As an heir of the Calvinist reformational tradition, some harder edges of Jonathan Edwards’ theology might appear to contradict certain evangelical beliefs. At the same time, the context in which Edwards worked, and his own contributions to the theology of conversion and religious affection, reveal some remarkable points of intersection with contemporary evangelicalism.
George Marsden positions Edwards’ New England Puritanism within the context of Christendom at large. Rather than standing outside the established ecclesial tradition, Puritanism sought to reform what were already nominally Christian institutions. This appears to be a crucial point. For since Edwards and other later-generation Puritans were working in a context in which the objective, external reality of Christianity was acknowledged, the perceived lack of piety appeared to indicate some inner religious void. Marsden gives a rather shocking portrait of 18th century New England life – one which contradicts the prim and conservative picture many moderns had in mind. Edwards’ family, for instance, was plagued by examples of contentious marriages, infidelity, and even cases of gruesome murder. Even the most respectable were in need of purification.
The reform impulse, then, was one that started inside the church and inside the individual Christian. As the external profession of faith was so ubiquitous, there must be some deeper, inward indication of true religion. Regarding regeneration, Edwards writes that while the process of awakening might be gradual on occasion, there still must be “a certain moment” at which the inward soul is enlightened. Further, any goodness or “doctrine of natural religion” is completely dependent on divine revelation.
This stress on the absolute necessity for a moment of conversion, with the stark contrast between darkness and light, becomes complicated in terms of actual religious expression. As Marsden relates, for Jonathan’s father “conversion was not just a euphoria of enthusiasm.” Certain affections may be mere self-deception. The twin emphases on the necessity of conversion and the difficulty in discerning true conversion often led to a rather doubt-ridden Christian introspection. For Jonathan, at least, childhood was marked by pendulum swings between spiritual devotion and worldly concerns. At the age of nine, Marsden writes, Edwards was so consumed by religious devotion that “he prayed secretly five times a day, spoke much of religion to other boys, and organized prayer meetings with them.” But after a time, he lost those affections and, in his own words, “returned like a dog to his vomit, and went on in ways of sin.” Concern over whether the conversion was a true one would plague Puritan society in general, as a symptom of the underlying tension between inner and outer spirituality.
There seems to an intriguing paradox in the late Puritan focus on the marks of true conversion. The original stress on the inner awakening appears to run directly counter to any perceived Catholic or Arminian doctrine of works and prevenient grace. However, as Marsden notes, there is a certain irony in the late Puritan emphasis on law and discerning the marks of true conversion. As conversion is made so absolute and central to the progression of the Christian life, material evidence that runs contrary to that conversion (namely, sin) seems to bring the Puritan back to a preoccupation with good works. The symptom is still there, apparently, even after the theological disease had been surgically removed.
I haven’t had a chance yet to read Webb Keane’s Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter, but there’s a fascinating review by Finbarr Curtis up at the Immanent Frame. Curtis focuses on Keane’s interpretation of Calvinist approaches to human agency, pointing out several (Weberian) assumptions that may have led the analysis astray at points. While Keane emphasizes Calvinism’s critique of mediating structures (the hierarchical church, viz. Roman Catholicism), Curtis argues that he does not give enough import to Calvinism’s alternative stress on divine agency. In other words, Calvinism’s critique of pre-modern society is not identical to secular modernity’s parallel critique.
For example, one could note that despite their critiques of institutional mediation, Calvinists in practice constructed coercive civic and ecclesiastical institutions designed to further their vision of a Godly society—just ask the residents of Calvin’s Geneva or the Puritans’ Massachusetts. But Keane decides to accept Calvinist critiques of institutions and chooses to doubt Calvinist critiques of human agency. To this end, he draws on the classical sociological theories of Weber and Troeltsch, but these theorists were working with their own background assumptions, which presumed that Protestants (as opposed to, say, Catholics) would have to have been the ones who shaped the process of historical development that bridged the gap between Christendom and secular modernity. Thus, what mattered was where Protestant agency ended up, and this made the sovereignty of God, the saving work of the Holy Spirit, and the critique of free will into vestigial ideas that were destined to disappear. But it is important to consider that the jury is still out about whether these classical sociological theories were necessarily right about the telos of secular modernity.
