Baroque Protestantism?

Here is an excellent exchange by two very good men demonstrating a slight theological difference and how it causes people to talk past each other.
Ever been in a debate where two people cite the exact same fact as evidence for two opposite conclusions?
Part of this debate is over whether the Reformation needs Reforming (Milton) and whether man's problem is that he is essentially religious (Karl Barth). Typically, one side in the Reformed movement aims at stabilizing a Reformed Orthodoxy, and the other side aims at continuing the Reformation project, even if it means self-critiquing, second-guessing, and even innovation (Neo-Orthodoxy or, in Bartos' case, Baroque and Continental Protestantism).
Part of the problem is defining the difference between inculcating a child and propagandizing/polemicizing.
Conservatives argue for character, and liberals argue for personality, but a broad-minded approach would no doubt incorporate both, recognizing that they are approaching the same problem from different directions. Alexander Vinet would be proud of both of these men.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Vinet


RESPONSE FIRST
Dear Pastor Bartos,

Thank you for this ministry. I enjoy your work. I have missed your articles lately, but now receiving this one, am perplexed by it, and if I understand you correctly, must disagree. How does your thesis jibe with Deuteronomy 6 and Psalm 78, for example? Briefly, my experience at applying the Biblical imperative for the last 25 years teaches me that it is not over-teaching that produces rebellion, but mere abstract teaching without diligent practice. A complex of teaching, example and practice (discipline), by faith with prayer, as a family has proved an astoundingly effective means of reproducing the faith in our children (five of them) and the children of those families I have served in formal educational office. Interestingly, I have found particularly that not continuing such education in practice through adolescence, at least through high school, tends to produce rebellion. Parents who live and educate the faith, including its discipline, with their children through adolescence win them for life. Some aspects of such a life include making the family the family in practice. The peer crowd (even a Christian one) is the most devastating influence on an adolescent. The home must be the greatest influence. A family embracing love of learning and literature, especially the Bible, is critical. Christina and I have worked as hard at forming a friendship with our children, an on-going personal relationship, as we have disciplining them. Parental self-consciousness and transparency regarding sin is hugely important. Children see through hypocrisy at a very young age. Indeed, what is the faith of Christ, if not trust in Him to forgive and redeem from our sin? Without transparency over sin, Christianity is mere external religion. The principle of liberty is imperative. The law is for the lawless. Discipline for discipline's sake is destructive, but where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. Family economy that includes everyone's contribution and blessing is another element. Many more principles bear on the results of family religion. Thus, parents represent God in a very personal and real way. Pretty much, if an evangelical parent (or teacher) wins a child's love and respect to himself, he has won love and respect for God.

Not too much religion, but the kind of religion is at issue. True religion, where everything belongs to God in practice, with joy, grace and loving discipline (especially including self-discipline) is the key to rearing a godly home. Neglecting Biblical instruction is equally as bad as hypocritical over-doing. I hope I have not misconstrued you. This is such a fundamental element of the Christian life, I could not neglect to respond. I hope that my thoughts on this will be a blessing to you as yours typically are to me.

Yours for the King,
Ron

ARTICLE
Just a thought…..
Christian * Non-democratic * non-egalitarian * Free-market * politically incorrect * anti-étatist
Can too much religion hurt?
At the first glance this very question may seem rather suggestive, and, in a sense, even misleading unless we exclude the fact that fallen man can never be “too religious” before the absolute God in the absolute sense from the focus of this essay. However, religion includes not only a non-propositional, ”abstract”, spiritual aspect of worship, but, and perhaps mostly, a practical, propositional, institutional aspect thereof, especially of an ecclesiastical character. Too much too early of the latter may indeed prompt even the most obdurate rebellion and apostasy. Yet, often quite unnecessarily.
According to one of the great minds of the past age it is a simple fact, if not a law, how unequipped young people are for any final negative decision as to religion, i.e. a definite, institutional religion, before the age of thirty at the earliest.* While leaving the question of the readiness for a final positive answer for another treatment, we can immediately deduce, if the forgotten author is right, how heavy responsibility parents, seniors, pastors, or theologians have, for then it is possible for them to give ready occasion to, to provoke the young people to any indiscriminate revolt against such a definite institutional religion.
It seems to me that mature men may have the deepest experience of what such definite, institutional religion means in and for their own lives, but they not always remember that their own presently formed conviction has been an affair of a long time, of own personal religious growth and overall maturation, and that they cannot presuppose it as extant in the young, the immature. More importantly, they may also fail to see that this particular experience is NOT simply transferable to the young, and this by any command, by any careful teaching. Complex experiences or ideas cannot be simplified into a ”simple talk” or a primitive didactic exercise á la “Let’s play on little Jesus” precisely because they are complex. There are simply no geniuses in true religion, and hearing little kids or young people how they commonly use formulas, phrases, words and concepts of which they clearly have no idea whatsoever, let alone any understan ding, is truly awkward, embarrasing and deplorable.
This does not mean at all that children and young people should not be taught, well, some religion, that they should not be trained in some institutional religious convictions and habits, for that is what general wisdom and discrimination requires. After all, docility is no less a most necessary virtue than sincerity in the modern era of cognitive superficiality and emotional disintegration and mediocrity.
The rebellions of the young against the necessarily self-induced misrepresentation of the parent’s, teacher’s, or pastor’s religion (due to the indiscriminate ”overdosing”, which they cannot handle) can be very tragic and saddening in the family, in the church, in the father’s and mother’s heart. Thus, it is a matter of imperative responsibility to remain conscious of the inevitable, of the fact and right of the difference between the young people and the mature at every step of their maturation. While we may think that the maximum exposure of the young to an institutional religion (both in a quantitative and qualitative sense) will make them good Christians and save them from unbelief, in the long-run evaluation the opposite may be closer to truth since rebellion and apostasy does not always, nor usually, take the form of outright denial and communion absence. There is no question that popular liberalism – empty or shallow religiousness - is growing en ma sse among church-going members.** Thus, on the other hand, we may gain a great and lasting point if our immature ones leave us only with a little, yet firm definite religion, but with a deeply rooted and cherished sense that there is much more in it than they can, so far, see for themselves.
P.B.
* Since the author, B. F. v. Hagel, belonged to the 19th century, still a literary age, we can only imagine that that age level would be still higher today, in the age of popular literary illiteracy, of the ”Real Flat culture”.
** Personally, I think this latter form of revolt and apostasy is more ”fatal” due to its internal, subjective and later even subconscious character leading to a total in-depth spiritual apathy while formally subsisting in the observation of religious externalities for social or cultural reasons. Surely, these apostates can pray marvelously in public and be even ecclesiastically quite active.