A Few Theses

A few theses following up my last post to provoke discussion:

1. Secular observers like Alan Wolfe and Harold Bloom are correct when they suggest, contra theocracy fear mongers like Damon Linker and others, that the liberal soul has nearly completed its march through American Christianity such that the American church is no longer an existential threat to the dominant liberal, secular order.

2. These observers are wrong when they argue that this is a good thing.

3. They are wrong from the perspective of one who loves America because the assimilation of Christianity has the effect of collapsing the tension between the otherworldly order of the church and the mundane order of the Hobbsian world of scarcity, competition, and death.

4. This tension is necessary to civilization in the current age.

5. They are wrong, also from the perspective of one who loves the church because the otherworldly order of the church is called to be a constant threat and pressure on the mundane order of the powers of men, whether it take the form of liberalism or something else.

6. Those within the church who seek by various means to eliminate the Hobbsian pole of this tension are likewise wrong.

7. The church must therefore figure out how to both resist the march of the liberal soul through its ranks and resist dreaming up ways to escape the Hobbsian contingency of life in this age.

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The Church’s Hesitant Liberals

As regular readers are no doubt aware, my sympathies in this discussion lie with Darryl’s thesis, especially with respect to the dangers of theocratic and Kuyperian dreaming. However, I keep coming up against what appears to me to be a contradiction within that thesis which, as I see it, risks allowing Darryl’s admirable body of work to bleed out rather slowly. In the comments below, Darryl sums up the creed of the hesitant or conflicted Christian liberal rather succinctly:

Is the church today any worse off than at the time when Paul was telling Christians to be subject to the authorities God had ordained? This question isn’t about the health of the church. It’s about the freedom of Christians to worship and serve God as they seek. The fairly obvious answer is that Christians enjoy far more freedoms and benefits than the early Christians did. … Yes, liberalism has its problems, as did Nero’s government. Do I like cell phones, air travel, or bans on smoking? Of course not. Even worse, do I think abortion is a terrible evil that even pragmatically makes no sense given the bloated budget lines sustaining middle-class entitlements? Yes, emphatically. But despite all of modern liberalism’s woes, I am hard-pressed to understand how the current state of affairs restricts the ministry of word and sacrement, the discipline of the church, the catechizing of covenant children, or the administration of diaconal assistance, the things that Scripture calls Christians to do while waiting for the return of their Lord.

Actually, I rather think the question is about the health of the church, and about the manner in which liberalism undermines that health. I haven’t seen an adequate account of or even a grappling with the deep ways liberalism is antithetical to Christianity in Darryl’s rendering of the church/politics question. Rather, the account we have seems to boil down to: liberalism gives the church freedom to worship and preach, and even though it also gives freedom to abortionists, etc., it is the best possible arrangement in this world through which we are pilgrims. From that point, the discussion almost always focuses on the latter half of the liberal bargain. And I agree with Darryl that the freedom liberalism grants to wrongdoers is not an existential threat to the church. But what gets missed in this discussion is what is, to me at least, the far more important question which concerns the first half of the bargain: is the form of freedom offered the church by the liberal order good for it? I don’t mean to reduce the question to a simple contrast between 21st Century America and Nero-style persecution, here, but rather to ask: is the order of the liberal soul compatible with Christianity?

To this question, Darryl seems to take the side of American whiggish thinkers (who seem in most senses not to be his natural allies) such as RJ Neuhaus and Chuck Colson who say, basically, with a few caveats here and there, “yes,” it is compatible. In my observation, these are thinkers who, when asked to survey the health of the American church, will by and large affirm the basic health of large-tent evangelicalism in its current form. This is, I think, the only tenable position to take: if you are basically comfortable with the liberal order, then you better be willing to accept the current evangelical mish-mash of the American church. The two are joined at the hip. However, I don’t think it makes any sense to affirm the former and lament or reject the latter. Here is a passage worth considering:

Shannon would no doubt agree with Allen Guelzo who wrote in a recent Books & Culture review of John T. McGreevy’s Catholicism and American Freedom that “Catholics might be better advised to forget assimilation to a culture drunk with autonomous individualism”–culture as choice–“and be content with Catholicism’s own authentic strangeness.” Guelzo comes close to suggesting what Shannon might have added himself: the “secular” norms of “individualism” and “choice” have such purchase among conservative, observant Protestants–the sort who are often keen to denounce “secularism” and “liberals”–that Alan Wolfe is correct in The Transformation of American Religion when he deems them “harmless” to the dominant liberal order.