Curtis suggests that modernist Protestantism, which is more explicitly a secular project, adopts a certain semiotic neutrality, i.e. that all human symbols are common and therefore ultimately pluralistic. This is not something that any classical Calvinist would confess:
What characterized Protestant modernists was their willingness to see Christianity as one religion among other religions. Thus, a semiotic ideology used to condemn other people’s false religions became transformed into a supposedly neutral hermeneutics of symbols, metaphors, and meanings. The insistence that everyone’s religions were alike and comparable could then be the basis for a tolerance that could serve as one of the markers of secular citizenship in a pluralistic society. I am just not convinced that most Protestants around the globe shared this semiotic ideology, especially those who persisted in calling themselves Calvinists.
Curtis stresses the role of the Spirit in Calvinism’s critique of modernity (true vs. false spirits). In my own studies of Reformed sacramentality, I think this is precisely the feature that many critics of the Reformation tend to overlook. Calvinism cannot be reduced to a synonym for disenchantment, per se. The real issue for Calvinists was a re-location of spiritual power, not its naturalization.
Read the entire article here: Giving up the Holy Ghost.
Peter Berger once wrote about the spreading “rumor of angels” in the modern world. Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age begins by probing the question of why angels ever faded into rumor in the first place. How is it possible that the Western world, in which it was once nearly impossible not to believe in God, is now disenchanted to the extent that faith must be excused and excepted in our secular context? At the outset, these disparate worlds provide very different conditions for belief (4). 
Even unchanged creedal definitions are approached differently by the Christian faithful, against a different framework for belief, than they were in pre-modern times (13). A world which presupposes spirits and magic will express itself in lived experience that is distinct from a world which precludes anything but the “natural.” Our secular age achieved the invention of the “immanent order in Nature, whose working could be systemically understood and explained on its own terms” (15).
The wide-ranging impact of this immanent order challenged the conditions of pre-modern belief. Taylor summarizes three features of this world: 1) the existence of a cosmos which “testified to divine purpose and action”; 2) a notion of society (or less anachronistically, a kingdom) which “could only be conceived as grounded in something higher than human action in secular time”; and, 3) the belief that the world was enchanted, in the sense that forces existed outside the immediate natural conception of things (25). In this context, power resided in things, rather than just human minds. By contrast, there are no “charged objects” in the post-Galilean world (32-35). The modern idea of the secular moves the loci of power to the human mind, the self. This leads to a new, “buffered” conception of the self, one which leaves behind the “vulnerability” inherent to the porous pre-modern self that was threatened by the enchanted world of spirits and magical forces. The modern buffered self attempts to distance itself from the “meaning” of things (37). The line between the physical and the moral is drawn more starkly than a pre-modern could have imagined possible (40). As with MacIntyre’s interpretation of the Homeric imagination, Taylor’s pre-modern individual would likely have trouble putting his internal “self” at a distance from his actions, since in his world extra-mental things and agencies can shape one’s spiritual and emotional condition. So, for example, to place oneself outside the Church is to forgo the protection of the “good magic” that resides around that community (72). But in the secular age, one can readily hear individuals foreswearing such an extrinsic “religious” identity while still claiming an authentic, inner spirituality.
The disconnect between these two worlds seems to echo MacIntyre’s claim that “rational justification … is available only to those who already participate more or less fully in that life” (WJWR 110). One imagines that atheism would be just as unappealing to a pre-modern Germanic pagan as Bible belt fundamentalism is to the new atheists of the 21st century.
With the move toward the secular, Taylor posits that we live in a self-contained “universe” rather than an integrated “cosmos” (59).How can modern Christians reconcile transcendence, which was once assumed to reside throughout the cosmos, with an immanent order which claims to exist entirely on its own terms?
To some extent, the dilemma for the Christian tradition seems to be eschatological. Just how “real” is the secular age? On one hand, the Incarnation and crucifixion seem to dignify time. And yet, according to Augustine, ordinary secular time suffers from “dispersal, distension, losing the unity” (57). We get easily lost in our isolated moment, and often by misapprehension tend to “invest our little parcel with eternal significance,” and fall deeper into confusion. Ordinary time can become confused with the “higher time” of eternity (58).
