History as Foil to the Present

"We need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion" (C. S. Lewis, "Learning in Wartime" in Weight of Glory, Kindle, 58–59).

A Staggering Statement about George Whitefield's Influence

I have not read much written by George Marsden. But what I have read seems to indicate, to me at least, that he tends to be understated and reserved in his assessments. Which makes the following assessment of Whitefield all the more staggering, even shocking:

George Whitefield not only changed Jonathan Edwards's life; he changed American history. His influence was so great that he ought to be considered as one of America's leading founding fathers. One reason he is not, of course, is that he was not an American, but remained based in England, even though he visited America a remarkable seven times and died in Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1771. Another reason why he is not as well remembered as others who shaped early America is that he was a religious figure, not a political one. Nonetheless, during his lifetime he was almost certainly the best-known person in the colonies, even more widely known among ordinary Americans than was his friend Benjamin Franklin. He was the first celebrated "star" in an emerging popular culture that, lacking hereditary aristocracy, would be particularly susceptible to stars. Not only was he famous: Whitefield revolutionized American religion, and hence much of American life. 

—George Marsden, A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 60.

Machen Faces Modernism in Faith

From Taylor's 10 Key Events on fundamentalism and evangelicalism in modern America, this is key event number 6:

Machen Defends the Faith against Modernism (1929-1937)

In 1929, J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937)—a brilliant Reformed New Testament professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, who had studied under Adolf Schlatter in Germany—left the school after it reorganized its curriculum, having opened the door (in Machen’s view) to modernist compromise. He would then found Westminster Theological Seminary (1929) and later The Orthodox Presbyterian Church (1936) after he was tried and found guilty for continuing his Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions (IBPFM), designed so that money contributed by orthodox Presbyterians would end up going to support likeminded orthodox Presbyterian missionaries rather than modernist Presbyterians like Pearl Buck (1892-1973).

Machen was a non-dispensational example of conservative dissent. He did not particularly care for or embrace the “fundamentalist” label, but he understood that their belief in premillennialism (while in error, in his judgment) was an error of a different kind than that propagated by the modernists.

In 1923 Eerdmans published Machen’s landmark book Christianity and Liberalism, arguing that modernistic liberalism was not a sub-species of Christian orthodoxy but rather a different religion that must be rejected once and for all. For example, he wrote, that the “Church of Rome may represent a perversion of the Christian religion; but naturalistic liberalism is not Christianity at all” (p. 52).

When Machen died in 1937 at the age of 55, after a bout with pneumonia, it marked the passing of an era in 20th century fundamentalist-evangelicalism.

(The best biography of Machen is D.G. Hart’s Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America; the best entry point is Stephen J. Nichols’s J. Gresham Machen: A Guided Tour of His Life and Thought.)

The Fascination and Difficulty of History

"The reason history is fascinating is because people in other times and places are so like us. The reason history is difficult is because people in other times and places are so different from us."

—N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 50.

The Decline of Heroes and Our Identity Crisis

David Wells has said that "the decline of heroes and heroines who embody noble virtues and their replacement by celebrities, not to mention antiheroes, is an important ingredient in our difficulties with identity" (Losing Our Virtue, 132).

If this is so, how then shall we live? What might our response be? Well, we probably ought to be on the lookout for heroes. We should look for people who have finished well, read about their lives, and seek to emulate in our own lives what is worthy of imitation from theirs.

It's high time, therefore, to start reading more biographies and history. Tolle lege!

Character: An Intense Conscious Sense of Living Morally Before God

In his book Losing Our Virtue, in the course of discussing the disastrous move from virtues to values in the modern era, David Wells gives this definition of character: "the intensely conscious sense of living morally before God" (16).

And in this sense, all talk about "character counting" (and similar empty speak) devoid of reference to God stays in the merely horizontal plane and thus never ascends to talk of true character. Which calls to mind Jonathan Edwards' magnificent treatise on The Nature of True Virtue.

Then and Now

I'm toying with the idea here of regular posts of a then-versus-now variety. I'm not doing this because of the belief that the past—well, "them's were the good 'ol days." No, that's not my thinking at all. I do believe the past has many glories and lessons to instruct us, even guard us and warn us. But I also believe that scriptural eschatology teaches us that the best days lie still yet ahead.

Instead, I want to start a then-versus-now category of posts simply for the sake of gaining whatever illumination might come about from making comparisons, guarding against drawing the wrong conclusions, guarding against succumbing to the "them's-were-the-good-'ol-days" mentality. With the brief quotation that follows, perhaps you'll get a sense of what I'm after.

Speaking of some of the problems (like one church member in Northampton punching another) and the influence of Christianity in rural New England in the days of Jonathan Edwards, Iain Murray records:

Much that we take for granted today— such as the existence of a criminal class in society— was unknown in rural New England. One fight was the sensation of a generation. Everyone in Northampton knew that Joseph Hawley, the town lawyer, could never find enough work to live on in that occupation; he was also town merchant, besides, no doubt, [doing] his own measure of farming (Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography, 88). 

Lawyers couldn't find enough work? Interesting. One fight was the sensation of a generation? Incredible. Now, it's quite easy to think of the stark contrasts of today, isn't it? Is this illuminating? You must decide for yourself. I find it so.

Chronological Snobbery

C. S. Lewis defines what he calls "chronological snobbery" as "the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited."

But, he says,

You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also "a period," and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them. 

—Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1955), 207-208.