Because I live
in the Pacific Northwest and because this book has sparked discussion and coverage
I’m belatedly getting around to Stephen Wolfe’s book published by Canon Press.
I’m
not a partisan of Christian Nationalism for reasons I don’t see much obligation
to get into. I suppose if you’re a
regular reader of Wenatchee The Hatchet the opening post of 2023 quoting from
John Neville Figgis’ Churches in the Modern State might go a long way to
telegraphing an explanation. I've name-checked Jacques Ellul, Edmund Burke, Roger Williams and some others enough times that my lack of sympathy for the Moscow, Idaho variations of Christian nationalism "probably" don't need to be restated for longtime readers. My comment about being a Mark Hatfield Republican at this blog has probably become a stale axiom but it does describe where I've landed over the course of my life and, at any rate, people in the Pacific Northwest will at least understand what the shorthand entails.
The
likelihood that heat rather than light will be generated is about average but
it would seem that the Wolfe book is the sort that can inspire writers at The
Gospel Coalition to decide the book is a bad apple.
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/christian-nationalism-wolfe/
Back
in mid-December 2022 Glenn Moots mentioned, almost in passing, that Wolfe
pining for some Christian prince seemed reactionary.
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2022/12/86478/
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2022/12/86487/
Neil
Shenvi has written at some length on the Stephen Wolfe book
Probably
the most entertaining reading for me was
Brian Mattson’s review of Wolfe’s case for Christian nationalism. The TL:DR version is that a scholar who has published
a book on Bavinck with Brill is in a better position to comment on Wolfe’s
competency in using Bavinck’s work (or lack thereof) than the average person
writing on the internet or a person who has had a book published by Canon Press.
https://brianmattson.substack.com/p/a-childrens-crusade
...
Wolfe begins the
book by exempting himself from the tasks of exegesis and biblical theology:
“Some readers will complain that I rarely appeal to Scripture to argue for my
positions. I understand that frustration, but allow me to explain: I am neither
a theologian nor a biblical scholar. I have no training in moving from scriptural
interpretation to theological articulation.” (16). Readers may accept this
excuse, if they wish; given Wolfe’s explicit aim to ground his theory in
Christian theology, coupled with his clear attempts to do some form of biblical
theology, I do not.
[emphasis added] If I wrote a book about how quantum theory grounds some
novel idea about, say, well, anything, I would not expect to be taken seriously
if I admitted to readers that I do not know how to do basic algebra.
Be that as it may, Wolfe invokes
a right to simply assume the “Reformed theological tradition,” and it is
certainly true that we all must start somewhere and assume something. And so
the book is filled with quotations from what seems an impressive collection of
Reformed luminaries. There are two problems.
First, the Reformed tradition is
not monolithic; not only has it experienced an age of robust theological
development and refinement, there have been centuries of intramural debate all
along the way over a host of issues, some of which rather importantly impinge
upon Wolfe’s case—the extent of the fall and its noetic effects; the “wider”
and “narrower” senses of the image of God; the relation of revelation and
reason, and more. Wolfe himself sometimes acknowledges these internal debates
in his lengthier footnotes. Page 44 reveals that “Thomas Goodwin disagreed with
this view, taking what I estimate to be a minority view […].” In the footnote
on the following page Wolfe claims that while “many in the Reformed tradition”
believed that Adam was under a probationary period, “this position is imposed
on the text of Genesis and is theologically unsound.”
And right there is the second
problem, and it is called being caught on the horns of a dilemma. Now that
Wolfe is, by his own admission, estimating and evaluating and picking and
choosing which views to embrace within the variegated, broad stream of Reformed
thought, and even making bold claims about the exegesis of Genesis and what is
or is not theologically sound, he can no longer avail himself of the excuse
that he is “not a theologian nor biblical scholar.” After all, on what grounds
does he decide that Turretin is right and Goodwin is wrong? How is he
discriminating between the two? Mere preference? Whomever happens to be most
helpful to him in the moment? (The answers are likely yes, and yes.) Wolfe
wants to have his cake and eat it, too. Either one is competent in biblical
exegesis and systematic theology or not. If one wishes to confess ignorance of
such things so as to avoid the hard work of attending to the Bible, so be it.
But one may not then try to sneak competence in on the cheap through the back
door. [emphasis added]
...
So Wolfe begins with a ready-made
definition of “nation” and “nationalism” that comes from who-knows-where and
only later considers how the Christian faith “modifies” it—the answer being, as
it strangely turns out, that it doesn’t modify it at all. Indeed, on his terms
Christianity by definition cannot modify it, because “grace does not destroy,
abrogate, supersede, or undermine nature” (23). Since he has projected his
construal of “nationhood” right back into the prelapsarian Garden of Eden (really,
that is the entire thesis in a nutshell), it is therefore invulnerable to any
alteration or modification by redemptive grace. [emphasis added] That
is what that exceptionally lovely and helpful theological phrase, “grace
restores nature,” now comes to mean in the hands of Stephen Wolfe—but I am
getting well ahead of myself. Wolfe’s “Christian nationalism” is just
garden-variety nationalism taken from his own intuitions with an obvious assist
from the first few chapters of Aristotle’s On Politics, involving a “Great Man”
(31, 290), the “Christian Prince” (277), who is the “nation’s god”(287) and the
“vicar of God” (290), and who is in charge of “ordering” everybody and
everything to the “national good” (31). I half-expected him to announce that
he’s volunteering for the job.
...
Yes, Wolfe can provide a lengthy
compendium of Reformed luminaries saying very nice things about reason. They
loved reason. It is no hard thing to find Calvin, or Mastricht, or Turretin
waxing eloquently on this extravagant gift that is an intrinsic aspect of the
imago Dei, and if you string enough of these quotes together they will all
sound like perfect natural theologians and rationalists. But this only works
if, simultaneously, you studiously ignore everything they said about the noetic
effects of sin. And at this Stephen Wolfe excels.