Taylor suggests that a counter-proposal arose early on within the Christian tradition which emphasized a “spirituality of death,” and the importance of something “beyond” human flourishing (67). Late medievalism developed this preoccupation with death, which perhaps unexpectedly prepared the way for the turn away from the old world of apparitions and communal judgment, with a new emphasis on the individual anticipation of death and impending judgment (67-69).
These twin narratives, or pieties, are perhaps akin to MacIntyre’s conception of competing goals within a particular tradition. The Christian desire to “repair the world” seems at odds with the goal of martyrdom, viz. for me to live is Christ, to die is gain. Along these lines, MacIntyre interprets Hildebrand’s view of the secular in this way: “Secular government is thus both the result of sin and divinely ordained” (emphasis original, WJWR 162). In MacIntyre’s view, the political (i.e. secular) power of the papacy is an inevitable result of the inadequacy of purely secular rule. Whether or not the conclusion satisfies the premise, the tension is certainly palpable.
There seems to be something fairly crucial in the placement of the secular. Just how real is the secular? Is it a space (Hildebrand?)? A lower plane (Jerome?)? Or if it is a time (Augustine?), what does the penetration of time by the Incarnation mean for the secular?
Check out a new essay about the crossroads at which Wheaton College finds itself after the retirement of long-time president Duane Litfin (HT: Evan Kuehn). The piece itself had a rather perilous journey before finding its final online form (it was originally supposed to be printed in Books and Culture). It’s worth the read if you have any interest or loyalty toward what may still be evangelicalism’s flagship college. See also this post at the Immanent Frame.
Update (1/20): See Evan’s further thoughts on the issue.
Political Theology has just published Daniel Bell’s response to Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech last December, which was noted at the time for its advancement of some sort of just war theory and Niebuhrian idea of justice. Access to the article is free, so enjoy.
Far from being a random, place-less revival movement, early evangelicalism occupied a unique historical moment. Mark Noll’s 2003 volume The Rise of Evangelicalism re-treads some familiar historical ground, but does so with an impressive range of detail. 
Evangelicals were distinct heirs of the Reformation, and yet, as Noll points out, their identity was often defined by opposition to certain tendencies in 18th century Anglo-American Protestantism. The declension of Christian orthodoxy at the time was connected to a perceived lack of piety in spiritual life. The evangelical turn toward heart-religion was a concerted attempt to purify the church, not through doctrinal reclamation primarily, but through more authentic religious sentiment.
The gradual shift away from standard formulations of Protestant and Calvinistic doctrine had become striking by the mid-point of the 18th century. The established churches – Presbyterianism in Scotland and Ulster, Anglicanism in England, and an assortment of colonial churches in America – were alike in a trend toward “liberalizing theology” and a certain nominal religious piety. In the same manner, the rise of the state over ecclesial authority provided fertile ground for experiential, evangelical renewal movements.
Evangelicals, driven forward by dynamic preachers, responded to the situation with a renewed emphasis on the internalized nature of true religion. While the movement resisted uniformity, there was a certain confluence of three primary sources: high-church Anglicanism, Puritanism, and Moravian pietism. These groups shared a common starting point in their emphasis on the doctrine of sola fide. For the evangelical movement as a whole, the inner awakening of faith was not something that could be constrained to normal ecclesial boundaries. The Holy Spirit will work wherever He pleases. And His work distinguishes those who have truly experienced an awakening, unlike the nominal Christians who filled the pews of the established churches. Heart-conversion was absolutely necessary. In consequence, the need for a full experience of salvation led many evangelicals to stress the need for full assurance of salvation. This in turn often led to complications of true piety where the “converted” no longer felt the same fervor as at the moment of renewal.
