Linkathon!

Linn says:

After going through the articles, I zeroed in on “White Nationalism Invading Reformed Circles.” It really boggles my mind that some Christians in America don’t understand a) the number of non-white people that are already in evangelical churches; b) that white people will be the minority in the United States with a decade or two. Besides not getting their facts straight, it is also blatant racism, which is not allowed in the family of God (see Gal. 3:28). Part of my “problem” is that I have spent most of my spiritual life with non-white believers, and they are so dedicated and diligent in both their love of the Word and their service to God and His people (not to mention the community at large). Most of the churches in my area showing strong growth are congregations of color, especially Asian and Hispanic ones.

WenatcheeTheHatchet says:

Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical mind is going to be 30 years old, if it isn’t already.

It’s more a riff at my blog but I’ve been thinking a lot about how metacultural speculation and punditry is not the same as actually making stuff and I feel the bane of Anglo-American Christianity in cultural commentary mode is that endlessly writing ABOUT culture and the cultural mandate is not the same thing as going out and doing something, knowing that the arts and entertainment markets are super-saturated as is. Decade after decade in Christian culture writing it seems that there’s a lot of writing about what it would take for Christians in the arts to matter and not so much making things in the arts that matter, to put it starkly.

I’m trying to dig into some David Brown on music, since I’ve been Anglican these days (up until recently PCA). If anyone has read him, feel free to share. Been on a Frank Burch Brown/Nicholas Wolterstorff/Jeremy Begbie kick the last few years and it’s a reminder that for all the invocations of Dutch neo-Calvinism by Christian nationalists they never get to the part where the Dutch neo-Calvinist tradition has a robust set of arguments for aesthetic pluralism as an outworking of the cultural mandate, an impulse to liturgical reform, and act of Christian hospitality. To put it harshly, Christian nationalists who invoke the Dutch Reformed traditions against the “woke” never bother to mention that even Francis Schaeffer’s buddy Hans Rookmaaker revered Mahalia Jackson and wrote an entire book on the vitality of New Orleans jazz; or how the Dutch Reformed art historian Gerard van der Leeuw regarded black American music as having as much sacred value as Palestrina for Christian reflection (while getting in a dry quip about the crude deistic frenzy of the finale of Beethoven’s 9th (because a Dutch Calvinist probably couldn’t help saying that)).

Even Doug Wilson’s got to know there have been Nez Perce Presbyterians since the days of Chief Joseph. The NAACP was co-founded by the black Presbyterian minister Francis Grimke, I hear, but the theobro Calvinists seem to have a narrowly neo/paleo-Confederate definition of what counts as “Reformed”. We’re at the centennial of Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism and while I”m reading it out of curiosity even R Scott Clark at Heidelblog pointed out that we have to remember Machen was white supremacist and that Machen and B B Warfield were at odds because Warfield thought racially integrating schools was a necessary outworking of the Gospel.

Stuff I didn’t think about when I was younger because I didn’t know of any of it, but the older I get the more I think about how my dad was a Native American Calvinist who married my white semi-Pelagian charismatic mom. I’ve been threading needles on contrasting doctrinal traditions all my life without ever quite realizing it.

If I had my way the influence of R L Dabney among North American Presbyterians would wither away to nothing but that’s not my call. In a way the story about Christian nationalism “invading” Reformed churches is misleading because among the paleo/neo-con theo-dudes who think Dabney is the bee’s knees they have always thought that. They’re going to invoke Kuyper for “every square inch” and not for “a free church in a free state” claiming the church shouldn’t bother wielding the power of the state to enforce the first table of the law (which sounds curiously similar to the English Anglican political historian John Neville Figgis warning Christians to not wield the power of the state to deprive others of their rights as citizens in Churches in the Modern State circa 1911). But my impression lately is that theobros are selective in their engagement with the Dutch Reformed traditions. I would … almost bet money Strachan is never going to invoke Nicholas Wolterstorff or Gerardus van der Leeuw on theological aesthetics.