Readers of The New Pantagruel will not be surprised to find that Wolfe’s thesis finds little resistance here. Father Richard John Neuhaus, captain of the First Things ship, however, has consistently railed at Wolfe, calling him “the Alfred E. Neuman of the sociology of American religion.” Neuhaus has also suggested more than once in “reviews” with very little analysis that Wolfe’s perceived failure to understand his subject inheres in his status as “a secular Jew.”

I agree with Neuhaus, pace Wolfe, that the assimilation of traditional Christians to the secular status quo is not a good thing for either the Church or the culture. Nevertheless, with serious questions about the integrity of religious traditionalism in general and of Protestant Evangelicalism in particular emerging in First Things and fellow-traveller publications, Neuhaus might do well to ask if he isn’t rather prejudicially shooting the messenger. But no–even when the otherwise admirable David Brooks failed to trash Wolfe’s book in The New York Times, this was clearly due to some lapse on Brooks’ part, and it became another occasion for Neuhaus to snipe at Wolfe. Playing the resentful victim who can never be understood by “outsiders,” Neuhaus’s animated reactions to Wolfe’s presumed “snobbery” resemble the reactions of other cultural minorities who seethe at any criticism from outside the family–criticism that they are quite able to accept from “their own people.”

As Neuhaus observes in his review of The Transformation of American Religion, “thoughtful evangelicals readily admit that their religious world offers a target-rich environment,” and Wolfe’s book “contains considerable truth.” Nevertheless, it is enough of a “caricature” to be dismissed as “superficial sociology of superficial religion–or, more precisely, of religion that the author is determined to construe as superficial.” Or–maybe Evangelicalism really is superficial! Considerably superficial? Nuance and self-critique is not the forté of what McCarraher has called “the embedded intellectual.” Signs of malaise and ideological familiarity indeed!

The sickness reaches also to Books & Culture editor John Wilson as he gushes over Robert Putnam, Lewis Feldstein, and Don Cohen’s book, Better Together. Writing in Christianity Today, Wilson claims that Better Together’s study of Rick Warren’s Saddleback megachurch indicates “[t]he unmistakable conclusion … that evangelicals can be trusted at the civic table.” They’re generating social capital, and what’s more, they’re still maintaining evangelistic agendas. This is supposed to silence the cautionary critics, “notably disciples of theologian Stanley Hauerwas,” who hold that Evangelicals “have been co-opted by the imperial state.” In a complete non-sequitur which does violence to the real arguments offered by Hauerwas and others, Wilson closes his article by posing Jesus–“a man who dined with tax collectors and all kinds of riffraff”–as a “precedent” over against those who don’t “believe that [Christians] should strive to have a place at the civic table.” I suspect that the civic tables Wilson, Warren, Neuhaus and other Christian culture elites sit at are not populated by riffraff. More appropriate would have been a response to Wolfe’s sense that Evangelicals are selling out their patrimony.

I am under no illusions concerning Wolfe’s place in this debate. He is clearly of the mind that the civic table is a good and necessary thing; a “civilizing” influence on the fervent passions that are prone to grip sectarians such as Hauerwas. Thus, like Neuhaus and Wilson, Wolfe dislikes Hauerwas’s adversarial rancor. Wolfe much prefers what he calls the phenomena of Evangelical “Salvation Inflation.” In an interview with Michael Cromartie for the March/April 2004 issue of Books & Culture, Wolfe says that in the Rick Warren mode of post-traditional Protestantism, “more Americans than ever proclaim themselves born again in Christ, but the lord to whom they turn rarely gets angry and frequently strengthens self-esteem.” “People confess fewer and fewer sins, and are rewarded with more and more.” This, to Wolfe, represents a positive development within Christianity, making its adherents better civil citizens of a pluralistic democracy. Wolfe’s manner is strikingly reminiscent of a colonial governor writing home with condescending delight to describe the natives’ halting embrace of the modern world.