When considering Noll’s account of early evangelicalism, the emergence of heart-religion stands out as uniquely fascinating and also troubling at many points. The evangelical stress on the invisible church and inner faith paradoxically led to greater and more enthusiastic displays of outward religion than perhaps was found in the non-evangelical traditions. The fervor of religious piety in the revivals, for instance, was at least as public as the more liturgical religion of Laud’s Anglicanism. And this is perhaps why the inevitable dissipation of religious fervor was so troubling (and sometimes clinically depressing) to the evangelical believer. Religion was tied to certain, almost quantifiable, sentiments and expressions; the escape from institutionalized religion could not fan the original flame forever.
So perhaps, strangely enough, the scholasticism of the second generation Reformers may have found its natural children in the fervent, not-so-invisible conversions of the Northampton awakening. Lacking a proper place for public, mimetic religion, evangelicalism seemed to have reconstructed its own context for a (paradoxical) public litany of piety. What seems implicit in much of this is evangelicalism’s adoption of the modern notion of self and internality — perhaps to a much greater degree than in the first generation of reformers.
Peter Leithart posts on Pascal, Ecclesiastes, and the iPod:
Pascal is one of the first to recognize that distraction works, and Pascal has a hard time convincing the reader, especially the reader without a predisposition to faith, that his path is the better. Pascal is too honest an observer of human life to pretend, as many Christians do today, that diversion always ends up as a dry dusty taste in the mouth.
Pascal takes a wrong turn, I think, by over-playing the ascetic dimension of the Christian life. When the Preacher meditates on death and the vapourousness of it all in Ecclesiastes, he turns Epicurean rather than Stoic: Eat, drink and rejoice now, because you don’t have much time to get it done. Pascal would have been more convincing had he been slightly less Augustinian, and slightly more Solomonic.
As a long time fan of Atlantic/NY Times columnist Ross Douthat, this Mother Jones sketch caught my fancy:
Alasdair MacIntyre on the Aristotelian good of placing limits on economic growth, for virtue’s sake:
What such translations of ‘pleonexia’ conceal from us is the extent of the difference between Aristotle’s standpoint on the virtues and vices, and more especially his standpoint on justice and the dominant standpoint of peculiarly modern societies. For the adherents of that standpoint recognize that acquisitiveness is a character trait indispensible to continuous and limitless economic growth, and one of their central beliefs is that continuous and limitless economic growth is a fundamental good. That a systemically lower standard of living ought to be preferred to a systemically higher standard of living is a thought incompatible with either the economics or the politics of peculiarly modern societies. So prices and wages have come to be understood as unrelated — and indeed in a modern economy could not be related — to desert in terms of labor, and the notion of a just price or a just wage in modern terms makes no sense. But a community which was guided by Aristotelian norms would not only have to view acquisitiveness as a vice but would have to set strict limits to growth insofar as that is necessary to preserve or enhance a distribution of goods according to desert.
– Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 112
Just out: David van Drunen’s new book, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms: A Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought. From the publisher’s summary:
Conventional scholarship holds that the theology and social ethics of the Reformed tradition stand at odds with concepts of natural law and the two kingdoms. But David VanDrunen here challenges that status quo through his careful, thoroughgoing exploration of the development of Reformed social thought from the Reformation to the present.
John Frame reviews van Drunen and plays the Reformed sola Scriptura trump card:
To repeat, I am convinced that there is such a thing as natural law. But I am not at all convinced of Van Drunen’s (or anyone else’s) distinction between religious and secular kingdoms, and I do not see any reason to limit the use of Scripture to the religious kingdom as Van Drunen suggests. Scripture is God’s word, and God’s word is the foundation of morality. When we want to draw people, believers or unbelievers, to that foundation, we should be unashamed to refer to Scripture. I grant that there are many cultural forces telling us not to refer to Scripture in the public square. But we should not listen to them. The attempt of Van Drunen and others to convince us not to apply Scripture to civil matters is a failure.
Universality lost its luster sometime ago. At the apex of liberal thought, the universal provided a conceptual framework for ethical and rational enquiry. But in a fractured ex-liberal world, there has been a perceived futility in appeals to idealized rationality or claims to universal justice. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Alasdair MacIntyre comments that we live in a context (not uniquely) that is unable “to arrive at agreed rationally justifiable conclusions” on matters of justice and reason (5). 
