Two plenary keynotes at the CFH (one from Kristin Du Mez and the other from Jemar Tisby) encouraged Christian historians to embrace activism on behalf of justice, but I suspect that competing evangelical interpretations of what constitutes justice will lead some Christian academics to embrace some causes that are directly opposed to those that other Christian academics embrace.  This is not the first time, of course, that American Protestantism – or American Protestant higher education – has experienced a fissure on an issue of theology, social justice, or politics.  

This question was on my mind in the days leading up to the 2022 Conference on Faith and History that met at Baylor University last week, and now that I have returned from the conference, the question continues to concern me.  Two plenary keynotes at the CFH (one from Kristin Du Mez and the other from Jemar Tisby) encouraged Christian historians to embrace activism on behalf of justice, but I suspect that competing evangelical interpretations of what constitutes justice will lead some Christian academics to embrace some causes that are directly opposed to those that other Christian academics embrace.  This is not the first time, of course, that American Protestantism – or American Protestant higher education – has experienced a fissure on an issue of theology, social justice, or politics.  But this time, when evangelical higher education fragments over issues of social justice, I expect that there will not be merely two separate factions, as there were in the modernist-fundamentalist debates of the 1920s.  Instead, there will be at least five.

Faction 1: Conservative Culture Warriors
The most politically conservative evangelical faction to emerge from this split will be the culture warriors.  Staunchly opposed to critical race theory, feminism, and so-called “socialism,” culture warrior colleges and universities (and faculty that identify with this view) see their Christian mission primarily in terms of training a new generation of Christians to resist cultural liberalism through a Christian faith that is inextricably connected with conservative political principles.  Some of these institutions, such as Liberty University and Patrick Henry College, have developed close relationships with the Republican Party or conservative elected officials in recent years.  Others, such as New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, may not be election campaign stops for conservative Republican presidential contenders but are just as politically conservative and are closely connected with a Christian homeschooling movement that attempts to reject cultural liberalism in all its forms.

Culture warrior institutions are a leading segment of Christian higher education today.  Liberty University enrolled 15,000 residential students and 80,000 online students in 2020.  (By comparison, Wheaton College enrolls slightly less than 3,000 students; Calvin University has about 3,300 students; Azusa Pacific enrolls just over 10,000; and Baylor has an enrollment of slightly more than 20,000.  Messiah University, the academic home of the current CFH president, has 2,338 students).  Liberty University’s history department has two chairs – one for its residential program and the other for its online classes – and it offers a Ph.D. program.  But at the CFH, the nation’s leading culture warrior institutions are barely represented at all.  This year’s conference did not include any papers from faculty or students at Bob Jones University, Regent University (the university in Virginia Beach that Pat Robertson founded – and that hosted the 2016 CFH), or Patrick Henry College.  There were two panelists from Liberty University, but neither one was a member of that university’s history faculty.  So, if one looks only at the CFH, one might not know that culture warrior institutions are attracting tens of thousands of new evangelical undergraduate students every year.

Not every faculty member at these institutions fully embraces the Christian nationalist ideology of their school, but those who do necessarily become activists – but activists for a cause that is diametrically opposed to the social justice mission that Kristin Du Mez and Jemar Tisby encouraged historians to embrace.  The chair of Liberty University’s residential history program teaches a graduate course, for instance, on “American Christian Heritage.”  He is a member of the university’s Center for Apologetics and Cultural Engagement at Liberty University.  Other members of the department teach courses such as the upper-level undergraduate course “Reagan’s America.”  In addition to classes such as “Reagan’s America” and “American Christian Heritage,” Liberty University’s online catalog offers classes on Jacksonian America, “The World of Jonathan Edwards,” “History of American Entrepreneurship,” and the Korean and Vietnam Wars, but not a single class on the civil rights movement, African American history, the history of American women, or any aspect of gender studies.  Instead of activism on behalf of minority groups, this Christian nationalist version of Christian higher education features an activism for a particular brand of conservatism – the conservatism that holds the American military and free enterprise in high regard and that celebrates the only two American presidents whose names headline a Liberty University history course: Andrew Jackson and Ronald Reagan.

Few other scholars, even at the most conservative Christian institutions, take this sort of Trumpist conservative partisanship seriously – which is why institutions in this category that once had some sort of connection to the CFH and the rest of the Christian scholarly world have become increasingly alienated in a faction of their own.  They might have a substantial part of the evangelical market share, but they’re no longer in conversation with the rest of Christian academia, which increasingly views them as engaged in a wholly different enterprise from their own educational mission.
Faction 2: Color-Blind (but anti-nationalist) Conservatives
The second most-conservative faction to emerge from the split will be color-blind conservatives who eschew Christian nationalism.  Like the culture warriors, institutions and individual academics who fall into this category are deeply concerned about the perceived moral decline of the United States, and they are also generally politically conservative and committed to free-market principles, but they don’t want to make their institutions adjuncts of the Republican Party.  Evangelical institutions that fall into this category are strongly committed to biblical inerrancy and gender complementarianism, and they are critical of critical race theory.  Among conservative intellectuals in the never-Trump crowd, faction 2 is attractive; it allows one to remain committed to all of the traditional principles of political conservatism while remaining critical of the Trump phenomenon, which has hardly any support among humanities faculty in colleges and universities, whether Christian or not.  But as conservative as faction 2 evangelicals might seem to outsiders, they sometimes face a difficult time navigating the politics of their highly conservative denominations and evangelical culture in general because of their unwillingness to support Donald Trump.