Accompanying the Books & Culture interview, Wolfe received an appreciative but anxious review of The Transformation of American Religion from R. Stephen Warner. Warner prompts readers to avoid Neuhaus’s histrionics and give Wolfe a charitable reading in the I’m OK-You’re OK Evangelical way where every critic is ultimately an okely-dokely heckuva nice guy. (Translation: we ignore whatever he says that rubs us the wrong way or try to put a positive spin on it.) For in Warner’s review, truth and accuracy in analysis take a back seat to pop psychology’s language of diplomacy: Wolfe is “well-intentioned,” he has “new evangelical friends,” and he does a fair job of understanding them. Wolfe is “sensitive to [Evangelicals’] vulnerability to his scorn.” Hence, when Wolfe uses negative terms to describe Evangelicals, it is because he “respects” them “too much not to share with them his disdain for the way many of their number flirt with the worst of American pop culture.” On the other hand, Warner wishes that Wolfe had talked about other, more progressive Evangelicals, such as those who took in Central American refugees in the 80s and helped “delegitimate Reagan-era counterinsurgency policies.”

Warner’s review works the way he thinks Wolfe’s book works–not primarily as a real analysis but rather as a negotiation between secularists and Christians. Warner’s main anxiety about Wolfe’s book is not that its analysis of Western Christianity is badly mistaken but that it is inconvenient for the cultural-political agendas of Christian “movement” literature like Books & Culture: “Wolfe’s well-intentioned purpose to allay mutual fears and disarm recriminations on the part of his two audiences would have been better served if the theme of capitulation had not been such a relentless drumbeat. As it is, he lends support to those who see an eschatological slippery slope instead of a perennial tightrope in every instance calling for their cultural discernment.”

Again, perhaps the point is capitulation, and perhaps it is an accurate point. Can it penetrate the hardened positions and hardened arteries among movement personalities–the passive-aggressive approach at Books & Culture on the one hand and Neuhaus’s aggressive-aggressive approach at First Things on the other?

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RE: The Problem With Westminster’s Two Kingdoms

Andrew Matthews

Darryl Hart admits that Christendom was far better then the Roman Empire, but asks whether America did anything significant. How America fits in post-apostolic redemptive history is a good question to consider. (I think a case can be made that redemptive history continued after New Testament times. Think of the A.D. 70 Judgment, the conversion of Constantine, the rise of the Papacy, etc.) The following may be suggested for America’s role: America was colonized to begin Christendom afresh in the New World. Its establishment meant the end of heathen barbarism, at least in North America. The U.S. has been preserved an an unofficial Christian nation (Lincoln’s “almost chosen people”) with the resolve to oppose some of the great evils of recent times: Nazism, communism, and Jihadist Islam. America has one of the best track records for promoting human rights, national self-determination, economic prosperity and governmental stability all over the world, especially after World War II through the Cold War. The Cold War was truly a contest between an evil empire and a God-blessed nation. So, I do not accept that God’s will is equally accomplished through the rule of George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein.

Since the Church is not exhausted by its ecclesiastical institutions but ecompasses families (and by extension–nations), I see no necessity in preferring the “Pilgrim” metaphor to the “Crusader” metaphor. The NT contains plenty of martial imagery describing the activity of Christians in the present age. This warfare is primarily “spiritual” in the sense that the Gospel addresses the root problem: sin and the demonic oppression that results. St. Boniface was acting in a capacity beyond “wayaring pilgrim” when he cut down Thor’s Oak in Geismar and converted the tribes of Germany. Of course it has been the lot of the Reformed to inherit lands already purged of the demonic.

According to a 2007 Princeton survey poll conducted for Newsweek, 82% of Americans identify themselves as Christian or of Christian heritage. A supermajority of Americans are probably covenantally Christian (i.e., baptized). Can Darryl explain why Americans shouldn’t have a polity and culture that reflects their actual heritage? Why should Americans be happy with the sorry alternative of secular progressivism that virtually guarantees the ascendancy of antichrist in our culture?

But since it can’t be a pleasant experience being accused of cosmic misanthropy, I welcome Darryl to provide an alternate account of W2K than the one I’ve attempted. My critique capitalizes on W2K’s rejection of the abiding validity of the cultural mandate and the substitution in its place of an unstable culture that has no other intrinsic purpose than to gratify men’s needs and wants. Darryl is welcome to explain how this down-grading of humanity’s task glorifies God. Does he hold that God is equally glorified in Constantine and Tony Blair, in Michelangelo and Jackson Pollock, in the Hagia Sophia and Las Vegas’ Bellagio?