Without foundationalism, how can we avoid abject relativism? Is there a way to resolve competing claims to justice and reason?
MacIntyre’s critique of liberalism is largely assumed in this sequel to After Virtue. His project is to demonstrate how claims and definitions of justice and reason evolve within various cultural narratives of rationality. Such claims, he argues, are necessarily tradition-dependent; the validity of various ethical claims is sustained and advanced by the tradition in which they are situated and how those beliefs are formulated linguistically over time. Stated succinctly, “rationality itself … is a concept with a history” (9). This prompts the liberal objection: How can the diversity of traditions, each with attendant rationalities and moral formulations, lead to anything but irresolvable disagreements? For MacIntyre, the answer to this objection lies behind a proper understanding of the character and historical progressions of these rival narratives of enquiry (10).
In his discussion of the Greek tradition of rationality, MacIntyre presents the incipient Homeric imagination as one in which “all psychology … is physiology” (18). There is a certain unity of action in this early stage, rather than dichotomized inner and outer worlds. Similarly, the ends of the individual and the goods of society need not compete with each other. Moderns mistakenly read Enlightenment categories back into a Greek rational tradition with its own self-contained presuppositions. We cannot make use of an uncomplicated , fully-functional rational foundationalism here. Internal motivations “may mirror, be responsive to, be compensating for, or be reactive against the constitutive elements of the public social world” (21). The very sense of an inner world is not part of the Homeric framework (21).
Likewise, justice is a construct of a particular narrative. MacIntyre’s proposal opposes a static notion of tradition, not only across specific cultures, but also within a single culture. Because every tradition is itself a narrative with an arc, progressing across a certain trajectory, it seems difficult to ever “pin down” a singular notion of justice, or any other virtuous ideal. (Interestingly, MacIntyre appears to conceive of rather paradigmatic – one might even say, common – “stages” of progression across multiple traditions.) Within the Greek tradition, MacIntyre’s narrative begins with the Homeric imagination. The inherent tensions within that framework, namely the competing goals of excellence and efficiency, gradually developed a new conception of inner reality disconnected from the public good (35, 42). The conflict of goods and ends is precisely what advanced the rational tradition and the conception of justice, politically and linguistically.
When MacIntyre returns briefly to the question of how to resolve rival enquiries into justice, he implies that non-rational persuasion is ultimately inescapable – the culmination of all preceding rhetoric (56). As in his example from Euripides, claims to rational justification can only transcend a particular narrative context with an intervention of the deus ex machina (62). This appears to be the only ultimate answer to rival notions of justice and good (e.g. the “ad hoc bidding of Heracles,” 63). Likewise, MacIntyre argues that Socrates is unable to answer the Sophists in any ultimate sense. The Sophists would not identify themselves as the targets of Socrates’ dialectic because the philosopher is not working within the Sophists’ tradition of rationality (75). Their narrative rebuffs the Socratic rhetoric precisely because the dialectic cannot offer arguments that are sustainable within the Sophists’ own concept of rationality.
So far, this presentation seems merely to bolster the liberal objection. MacIntyre suggests that within competing narratives, the presence of different arche provide conceptual grounds for ultimate explanations. While these arche direct competing traditions toward different theoretical goals (teloi), some commonality in cultural maturation is assumed. “If one begins with a society informed by the Homeric imagination … then one is led inescapably to the problems posed by the Republic” (84).
Certainly, the eschatological dimension of MacIntyre’s arche is appealing in many ways. However, at times MacIntyre seems to be developing a teleological justification which contains elements similar to the Platonic noble lie. The arche is useful and, yes, it is extremely unlikely that any culture will ever self-consistently achieve its telos (80). But one wonders whether any completely non-transcendent arche will satisfy a community – unless, that is, the powerful tell a magnificent fiction in order to keep the tradition integrated, alive, and well.
Theopolitical is the weblog of Davey Henreckson, a graduate student in theology at the University of Notre Dame. Topics of conversation are political and historical theology, with semi-frequent forays into literature, economics, localism, and the divine American sport -- baseball.
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