On David Brooks and the Death of Conservatism
Three thoughts on David Brooks’ recent and otherwise excellent “What Happened to American Conservatism?” over at The Atlantic.
First, conservatism naturally requires love of place and people. Conservatism values sentiments cultivated rightly, which happens through people and societies that are not interchangeable. The sentiments in-cultured by the English village are not the same as the sentiments cultivated by the open expanse of west Texas. Certain values may be held in common, but the means of that cultivation is specific to concrete, enfleshed peoples and traditions. The habituation of communities also instills love of those communities. Conservatives love their communities (neighborhoods, cultural histories, states, nations, families, churches) because they have been formed by them. It is loving your father and mother, civilizationally…
Why Didn’t God Save Fallen Angels?
John Owen gives his answer in Vol. 1 on his commentary on Hebrews, in Part 2, Excercitation VII.14.
Preliminarily, Owen establishes that God may have justly rescued angels from their sin, but that justice does not obligate God to do so. While the same could be said for God’s redemption of man, there is such a difference between the original transgressions of angels and men that God’s righteousness is more gloriously displayed in withholding rescue from one, and that this reflects good concern for God’s glory being displayed in universe.
1. Angels were created in a higher state than man, in the highest heaven, while man was placed on earth. Earth is good and suitable to man, but not as glorious as heaven.
2. In heaven angels were tasked with attending the throne of God, to minister to him, give glory to him, to execute his commands of providence, all of which together are the highest honors given to creatures. Man was given the duty of cultivating the ground, which while good, is below the vocation of angels.
3. Angels enjoyed the immediate presence of God without a mediator resembling themselves. Man was kept at a greater distance and without such direct communion with God.
At this point Owen affirms that this does not excuse the grievousness of man’s sin, but greatly aggravates the wickedness, ingratitude, and pride of the angels…
Thanksgiving as a Presbyterian Political Plot
John Adams thought that his Thanksgiving proclamation cost him reelection. Or at least that’s what he told Benjamin Rush in an 1812 letter. During his term in office, Adams had asked that Americans mark Thursday April 25 “as a day of solemn humiliation, fasting, and prayer.” He wanted the American people to give thanks to God for “the countless favors which He is still continuing to the people of the United States, and which render their condition as a nation eminently happy when compared with the lot of others.”
You might be thinking: Why would this mark him for electoral disaster? Presidents now announce their forthcoming attempts to subvert Congress with a pen and a phone, or join the nation to semi-treaties, or declare war with a Declaration of War. Why in the world would the use of the 18th-century presidential bully-quill be such a misstep?
Well . . . it made him look like a Presbyterian. Adams said that Presbyterians had “allarmed and alienated Quakers, Anabaptists, Mennonists, Moravians, Sweedenborgians, Methodist, Catholicks, Protestant Episcopalians, Arians Socinians, Arminians . . .” and that “a general Suspicion prevailed that the Presbyterian Church . . . aimed at an Establishment as a National Church.” All that fasting and thanksgiving on a marked day. Mighty suspicious.
-Michael Brendan Dougherty in today’s National Review. This made me laugh.
The Limits of UATX
This announcement about the formation of the University of Austin (UATX) is welcome,
It will surely seem retro—perhaps even countercultural—in an era of massive open online courses and distance learning to build an actual school in an actual building with as few screens as possible. But sometimes there is wisdom in things that have endured.
We believe human beings think and learn better when they gather in dedicated locations, where they are, to some extent, insulated from the quotidian struggle to make ends meet, and where there is no fundamental distinction between those who teach and those who learn, beyond the extent of their knowledge and wisdom.
We believe that the purpose of education is not simply employment, but human flourishing.
Creating an alternative the universities that profess the search for truth as their guiding value, while simultaneously squelching dissenting viewpoints or even persons, is something that needed to be done.
Yet UATX’s emphasis on being fiercely independent even includes being fiercely independent from any religious affiliation. From a Christian perspective, detaching pursuit of truth from the person of truth only leads to the very problem that UATX is trying to escape, namely a Nietzschean dynamic of power determining the limits of truthful acceptability. Pursuing a liberal arts education committed to a libertarian freedom of inquiry and speech without a commitment to formation in the common good as expressed in the Christian faith only gets your students as far as the University of Chicago, not to human flourishing. It’s as if the UATX team looked at the current situation in academia and only took one step back without considering that they are now standing on the launching pad for the very kind of institutions they want to avoid becoming.
I’m sure the United States could use more truly liberal art universities, but I do wonder what drove this group to the costly endeavor of forming UATX instead of investing in some of the really “fiercely independent” schools out there already, such as Hillsdale and Grove City. The announcement of UATX is reminiscent of when a faction splits off from a mainline church to form their own group rather than joining one of the many already in existence. It hints that there may, in fact, be motivating factors connected to power, rather than liberality, driving the project.
PCA Big Tents and Strict Subscription
PCA Pastor David Cassidy has written on the problem of presbyteries granting exceptions but forbidding them to be taught (something I’ve written about a lot, most recently here). Cassidy says that the PCA is great because it is a “good faith subscriptionist” denomination, not a strict subscriptionist church, and this change in policy makes the PCA de facto strict subscriptionist. He, correctly, notes that presbyteries cannot bind the conscience of ministers in this way, and so the recent move by the PCA is incorrect. But something he fails to consider in his piece is that the alternative to grant-and-forbid is outright denial: if an exception cannot be granted while simultaneously banning its teaching, the presbytery has the right to deny granting that exception. That doesn’t change in any scenario, and I know plenty of presbyteries where exceptions are only granted because they believe they can forbid its teaching. If this option goes away, fewer exceptions will be granted, and the PCA will become far closer to a strict subscriptionist church than it is under the current arrangement. In fact, the PCA will grow more divided culturally as each presbytery varies in what exceptions it allows (goodbye recreation on the Sabbath!), a problem that doesn’t exist in stricter denominations.
Being a big tent denomination means allowing strict subscriptionists to not only belong to the church, but to practice their convictions of strict subscriptionism and being ok with that.