Darryl says that “transformationalists” ascribe ultimate significance to culture & politics, and that this was crucial to Rome’s error. I am persuaded he is wrong on both counts. Megapolis is not Metapolis. Megapolis is penultimate rather than eschatologically ultimate. However, this does not mean that the human race should not cultivate the world to its full potential in anticipation of the consummating work only God is able to perform. And I don’t believe Rome ever considered secular (as opposed to ecclesiastical) culture to be an ultimate good.

Darryl affirms the inherent goodness of creation and counter-charges that the “constant need to redeem creation” implies the opposite. My own counter to this is that just as human nature is corrupted but still retains its essential goodness, that is, its purpose to conform and be glorified in the Image of God, so creation has been diverted from its original purpose, subjected to “futility.” Just as believers receive God’s forgiveness anew when they confess their sins and brought back into the joy of their salvation, so things of this life can be removed from service to idolatrous futility and consecrated to serve the Lord.

Since humanity is ontologically related to the rest of creation, as its summit and capstone, all of creation was affected by the Fall. It is consequently the work of God’s grace through the agency of the theanthropic Person of Jesus to restore creation and re-orient it to its original purpose. This is an on-going ministry of reconciliation that the Church performs on the basis of the once-and-for-all sacrifice of our Incarnate Lord. In asserting this basic biblical teaching, I believe I justly claim that W2K is a degraded expression of our catholic and apostolic faith.

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Gasoline and economics

Gas prices are killing my family budget. Maybe the government could help by giving a little less help?
Read this article at Human Events by Terry Easton.

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RE: The Spirituality of the Church and 1 Cor. 6:1-11

I did not want this comment to be lost in the shuffle.

This is interesting. Darryl, what you say makes sense in the context we live. Our churches are like regional centers. People travel from miles around to gather to worship in our conservative Reformed and Presbyterian Churches. But this is a unique, and maybe unfortunante, aspect of our present setting.
What if our congregations served our neighborhoods, villages, ect. What if our neighbors where also members of our congregation. What if we all moved into the same neighborhood or village. How would this change the dynamic.
By your agreement, the Session would be answer many questions that were not “spiritual” in nature. The courts of the church would be a parallel court of originial jurisdiction not under the authority of the magistrate. Such courts would have a significant limiting impact on the civil courts, no? Set in an earlier context this explains the rise of canon law over against the civil law. At the very least this represents a Christian limitation on the soverignty of the state but it also implys that the church will have to deal with many “secular” issues.
I wonder if this change of context has caused the office confusion of the last three decades. What is the role lay elders if the church us purely spiritual and not also an incarnate community?
Interesting, right?

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Immigration Amnesty?

President Bush has secured his legacy. The promise of immigration reform has degenerated into amnesty. How should Christians think about the issue?

This is an excerpt from the Understanding the Times Committee Report to the Reformed Presbyterian Synod in 2006. The controversial report was recieved as information. I am the author.

“Wars and Rumors of War: Border Security

While American soldiers are fighting in the Middle East, and army of illegal immigrants is invading the homeland. Of course, the invasion of our southern border is not a military conquest but it does have grave cultural and economic implications. The RPC recognizes the moral dilemma involved in the discussion.

First, as Christians, we must remember that we were strangers who dwelt in Egypt. When Israel inherited the land of promise, they were called upon to remember this history of subjection when dealing with aliens in their midst. As such, we should be tenderhearted to those in need and show liberality toward those who seek refuge.

Yet, our sympathy is moderated by the unwillingness of illegal immigrants to show respect toward the American system of ordered liberty. Radical leaders of the pro-immigration movement speak of reclaiming the southwest for Mexico. Thus, as millions of illegal aliens cross the border under the flag of Mexico, the question is not how can we deal mercifully with needy refugees, but rather how can the United States defend its historic, cultural, and linguistic heritage? The moral law of God maintains the individuals inherent right to self-defense. Do nations and cultures have no such right? Such a conclusion would appear absurd.”

A year later, I say amen.

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Jerry Falwell, R.I.P.

Andrew Matthews

Whatever can be said about how this man represented Christ in the public realm, for good or ill, I think it’s safe to say that an era has passed.

