committed to us, to whom no command has been given but to obey and suffer. I speak only of private men. For when popular magistrates have been appointed to curb the tyranny of kings…and perhaps there is something similar to this in the power exercised in each kingdom by the three orders, when they hold their primary diets. So far am I from forbidding these officially to check the undue license of kings, that if they connive at kings when they tyrannize and insult over the humbler of the people, I affirm that their dissimulation is not free from nefarious perfidy, while knowing that, by the ordinance of God, they are its appointed guardians.

So Calvin is saying that God in his providence may arrange things so as to bridle the tyranny of kings. The instruments he uses for this may undertake this role consciously, or they may be God’s unwitting partners. And the 'popular magistrates' have a responsibilty to curb the 'undue license' of kings, a responsibility which they may shirk. What then? Are there any other avenues of permissible resistance to the king? Calvin did not go so far as to say that this can ever be an option for Christians.

Yet it can be argued that for all his personal conservatism, there were, in Calvin’s view of civil society, enough chinks and fissures through which a case for rebellion against civic injustice could be developed. Calvin himself was certainly not an advocate of rebellion. Far from it. But what of those who came after? That this is the road that some Calvinists trod can be seen from Quentin Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Volume 2: The Age of Reformation.

Next time, a look at the Contra Tyrannos 

Circumstances Change

Stephen Clark,  Pastor of Free School Court Evangelical Church, Bridgend, and Chair of Affinity’s Theological Studies Conference, has written an interesting pamphlet on ‘separation’. In Serving God in His Church in our Generation: Learning from the Past while Living in the Present, he argues that while the verities of the gospel remain unchanged, the circumstances in which these are upheld are continually changing, and that the path of wisdom lies in discerning these changes. My friend the Exiled Preacher drew attention to this publication and commended it, otherwise I might not have known about it. It can be downloaded here.

The context of the piece is the claim (made in another pamphlet, to which Clark's is a rejoinder)  that the evangelical inter-church organisation Affinity no longer stands where its direct antecedent, the British Evangelical Council, once stood, and that true separatists will do the right thing if they shun it. ‘Separatist’ here refers to someone who believes it is a Christian duty to refuse to work in concert with any who are members of a denomination or other group that is theologically ‘mixed’, accepting evangelicals and non evangelicals in equal standing therein.[There is no end to such separationism - a separationist of the second degree would presumably shun a person who was in an approved-of separationist church but who in fact was non-separationist in his views.]

Stephen Clark begs to differ from this view, for to take such a stand is to forget that circumstances change. In particular, to forget that the wider English church culture in which evangelical churches operate has changed since the 1960’s and 1970’s. Then the call for churches and individuals to separate from mixed denominations of evangelical and other types  had a point. That was in the era of the ecumenical siren-call, and the seeming steady Rome-ward march of the Church  of England. But by now the ecumenical appeal has been marginalized,  and the leadership and punching power of the ‘liberal’ leadership of Christian denominations has dwindled and become emasculated, as have the denominations themselves. So much so that your average 20 and 30-year old Christian is likely neither to know or care what ‘ecumenical’ means, or suffer from sleepless nights fearing the onward surge of the W.C.C. and the B.C.C. He's more likely to think that the initials are of cricket clubs

On top of this, by her advocacy of the ordination of women clergy, the Church of England has erected an electric fence between herself and the Roman Catholic Church. Those Anglo-Catholic clergy who longed for union with Rome have done what John Henry Newman did, they have long since bought a one-way ticket for the Rome express. And many of the current evangelicals in the Church of England,  the product of the work of the Proclamation Trust and of Oak Hill, do not have the ambition of their immediate predecessors as far as the upper echelons of the Church of England are concerned, nor a penchant for 'social action'. Instead, they teach a more biblically robust and trenchant version of the Gospel, more so (Stephen Clark whispers) than some of their dissenting and nonconformist brothers. Finally, in the couple of generations since the 1960’s the general culture of the British Isles has become more hostile and less deferential to all things Christian even as it has become more ignorant of them. Secularism reigns.  Circumstamces change. New dangers and new opportunities.

[In parenthesis, one of those who caught the train to Rome, William Oddie, has written recently written as follows: 

Why does the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) still meet, as though Anglican ordinations to their episcopate of openly gay men living with their partners, and also of women to their priesthood and episcopate, despite the warnings of successive popes of the fact that these steps would erect insuperable barriers to unity with the Catholic Church, why do we still carry on with the farce of behaving as though these insuperable barriers just did not exist at all?]

Stephen quotes John Calvin to the effect that the Roman church is not a church but may nevertheless have churches within it. (Inst. IV. 2. 12) 'Therefore, while we are unwilling simply to concede the name of church to the papists, we do not deny that there are churches among them'. Such a recognition is what Stephen Clark refers to as a ‘nuanced’ attitude to separation and alliance, more discriminating than the 'ecumenism at any price' or 'separation at any price’ outlooks. The point of principle that must not be lost sight of is ‘opportunity’: Does a prospective church situation provide the opportunity for unfettered preaching of the gospel?

