Hyperdulia

I hate to keep harping on Steve Camp, but he seems to have a following and a facility for churning out a remarkable amount of unscriptural and self-contradictory nonsense.

Mind you, not everything he says is unscriptural nonsense. Some of what he says is very good. Unfortunately, the good stuff becomes the lubricant which he uses to grease the way for all of unscriptural and self-contradictory nonsense.

Take “Justice Sunday,” which is his showcase for all that’s rotten in the rotten heart of ECB. What does he find so outrageous?

The C-bees turned the pulpit, nay, the “sacred desk,” into a political podium. They turned the “church” into a PAC. They substituted a political rally for a worship service. And this, to Camp’s way of thinking, is nothing short of “Romanistic accommodationism.”

What’s so deeply ironic about all this, and “irony” quickly becomes an overused word where Camp is concerned, is that he is the one who is unwittingly guilty of Romanistic accommodationism.

You see, he talks about the pulpit and the church and the sanctuary as if the C-bees were desecrating the high altar in a Catholic cathedral.

Let us back up a few paces. the Reformed Baptist tradition is a branch of the Puritan tradition. Those who drafted the LBCF were Puritans.

Now, a hallmark of the Puritans is that they had no such reverence for a building or a stick of furniture.

Indeed, they didn’t call their houses of worship “churches.” Rather, they called them “meetinghouses.”

And this was deliberate. It was to avoid any idolatrous or superstitious reverence for mere things of wood and stone.

The insinuation that the C-bees committed sacrilege on Justice Sunday when they commandeered a church building for a political pep rally would strike the Puritan’s as, itself, a Popish veneration of mere things.

And it’s for this selfsame reason that Colonial American Calvinists suffered no scruples about preaching Election Day sermons from the pulpit.

I agree that the symbolism of Justice Sunday was a tactical miscalculation. But that’s the point. The flashpoint of controversy is nothing more than empty symbolism. Camp is reacting the way a devout Catholic would react if you threw a bucket of green paint on a statue of the Blessed Virgin, or a Muslim would react at rumors that the “Holy Koran” had been flushed down…but you’ve heard that story already.

Indeed, some of the Puritans were iconoclasts—literally, not figuratively. They went around smashing up Cathedrals.

It shows just how far Mr. Camp and his disciples have departed from the authentic Reformed Baptist tradition that they get so hysterical over religious architecture.

Now, because I agree with the Puritan premise, I have no particular problem calling a building a church. Because that’s all it is: just plain old symbolism—nothing more, nothing less.

For the same reason, among others, I don’t see that we have a mandate to go around smashing up cathedrals.

What is especially ironic—yes, that indispensable word again—is that all this emotional lather and palaver is coming from a self-styled Reformed Baptist.

For what we’re dealing with here is the OT notion of ritual purity and impurity. And this category carries over into Roman Catholicism, with its cult of holy paraphernalia—holy water, holy sees, relics, genuflections before the “Sacred Host under the species of bread and wine.” We also see it in spades with Islam.

The ceremonial law served a pedagogical function in the economy of God. But of all people, the Reformed Baptist ought to be the first to accentuate the obsolescence of bright red line between clean and unclean, sacred and profane, as it applies to inanimate objects.

I’d just like to see more Reformed Baptists start acting like Reformed Baptists again, instead of acting like Catholics and Anabaptists and fundamentalists. Get over the identity crisis. You have a fine heritage of your own. It’s time to reclaim it instead of letting yourselves to be jerked around every which ways by lesser theological traditions. Is that really too much to ask? Just try being yourself for a change!