Correspondence

I am very disappointed with Al Wolters’ “insider” response to Comments’ series, “NeoCalvinism… Yes, No, Maybe?” including but not exclusive to my own contribution. Wolters’ response (not available online) takes no account of and is very different from the reactions that appeared in the online comments on these essays at the Comment website, not to mention bloggers around the world who responded. Instead, the effect of Wolters’ “comprehensive” reply is to put a gloss on each essay so that difficult points and obvious disagreements between them are softened, ignored, or misconstrued. Whether this is intentional obfuscation or indicative of an unconscious “insider” myopia, I do not know, but it is not symptomatic of health for neocalvinism.

First off, Wolters insists James K. A. Smith is a “dyed-in-the-wool neocalvinist …. who wants to call [neocalvinism] back to its true identity.” This comes despite the fact that Smith positions himself in “the more suspect ‘antithetical’ line [of neocalvinism] that runs from Evan Runner through Richard Mouw.” More importantly, Smith notes a key difference between himself and those he calls “real” and “orthodox neocalvinists.” Unlike the “orthodox”, Smith uses some aspects of neocalvinism as tools stored in a box alongside tools from other traditions. Using this metaphor, Smith explains that he rejects neocalvinism as a comprehensive system and movement whose integrity requires a primary (if not a total) commitment that would exclude or at least strongly subordinate the appropriation of other systems and movements. Evidently Smith is not comfortable doing this because he associates neocalvinism with a specifically reformed confessional identity that he finds too narrow and a politics he finds incorrect. It appears that unless neocalvinism sheds its traditional ecclesial roots to become a non- or post-confessional Christian philosophy that is somehow “more catholic”–and unless it is used in a more politically liberal fashion–Smith believes he can’t be a “real” or “orthodox” neocalvinist. In essence, Neocalvinism needs to change to suit Smith.

This raises serious and contentious issues about the identity and future of neocalvinism. David Koyzis, Brian Janaszek and I all identified ecclesiology–with a bias toward a “thick” one–as central and critical. Janaszek suggests what I implied might be necessary–that reformed churches “take back” neocalvinism. This seems quite opposed to Smith’s vision, which Wolters affirms without noting this conflict at all.

Perhaps it is really more of a performance on Wolters’ part than a real analysis or debate about ideas. Smith plays a little hard to get as a disaffected neocalvinist scion, and Wolters gives him a big hug to reassure him and onlookers that theirs is really one big happy family.

On the other hand, one can’t ignore what Wolters is literally saying when he insists Smith is a real neocalvinist who “wants to call [neocalvinism] back to its true identity.” Apart from Smith’s identification of neocalvinism with neoconservatism, which Wolters rejects, apparently everything Smith wrote is, in Wolters’ view, compatible with neocalvinism. Yet Smith says his colleagues at Calvin College consider him a marginal and semi-heterodox neocalvinist, and he seems to accept their classification of themselves as the real, orthodox neocalvinists. Does Wolters mean these colleagues are wrong, that it is they, not Smith, who represent a lesser strain of neocalvinism?

Regarding my own essay, it is extremely consternating that Wolters calls it “provocative” but then labors to blunt all its points. First he focuses on speculating that I must have “quite a high regard for [neocalvinism] as an intellectual movement” since I called it “the only sustained alternative in North American Protestantism to Marxist thought and political action that has been attentive to critical insights on the left (and the traditionalist right)…” This was hardly my main point, and I see it as more of a glass half empty, glass half full situation: you can construe my remarks on neocalvinism as being more or less complimentary. Is squeezing a compliment out of a critic at a moment of crisis really important? What about the question of what is true, accurate, and useful criticism?

What is central to my essay, as Wolters correctly notes, is the problem of neocalvinism’s ill-defined and eroding relationship to the church and specific churches. Wolters says this is indeed a “very real” problem and that I am “right to insist on it.” (I would again prefer to use the word “crisis” to be clear about the seriousness of the problem.) Wolters notes that I perceive a necessity for neocalvinism and neocalvinists to be rooted in confessional, reformed churches, but then he hopes that those of us who have no interest in being members of a reformed church can still become neocalvinists. This is precisely what I oppose!

Neocalvinists interested in survival as a distinctive group that stands for identifiable beliefs that nourish their cultural and intellectual pursuits must understand their churches as confessional bodies where historic doctrines are not subject to being ignored, discarded, or radically misread so they would be utterly unrecognizable to Kuyper and Dooyeweerd, if not John Calvin. I believe this might be done with some measure of catholicity and with a minimum of the baseless sectarian chauvinism I criticized in my essay. (E.g., the kind that surfaced in Harry Van Dyke’s and Janel Curry’s essays. Van Dyke implies neocalvinism is really the only worldview for Christians who are not asleep, and Curry says non-neocalvinists are basically gnostic dualists.)

While I strongly disagree with key points in the Calvinist confessions, as an outsider I do appreciate those who understand and unapologetically proclaim the reformed faith in its integrity. I am likewise dismayed by the internal neglect and assaults this integrity has suffered. It seems a large part of the problem is neocalvinists who consider themselves non- or post-confessional and who advocate Smith’s view of neocalvinism as an intellectual tool one might use as a member of a very broad range of churches. To hold this view one must have very little regard for history and the simple fact that it is a dicey political act to mix material from bodies that are separate due to well-articulated disagreements. It is subversive and to some extent dishonest. Legitimate and orderly ways exist for significantly different groups to interact intellectually, but they depend upon candor about the differences.

Eluding the whole point of my autobiographical account of my family’s church-hopping, Wolters apparently subscribes to Smith’s view that there is no real harm in an intellectual and ecclesial mix-and-match, so long as it means spreading “neocalvinism” in some form. How far can one go with this? What are the risks? Is it really the best path?

The point I had most hoped to get across was that outside of the substantially corrupt and anti-orthodox mainline Protestant churches today, Calvinists are not being Calvinists, Lutherans are not being Lutherans, and the gamut of free-church Evangelicals have never been anything but an identity crisis open to taking counsel from many sources, including contemporary reformed thinkers. Too many of the latter strike me as being equally lost and adrift regarding who they are, what they believe, and how they concretely define their community.

This is clearly a problem touching on mission, whose centrality Wolters emphasized in his essay, “What is to be done about…neocalvinism?” and which he lamented was overlooked by those who wrote responses. Perhaps Comment could do an issue on ecclesiology, as Koyzis suggested, with some special emphasis on its relation to missiology.