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The Problem With Westminster’s Two Kingdoms

Andrew Matthews

Bill Chellis has pointed out that according to St. Paul, ecclesiastical courts should ideally arbitrate disputes between Christians (I Cor. 6:1-11). At the very least we should conclude from this that the sacred/secular dichotomy is an insufficient method for determining what is proper to church versus state oversight. However, Darryl Hart explains that “matters pertaining to this life” really means matters pertaining to the community of faith.

Darryl holds that matters inherently secular attain the quality of spirituality when more than one Christian is concerned. However, this is to involve himself in an experience of cognitive dissonance. For, according to his thinking, Christians are to play by the rules of the City of Man when moving in the secular sphere: that is, the three-dimensional world outside the walls of our churches he identifies as the present age. Much less should ecclesiastical judges be carried away with any thoughts of their competence to decide matters pertaining to this life!

As a spiritualizer of our religion, Darryl has no substantive objection to Christians hashing out their secular concerns in secular courts. Why not let the courts decide if a matter concerns temporal justice? After all, they’re the experts…

Really, it may be demonstrated ad nauseam that the two categories (sacred/secular) describe different experiences of the same life and often pertain to identical subjects. Subjectively, it is true that “to the pure all things are pure, but to the corrupt and those who do not believe, nothing is pure” (Titus 1:15). However, there is an underlying objective truth about the sanctity of the world: “Do not call unclean what I have made clean!” (Acts 10:15).

Those of us who have tendencies “prematurely immanentizing the eschaton” fail to understand the necessity of Darryl’s precise formulation of the opposition between the two ages, which are both essentially spiritual, not temporal, spheres. Man’s city and God’s city cannot be absolutely separated by the discrete temporal moment of the final judgment. The Kingdom of God is now fully established in principle (Matt. 28:18ff; Eph. 1:20-23), and competitively coexists with the Kingdom of Satan in the present era. Furthermore, the City of Man will continue to exist after the Judgment: it will then be called Hell.

From this we are situated to understand that the Westminster Two Kingdom (W2K) School is guilty of attempting to combine temporal and moral categories in such a way as to engender fuzzy conceptual thought. It is not possible to split off an opposite from one dichotomic duality (old creation/new creation) and identify it with an opposite from another duality (love of self/love of God). This is because both loves equally persist through both phases of history.

The old creation, even in its fallen state, is still fundamentally good, and is now purified by the blood of Christ. Though temporarily subject to futility, creation remains oriented to its original telos (Rom. 8:19ff.). The fallen ethic of “the self for its own sake” cannot be identified with the old creation in its essence without fatally compromising creation’s goodness. Such is to identify the laws and principles of the created order with evil.

The purpose for which W2K combines ethical and temporal-eschatological categories is not merely to steer theological discourse away from metaphysical speculation. It actually serves to surreptitiously introduce a contrary metaphysic, one that not only divorces being from goodness but positively attributes evil to being. Of course, this is the essential principle of gnosticism.

To develop the critique further: W2K theory effectively attributes evil to creation when it attributes common culture with the fallen ethic of self love, and calls it the City of Man. Human culture has been relieved of its chief task to fulfill the cultural mandate (Gen. 1:28-30; 9:1ff.) and now serves to maximize comfort and pleasure in this life. Here, collective human activity has been diverted from its original purpose to glorify God and pressed into a different service circumscribed by the limits of “this world,” the world treated as an end-in-itself. Here we see that W2K provides theological justification for idolatry in principle. The end result can only be an abandonment of human society to demonic domination.

A pernicious confusion of categories has led Michael Horton and his disciples to deny the possibility of Christian culture. Only the institutional church may have a transcendent “politics” and “culture” of sorts. The W2K’s particular emphasis on the Calvinist antithesis has led to a denial of the fundamental unity of the race that underlies and is presupposed by the antithesis. It rejects any possibility that the reprobate can positively contribute to or even cooperate with the construction of the City of God. Such possibilities are deemed by W2K men as illegitimate attempts at salvation by works. Yet another example of W2K’s confusion of ethical and eschatological categories.

