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Ron Sider's Evangelical Legacy

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 06:00:00 -0400

What if scholars and pundits writing about white evangelicalism in the United States have it all wrong? What if the books published since 2017 arguing that white nationalism, racism, and toxic masculinity explained the outcome of the 2016 election missed the real story?

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Presbyterian Politics

Thu, 21 Jul 2022 06:00:00 -0400

Although white evangelicals receive most of the press coverage, below the surface of American Protestantism are believers who defy the red state–blue state analysis of faith and politics. One indication of this non-conformity: the annual denominational meetings where church leaders review finances, propose new strategies for evangelism, and hear reports on the state of the greater Church. In June, three Reformed denominations—the Christian Reformed Church (CRC), the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC), and the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA)—held meetings to assess and plan for another year of church business. At each of these three gatherings, these descendants of John Calvin and John Knox surprised anyone who thought they have white evangelicals figured out.

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Small Is Beautiful

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 00:01:00 -0400

If Google is a reliable search engine, the anniversary of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church on June 11 passed without any mention by the press. The reasons are not hard to fathom. The OPC is small, and it lacks a celebrity. In an era when megachurches rival Walmart and Home Depot in square footage and pastoral fame generates worshipers, the OPC usually slips under the media radar.

The OPC’s lone celebrity was J. Gresham Machen, a professor of New Testament at Princeton Seminary who fought liberalism in the mainline Northern Presbyterian church throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In 1929 he took the lead in starting Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, which he hoped would counteract the liberalism of the Northern Presbyterian seminaries.

In 1933 he continued to fight liberalism, this time on the mission field, by creating a rival Presbyterian missions board. Finally, after a Presbyterian church court tried him for his competitive ways in 1936—a trial that received significant press coverage—Machen found peace and quiet in the new Presbyterian denomination he helped establish on June 11, 1936.

Just six months later he died, on January 1, 1937. The faculty at Westminster Seminary tried to fill the vacuum, but as familiar as the names of Cornelius Van Til, John Murray, and Ned Stonehouse may be to Orthodox Presbyterians, to outsiders they garner only confused stares. At the time, even some of those who knew the names didn’t care for Dutch and Scottish theologians giving direction to an American denomination.

The new Presbyterian church never really took off. The OPC began as a small band of 5000 committed communicants with a remnant mind-set—a drop in the bucket compared to their competitor, the PCUSA, which then had upwards of 2.5 million members. Today the OPC’s rolls include slightly under 30,000 members. For the past twenty years the PCUSA has been losing more members each year than the OPC’s total membership. Obviously, evangelically minded PCUSA members have not been looking to the OPC as an alternative to their mainline church.

Meanwhile, many born-again Protestants in the United States seem to prefer congregations whose membership is bigger than any of the OPC’s presbyteries. For instance, in one new membership class, Rick Warren’s Saddleback Community Church trained 2400 new members. The OPC as a denomination is lucky—wrong word for Calvinists, of course—if it receives 2400 new members in an entire calendar year.

Many inside and outside the OPC have speculated about why the denomination has stayed so small. Some argue that the church has fought too many theological battles and driven away worthwhile members by being wary of Protestants who are neither Calvinistic in theology nor Presbyterian in polity. But Dean Kelley’s 1972 book Why Conservative Churches are Growing indicates that such religious strictness does not generally retard a church’s growth.

At the sociological level, the OPC provides religious services (what used to be called “the cure of souls”) in settings that some find too intimate. Worshiping with just sixty other persons can seem invasive or demanding to someone used to the comfortable anonymity of the 500-member congregation a couple miles away.

One of the problems facing the OPC also confronts Calvinism more generally. Yes, a few of the doctrines associated with John Calvin—such as divine sovereignty (but what Christian doesn’t affirm that?)—have received a new lease on life among charismatic and Baptist Protestants calling themselves Young, Restless, and Reformed. But when it comes to the entire set of Calvinism’s five points, including limited atonement or predestination, many follow H. L. Mencken, who arranged Calvinism next to cannibalism alphabetically in his cabinet of horrors.

The other factor working against the OPC is its Presbyterian polity. Orthodox Presbyterians generally follow the debates of presbyteries and assemblies, and support the various agencies of the denomination in ways that seem strange to many congregationally minded Americans.

The very fact of belonging to a denomination is often hard for Americans to swallow. Denominations once were the backbone of mainline Protestantism, but as more and more have lost their way while trying to function as an informal ecclesial establishment, Americans seem to have concluded that denominations are either inherently corrupt or ineffective. As such, when denominations do make the news these days it is generally due to sexual or financial scandals, not to the deliberations of their appointed committees on hymnody or on foreign missions.

But denominations were also the expression of a robust, faithful American Protestantism that had both morning and evening Sunday worship services, provided a roster of Sunday-school classes for kids and adults, organized Bible studies for men and women, held a mid-week prayer service, and sponsored Vacation Bible School in the summer.

The OPC is a throwback to this kind of Protestant church life. Most of its congregations offer all of the above. If it fails to attract newcomers the reason may be that the routine and expectations are suffocating to folks who attend Sunday services sporadically and look for a congregation with devotional aerobic classes.

But the gloomy pitcher’s count facing Protestant denominations did not prevent Orthodox Presbyterians from celebrating their seventy-fifth with humility and gratitude. Because God works in mysterious ways and because appearances are genuinely deceptive in matters spiritual, Orthodox Presbyterians believe what most religion reporters cannot: Instead of being down to their last out, conservative denominations like the OPC are always taking the field in the top of the ninth, up a couple runs, with their ace on the mound. The gates of hell will not prevail. Indeed.

D. G. Hart is visiting professor of history at Hillsdale College and the author of Between the Times: The Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Transition, 1945-1990 (2011).