Clark develops this 'nuanced' approach by an appeal to the behaviour of Dr Lloyd-Jones over the years.  In the 1940's he counselled the late Leslie Land (late of Melbourne Hall, Leicester), to find a preaching place in the Church of England. For many of his years as a minister,  he himself was in a ’mixed’ denomination, and his preaching-place, the church meeting  at Westminster Chapel, was a part of such a denomination. Only latterly did each becoming separate. And while Lloyd-Jones’ 1966 clarion call for evangelicals to come out of their mixed denominations and federate together was right (Stephen Clark thinks) for then,  the era of ecumenism, it was not right before then, and (Clark claims) is not right after then, in 2013 for example. The prevailing question for  Dr Lloyd-Jones was not separation for its own sake, (that was negativity of the sort that he (privately?) reprobated in T.T.Shields), but always ‘In situation X or Y is there (or is there not) opportunity for preaching the gospel in an unfettered way?’

It is a pity that  DMLJ is knitted into and has become an intrinslc part of Clark’s case. For one thing it provides ammunition for the barrack-room Doctorologists, and they certainly don’t need any more encouragement. For another (no doubt unintentionally) it gives comfort to the Doctor-apers. If it is not the Doctor’s gait and voice, then it is the Doctor’s views on co-operation and separation.  Maybe it is impossible to have one without the other.

To develop a nuanced attitude requires the employment of another trait, or traits. One is the ability to distinguish big issues from small issues, another is being prepared to change one's mind, and still another  is the willingness to sacrifice the expression of or insistence on dearly-held views in the interests of cooperation with others who do not hold these views. As Stephen puts it - ’some things may have to be borne in order to ensure that the most important matters are dealt with’. (11)

I like to imagine that in the days before his clarion-call, while he was still mulling it over,  Martyn Lloyd-Jones might have met up with John Stott over a cup of tea at the Liberal Club, and sounded him out. I dare say this did not happen. From this distance the two seem like chalk and cheese. But, if his issuing of the clarion-call was the result of views which developed from a new analysis of the times,  perhaps they should have had that cuppa. Or maybe we should conclude that since the clarion call fell largely on deaf ears it ought not to have been made, though Stephen Clark does not say as much as this.

Nevertheless if, as Clark suggests, nuanced views arise from a fresh look at circumstances, to see if they’ve changed in important ways, and if you (supposing you are a church leader of some sort) conclude that they have, then (so it seems to me) you have a duty to confer with others, to see if they have changed their views, before one issues the call in public, dramatic circumstances. Clearly Stott and Lloyd-Jones did not see eye to eye. Different nuances?

You see, appealing to nuanced distinctions carries a price. It is much more difficult than making a black-and-white clarion call to ‘Come out!’ (even if this also arises from 'nuanced' thinking) or in thinking of the church in terms of 'marks' - the preached word, the ordinancies, discipline. In order for the clarion-call to carry weight there is need for wide agreement on the facts about a situation and the weight that should be attributed to each of them. It’s fearsomely difficult to agree on nuances. So if we are now in the day of nuances, then clarion calls are (for the time being) a thing of the past, yet may be (if circumstances change) a thing of the future. If so, it seems that in an age of individualism ministers and churches of Christ are catching that spirit. 

Another thing, a policy according to which ministry in a mixed denomination is permissible in the 1940’s, but not in the 1960’s and permissible again in 2000 seems hard to take as a strategy.  Look at this in terms not of time, but of place. What is allowable in Wales may not be so in England, or what is allowable on Bridgend may not be in Bala. What stops the appeal to opportunity from being ‘opportunistic’? Unfortunately the appeal of a principle that it is possible to define, as ‘separation’ is, will always have more pull to a certain kind of mentality than one that is based in what it is permissible to do, or requires judgment to be made, balancing one issue with another, and allows that good men may differ.

Several different things need to be kept distinct. We should all be able to distinguish large issues from small, in all manner of circumstances. That way we show we are grown-up. That's one element in what for Stephen is 'nuance'. But Calvin (who as he have seen, he cites) had not only this in mind, and (I dare say) not even this first of all, but his approach to what is and is not a church is rather different from that which prevails presently. For Calvin whether a church is a true church or not is a matter of 'marks'. 

....we do not deny that there are churches among them. The question we raise only relates to the true and legitimate constitution of the church, implying communion in sacred rites, which are the signs of profession, and especially in doctrine.....Hence, however it is obvious that we do not at all deny that churches remain under his [the Roman Roman pontiff's] tyranny....In one word, I call them churches inasmuch as the Lord wondrously preserves some remains of his people, though miserably torn and  scattered, and inasmuch as some symbols of the church still remain - symbols especially whose efficacy neither the craft of the devil nor human depravity can destroy. (IV. 2. 12)

We must agree that there is something rather unbalanced about a church situation in which calls to separation are judged to be sour and negative if not nuanced, and the only alternative is a nudge in this direction or that, a touch on the tiller, in the light of opportunities. Surely the centre-ground should ideally be filled by an outlook on the church and her confession that is more principled than this.

However this may be, Stephen Clark's pamphlet is a good read - well-written, informative, and thought-provoking.