Tried With Fire

When we attended the 2012 Ligonier Conference, Dr. Robert Godfrey spoke on the damage anti-intellectualism has done to the Christian mind and traced its rise in American history. After the Revolution, the glory of individualism took hold in such a way that "Power went from the snobs to the mobs" in three specific areas - medicine, law, and religion. In The Search for Christian America , the authors also discuss the Revolution's affect on theology, but they get specific with the school that was affected. It was Calvinism. "The kind of democratic individualism unleashed by the American Revolution altered no dimension of the church more than its theology. Most obvious in the fifty years after the Revolution was the revolt against Calvinism. But most notable was the revolt against the accepted ground rules of theology itself. This second revolt attacked especially the long-standing Christian conviction that it was valuable for an educated segment of the church to re...

When I was in elementary school, the Cold War showed no signs of letting up. The designated bomb shelter was the janitor's office/storage room off of the loading dock. I have no idea how the teachers, kids, and support staff would have fit, which is probably why the student handbook also advised us to hide under our desks. Yeah, right. We had family friends who were members of the John Birch Society. They tried to get my dad to join thinking that as a Chinese immigrant he would hate the Communists too. He refused, but they still gave him literature detailing the latest conspiracy theory in which powerful Americans were allied with the USSR to take away "life as we know it." During a crisis like this, "it is a natural human reaction to turn to the past for support." 1 Appeals are made "to recover the Christian roots, the Christian heritage, the Christian values of an older America. Our instinctive reaction is to recover what we have lost." 2 Thi...

A friend on FB posted a link to the Heidelblog -  Sola Scripture ≠ Nuda Scriptura . I wasn't familiar with the term, Nuda Scriptura , so I read the post, which says: Evangelical Christians in North America sometimes misunderstand the Reformation doctrine of sola Scriptura to mean that the Bible is the Christian’s only theological resource, that it can and should be denuded of its churchly context (hence nuda Scriptura ). Such an understanding is altogether incorrect. While believers should be Bereans and search the Scriptures for themselves, we don't do it in a vacuum. Our study of the Word is not disconnected from what has transpired through church history. Neither should it be divorced from the context of the present local church. So given the potential for deception if one is left to one's self, I wondered if any cults or erroneous teachings were conceived via  Nuda Scriptura . Well in my recent reading, I happened upon: - Caleb Rich "insisted that his...

Religious camp meeting Dr. Robert Godfrey mentioned the book,  The Democratization of American Christianity ,  during his talk at Ligonier 2012. As I was interested in learning why evangelical Christians think (or don't think) the way they do, I added the book to my stack, and I'm finally getting around to reading it. It looks like this may answer many of my questions. From the introduction: "The rise of democratic Christianity in the early United States is riddled with irony, unrealistic hope, and unfulfilled expectations. A central theme of the chapters that follow is the unintended results of the people's actions. Attempting to erase the difference between leaders and followers, Americans opened the door to religious demagogues. Despite popular acclaim, these leaders could exercise tyranny unimagined by elites in more controlled environments of the colonial era. Likewise, a deep sensitivity to audience resulted in values of the audience shaping the message...

Ever since I've come to the Doctrines of Grace, I've been curious how, when, and why American Christianity took a turn away from its reformed roots to where we are today. I've been trying to dig into the subject, so I was thrilled to find a used copy of  The Democratization of American Christianity by Nathan O. Hatch.  Dr. Hatch examines how politics, culture, and religion came together in our fledgling nation and the result of that amalgamation. Dr. Robert Godfrey referred to this book during one of his talks at the Ligonier National Conference, and Nancy Pearcey also references it in Total Truth.  While I was flipping through the text, the title of the appendix caught my eye:  A Sampling of Anticlerical and Anti-Calvinist Christian Verse. Sounds like some fun reading, no?   Dr. Hatch writes,   "Better than any other source, popular poems and songs capture the force of the early republic's religious populism... Using biting sarcasm, a Jeffersonia...