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An American Bible

Sun, 01 Oct 2000 00:00:00 -0400

Readers of popular evangelical magazines could plausibly conclude that the historic Protestant conception of the authority and infallibility of the Bible is alive and well. Advertisements for Bibles in various translations and with differing annotations, along with commentaries, software programs, reference works, devotionals, and paraphernalia, testify to Protestantism’s continuing allegiance to Scripture as the only source of divine guidance. Today’s Bible industry would also appear to vindicate the Protestant Reformers’ efforts to translate the word of God into the vernacular and make it available to a broad audience of lay believers. Testimonies to the Bible’s uniqueness and popularity come in all forms, from the advertisement for a new translation that required “ninety leading Bible scholars laboring prayerfully for seven years to assure the accuracy and readability” of Scripture, to General George F. Patton’s habit of reading the book “every goddamned day.”

These two books challenge the apparent success of the Bible industry in America. Indeed, as Paul Gutjahr and Peter Thuesen show, scholarly criticism is just the beginning of Protestant worries when it comes to defending the Bible as the sole authority for faith and practice. As a physical object, the Bible is never only the word of God, but comes mediated through the human hands of publishers, translators, editors, and booksellers. For this reason, efforts to prevent sinful humans from tampering with the pristine character of holy writ are futile. In the history of Bible publishing and translation, the Creator’s word ends up depending on the words, hands, strength, and especially money of His creatures.

An American Bible is a particularly effective account of how matters as seemingly innocuous as bindings, covers, illustrations, and maps have had the ironic consequence of redirecting Protestant reverence for Scripture. Gutjahr starts by demonstrating that the Bible, as a book, created an inherently contradictory dynamic within the marketplace of American publishing. For instance, the American Bible Society’s laudable desire to furnish every home with a Bible established the book as the most accessible and influential among nineteenth“century readers. But the widespread availability of the good book required changes in print and distribution that made it increasingly cheap to produce and set in motion a competition among printers and publishers for the largest market. And one of the cultural contradictions that attended this form of capitalism was that an affordable Bible required publishers to look for packaging that would attract buyers. With the advent of niche marketing came Bibles designed for display in the parlor, Bibles with more expensive bindings, Bibles with better illustrations, Bibles with more comments, and Bibles with superior translations. This story of the Bible’s publishing, packaging, and marketing allows Gutjahr to make the important point that the materiality of the book itself may have had the unintended effect of distracting readers from the Bible’s very words.

Likewise, the Protestant desire to make the Bible influential in American public life resulted in a series of skirmishes for the soul of the nation’s public schools. Most of what Gutjahr presents here concerning the nineteenth“century school wars is familiar terrain. Nevertheless, his telling of this story brilliantly reinforces his larger point about the way that the promotion of the Bible ended up undermining the book’s pious advocates. In this particular case, not only did the debates about Bible reading in public schools show the growing numerical and political influence of Roman Catholicism in the United States, but the court battles that ensued diminished the Bible’s status in the schools’ curricula. As Gutjahr puts it, “a text that had provided the nation with a source of shared cultural memory and language for nearly two centuries would find itself increasingly ‘ghetto“ized’ among specific, more Protestant segments of the nation’s population.”

If An American Bible shows the unintended mess that Protestants made of the Bible’s significance, In Discordance with the Scriptures details the ways that Protestant churchmen over the last 125 years have tried to put the genie of a vernacular Bible back in the bottle of one version that all Protestants would use. (By 1880, according to Gutjahr’s count, Americans had nearly two thousand different editions of the Bible from which to choose.) The most notable results of the search for a commonly accepted English version of the Bible that would supersede the King James Version were the Revised Version (1881 for the New Testament; 1885 for the Old Testament) and the Revised Standard Version (1952). Thuesen’s narrative explores more than these two versions, covering English Bible translations from William Tyndale to the New International, but the heart of his story is the effort by American Protestants to arrive at a definitive version.

Neither the Revised Version nor the Revised Standard Version succeeded in becoming the translation used by all American Protestants. Part of the reason for this failure was the rift that developed between mainline and evangelical Protestants over the last 125 years. But just as important”and this is the most significant point in Thuesen’s argument”is the legacy of Protestantism’s teaching on sola scriptura . In the late nineteenth century the contributors to the Revised Version believed that textual criticism could be used to arrive at the best translation. But the study of manuscripts inevitably raised questions about the history recorded in the text and so had the potential for creating doubts about the Bible’s veracity and authority.

In the twentieth century the debates about the Bible escalated as Protestants recognized that even such simple matters as translation were bound up with interpretation. Consequently, evangelicals suspected the Revised Standard Version as a liberal Bible, and eventually countered with the New International Version, a translation produced by conservative scholars. Along the way, Protestants demonstrated what Catholics already knew”namely, that the Bible never stands alone but, even in its translation, is situated in a web of relationships that involve the authority of church leaders and questions about who has responsibility for determining orthodoxy.

These books, then, are sobering reading for Protestants. As soon as anyone reproduces the Bible for others to own and read, human agency becomes entangled with divine authority. The question is which person, institution, or scholar should be responsible for controlling access to the Bible.

That may be an indelicate way of putting the matter, especially for Protestants who think human authority of any kind should stay out of the way of divine revelation. But in evitably someone takes charge, either the market (as Gutjahr shows) or churchmen (as Thuesen documents). One should not have to be Roman Catholic to sense that churches may be a more appropriate context than the market for supervising the reproduction of the Bible. But thanks to the American Protestant habits of Bible“only“ism and anticlericalism, most Protestants are so far removed from the wisdom of ecclesiology that they may need some instruction from their Catholic neighbors. Short of that, these books could well provide a useful guide to reflection.

D. G. Hart is Academic Dean at Westminster Theological Seminary in Escondido, California.

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