...
Legend has it that in the year
Anno Domini 1212 a German boy named Nicholas of Cologne was visited by Jesus
and given a divine commission to lead a Crusade to peacefully conquer the Holy
Land. Gathering some 30,000 children, he marched them to the Mediterranean,
believing that the waters would part before him. When the expected miracle did
not occur, unscrupulous merchants offered to take as many of them as they could
across the sea. Many were disillusioned and turned for home. The ones who
boarded the ships were taken to Tunisia and sold into slavery.
In the year Anno Domini 2022
Stephen (of “Wolfeshire,” his bio says) has launched a manifesto sparking the
imagination and enthusiasm of a large cohort of energetic, young, American men.
There is a Holy Land to liberate from infidels and their enablers—the anemic
and compromised relics of the post-war generation. That Holy Land is the United
States of America. His manifesto is a theological train wreck and a political
mishmash of dangerous and historically deadly ideas. I hope that many will turn
away in disillusionment before they get to wherever they are headed, because
the waters are not going to part.
There
was a much briefer follow-up
https://brianmattson.substack.com/p/sordid-business
An
extensive, nigh exhaustive, exhumation of Thomas Achord’s social media
statements was done by Alastair Roberts in late November 2022.
https://alastairadversaria.com/2022/11/27/the-case-against-thomas-achord/
That
was more or less summarized at Salon from a Salon perspective. Full disclosure, I have a very low estimate of
Salon journalism on religious topics because of the history of utterly botched
fact-checking in the past. I took a week
to
delineate all the factual errors in an article Salon ran on Mars Hill a few
years ago. I dare to venture that
few, if any, have written more extensively than Wenatchee The Hatchet about
Mark Driscoll and so I felt obliged to correct the errors in Tarico’s article. With that substantial caveat about Salon in
mind, the link is part of recent public discourse about Achord and Wolfe and
Christian Nationalism so here’s the link.
The
article references Roberts’ work and also material published in different
settings by Rod Dreher and Warren Throckmorton
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-thomas-achord-alastair-roberts-mess/
https://twitter.com/wthrockmorton/status/1596595134627733504
One
of the things I have wondered about as I have kept some tabs on Doug Wilson is
that he has seemed to refer to woke clergy as false brethren but he makes fun of kinists
without calling them false brethren.
Take
this passage
…
An Aside to the Actual Kinists Out
There
Since we are talking a lot about you guys, I thought it
might be appropriate to take you aside for a minute. You all like to think of
yourselves as the shock troops of the resistance, as an elite corps of
hard-headed race realists. You are in fact the soft underbelly of the
resistance.
You are not the lost golden apples of the Hesperides in the
true West. You are the crabbed fruit of the West, lying on the ground in one of
our lower-IQ orchards, most of which fruit the ants have already carried off.
If anyone on the right suddenly starts talking about
the Jooozzz, and is sounding suspiciously like Ilhan Omar, the
chances are outstanding that it is one of you guys.
The tweets in question in this case can sound so brave right
after two in the morning, and also after two beers, right before you publish
them, but when your opponents find those tweets and are consequently
saying ohboyohboyohboyohboy to themselves, they are not doing
this because they just plopped their lame arguments onto the sturdy slab of an
oak table called the adamantine right. No, they actually found a two-dollar
card table of the wobbly right, the kind that collapses as soon as they
put any kind of weight on it. That’s why the ohboyohboyohboy
reaction.
…
But my recent attacks on kinism, anti-Semitism, and the like are
nothing new. They are not examples of me trying to sidle away from
anybody for PR reasons. I have been fighting with kinists and their ilk since
Joel McDurmon was still in short pants. I have been fighting this kind of
rancid thinking for decades because it is one of
the oldest methods Satan has employed for corrupting the gospel. See, for
example, here (2005) here (2005)
and here.
(2019). And there are plenty more, if you like.
I write like I hate this stuff because . . . and please follow
me closely here . . . I hate this stuff. Because . . . Bible.
The reason I fight ethnic animosity and ethnic vainglory is
because such attitudes are manifestly wicked, and one of a faithful preacher’s
central tasks is to attack sin.
…
Okay,
then, if the woke have objected to the ethnic vainglory of kinists and racists then
shouldn’t Doug Wilson be woke himself? Why are kinists not apostates, heretics
and false brethren in the way that the woke and anti-racist clergy seem to be
in Wilson’s public polemics? For Wilson’s complaints about guilt-by-association
gambits he doesn’t seem to hesitate to use the rhetorical device himself.
It
still somewhat amazes me how Doug Wilson can take any and every controversy he
courts via publication to plug for one or more of his books or books Canon
Press has published. It’s as though he’s
always in salesman mode. Each
controversy is great for advertising something or free giveaways.
I don’t have much sympathy for claims that Thomas
Achord was doxed, though some Christian online punditry has become as sloppy in defining "dox" as it has on "slander".
https://americanmind.org/salvo/just-dox-theory/
Retrieving
and preserving a litany of social media statements that were made in what is
fundamentally a broadcast mass media platform (Twitter) is not doxing. If Christian online pundits act as if Achord
was doxed on the basis of what Alastair Roberts published then “dox” has become
a variant of “slander”, an incompetent buzzword or shibboleth used by Christian
writers on the internet who don’t even know what the difference between libel
and slander are, don’t care to know what defamation is as unprotected speech,
and conflate public figures (limited or unlimited) who have made a point of
thrusting themselves into the limelight of public discourse getting held
accountable for what they published under their own names or pseudonyms as
getting “doxed”.
Christianity
Today has a piece on the book over here
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