As you may have noted, dear reader, I have had it up to here with the kids at Calvinist International. At one time I thought it a fairly scholarly endeavor, one that was honorable even if wrong-headed at times. Even then, when I thought it wrong-headed, I remained in denial and wrote that off to the inevitable disagreements I would have with any devoted and traditionalist-minded Reformed gaggle. Now, I see it as sinister posturing, with a thinly veiled political agenda that would make one shudder were it not so patently absurd.
Put simply, for all their talk of freedom and the like, the kids at CI are prepping us for totalitarianism, plain and simple. This is difficult to discern because they seem to believe in all sincerity that somehow we can resurrect the office of the Christian Magistrate who benevolently oversees a pluralist kingdom where disputes on matters of morals and political moment are adjudicated on the basis of a commonly accepted norm of natural reason. All the while, of course, the Christian Magistrate is also keen to manage the affairs of the various churches in all their diversity. That diversity itself is a result of the fact that the Church is fundamentally invisible, a crudely Platonic affair, with each particular congregation a fragment manifesting perhaps a shadow of that True Invisible Church.
To further this agenda, Steven Wedgeworth has recourse to the old cliché that the Church in the first centuries was in essence fissiparous and chaotic. This hoary notion, dear to Mainline revisionists and Fundamentalists alike, is both stupid and easily refuted. I mean, is it not clear that there was always a firm, clear proclamation of the Trinitarian Gospel starting at Pentecost? That this was contested, pressured, marginalized, hounded, misunderstood, understood variously by different bishops and the like - that, in short, the Church lived in real human history - is both a fact, and trivial.
This reminds me of the time he dismissed Cyril of Alexandria on the basis of a passage from Clement of Alexandria taken out of context and then read as tendentiously as possible. This represents a movement in a larger critique of patristic Christology, which again is nothing new in revisionist circles, nor is the practice of noting that then, as now, there was a riot of people writing theology of one stripe or another and declaring, on that basis, that there was no essential unity to the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. That there is a complimentary fantasia about that Early Church hovering blameless and unscathed above the sublunary world does not sanction a shoddy and manipulative reading of the first few centuries of the Church's history.
So, what are the implications of all this?
The distinctively, shall we say, English form of Fascism thus constituted on the basis of Locke and Grotius and Hobbes, unopposed by a Church crippled by doctrinal skepticism and thus lacking the institutional weight to stand against the State thus constituted, would be of a soft, almost yielding sort, but it would be a form of public ideological and ecclesial micromanagement all the same. (As an aside, how folks can miss the totalitarian implications of Locke's thought in particular, both his political thought and its foundational epistemology, is a mystery not to be plumbed this side of the eschaton.)
Again, this would be terrifying were it not pure fantasy. As much as they hate the word, we are living in apocalyptic times. The Church is shrinking both in terms of numbers and in terms of influence in this Northern Hemispherical Nightmare so fast it's like watching a time-elapsed film. In the South, persecution is rampant - show me the benevolent Christian Magistrate in Nigeria, or the Sudan. Christians are fleeing, or being killed, throughout the historic homes of the faith in the Levant and around the Mediterranean. As soon as the Vatican is sacked, and Mt Athos annexed by the EU, the game will be over. To come closer to home, when you face, inter alia, militants who know they're killing children for convenience and profit, and think it a virtuous act, some sort of Lockean bastardization of Thomist natural reason will not save you. To my ear you have no choice but to bring out the howitzers of prophetic denunciation and ascetic prayer and fasting.
Finally, each of them, Escalante in particular, have mistaken their personal idiosyncratic tics for the foundations of a movement. It is a movement, moreover, that has shown itself to be without honor and intellectual integrity. It saddens me to say that, my friends, because I had high hopes for so many of those involved.
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