Darryl Hart thinks that Christian politics is as nonsensical as Christian plumbing or Christian auto mechanics. When he speaks in this way he betrays a confusion of proximate utilitarian ends with ultimate ends. Darryl concedes only practical value to cultural activity in the world and rules out the possibility that culture has reference to the higher purpose of mankind: to glorify God and fully enjoy him forever. But the practical science of plumbing is not the same as the art of politics. Christian architecture is not so silly an idea as Christian plumbing. And if there can be Christian architecture there can be Christian city planning.

W2K is skeptical that creation retains any intrinsic purpose that complements God’s will, but affirms only an extrinsic teleology imposed by sovereign divine determination. Concomitant with this doctrine is the unwarranted assumption that human authority and government came about as a result of the Fall. This theory of political origins implies an unlikely proposition: that Adam was not to administrate the collective activity of the race in its fulfillment of the cultural mandate.

My analysis of W2K is also sufficient to explain the school’s antagonism toward any “grace perfecting nature” language. As shown, W2K attributes only a “good of utility” to created being and specifically denies an intrinsic telos in it complementary to God’s ultimate eschatological purpose. In Klinean terms, there is really no Megapolis to be transformed into the glory-filled Metapolis. Created being exists therefore to be entirely obliterated by the eschaton.

The W2K common grace city can never be Megapolis. Any attempt by “transformationalists” to preserve some semblance of Megapolis in the common grace city is bound to be continually opposed by partisans of W2K. Such partisans prefer any and all forms of polity to Christendom, even sacral pagan, fascist, and communist social orders. This one-sidedness is indistinguishable from the toxic animus that inspires the political left. And so, W2K is finally exposed as a theologically sophisticated form of the same radicalism that inspired Anabaptism, Enlightenment republicanism, and modern (political) liberalism.

W2K proponents share a wholesale repudiation of Christendom’s legacy with their radical brethren. Driven by madness over the sins of Christian civilization, W2K men fail to compare on balance its relative achievements and failings with other civilizations that have actually existed. Apparently, the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Salem witch trials are enough to indict a 1500 year old civilization. But contrary to one-sided historical accounts, the Crusades were a response to the aggression of another civilization with theocratic aspirations, the intent of the Inquisition was to counter arch-heretics who threatened social order, and black witchcraft was practiced in colonial Massachusetts. Though excesses were certainly perpetrated during those events, a civilization as old as ours ought not be judged only by its sins but by its ideals and accomplishments as well.

The essential error of W2K is that the created order has not retained an intrinsic transcendent purpose. The effect is to re-orient humanity’s collective teleological ethical imperative to serve this-worldly ends. W2K renders itself more destructive when it associates created being with the fallen ethic of “self love to the exclusion of God.” W2K theology holds that the Incarnation served no other purpose than as a means to the end of delivering the elect from the evil world. The world itself, abandoned to the demonic, will not be redeemed; it will be destroyed. This theology is an expression of profound existential alienation from God’s good world.

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The Spirituality of the Church and 1 Cor. 6:1-11

I am no opponent of the grand Presbyterian doctrine of the Church’s spirituality. I have a question that in unresolved in my mind.

In 1 Cor. 6:1-11, Paul warns believers not to go to the courts of the world for justice against other believers. Rather, he declares that jurisdiction belongs to the church courts, “are you incompetent to try trivial cases? Do you not know that we are to judge angel? How much more, them, matters pertaining to this life!”

It appears that Paul’s sees the Ruling Elders “ruling” function pertaining to more than the “spiritual” but rather including the temporal and secular. Do you have a property boundry dispute with your believing neighbor? Take it to the Elders and not to the magistrate. Do not look for justice among those who mock Christ.

Further, does such an interpretation of the temporal work of the Elders make sense in light of classic three office distinctions? Ministers are primarily charged with matters spiritual but engage in judging some temporal matters as members of the Session. Ruling Elders are primarily engaged in ruling on temporal matters as the God’s ordained leaders of the eschatological community but also deal in spiritual matters as part of the Session?

Of course, the RPCNA is officially 1.5 office. Not sure what this means for the spirituality of the church. Any ideas?