Despite issuing an official statement opposing CRT, Grove City College became the subject of a months-long uproar after the college allowed Jemar Tisby and Bryan Stevenson (founder of the Equal Justice Initiative) to speak on campus but then found itself caught in a bind between the criticism from parents who worried that the college was embracing CRT and faculty and students who identified as conservative but didn’t want the college to compromise academic freedom.  This week’s college conference on “The Limits of Government,” sponsored by the Institute for Faith and Freedom, presumably represents the type of activism that is more in line with Grove City College’s core constituency.  Instead of Jemar Tisby, the conference will feature Lenny McAllister, an African American Republican who is described on the conference announcement as a “civil rights advocate” who is promoting “equality” through “free market solutions” and “adherence to the spirit of the U.S. Constitution.”

Evangelicals who fall into faction 2 profess a genuine concern for racial justice, but they define it in individualistic terms and often deny the existence of structural racism – especially when it challenges the principles of the free market, which they believe offers the greatest hope for long-term poverty relief.  In doing this, they genuinely believe that they are upholding important principles of fairness; critical race theory, they think, is racist and therefore antithetical to Christian values.  While often criticizing Donald Trump and the evangelicals who support him, they are usually unwilling to vote for pro-choice Democrats, because they view the sexual revolution and abortion as the most urgent moral problems of our time.  So, for them, activism is much more likely to mean participating in a march against abortion or speaking out in defense of religious freedom when they feel that it is threatened by legislative initiatives such as the Equality Act than advocating for racial justice.

The historical scholarship of academics who endorse the beliefs of faction 2 is likely to be shaped by a conservative interpretation of American history that sees the decline of sexual morality or traditional religious practice (rather than debates over equality) as the most important trendline of the last few decades.  Carl Trueman’s (Westminster Theological Seminary) The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to the Sexual Revolution, is a wonderful example of the type of scholarship that one can find from historians in this camp.  It’s certainly activist in the sense that it is attempting to diagnose and correct the perceived problems of the sexual revolution rather than present a dispassionate narrative in the mode of Leopold von Ranke.  And it’s unapologetically Christian and deeply theological.  But it’s not the sort of activism that Jemar Tisby highlighted.
So, evangelical academics who fall into faction 2 are caught in a bind.  They’re often critical of Christian nationalism in general (and may even view it as dangerously heretical idolatry), which separates them from evangelicals in faction 1.  Indeed, some evangelical historians teaching at faction 2 institutions have written thoughtful critiques of Christian nationalism, as CFHer John Wilsey (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) did in two separate books on civil religion and the idea of a Christian America.  But at the same time, their strong opposition to the sexual revolution and their general belief in limited government and the free market makes them wary of joining evangelicals to their left who believe that Christian politics should center on opposition to structural racism and gender inequities.  In the view of many members of their own highly conservative denominations who voted for Trump, these faction 2 academics may already be too progressive, but from the standpoint of most other Christian academics, their refusal to embrace anti-racist activism that is defined structurally rather than individually makes them far too conservative.  Outside of a small group of faction 1 and faction 2 institutions, the assumptions about race among faction 2 academics are diametrically opposed to the prevailing assumptions of the profession and of secular academia in general.  This will probably mean that faction 2 evangelical scholars will be increasingly intellectually marginalized in nearly all parts of academia, with the single exception of a small conservative academic subculture that only a few other historians are willing to engage with.

In the view of most of academia, faction 2 academics are on the wrong side of morality and history.  Despite their attempts to separate themselves from the pro-Trump evangelicals, they’re going to have a hard time convincing other academics in the age of DEI that their views are not politically dangerous and immoral.  I wish that were not the case, because I respect many scholars in faction 2 even if I don’t fully agree with them on every issue, but I think that my expectations that this faction will become increasingly marginalized and beleaguered are probably realistic.

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PC offers a different view of the Lord’s Supper than that which is found in the Westminster Standards and other confessional documents. A question that reveals the theology that supports PC is precisely this: what benefit does an infant derive from taking in the Supper? If you say that Christ is communicated with all His benefits to those who partake of the Supper, even among those who have not yet professed faith, then you have departed significantly from those within the Reformed tradition and may have unwittingly adopted a view that is superstitious and sacerdotal (ex opere operato).

