But he said he was sorry

U. S. Attny General and drug lord/gun runner Eric Holder urged America to have “an honest talk about race.”  What he meant was, “Shut up and listen to me gripe.”  I doubt an honest conversation will ever happen because emotions run high on both sides.  Still, it’s worth a shot.

The Impossibility of an Honest Talk about Race

I saw on my Facebook feed a PCA thinker, who is a black man, complain about Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary’s creating a chair in Morton Smith’s honor.  He is angry because Smith created the PCA with the values of the Old South in mind (He seemed surprised.  I thought this was common knowledge years ago to anyone who read more than an hour’s worth of Southern Presbyterian history).   Of course, the situation today is somewhat amusing since the PCA is more likely a pale reflection of the SBC’s Worship Committee’s than a continuation of Dabney, but I digress.  I really don’t care one way or another that GPTS is doing this.  The Reformed seminary world has long been dead to me and I refuse to even look back.  However, it raised other questions.

Is the PCA still racist?

The aforementioned black gentleman is concerned that the PCA is still allowing racist things like this.   How does one respond?  Morton Smith’s actions simply aren’t representative of the PCA.  In fact, he is probably the minority (no pun intended). But the gentleman wanted to the PCa (and presumably by extension any white Presbyterian male) to really apologize for racism.   Here is where it becomes problematic.  How does one really apologize for racism?   Well, the PCA (and the Missouri Lutherans and the SBC) issued statements condemning the nebulous entity known as racism (the SBC does this on a yearly basis).  Is that good?

No.  It isn’t.  Presumably he wants “racist” ministers disciplined.  Fair enough, but keep in mind this is the PCa and no one ever gets disciplined.   A PCA pastor pointed that out to the gentleman.  Not good enough, but we need to remember if the PCA will publicly condemn the Federal Vision but refuse to discipline guys who write books promoting the Federal Vision, that should tell you something.

But all of this raises an even harder question that is at the heart of the problem.  Hating other colors is wrong (and not even Kinists advocate that).  Discriminating at the communion table is wrong (and maybe I missed something in the PCA during the 80s, but was even that a problem?).  Heck, I remember attending Auburn Avenue one Sunday during its Confederate Heritage Conference and I saw a number of black people in church “amen-ing” and “Oh glory-ing.”

So we’ve ruled out “discrimination” and “hating” so what else is left?  It wasn’t exactly said, but I think “racism” in this context means “continuing to love the Old South.”   That is a bit more concrete, but is still problematic.  Loving “what” about the Old South?   I highly doubt Morton Smith means sitting on the front porch of the Massa’s House drinking mint juleps while watching the slaves happily sing in the fields.   I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

But maybe he means “Loving the Confederacy.”  But even this is ambiguous.  Do I love the Confederacy?  Not really.  I think their political system was doomed from the start and the only way they really had a chance of winning the war was to let Stonewall and Forrest go nuts and do whatever they wanted.  That wasn’t going to happen.  The Confederate Establishment thought Virginia’s soil too sacred to be polluted by the foot of an invader. So maybe to prove to the world I am not “racist” (undefined Marxist term that it is), maybe they want me to “apologize” for the Confederacy.

Well, that’s problematic on several levels.

1. The Confederacy doesn’t exist today.  You aren’t a slave.  I am not a Confederate soldier.  This is silly.
2. 2/3 of my ancestors weren’t even in America at the time.
3. The 5th commandment and Hebrews 13:7 demand I honor my superiors and those who brought me to the faith.  Stonewall Jackson is one of those.  To attack him is open sin.

In fact, all of this reminds me of Sheldon Cooper’s trying to apologize to Howard.

And the truth of the matter is I don’t really like the Southern Presbyterian ethos.  They were Baptistic on the sacraments and their descendants made it worse, if anything (this is one of the few areas where the Federal Vision guys legitimately nailed them).  If we are going to have an honest conversation about “race,” then the infractions must be concrete.  Saying, “They really mean otherwise” or “They really don’t like us” or “They really have their fingers crossed” isn’t helpful.  If they are saying things like “Coloreds and Whites should live in different neighborhoods or go to different churches,” then that’s entirely different.  The fact is, and I have read Smith’s Q & A and he is ethically wrong, but probably sociologically accurate, most people aren’t saying this.

If cultures are organic outgrowths, which thousands of years of human history have demonstrated beyond doubt, then they will inevitably reflect this.  Am I arguing for segregation?  Of course not. I would be against government-enforced segregation and government-enforced integration.  Why?  Because it isn’t the government’s business.  People want to live where people want to live.  (Of course, I’m the exception on this since I have many black neighbors around my street.  Which white liberal agitator can say that? None).

By all means attack racism, but attack concrete examples, like when Ice Cube talks about killing white girls.

Fearfully disagreeing with Carl Trueman

I used to be a critic of Trueman, but he won me over in the course of the years.   His works on John Owen show just how sharp a theologian he is.   Still, I have to disagree with him on the literary aesthetic of the Southern Presbyterians.

He writes,

 What a pair of tedious prose stylists!  Berkhof (note the spelling, Del) wrote a dictionary; dictionaries are meant to be boring; that’s the deal.  But these guys wrote continuous prose that is too often as wooden as it comes — except, of course, when Dabney is hating, which he does do exceptionally well at times.

I disagree.  Both gentleman had mastered Milton and Gibbon.  Dabney can be laborious at times, but he often soars the heights.  Thornwell is about as close as one can come to truly classical American literature.

Southern Presbyterianism and the Culture War

D.G. Hart has long been a whipping boy among postmillennialists and Reconstructionists.  Indeed, it took me about 8 years to warm up to his arguments.  I used to be a hard-core Recon.  I thought the highest goal in my life would be to take back city hall for Christ (okay, maybe it wasn’t really that, but you get the idea). Through various shifts and trials in my life, I have backed away from that rhetoric.  Something else appeared as superior to the culture war:  ecclesiastical statesmanship.  Christ’s promises were specifically made to his church, not to parachurch ministries and quasi-political cell groups.

Both sides in the debate, R2Kers and Kuyperians, have a troubled use with Thornwell, Dabney, and Southern Presbyterianism.  On one hand, Hart and Co. have correctly identified and applied Thornwell’s “Spirituality of the Church” doctrine.  This is a slap in the face to Kuyperians, at least modern-day ones.  On the other hand, I am not sure how thoroughly Hart can fully apply Thornwell.  Thornwell had no problem with society being governed by “right reason” in accord with a general biblical outline.  (Few Van Tillians hold to Common Sense Realism).  Further, Thornwell (and especially Dabney) are not dis-interested in political and economic questions.

Still, I can’t help but wonder if the 2Kers have a practical point: whether we ought or ought not to “transform” society for Christ, we have to look at issues on the ground.  I am not going to trumpet the typical R2K objections to Kuyperianism (e.g., the world is evil and transformation is impossible).  I think there is a far more troubling objection:  what if the  transformationalists actually succeed?  The problem is that a lot of transformationalists think they are going to go back to Patrick Henry.   More like, though, and more troubling, is that we won’t get Patrick Henry.  We will get Tim Keller.  Tim Keller is a more likely bet for transformationalism.  He is a gifted speaker, a talented organizer, and has a growing church in a large, important city.   The problem:  Tim Keller isn’t really Reformed.

And such a “reformed” society would end up looking like the broader PCA culture.

But what about the points where the transformationalists seem like they got it right?  Should they just be abandoned?  Maybe not.  This is where simply being a student of the magisterial reformation pans out:  we get the theocratic impulse behind such views but we root it in a robust ecclesiology.