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Binnie on the Imprecatory Psalms

Since the imprecatory psalms were mentioned recently, I thought that some of you would be interested in these selections from William Binnie’s The Psalms: Their History, Teachings, and Use (1886). Binnie was a Scottish RP minister and theologian, until joining the Free Church toward the end of his life. Here are some of his closing thoughts from the chapter on the imprecations:

It cannot be denied that, like the imprecations of the apostles and of the souls under the altar, the language of the Psalmist has reference not only to judgments already executed, but to judgments which are viewed as still future and in suspense. It brings up the question, What ought to be our sentiment with respect to such judgments?

In reply to this question, I do not hesitate to say that, as a rule, our duty is to deprecate them, and not to imprecate them. Even although we see reason to conclude that they are surely coming, we ought to cry aloud for mercy to be shown to the transgressors. The Lord Jesus prayed for His murderers; and we ought to do likewise. To make the Imprecatory Psalms the vehicle of maledictions against personal enemies is a frightful abuse of God’s holy Word. Calvin mentions, as a fact notorious in his time, that certain monks, the Franciscans especially, made a trade of this detestable sacrilege. If any one had a mortal enemy and wished him destroyed, he would hire one of those wretches to curse him, day by day, in the words of the Hundred-and-ninth Psalm. The Reformer adds that he himself knew a lady of rank in France who hired certain Franciscans to imprecate perdition in this way on her only son (Commentary on Ps. cix. 6). Matthew Henry, after mentioning these shameful facts, makes this reflection, that “greater impiety can scarcely be imagined, than to vent a devilish passion in the language of sacred writ; to kindle strife with coals snatched from God’s altar; and to call for fire from heaven with a tongue set on fire of hell.” Those who are capable of such daring profanity (one may surely trust that it has never shown its head in any Protestant Church) would not be dissuaded by any argument of ours; but it may not be useless to observe that it would be a dangerous and overbold employment of these psalms to recite them even against those who are our enemies in some good and holy work. When James and John proposed to imitate Elijah by commanding fire to come down from heaven and consume certain Samaritans who opposed their passage to Jerusalem, the Lord “turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of” (Luke ix. 55).

This, I repeat, is the rule by which we are to walk. We are to bless them that curse us, and to pray for them that despitefully use us, and persecute us. But there are exceptions even to this rule. One of these is pointed out by the loving disciple, in a quarter where, but for his intimation, we might well have deemed the rule absolute. “If any man see his brother sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and God will give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin unto death: not concerning this do I say that he should make request” (I John v. 16). And there are other exceptions. It is plain that civil society and its officers are not to walk by the letter of the commandment about forgiving trespasses and rendering to no man evil for evil. The Civil Magistrate is neither obliged, nor at liberty, to forgive those who trespass against him. “He is a minister of God, an avenger for wrath to him that doeth evil” (Rom. xiii. 4). It is at his peril if he refuse or neglect to perform this office; and all private persons whose minds have not been corrupted by a false sentimentality will concur with him in the execution of his stern duty. When a foul crime has been perpetrated, tender-hearted Christian women, who would not touch a hair of their enemy’s head but would rather feed him, will express keen resentment, and will be disquieted in mind till they hear that the perpetrator has been convicted and duly punished. They will imprecate condign punishment on the offender. It is their hearty desire and prayer that the violated majesty of the law may not remain unrevenged. Facts like these, if they were fairly considered, would be felt to throw much light on the Bible imprecations. If we had more of the Psalmist’s consuming zeal for the cause of God ; if we were as much concerned for the honour of the divine government as every virtuous citizen is for the honour of the national laws, the imprecations would sound less strange and harsh in our ears.

And, then, this final paragraph:

I will not maintain that the Imprecatory Psalms are to be the Christian’s habitual song. Many godly persons, who would be the last to charge them with sin, are accustomed to omit them, for the most part, in the regular consecutive singing of the Psalms. Certainly, they ought never to be sung but with fear and trembling. Nevertheless, at fit seasons, they may and ought to find a place in our service of praise. It has been justly said that “in a deep sense of moral evil, more perhaps than in anything else, abides a saving knowledge of God.” There is “a hatred of them that hate God,” which is the invariable accompaniment and indispensable token of the love of God in the heart. And sin is to be looked upon not only as a disease to be loathed, but as a violation of law which calls for punishment. As powerful witnesses for the truth that sin is hateful to God and deserving of His wrath and everlasting curse, a truth which the world would fain forget, the Imprecatory Psalms must be accounted worthy of their place in the divine Manual of Praise.

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