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Calvinism – An Interview with Darryl Hart (part 2)

Editor’s note: If you are joining us for the first time, you may be interested in part 1 of this interview.

Darryl Hart, Visiting Professor of History at Hillsdale College, is one of America’s premier Christian historians. Since publishing his work on J. Gresham Machen in 1994, the Church has been blessed with a series of well written studies on Presbyterianism, American Evangelicalism, Jonathan Edwards and American Christian conservatism. Recently Yale University Press published his latest academic study—Calvinism: A History.  It has already been reviewed in several prominent places like the Wall Street Journal, The Tablet, and the International Catholic News Weekly. Any evangelical book taken up by the Journal certainly warrants consideration from Credo Magazine. Recently I (Jeff Straub) spoke with Darryl Hart about his new book, Machen and Presbyterianism, and his view of the current evangelical fascination with Reformed theology.

Would you summarize what you consider to be the sine qua non of Reformed identity today?

Simply put, although it’s a much bigger answer, it’s belonging to a church that confesses a Reformed creed. Those creeds are many, but the ones that have emerged historically as the most influential are either the Westminster Confession and Catechisms coming from the Westminster Assembly in the 1640s or Three Forms of Unity that the German and Dutch Reformed Churches have used, which include the Heidelburg Catechism, the Belgic Confession of Faith and the Canons of Dordt at the Synod of Dordt, 1618-1619. That’s an institutional, formal understanding of Reformed Protestantism or Calvinism, I understand that. But historically it’s been very difficult to isolate, even though people think of Calvinism as pertaining to election or predestination and doctrines like that, but I still think that overall, what the churches have done has been more important.

A really important aspect of the Reformation was to break away from a hierarchal church, dominated by the bishop of Rome and the bishops whom he appointed, to a conciliar model of understanding the church, which the Reformed churches did whether through a Presbyterian form of government or synodical forms of government. So when those churches meet in their assemblies or their councils, that’s where the authority in Reformed churches tends to be. When those churches and councils articulated a confession of faith that was going to set the doctrinal standards as well as the worship standards as well as the governmental standards of those churches, in some ways, that is what Reformed Protestantism meant and continued to give those churches coherence and identity. That’s a way historically to try to limit what Calvinism is, because if you tried to write a book on Calvinism or the idea the way people have used it, it would go in so many different directions.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t overlap between Reformed churches and Baptist churches or Congregational or Puritan or even some Anglican communions. There clearly is an overlap, but institutionally those creeds matter quite a bit. That’s why I have been identified with people talking much more about a confessional understanding of Protestantism, not so much simply creeds themselves (confession in that sense), but also confessional in the sense that these are the confessions that the churches themselves have confessed and those confessions have identified or marked off those churches.

Can you comment on the state of the evangelical world with reference to the so-called “Young, Restless, and Reformed” movement. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Is it helpful to the cause of Reformed truth or does it ultimately undermine the Reformed faith?

I think it is good any time people take more seriously the transcendence of God and the power of God, which Calvinism has been known for, although most of historic Christianity have confessed these as well—Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans. So if there is a greater seriousness about a sovereign, transcendent, powerful, omniscient God, I think that’s a good thing for Christianity.

However, it strikes me that much of the current understanding of Calvinism comes from people who are intrigued with Jonathan Edwards. Edwards has a lot of admirable features, but Edwards was also not the clearest of teachers.  A brilliant mind, but that doesn’t make his writings always clear and compelling. Edwards also represents a strain of Calvinism that was different from what preceded him. People call this experimental Calvinism. It’s more interior, subjective, and concerned with religious affections—he wrote a book about that. It’s that subjective side I think that may not be as helpful. That’s probably a concern that I have about the Young, Restless, and Reformed. It’s a Calvinistic understanding of evangelical faith that is already largely too devoted, for my taste, although I could give some biblical reasons for this, to what’s going on inside the believer and making sure that the motives are authentic and sincere. If you read Roland Bainton’s biography of Luther, which I think is a great biography, it was that interior struggle which drove Luther crazy and ultimately drove him to the cross as the way out of that struggle. I would prefer to see more of the objective nature of the gospel and the institutional nature of the Church as placeholders that can really define us and shape us in our walk.

What other projects are you working on now? I have heard you say elsewhere that you are working on H. L. Menchen (a contemporary of J. G. Machen).

Yes I am. I am getting ready to write a religious biography of Menchen, which seems odd in that he was not a religious man. But I think he was one of the most astute observers of religious life between 1880 and 1956. He was very penetrating and perceptive. In the current debates about the new atheism, he is a person I think people need to think more about because, while I don’t think he thought of himself as an atheist, he is clearly something more than an agnostic. Yet he was, even as funny and as ridiculing as he could be, good natured a lot of the time and there was a kind of respectfulness for religious people and institutions that you just don’t see in the new atheism. I am most interested in his objections to Protestantism of that era. I think he is registering similar kinds of criticism of liberal Protestantism as Machen was and that makes him very interesting because he sees the problems with it from a different perspective, from a different side of the aisle.

Also, I am interested in a comparative perspective of Presbyterianism politics in Scotland, Ireland, Canada and United States. Additionally, for American tastes, I am thinking about the degree to which Presbyterianism was a factor in the American War for Independence. This is a question in the study of Presbyterianism: What was the degree to which Presbyterians were rebels or revolutionaries or not? There is also a book on Roman Catholics and conservative politics in America since Vatican II. Among the things I am fascinated by now, Roman Catholicism is particularly intriguing. I am not happy with some of the conversions among some prominent Protestants to Roman Catholicism on the one hand. But as a subject of historical research, it’s an amazing institution and set of people to try to get some kind of understanding of, particularly looking at the presence of Roman Catholics in the Religious Right and conservative politics in the last three decades.

Jeff Straub (Ph.D., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Central Baptist Theological Seminary.

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