I feel somewhat like a “Johnny-come-lately” when it comes to the debate surrounding the doctrine of paedocommunion (PC from here on). I was, as they say, “knee high to a grasshopper” when Reformed denominations were at work discussing and even debating the matter at the height of the Federal Vision controversy. I won’t tell you how old I was when PC was discussed as a standalone topic long before the Federal Vision was on the map.
While things have certainly shifted over the years, and the conversation around Federal Vision has generally fallen to the background, one of the remnants of the “old days” is confusion concerning the proper recipients of the Lord’s Supper. I currently minister in a place that is no stranger to the practice of admitting infants to the table (North Idaho), but this issue is not limited to a geographical corner of the United States or bound to any one Reformed denomination – it seems that there isn’t a minister that I have talked to in recent months who hasn’t had a congregant who is on the fence with PC.
My purpose in revisiting this issue is to encourage church members who are either on the fence regarding PC (or may even desire to push their churches in the direction of allowing the practice) to pause for a moment and consider the ramifications of holding such a view. My caution to those who are already on the other side of the fence is that PC might not be all that it professes to be: a biblical, historical, and beneficial practice – and that there may be some wisdom from those within the confessionally Reformed tradition that is being overlooked.
No, We Aren’t Baptists
A few months ago, I was sitting across the table from friends who recently started attending a church that practices PC. The wife was raised in a congregation of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC), but she found the arguments for PC to be quite convincing. I did my best to explain biblically and historically why the view had significant issues, but it was met with the rejoinder: “You sound a lot like a Baptist right now.” That wasn’t the first time I had heard such an accusation, and so it’s worth addressing.
The argument goes something like this: those who admit infants to the Font but not the Table are inconsistent in their admission of persons to the sacraments. How can a child belong to the covenant but not have the right to all the benefits of the covenant?  Essentially, those of us who hold to a view that allows for only one sacrament to be applied to infants are adopting a Baptist framework of evaluating someone’s worthiness to partake in a sacrament by their visible faith.
While the argument of consistency may be appealing to some, it’s worth asking: why is it so appealing? I would contend that it’s far more of a Baptist framework to insist upon infants receiving both sacraments than to bifurcate them as different sacraments with different principles of inclusion (which is how the Westminster Divines treated the issue). To prove my point, watch this PC debate between a credobaptist and a paedocommunionist. You will notice that the discussion inevitably reverts to debating infant baptism. Why? They do not differ on whether a person who receives baptism can receive communion; they only differ on whether the child can receive baptism in the first place.
Returning to the original claim that those of us who do not hold to PC “still have some Baptist” left in us, consider a simple question: why are there two sacraments anyway? My concern is that the “consistency” approach invariably flattens the differences between baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Yes, they are both signs and seals of the covenant of grace, and their value is found sacramentally in their connection to Christ and all his benefits. Yet, their function is different.
Baptism is that sign of inclusion into the covenant people of God, and the Lord’s Supper is that sign of strengthening, nourishing, and feeding upon Christ by faith. There is a different experience of enjoying this sacrament: we do it as a body and in perpetuity. There are even sanctions through discipline that can bar someone from the Lord’s Table, whereas baptism is only administered once and cannot be “undone.”
Now, at the time of writing this, I admit that I was a Baptist just eight years ago, so perhaps someone can legitimately claim that I am still thinking ‘baptistically.’ However, the same can’t be said of the men who wrote the Westminster Standards. Note how they see a pertinent difference between the sacraments, which ties into their views of the proper recipients of the sacraments:

 Wherein do the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s supper differ?

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Written by S. M. Baugh |
Friday, July 15, 2022
Christ’s death was not a death like ours. It was a sacrifice. His body was symbolized in the animals which Abraham cut in two, so that through Christ’s substitutionary death as an “eternal redemption” (Heb. 9:12) through the “eternal Spirit” (Heb. 9:14) we might enter into an “eternal inheritance” (Heb. 9:15). All this is sealed to us with an imperishable promise because the new covenant has been inaugurated now and into all eternity by his “blood of the eternal covenant” (Heb. 13:20).

I corresponded with John Hughes recently and complimented him on a detailed scholarly article he wrote some years ago where he gave a most helpful treatment of Heb. 9:15-22. He mentioned in return that it was disappointing that his work seems to have made no impression on English translations that have appeared subsequently. Let’s look the passage over (going only to v. 18 for time’s sake). I will rehearse the heart of Hughes’s interpretation of Heb. 9:15-18 and zero in on one phrase in particular that I find especially illuminating for accepting his conclusions.
Here is Heb. 9:15-18 in the English Standard Version (ESV), an excellent newer translation, but it does not adopt Hughes’s interpretation. The issue revolves around the translation of one Greek word, diatheke, that occurs several times in these four verses and is translated as either “covenant” or “will” (and are highlighted here):
Heb. 9:15-18: “Therefore he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant. [16] For where a will is involved, the death of the one who made it must be established. [17] For a will takes effect only at death, since it is not in force as long as the one who made it is alive. [18] Therefore not even the first covenant was inaugurated without blood.”
It seems rather odd that the author of Hebrews should speak of Christ as “mediator of a new covenant” (v. 15) and then switch to discussion of a seemingly unrelated “will” in vv. 16-17. More odd is that the author draws out from his discussion of a “will” in vv. 16-17 a conclusion about covenant inauguration practice in v. 18. Why discuss a last will to make a point about a covenant?
The answer to this last question receives some interesting explanations in the literature, though even the best of them are not convincing. It is true that the Greek word diatheke may legitimately refer to either an OT type of “covenant” or to a “last will and testament.” These are two established meanings of this word.
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