It wasn’t Hodge or Frame that made me think of it. It was listening to Jeff’s lectures on the Mercersberg Theology again. Philip Schaff and John Williamson Nevin had some great things to say, but when I keep reading mantras about putting doctrine’s into their “proper scientific form” I almost feel pity for them. But this isn’t just Mercersberg. Reading the centinniel selection of Abraham Kuyper’s speeches and writings was incredibly familiar because he spoke in the same Hegelian modern context as them.

It was thinking again about Kuyper’s similar manner of speech to Nevin and Schaff that reminded me of Frame’s off-hand remark about the Dutch Reformed obsession with proper “place” within an encyclopedia.

What strikes me as ironic is that Nevin and Schaff both wanted to communicate with a general audience. Yet they had this inherently elitist academic notion about theology. Of course, not all elittism is bad. But then, even valid elites are constantly tempted to use their advantage to gain some invalid leverage over the common lot. It needs to be watched. When Nevin complained that Calvin had not put his doctrine of the Lord’s Supper in its “proper scientific form,” he offered what I found to be some extremely helpful analogies for how to understand our participation in the actual humanity of Christ without needing physical particles.

But it wasn’t science. It was simply an analogy about an acorn growing into an oak tree. It didn’t need to be called “science” as if that was some sort of inherently superior form of speech.  Frankly, I found it easier to compare to science fiction.

In Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, Frame constructed a cogent argument against Charles Hodge’s claim that the task of a theologian was to arrange the facts of Scripture in their “proper” order, like a scientist. That was an important move to give us exodus from modernity.

But almost as important, perhaps just as important, was his passing remark of being puzzled why Dutch Reformed theologians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries spent so much effort arguing over the “place” of a doctrine within an “encyclopedia”–as if it really mattered.

This I think is actually more revealing. Modernity doesn’t so much need to be argued against. People just have to be willing to express how incredible and baseless the entire project now looks.

“Remind me: Why are we writing about this again? Or: “Why are we writing this way? How is it helpful?”

One question and the cards start falling.

I almost missed this brief entry, but I’m glad I didn’t. It is gold.

What do outreach and the sacraments have to do with one another? In a word: guilt–“us” with two much and “them” with none.

In my opinion part of the none-guilt problem is that the entire Protestant world has developed a centuries-long tradition of “saving” Roman Catholics–saving hypothetical Luther’s suffering terrors of conscience.

If we could build time machines and go back a few centuries to Medieval Europe we might make great Evangelists.

But since God is dragging us, kicking and screaming, into the twenty-first, it might be good to stop addressing people who aren’t alive anymore and actually aim our message at the people who are here with us.

It also may be we are free to acknowledge that, for whatever reason, guilt does not resonate for non-Christians of our culture and time and generation, and that’s okay. We do not need to go to guilt to get to Christ – that is not the only formula or plot line available. To say another way, we do not need to force non-Christians to feel something they do not now feel in order to fix something they never thought they had a problem with until we came along (especially if that is not the route we ourselves followed). Sometimes all we need to do is invite people to come and see, and then watch the story God writes as He moves to set things right.

As to the guilt problem, how can one’s heart not burn within when reading this?:

For Christians, it may be we do not need to believe the Gospel harder, we need affirmed to us that the story of our connection with the Gospel is valid (it is) — and therefore the Good News is for us, too. And our story may have been through relationships and “come and see” experiences, or never knowing a day we did not know Jesus, or something else. (Though I won’t delve into it, I find echoes of the need for one’s story to be validated in Galatians, where Paul affirms the Gentile “come to Jesus”/ “remember how you first came to know God” story and refuses to let the Jewish Christians impose another story on them and try to fit their story in a different mold).

ddd